Songs From The Stars Read online

  But the world did not end in a bleak abyss or with an unseemly suddenness. Now Lou's eagle was flying abreast of the peaks of the higher foothills, and he was ascending into a great aerial river system of canyon passes leading on into ever higher and more forbidding mountains, awesome in their beauty.

  Here was truly a land untouched by the unclean hand of man, a world unto itself that had existed in its impenetrable vastness for trans-human aeons. The Smash had not touched it. Even the awful black science of the pre-Smash Americans ad not been able to seriously mar these mothers of mountains. All they had left behind was a sparse network of roads where tall trees burst from the shattered concrete. Lou soared past fir-covered slopes where hawks and eagles circled, high verdant meadows where sheep and deer grazed. The world ended in a wilderness Eden whose far boundary was impenetrable to man. What irony that beyond the highest peaks of this primeval majesty lay a radioactive hell and the lairs of sorcerers!

  In all of this mountain fastness, the only significant human settlement was La Mirage, one of Aquaria's major towns, a long day's flight from anything of significance and two days from Palm by wagon on the torturous back-door road.

  What this bustling town was doing way out here in the middle of nowhere was generally considered best left unsaid. La Mirage was near nothing but the fuzzy mountain boundary between Aquaria and what lay beyond.

  And now the sorcerers beyond the mountains had showed their hand at work with uncool clumsiness. More than the fate of the Eagle Tribe, the Lightning Commune, and Sunshine Sue's Word of Mouth was at stake. La Mirage itself was now under a heavy cloud of black science of the most blatant sort.

  And the fact was that Aquaria needed La Mirage for the very reason that made it content to leave the doings in the shadow of the High Sierras out of sight and out of mind.

  An arcane chemistry took place here upon which the civilization of Aquaria depended. The children of Aquarius had built a civilization based on the white sciences, under the law of muscle, sun, wind and water. Now they could fly like eagles, and generate electricity, and pass messages along by solar radio. White science advanced year after year, and its mages and merchants did their business together in the La Mirage Exchange. New technology was manufactured most often in the workshops and factories of the town and from there diffused slowly outward.

  It was conveniently said that the scattered mountain William tribes in the eastern back country had preserved certain manufacturing techniques from pre-Smash days, and it was certainly true that these simple people zealously guarded their so-called trade secrets.

  It was also true, however, that somewhere up in the Sierras, mountain william country ended and the haunts of the

  Spacers began. It was hard to believe that there was no interpenetration. It was hard to believe, but most people tried.

  Expeditions too high up into the mountains had a way of not coming back. Besides, bounty flowed across the land from La Mirage, and none could prove that the law of muscle, sun, wind and water was violated by eagles or solar radios or sophisticated batteries and wind generators.

  Such was the delicate balance that allowed La Mirage to flourish. By such a nonexistent pact with the unnamable did Aquaria ultimately thrive in its righteous whiteness. Some perfect masters saw this as a fatal flaw, but Clear Blue Lou didn't believe in being bad for business. Which was why he was the favorite perfect master of La Mirage.

  Which was also why the nature of this klutzy confrontation pointed to machinations by the Spacers. Sunshine Sue might very well be capable of knowingly purchasing atomic-powered radios—her reputation was well grayed to say the least. But the Eagle Tribe had no percentage in wanting to expose her. Shining unwanted light into someone else's dark corner was against the rules of the game, if only because you yourself might be next.

  Around the next bend, the canyon that Lou was following widened out into a steep green meadow that swept upward before him. He valved more helium into his eagle and nosed it upward, slowly inching up above the steep slope, making his final climb to La Mirage in a long climbing arc.

  On the high mountain plateau above him was a town that had summoned his justice, a town that trusted him and which he had perhaps come to love. Perhaps that might prove to be a stain on his karma. Certainly the missed night of sport with Little Mary Sunshine had already made things personal.

  As he soared upward through the most beautiful country in his world, the Eden below seemed to mock him with its purity and innocence. For the shadow of black science lay heavily across this mountain greenery where the domain of sorcery touched the lives and fortunes of men.

  Sunshine Sue

  As always, Sunshine Sue was in a hurry, and as always, her world moved too slowly. There was a great bleeding freight wagon clogging the road up ahead of her, just as the wind was finally getting some speed out of this stupid contraption!

  Her current mode of transport was a sail cycle. She had made it down the coast from Mendocino by boat in under three days, but from Barbo, her way to La Mirage had become a crawling nightmare. Endless hours on a dumb smelly horse to Javelina and then two bloody more days to Palm by coach, where she missed her connection to La Mirage because of a busted axle and was told she'd have to lay over for eighteen hours.

  Fortunately the Sunshine Tribe maintained a messenger station in Palm and had its own transport. Of a kind.

  Now her sweet ass was riding a few inches above a rock-strewn dirt roadway in the saddle of a speeding sail cycle. With a good wind, this thing could really move—right now she must be doing nearly thirty miles an hour. But the trouble was you lost your following wind around every other bend in the road, and most of the time, you had to lean against the torque of the angled sail to keep on the ground. And when the wind died, kiddo, it was hit the pedals.

  The sail cycle had two small wheels up front for steerage; behind was a big pusher wheel that rode free under sail and was driven by the pedals when the wind died. Sue reclined low against the road in her saddle behind a deerhide fairing to minimize drag. The triangular sail rode on a boom behind the rear wheel and was controlled by a crank through a system of ratchets.

  She had been told in Palm that the record time to La Mirage in one of these things was under thirteen hours, whereas the coach would take nearly two days—and that after a layover.

  She had also been told that she was crazy, that you had to be in shape for pedaling, that you needed to know what you were doing, but Sunshine Sue was burning with adrenaline and impatience, and she would've hitched a ride on a passing mountain lion to get to La Mirage a few hours sooner.

  In the Word of Mouth business, she was fond of telling apprentice messengers, the fastest transport between any two points was the one you took. The fastest transport was always too damned slow anyway.

  She had been up in Mendocino, setting up a net node station for the new fifty-mile radio transmitter whose arrival should have been imminent. Instead, word had crawled up the coast that the entire shipment had been interdicted by Levan the Wise. For sorcery.

  A black science interdiction in La Mirage? By Levan? Atomic power cores in the transmitter circuits? What the fuck was going on down there?

  Sue sent a blizzard of questions into the Word of Mouth net, but she didn't sit around waiting for answers. She knew that her presence was required on the spot the day before yesterday.

  She grabbed the first ship south and couldn't make radio contact till she got to Barbo. There she had learned that the Eagle Tribe had supposedly discovered an atomic power core in one of the new radios which the Lightning Commune had tried to sell them. When the Eagles righteously blew the whistle, even cool old Levan had been forced to interdict the twenty-five examples of this black science that the Sunshine Tribe had taken delivery of in La Mirage.

  That did not exactly clarify the logic, but it did transmit he brimstone smell of the shadowy Spacers. The Lightnings might just have the collective intelligence to assemble the devices, but no one who did busin
ess with them seriously believed that they were really reproducing pre-Smash designs. And anyone who believed that even more brain-burned mountain Williams farther back in the woods supplied their components from pre-Smash stashes might as well have believed that solar cells and microcircuits grew on trees. Someone somewhere out of sight was making this stuff and using the Williams as a thin camouflage which fooled only those who wanted to be fooled, namely, any reasonable person.

  The Eagles might buy solar cells and electric motors from the Lightning Commune, but they didn't buy radios. They didn't know squat about radios. So how come they found the atomic power cores hidden in the circuitry when our own aces didn't? And why would they want to blacken the reputation of their supplier of solar cells and motors?

  Sunshine Sue had pondered these questions during the endless horseback trip to Javelina without coming up with answers that satisfied the test of self-interest. And this was too complex a mess to be the result of mere random fuck-ups; uncool things like that just did not happen in La Mirage. Therefore, someone with a hidden self-interest was pulling strings from out of sight, and that meant the damn Spacers.

  Who else could hide atomic power sources so thoroughly in the transmitter circuits that they could get past the radio mechanics of the Sunshine Tribe? The Eagles could not have discovered the atomic cores unless they were meant to.

  But why? Why would even the Spacers pollute Aquaria with atomic power sources and then somehow arrange to have their own dupes exposed for the blackest of sciences?

  Before she left Javelina, Word of Mouth came from La Mirage that Levan had decided that this situation required justice from a perfect master. The Eagles had suggested Clear Blue Lou and the Lightnings had accepted. Would she agree? Of course, she had to decide immediately because otherwise they would have to await her arrival to negotiate another choice of perfect master, and it could take a week for one to arrive whereas Clear Blue Lou was two days away, and in the meantime, the Sunshine Tribe might find itself under sorcery boycott until the situation was resolved...

  Some "freely agreed-upon choice of judges!" It was Clear Blue Lou, or this mess would fester for weeks. And of course it was common folklore that Clear Blue Lou was in love with his solar eagle; no doubt the pea-brained Eagles thought that would shield them from any repercussions.

  But Word of Mouth on Lou was that he really was Clear Blue; few people lost when he gave justice. And he was practically the patron saint of La. Mirage. He and Levan saw eye to eye on keeping things cool. Furthermore, the solar cells in Lou's eagle came from the same source as the Sunshine radios. A perfect master like Clear Blue Lou would be wise to the wider implications, and he himself already owned a piece of this karma.

  Finally, Clear Blue Lou was a perfect master who boogied. Better him than some whitely righteous celibate or vibrating lady!

  So she sent her agreement down the net and hauled ass for La Mirage, hoping to get there before anyone else had a chance at working on Clear Blue Lou's head.

  That is, if you could call this hauling ass!

  Sue sounded her klaxon, and up ahead the wagon began to inch to the right side of the so-called road. But not fast enough. She would have to lose some momentum by using the brakes, or she'd hit the damn thing going by.

  She slowed down to under twenty, centered the boom, and slipped by. Then she found the road going into a rising bend, lost the wind, and had to pedal, puffing and cursing, to gain the crest.

  And that was what this whole bleeding trip had been like! Finding out about things days sifter they happened and not being able to make your reaction felt until more days later. It was a source of wonder to Sunshine Sue that anything ever managed to get done in Aquaria at all.

  She but dimly remembered how much worse it had been before she took leadership of the Sunshine Tribe and established the Word of Mouth net. In those days, it could take a week to get a hand-carried message from Mendocino to La Mirage, and there was no such thing as public news. Now at least the Sunshine Tribe had enough solar radios to relay messages all up and down Aquaria while the sun was up. Well, almost. The damn things had only a five-mile range—less in hilly country—and you still had to shift them around to set up Word of Mouth chains. And if too many radios had been shifted to the wrong places, it could take days to set up the right chains.

  Last year she had purchased a solar-and-battery-powered computer, which had magically appeared on the Exchange, and now at least the radios she had could be moved around to reform new chains with maximized efficiency. But it was still nothing like the old networks.

  Sue crested the ridgeline just as her lungs were starting to give out. Before her, the road circled down a few bends, then debouched upon a long straight dry lake bed without a bend or a dip until it reached the famously awful switchback road that climbed torturously up to La Mirage.

  Those new radios should have been the beginnings of a real Sunshine Radio Network. With their fifty-mile range, they would form an unbroken chain of relay stations covering all Aquaria. Voices could be transmitted up and down the land instead of secondhand messages. And the Lightning Commune had promised her cheap and plentiful solar receivers for next year. With the beginnings of a Sunshine Radio Network already broadcasting, she could have marketed them to every town and commune and farmstead in the land. It would have been the beginning of the new electronic village.

  Sue had to ride the brakes as the sail cycle nosed over and began to speed down around the curves toward the dry lake bed. Now all that was down the willy hole because of the atomic power cores that had been found in the key piece of hardware. And if this situation came out badly, who knew how much of the Sunshine Tribe's equipment might end up proscribed!

  Sunshine Sue had never met an admitted Spacer, nor had she met anyone who admitted to dealing with Spacers. Who, after all, would admit a connection with black science, even in La Mirage? But she had always felt that the unseen sorcerers somehow favored her enterprise.

  When she needed a large supply of the old radios, the Lightnings had magically managed to triple their production. When she was ready to make good use of a computer, up popped that piece of legendary arcana, white as the clouds in the sky, or maybe almost. And the new fifty-mile radios had seemed like the latest gift from the trolls who apparently were her silent partners twice removed.

  Hell, everything up until then had checked out ultrabright, hadn't it? If these pure white devices had been dropped in her lap, who was she to find out more about their ultimate source than was good for her to know?

  Sunshine Sue accepted the law of muscle, sun, wind and water as the distilled wisdom of human history. The black science of atomics had poisoned the vast continent beyond the Sierras and who knew how much of the rest of the world, and filled the air of the planet with carcinogens. Unnatural chemistry had killed the fish of the sea. And the burning of black coal and black petroleum rotted the lungs and made the air unfit to breathe. Every human on Earth was still paying for the sins of black science with a reduced life span, and the species itself might eventually pay for its folly with extinction. Black science was evil, and the Spacers were sorcerers.

  Or were they? After all, none of the technology that seeped across the mountains was demonstrably other than white. None of the equipment she had bought did anything but sweeten the karma of Aquaria.

  Until now, that is.

  Was this karmic punishment for her flirtation with black science? Now her whole enterprise was threatened by the very distantly removed black science that had allowed her to build it to this point in the first place. Could this bad karma be just?

  The sail cycle rounded the last descending bend and whooshed out onto the long straight road up the dry lake bed. She ratcheted the sail around to catch the following wind blowing north toward La Mirage, and the sail cycle began to pick up even more speed. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty, nearly forty miles an hour, fairly skimming along this well-maintained high-speed section of the road. Faster than a horse, faster t
han an eagle, faster than any yacht, faster than anything else in the world save Word of Mouth. Almost fast enough.

  Justly earned bad karma, my ass! Sue thought. The karma that took me this far has been sweet, for me, and for mine, and for Aquaria too. I've been true to my destiny, I've walked my own Way.

  Admittedly, it had been a Way that no other feet had trod in centuries, a Way that narrow minds might find streaked with black had she revealed the true path now, before its time. More Rememberers' hoards than not were burned for sorcery when discovered, and the dim remnants of this mysterious ancient tribe were shunned by the whitely righteous.

  Even her first reaction had been a certain dread when she stumbled upon the abandoned Rememberers' hut on that long-ago late fall afternoon in the redwood country northeast of Mendocino. She had been plain Susan Sunshine then, a teenaged messenger carrying a packet through the mountains from Mendocino to Shasta. She had stopped along the road to relieve herself and improperly tethered her horse. By the time she had gotten her breeches back on, the animal had wandered off into the forest.

  The waning sun sent intermittent shafts of ruby light through the dark aisles of giant trees. Bird sounds seemed abnormally far away, and the still forest air was redolent of resin and loam and cool with impending night. The atmosphere seemed pregnant with mysterious import.

  And then she caught up to her mount, sipping placidly from a little brook. On the bank of the stream, half-hidden by the saplings and brush that had grown up around it, was the crumbling log hut.

  She tethered her horse to a tree—very carefully this time—and gingerly entered the abandoned hut through the open portal where the door had fallen from its rotted leather hinges.

  Inside, moldering rough-hewn furniture, semi-darkness, and the earthy rank odor of the pallid mushrooms that grew all over the dirt floor. Bits and flakes of paper scattered about like dirty snow. When she fingered one of the larger fragments, one surface felt slick as glass. Holding it up to a thin shaft of sunlight filtering through a crack in the log wall, she saw the right upper quarter of a woman's face impressed upon the parchment. Her heart skipped a beat.