Songs From The Stars

by Norman Spinrad

  That's the true source of this feeling of guilt, Lou realized, and it's mine as much as Sue's.

  "Why did he do it, Lou?" Sue said, pulling away from him and skittering nervously about the room. "He was having things his way, wasn't he? He could've just burned the tapes, and..." She froze and looked at him with a stricken grimace. "Just because of what I said? Oh gods, did I kill him with my foul temper and my big stupid mouth?"

  Lou stared at the sheet-draped body in its chair, surrounded by the arcane machineries of the galactic receiver, then at the pile of data tapes apparently prepared by the Spacer for burning, a destruction that for some unknown reason had never been consummated. Or did I? he began to wonder nervously.

  "No, you didn't kill him with your big mouth," he said, taking her hand. "He died in that chair, after—" He caught himself short. "Oh, no!"

  "Oh, no, what?"

  "He must've been ready to burn the tapes," Lou said slowly. "And then he probably decided that since he was going to destroy them, and we were about to leave the Ear, that... that... that he would prove to us that he was no coward..."

  "And finally try the galactic receiver himself? And he did, and... But that makes no sense. There's nothing in the songs from the stars that would make even Harker kill himself."

  "Or so I assured him," Lou said queasily. "On my word as a perfect master. Oh shit."

  "Lou!" Sue said sharply. "Don't you go blaming yourself now! There's nothing bad for anyone's spirit in the songs from the stars, and we both know it."

  "Unless..."

  "Unless?"

  "Unless the receiver picked up a new song while we slept," Lou said speculatively. "Something that we don't know about. Something that..."

  Sue stared into his eyes, her lower lip trembling. "Easy enough to find out," she said. "All we have to do is sit down beside him and recycle whatever it was he was playing at the end..."

  "The twenty-second song...?"

  "If there is one."

  "Do we dare?" Lou said. But it was really not a question. Do we dare not? he thought, and that wasn't a real question, either.

  "We owe it to him, don't we?" Sue said. "If you hadn't told him you were so sure it would be all right, and I hadn't called him a coward, he wouldn't have... So what does that make us if we refuse to walk the way we made him follow? We have to know what made him kill himself, don't we? We can't go home without knowing."

  Lou nodded. "Justice demands it," he said. He forced a wan smile. "But we're not Arnold Harker. I can't think of anything that would make us want to curl up and die. We'll be all right..."

  "Sure we will..." Sue said in a tiny pale voice. And she took his hand and led him toward the final confrontation with the destiny written in their stars.

  "Recycle."

  "Twenty-two, start..."

  Stars stream past you, or perhaps you are streaming past them, for all is chaos and confusion as planets, suns, streams of glowing gas, spiral down around you into something behind, flickering in and out of substantiality as if all this is coming from a long ago and attenuated far away, or as if that something is fragmenting the very body of reality itself. A something huge and terrible that you flee from at the straining edge of your powers like a dreamer trying to run up a hill of sand in a nightmare. Something that is gaining on you, inexorably sucking you down, down, down...

  "Good-bye to you brothers, good-bye to you good friends, our story is over, our chapter ends. We were the children of ten thousand suns..."

  You float in a vast cluster of tightly packed stars. Tiny motes of light drift among them like swarms of fireflies in the night. Wavefronts of colored light dance slowly back and forth among the stars. You soar high above the star cluster, and you see that it is the center of the galactic spiral, the living heart of the island universe.

  You dive back into the great concourse of central suns, rejoining the streams of ships and worldlets and mysterious unknowable objects plying the slow starways from world to world.

  Like the great swooping bird of time, you dip through the atmospheres of a dizzying succession of worlds, sampling the profusion and complexity like a connoisseur of life. Rafted cities plying azure seas. Glowing townships spread across the tops of immense forest canopies. Castles of crystal and gold, floating among the high passes of enormous green mountains. Great archipelagos bridged by faerie traceries of spun steel. A myriad islands in the stellar stream of life...

  "... in the galaxy's heartland, ah, we had fun! Long was our summer, wise was our mind..."

  You float in the jeweled cluster of suns at the galactic center, where motes of mind and waves of light knit the rich density of stars together into a living manifestation of the triumph of the sentient spirit over the empty void.

  But something is happening at the very heart of this triumphant glory, something cold and dark and ultimately terrifying is announcing its existence with baleful black vibrations. A bone-chilling sucking presence, a cosmic undertow, begins to subtly draw you down...

  "Galaxies too birth, live, and die. Ten billion years is the blink of an eye.

  An endless crystal void. Like firework pinwheels, thousands of tiny galactic spirals coalesce into incandescent existence, then fade back into the dark. The dancers are myriad and transient, but the dance goes on.

  You float above a single spiral galaxy now. A vortex is beginning to appear at its core as it revolves through time—a deadness at the center, a slowly growing carcinoma of utter void sucking matter and energy into it...

  "Young central suns burn hot and fast. Before life can quicken their hour is done."

  A huge cluster of moribund suns. Some gutter out into dead black nodules. Others explode in showers of superheated supercompressed gas, flinging clouds of particles and light into the interstellar medium until nothing exists but glowing vortices of gas and drifting particles and chunks of utter darkness.

  Nodes form in the swirling gas as eddies begin to interact. They thicken and proliferate and wink into existence as new stars.

  "From this cycle of fire, new suns are born, circled by planets birthed by new light."

  Now the stars disappear, and there is nothing but dark nodules and tiny pinprick clouds of black sand, deeper darknesses against the void. A negative image of the universe of light, where holes of nothingness form in the slow eddies. Form, and grow, and suck each other into themselves...

  "But out in the darkness and out of the light, symmetric forces marshal the night. Matter compressed and matter imploded. Holes in space where suns exploded. Coming together in entropy's dance, time is their ally, the slow hand of chance."

  The galactic spiral revolving faster and faster through space and time, a sphere of dead black darkness forming at its core, a darkness that sucks the light spiraling down into it, devouring suns and gas and growing, growing, growing...

  "At the heart of a galaxy an anti-life is formed. Our ending was written before we were born. Great suns collapse into burnholes in space, light goes into darkness, death comes in its place and we all disappear, our futures all go into the vortex..."

  The spherical vortex of darkness grows and grows, ever faster, ever larger, as it feeds on the clouds of suns that whirl down its black maw into inevitable oblivion.

  "... into the depths, the terminal black hole."

  The last stars out at the tips of the spiral arms slip down into the vortex and then there is nothing—

  —but the endless random dance of pinwheel galaxies flaring into existence then dying slowly back into the nothingness of the crystal void.

  Stars stream down past you into the huge and terrible void whose vibrations chill the back of your neck, whose onrushing presence sucks the straining atoms of your being toward it... Slowly, inexorably, you are being dragged into the unnamable, rushing up at you from behind...

  And then you dare to look back.

  An immense whirlpool of nothingness blots out the stars, a gaping gullet mouth of onrushing extinction, a tunnel of nonbeing
upon whose depths the eye cannot focus. It is there and it is not there. It is visible and it is the very absence of the possibility of vision, an ever-widening sphere of oblivion, consuming the body of creation.

  Closer and closer the yawning black vortex comes, but as the stars drain away down into nonbeing, a sprinkling of tiny motes becomes visible, fleeing before the onrushing sphere of terminal night. Worlds entire, girdled by rings of tiny orbiting suns, straining unguessable energies to ride before the bow wave of oblivion for a few last long moments of sweet and doomed life.

  One by one the brave refugee worlds are overtaken by the vortex and slip spiraling down into unguessable nonbeing...

  "When all of us are gone, you'll still have our song and a million years of lifetimes before your hour nears. We'll give it one last try, for although we know it's hopeless, we have nothing left to fear."

  You are standing at the pole of a fair green planet as it hurtles faster and faster and faster into the all-enveloping darkness down an endless corridor of nothingness, bending and warping and spiraling down into itself forever...

  "And now our time is come. We vanish one by one. We turn to face the ending from which no life can hide. Just maybe if we're lucky we'll come out the other side—"

  Suddenly Sunshine Sue flashed out of the terminal darkness into the prosaic light of the main computer room of the Big Ear station. She shuddered. She blinked. She slowly began to come back to here-and-now reality. She was sitting in one of the chairs of the galactic receiver. In a great metal wheel built by men, a fragile capsule of life rolling through the endless deadly darkness. Clear Blue Lou sat next to her, staring into space, into emptiness, into... The sheet-draped form on the chair beyond Lou was... was...

  "Oh shit..." she finally managed to whisper.

  Lou began to come out of his own daze. He glanced over at the corpse of Arnold Harker, then at her, as life and humanity came back to his features.

  "Did you understand all that?" Sue finally said.

  "Enough," Lou sighed. "I think so... Poor Harker probably understood the science of it better, but he couldn't face the music. He didn't understand."

  "And you do?" Sue said, eyeing him peculiarly. And that very act seemed to dissipate more of her disorientation and horror, to anchor her being in the here and the now.

  "Galaxies are born and die," Lou said quietly. "Just like people and species and suns. It's apparently all part of the same eternal evolutionary process. And in a million years or so, time will run out for our part of this one. Everything's ultimately headed down the same final black hole..."

  Sue goggled in stunned stupefaction at the tranquility with which he had summarized the awful. "So that's why Harker killed himself," she muttered. "In the long run, our lives, our dreams, and everything we do for the benefit of our species... It all really is pointless, isn't it?"

  Lou shook his head. He shrugged. "I don't think you or I will ever really understand why Arnold Harker killed himself," he said.

  "Never understand!" Sue cried. "But... but... we're all doomed! You and me and the world and all those wise and ancient beings out there, and..." She shuddered. She blinked. She began to tremble uncontrollably. "I understand why he did it," she said. "And I'm beginning to wish I didn't..."

  Lou climbed out of his seat and stood beside her. He touched her cheek and hand. "No real reason to let it get you down, lover," he said. Incredibly, he managed to laugh.

  "After all," said Clear Blue Lou, "from a personal karmic viewpoint, what else is new?"

  "Huh?" Sue stared at him. Something in her soul seemed to be trying to snap back into focus.

  "This galaxy of ours, doomed though it is, will outlive you and me and Aquaria and a million years worth of a future we can't even guess at," Clear Blue Lou said. "You and me and the people of the Earth and all those civilizations out there and even poor Arnold, if he had only understood—we're all in the same place we always were, love. Tell me how this makes anyone's personal fate any different."

  Sue blinked. Her body stopped shaking. She even laughed, amazing herself. Great gods, why had Harker killed himself? What was life but an interval of light between two unfathomable darknesses? What was the point about worrying what the point was? How many other beings had experienced this song and still gone on? Was that perhaps not the ultimate glory and wisdom of the Galactic Way?

  "We really didn't kill Arnold, did we?" she said. "We're really not guilty of pushing him into a psychic space where humans can't survive..."

  "Not as long as we prove it by going on," Lou said. "Not as long as we have the courage to go where we led him and still survive. He died because of who he was, not because of where he had been."

  Sue looked up at Lou. She kissed him briefly on the lips. "You really are Clear Blue, aren't you, Lou?" she said.

  Clear Blue Lou smiled back at her boyishly. He shrugged. He rolled his eyes upward. "Fortunately for us," he said, "we've got a lot of Clear Blue friends."

  Celestial Mechanics

  For once in his life, Clear Blue Lou had been able fully to appreciate the yoga of physical labor without ironic internal grumblings or sweaty reservations. It had taken him five long and tedious trips from the wheel to the docking slab to get all the data bank tapes on board the Enterprise, during which time all deep thoughts and karmic ambiguities had been banished from his consciousness by the all-involving physical task of lugging so much stuff through the tricky changes of gravity and orientation.

  Only now, carrying the sheet-wrapped corpse of Arnold Harker into the wheel's main airlock, did the enormities and complexities of the long psychic journey come flooding back to haunt his spirit.

  Sue opened the airlock door for him but did not help him float Harker's body inside. She had refused to touch the corpse at all, or rather he had refused to burden her further with any such request. He himself had used the task of transferring the tapes to the Enterprise as a kind of psychic judo on himself, warping his consciousness into the physical mundacity of regarding this final haul as just more of the same.

  But now he and Sue were floating inside the main airlock alive in their spacesuits, and Arnold Harker was floating dead in his winding sheet, and the time had come to say the words that would commit the black scientist to his eternal rest in the void he had sought to conquer but which in the end had devoured his spirit.

  Sue valved partial pressure into the airlock and stood by ready to open the door into space. Lou regarded the sheet-draped body, then Sue's space-suited form. In both cases, the material carapaces perhaps mercifully obscured the emotional realities within. Even in this final moment, the realities of the spirit were encased in the material masks that they had traveled within; even in death Arnold Harker's soul was alone.

  It was a sad and terrible thought, but in some way Lou felt that the Spacer would have wanted it this way.

  He sighed. He took one deep breath. "We commit the spirit of Arnold Harker, scientist and fellow human, to the endless sea of space which he sought to travel, and which in the end held deeper darkness than his soul could harmoniously contain. We cannot say we really knew him. We cannot say we know for what he died. But we hope that the inner mysteries he now takes with him to his final rest will serve to remind us that the greatest paradox in this galaxy of wonders still remains the unknown heart of man, that we who have learned so much still have much to learn about what lies within ourselves."

  He shrugged. It wasn't much of a farewell, but it was all that he could truly say. Sue hit the but toil, the outer airlock door slid open, and poor Harker's fleshly envelope drifted out to join his psychic ancestors in the everlasting void. To which all life would return in the end.

  Sunshine Sue stood on a tube of cold metal in the icy dark of space under the looming shadow of the Enterprise, all alone save for Lou in all that deadly star-speckled immensity.

  But high above her rolled the Earth, huge and alive and majestic against the unreal starry blackness, its veil of life-giving air glowin
g where its brilliant disc intersected the void. Continents paraded by—green and fair, pockmarked and ruined, floating in bright blue seas—unashamedly revealing both their beauties and their scars. Though this sight had lived in memory's vision and though she had walked through many a galactic dream since last she saw the planet that had given her birth, still it took her breath away as if she were seeing it again for the first time through reborn eyes.

  As indeed she was. And soon the scattered peoples of the Earth would share at least a shadow of her vision through the satellites of the new Sunshine World Broadcast Network, which she had activated while Lou was transferring the data bank tapes to the Enterprise and preparing poor Arnold for his final journey. While full operation of the network depended upon holding the Spacers to their promise of supplying her with the necessary ground station, and though the full glory of the songs from the stars could not become the common property of all those fellow humans down there until the scientific secrets that they were bringing home gave forth their lore and allowed the Earthbound to walk the true Galactic Way for themselves, at least the sight and sound images of the missionary-introductory packet were now winging their way to the ends of the Earth.

  She had rigged a continuous playback loop on one of the satellite network channels so that the words and pictures from the stars would unreel and repeat their story to every open Earthbound eye and ear as long as the power of the sun drove the transmitter of the Ear. Thus would the first message from the stars serve as an eternal beacon for the spirit of man under the law of muscle, sun, wind and water, a many-leveled living symbol of the Galactic harmony of the Way.