Songs From The Stars

by Norman Spinrad

  Hand in hand to the oohs and sighs of the crowd and a celestial chorus rising into a hymn to glory, Sunshine Sue and Clear Blue Lou slowly walked beyond the circle of humanity to accept the destiny ordained from on high.

  Drum rolls accompanied them up the ladder, and then the star being ascended to the rising thrum of heavenly strings, drew up his staircase, and closed the door to the sky chariot behind him to a clap of thunder and a bright flash of lightning.

  There was a long moment of silent stillness under the canopy of blue light, as rhythmic flashes of lightning etched this mythic moment into the back of every brain.

  Then soft music began playing and the wheeled feet of the sky chariot left the ground. The golden bird floated slowly upward as the music began building toward a mighty crescendo, as the sky itself seemed to recede in a bright blue glow, becoming a great blue wing across the starry black sky.

  Like a feather rising above a flue, the firebird soared aloft, clutching the golden sky chariot in its claws, while the music crested into a triumphant song of heavenly glory.

  When it had dwindled to the size of a great blue eagle, there was a final clap of thunder, and the firebird suddenly disappeared in a last blaze of lightnings.

  Only the dark silence of the night remained—and the golden speck of the sky chariot floating up into the black sky, a second Venus ascending to its starry realm.

  Thousands of eyes watched it as it slowly became but one bright star among many. Then a great tongue of fire exploded from the yellow speck, and it began to move ever faster across the dark vault of the heavens. Low thunder echoed across the plateau, an eerie thrilling sound, a steady peal without waver or end. Faster and faster and faster, the golden speck moved across the sky, as if goaded by the bright flame it rode.

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the thunder began to fade toward silence as the sky chariot became a meteor ascending from the Earth... a single star moving across the firmament... a tiny point of light that finally vanished in silence into the dark heavens.

  Quiet reigned. Crickets began to chirp. A nightbird called. It was a long time before anyone spoke.

  We All Live in a Yellow Submarine

  "I saw it, but I still don't believe it," Clear Blue Lou muttered dazedly as he closed the final fasteners on the uncomfortable suit that encased him in clumsiness and the burden of great weight. "You really are a sorcerer, lady. It was the greatest art I've ever seen, but was it truth?"

  "I may not know what truth is, but I know what I like," Sue said, screwing the round metal helmet onto the collar of her spacesuit and winking at him silently from behind the thick glass faceplate.

  Lou helped her into the right-hand acceleration couch, then donned his own helmet and climbed into the center couch next to Arnold Harker, who had already wiped off his makeup and suited up and was peering out the window as he checked out the controls.

  It was unpleasantly confining inside the suit. The thing must have weighed a hundred pounds, he was already sweating and itching in places he couldn't scratch, and his cock was mated to a hose that led to a piss bottle inside the infernal contraption, which was surely the worst place that organ had ever been. He looked out at the crowded little world of the spaceship cabin, through a window in a steel bucket, breathing sour air that stank of oiled metal.

  "Radios on," Harker's voice said from speaker grids inside his helmet. It was thin and colorless and it seemed to rattle inside Lou's brainpan.

  "How long did you say we had to wear these damned things?" Sue's voice said as if from across a large room, though she was sitting right next to him.

  "I told you, till we reach the Big Ear," Harker said testily. "Now strap in. We're reaching launch altitude."

  Lou did up the acceleration couch straps, still trying to catch up with the changes. A few minutes ago, he had been part of a glorious scene that would live forever in legend, and now he was stuffed inside this instrument of torture, breathing rancid air and waiting to be shot into space. Perhaps it was a blessing that there was so little time in which to think.

  "Launch altitude," Harker said mechanically. "Initiate launch program." And he punched a button on the computer console beside him.

  A ghastly roar exploded into being, a sound that set the spaceship cabin vibrating and shook Lou's teeth in his jaw.

  "Oh shit!" Sue screamed as the spaceship took a sudden gut-wrenching drop, plummeting like a stone.

  Then Lou felt an avalanche slam up against his back, not a giant's swift kick, but an endless pressure that squeezed him down into the cushions of his couch, and he could feel the spaceship surge forward, roaring and rattling like a water tank in an earthquake.

  "Eeee..." he heard a male voice groan shrilly, and it took him a moment to be sure that it was Harker's and not his own as the pressure against his back wheezed air from his lungs.

  A leaden blanket seemed to press on his body, a blanket that got heavier and heavier and heavier as the bone-thrumming roar went on and on and on and the cabin of the spaceship became a quaking cacophony of vibrating and groaning metal.

  "Is this fucking thing coming apart?" Sue snarled thickly.

  "Shut up," Harker whined sickeningly, "just shut up!"

  Lou's body got heavier and heavier. Bright spots flickered before his eyes. He could hardly raise his head far enough to get a glimpse out the window, where the sky was purpling brilliantly from blue to black.

  He was so heavy now that he couldn't move. He could feel the flesh of his face crawling backward like melting wax. His tongue was a dead thing in his mouth. His vision sparkled with butterflies of light that seemed to be guarding the mouth of a long black tunnel, down and down and down he went, crushed into the dark dream of oblivion...

  ... emerging in a blessed smooth silence that caressed the ears like the soothing murmur of the sea. It was so quiet now that all he could hear was his own breathing echoing underwater in his helmet. It was such a relief that he seemed to be floating in ecstasy, weightless even inside the gross suit, free and light as a feather.

  "Oooh," Sue moaned, "I think I passed out. What happened? I feel like my body doesn't know which way is up."

  Only then did Lou realize that his body was trying to tell him that he was falling; only then did a vacuum clutch at his guts. But he knew what this must be. This must be what Harker had called weightlessness. They were not plunging to their doom, they were in orbit, beyond the pull of the Earth, flying freely through outer space in an endless gliding swan dive. The falling feeling faded as he gave himself back to the glorious floating sensation.

  "We're in orbit," he told Sue quickly. "Our bodies weigh nothing. We're not falling, we're floating." The spirit must master the flesh in this strange space, or the flesh would surely sicken the spirit.

  "Thanks..." Sue muttered. "Hey... thanks! Say, this feels good! Hmmm, too bad we're in these damned chastity suits; can you imagine what it would be like to—"

  "Please!" Lou shouted as the thought of free-floating sport began to engorge his member within the tight confining ring of the piss bottle hose.

  "Oooh... I don't feel good... I'm going to vomit..."

  Harker was making green gurgling sounds over the radio. Through the window of his helmet, his eyes were glazed and his face was deathly pale.

  "Harker! Snap out of it!" Lou commanded. "You can't let yourself vomit inside your helmet!" The thought was horrifying, and the sight would be something he could well do without. "Close your eyes... You're floating in warm thick water... You're not falling, you're flying free as a bird..."

  "Oooh, I don't know... I didn't think it would be like this..." Harker groaned. Then he was finally quiet, and Lou could hear his jagged breathing slowly smoothing out in a series of gulping sighs.

  "Now open your eyes and be here now!"

  "Oooh..." Harker moaned. "I think I can hold it back now... I didn't know, I—"

  "Oh look!" Sue exclaimed in childlike wonder, gazing out the window.

  Lou gave his
attention to what lay outside, and even through two thicknesses of glass, the vision took his breath away and sent his spirit soaring.

  The Earth was a huge living globe beneath them, rolling with slow majesty through crystal blackness sparkling with unwinking stars. Seas shone a lucent blue under patterns of swirling cloud. Continents—green and brown, veined with rivers and dappled with lakes—humped out of the seas like the backs of fabled basking whales. Where the curve of the planet met the blackness of space, the interface was a shining corona of deep purple. It was staggering, it was beautiful, and it was palpably alive.

  But it was grievously wounded.

  Lou saw great holes pocking the skin of the continents that rolled beneath him, punched in horribly deliberate-looking patterns along the coasts, up and down the wide river valleys, and around the shores of the larger lakes. Sere brown deserts seemed to eat into the fragile-looking patches of green like an advanced case of mange. Great scars gouged in the flesh of the planet glowered an ugly purple.

  The vision seemed to speak with a great soundless voice in the center of Lou's soul. Behold, it said. Behold my grandeur. Behold my living beauty. And behold what you've done to me.

  "I sure hope there really are wiser beings out there than us," Sue said wanly. "After seeing what we've done to our world, the thought that we're the highest form of consciousness there is doesn't exactly inspire confidence."

  "I've got the Big Ear on the acquisition radar," Harker said in a tense, tightly controlled voice. "Initiate rendezvous program." The Spacer was hunched down over his controls, staring fixedly at the glowing round screen as he punched in the computer program.

  A series of small hisses and shudders and then the Earth seemed to shift slightly outside the window. For a moment, it seemed to have left its proper position in the heavens, and it took Lou another moment to realize that it was the angle of his vision that had shifted. Then there was a momentary roar and the spaceship creaked and rattled. Then once again calm drifting silence.

  "Course correction completed," Harker said woodenly, still hunkered over the radar screen. He hadn't taken his eyes off it.

  "Are you all right?"

  "All systems... all systems are working nominally...," Harker said shrilly. "We should rendezvous with the Big Ear in approximately twenty minutes."

  "Well I guess there's nothing to do until then but lean back and enjoy the view."

  Harker still didn't look up from his radar screen.

  "Are you sure you're all right? You're not going to—"

  "I have to be all right, don't I?" the Spacer said thickly. "I've been trained all my life for this..."

  "No one can be trained for this," Lou said. "There's no scenario for this experience." Even in its wounded agony, the Earth was beautiful and alive from this perspective, and perhaps the scars only added a frisson of tragedy to its soul-stirring glory, an emotional dimension that was, alas, all too human.

  Arnold Harker looked up at the planet for a moment. "I fear that you're right," he whispered, then sank back into contemplation of his screens and instruments. Apparently not every master could walk his own way.

  Time seemed to crawl to Sunshine Sue. The spacesuit chafed, her body itched inside it, the air she breathed stank of chemicals and her own sweat, and she was becoming all too aware that she was trapped inside the bucket of her helmet, inside a frail metal capsule, floating in a cold hard blackness whose touch was death.

  And Arnold Harker wasn't exactly making it any easier to take. Crouched to no purpose over his controls, muttering monosyllabically to any attempt to snap him out of it, the Spacer had not exactly come into his expected glory. A vibe of terror came off him, a far too literal perception of their true fragility and danger which began to infect her by osmosis.

  You poor bastard! she thought. This is your dream, and the reality of it is scaring you shitless. Empathy or not, however, she wished he would keep his bummer vibes to himself. For the vision of the Earth that revealed itself beyond this claustrophobic tomb of metal inspired both sadness and hope, terror and promise. Terror in its living vulnerability, sadness in its ravaged state, and the promise of hope in the world seen whole—the hope that one day all the world might see itself as one through the magic of the world broadcast network, the dream that had led her to dare this place.

  If only Arnold—

  "Over there!" Lou shouted. "That must be it!"

  The upper edge of something enormous was drifting into vision, seemingly from underneath the spaceship, a huge round fisherman's net cast up out of the dark sea before them.

  "That's it all right," Harker said dully, finally looking up from the mechanical world of his screens and controls. "The Big Ear antenna..."

  In another moment, Sue saw the thing entire.

  A celestial fishnet a mile across floated before them in the nothingness, a spiderweb of wire spun out on an impossibly thin round framework of metal girders. A metal tube connected the antenna with the hub of a huge metal wagon wheel spinning in space; a round windowed rim and four quartering spokes, each about five hundred feet from rim to hub. The axle that connected the antenna to the wheel became a thin girder-work spire as it pierced it, supporting four rectangular metal paddles like a windmill's sails frozen in the breezeless void.

  "The Big Ear," Harker said tonelessly. "The greatest work of the Age of Space..."

  "Yeah, but what is it?" Sue asked. "I've never seen anything like it in my life." Nothing had quite prepared her for this; it wasn't merely huge and strange, it was visually incomprehensible.

  "The antenna is the largest listening device ever built by men," Harker said. "Nothing so large could ever be constructed on Earth. The blades on the wheel are the solar panels that power the station. And the wheel itself... the wheel itself is the crew's quarters, where the spin gives you weight, and there'll be air and warmth, and we can get out of these horrible suits, and..."

  The Spacer's voice had been getting faster and shriller, until he seemed to finally choke back his hysteria by sheer act of will. "Got to dock it somehow," he said nervously. "Docking port's on the tube between the Ear and the wheel, so we're going to have to fly between them... Please don't disturb my concentration; this is going to be bad enough as it is..."

  Gazing fixedly out the window, Harker fiddled with his controls. The nose of the spaceship came down and around until it was pointed straight at the tube in the massive canyon between the wheel and the antenna. The rockets roared for an instant, and then the spaceship began to slide forward into the narrow cleft between the giant spiderweb and the dangerously spinning spokes.

  The Graveyard Heart

  Although there was nothing pretty or graceful about it, Clear Blue Lou had to admire the way the clearly terrified Harker managed to maneuver the spaceship between the stationary antenna and the spinning wheel with dozens of tiny corrections and re-corrections from the control rockets, easing it down onto a big metal plate slung laterally across the connecting tube at less than the speed of a walking man.

  The landing slab was connected to the tube by a series of large springs, and two huge metal scimitars were slung out from each side of the slab like quarterhoops of a barrel large enough to enclose the Enterprise. As the spaceship clanged roughly onto the landing slab, the four quarterhoops banged closed overhead to secure the ship to the Big Ear, as if a giant trap had been sprung.

  "Docking completed," Harker said shakily. Lou heard his long exhale of breath over the radio, a tinny sigh of released tension.

  "Nice piece of flying, Arnold," he said.

  "I'm glad I won't have to do that again," Harker whispered hoarsely. "It'll be a lot less delicate on the way out."

  "Now what?" Sue asked.

  Harker stared silently out the window.

  "I said, now what?"

  "Now... now we collect our food packs, hook up the Enterprise's air and water tanks to the station's intake lines, and enter the access tube through a hatch," Harker finally said. "But... b
ut it means we have to go out there. We have to walk in space."

  "Fantastic!" Sunshine Sue exclaimed, standing on the metal landing slab, held down only by the small magnets in the spacesuit's boots. To her left, the great wheel arched high above her, sweeping grandly across the heavens in its stately revolution; to her right, the Big Ear antenna was a lacework of silver that seemed to trap an infinite school of stars. The Earth loomed low overhead, an immense living jewel that utterly humbled even this grandest construction of man. Weightlessly, soundlessly, she stood in the naked heavens gazing down upon her world like a god.

  Then Arnold Harker shattered the glorious moment. He came scuttling across the landing slab, dragging two hoses from the ship, a picture of mundane drudgery. "The intake valves should be right by the access hatch, and that should be right below where you're standing," he babbled frantically as he pushed between Sue and Lou. "Yes, there it is, and here's the ladder."

  He scrambled over the edge of the landing slab, still dragging his hoses, and crawled down a metal ladder to the curving tube below.

  Sue watched him screw the hose nozzles into two holes set into the curve of metal close by a round door. "Well, come on, what are you waiting for?" his shrill impatient voice said over the radio.

  "We'd better go," Lou said, climbing down the ladder. "I don't think our sorcerer is enjoying the view."

  "Lou! He can hear us!" Sue hissed. Arnold seemed pretty close to the edge as it was, and they certainly couldn't afford to freak him out further.

  "No, I'm not enjoying the view," Harker said grimly when they had reached the hatch. "I just want to get inside and get out of this suit before I... before I..."

  Sue heard him choke back a gag, even as he kneeled down beside a panel of labeled switches beside the access hatch. "Air feed... on," he muttered hoarsely, throwing a switch. "Water feed... on. Lights... on." He hesitated over a fourth switch. "Transport cable? What's that? It's not in our specifications."