Songs From the Stars (10 page)

In the center of the room was a round table piled high with reef, peyote, arcane mushrooms, powerful herbs, dried un-nameables, and vials of magic extracts—the full Aquarian pharmacopeia of natural foods for the head. This smorgasbord of the psyche was not as crowded as the buffet spread as yet—the vibes were still too tight for all but the most daring or desperate.

The rest of the tavern floor was a seethe of bodies and psyches, dancing from table to table, sliding sparking against each other in the process.

And people were still pouring in. Here comes Kelly the Munificent and... uh-oh, isn't that the overeager lady astrologer from the Smokehouse?

"Lou!"

"Lou!"

Kelly and the astrologer both spotted him at the same time. Then they spotted each other spotting him and started snake-dancing through the crowd toward him, shooting poisonous glances at each other. Flattered though the natural man might be, the perfect master had other things to think about tonight.

The astrologer got to Lou first. "You chose your place of justice well," she said, sidling up to him. "The stars say—"

"There you are Lou—uh, excuse me—I've got to talk to you before these people start bending your brain about the Eagles!" Kelly had arrived, fairly bumping the lady astrologer out of the way with a swipe of her ass, grabbing Lou by the elbow, and was already talking as she dragged him away. Neat move, Lou thought, glancing back over his shoulder with a gentlemanly shrug of regret at the lady astrologer.

"Look Lou, North Eagle and I are bedfriends from way back if you know what I mean, and he feels just awful about the way people are treating the Eagles..."

"Without making a judgment myself, I'd say the town feels pretty awful about the way the Eagles treated it."

"Well North Eagle feels bad about that too, it wasn't really their fault, if you'll just talk to him, look how sad he looks!"

Without even knowing it was happening, Lou had been steered over to the booth where North Eagle brooded alone, perhaps already slightly in his cups. Well, this was going to have to be confronted sooner or later...

"Hello Lou," North Eagle grunted unhappily as Lou sat down, with Kelly shoving in beside him, neatly trapping him in this reality. Lou knew North Eagle slightly himself, and he had always been a good-time boy. But now he seemed morosely loaded.

"Hello, North Eagle, how's your karma?"

"Very funny. But then you probably think we smell like shit, too."

"Hey, don't put the man on your bummer!" Kelly said, punching North Eagle affectionately on the shoulder. "He's here to sweeten your karma, isn't that right, Lou, so give him a chance!"

"Gonna have to deal with some bad shit if he's gonna do that," North Eagle grunted with defensive belligerence. "Some really bad people..."

"Like who?" Lou asked, pouring himself his first drink of the night.

"Who do you think? Double-crossing Spacers, that's who! You think we wanted to create this mess? Tell me what we're getting out of it, man!"

Over his shoulder, Lou saw that people were indeed eyeing this meeting with suspicion and distaste. Sunshines were drifting together to talk strategy. Levan dispatched one of his female minions into the crowd to drift casually in their direction. North Eagle, too, picked up on what Lou was seeing.

"Yeah, we sure gained a lot of friends being good citizens, didn't we?"

"And that's all you were doing, being whitely righteous?" Lou said archly. "You called the present unpleasantness down on your own heads because of your righteous wrath against black science?"

North Eagle sipped at his wine, shrugged, grew calculatingly more intimate. "Aw, you know how it is, Lou," he said. "To make eagles, we need solar cells, which come from mountain williams like the Lightnings, who get them from..." He deliberately let the unsaid hang in the air. "Dealing with the williams isn't easy; you never know what may spook them. So we had this Eagle, Joe, who came from near their country, who the Lightnings insisted on dealing with. Had a whiff of gray about him, but what can you do? So the Lightnings try to sell this Joe this radio, and the assholes tell him about the atomic power core. So Joe goes to the tribal council and convinces us the Sierras are trying to trap us—he got the story out of the Lightnings by getting them loaded, or so he says. See, the Sierras paid the Lightnings to run this number. If we play it cool, which they're counting on, then we get denounced for not denouncing the radio, all the williams get spooked out of doing business with us, and the Sierras can take over the eagle business."

"That's the biggest load of shit I've heard in quite a while," Clear Blue Lou said unsympathetically. "You're trying to tell me you couldn't smell it?"

"No... yes... AW..." North Eagle sighed. "Okay, okay, so we weren't exactly surprised when Joe disappeared, and maybe he was... kind of... our Spacer connection, and maybe we sort of knew that someone east of here wanted us to do what we did... But what difference did that make? I mean, it was pretty clear that if we didn't denounce the atomic radios, we'd have a hard time getting solar cells, one way or the other..."

"So you played a little quid pro quo with black science?"

"Ah come off it, Lou!" North Eagle snapped. "Look around this place! Who isn't playing a little quid pro quo with sorcery! Without it, there's no La Mirage." He looked Lou straight in the eyes for the first time. "And you flew here in your eagle, didn't you?" he said more quietly. "If we're so black for doing what we had to do to make it, how whitely righteous does that make all you happy eagle freaks?"

Kelly winced, clearly of the opinion that this zinger was not exactly calculated to win the pleasure of the giver of justice. But zinger it had been, and not without justice. The Eagles had only been playing the same old game, and not too many people here, including perhaps Lou himself, were in a position to be too whitely righteous about it. Black science was not their karmic stain. Nor was naive klutziness. However, what they had knowingly done was allow sorcery to blackmail them into creating this bummer to save their own commercial asses. And that, Clear Blue Lou decided, was karma that would have to be paid back.

"Levan would like to see you when you have a moment." A young lady in Levan's livery spoke up from the swirl of people in front of the booth. How long had she been standing there? How much had she heard? Did it matter?

"Okay," Lou said, shooing Kelly out of her blocking seat and sliding away from the table.

"Tell Levan I'll be there in a bit," he told the Arbiter's emissary after she had covered his retreat into the crowd. He didn't want Le van's opinion on what to do with the Eagles at the moment. Instead, he made his way to the head-food table, which was much more crowded now. The party was rolling and people were no longer trying to hold back the changes. Couples and threesomes and foursomes were beginning to ease upstairs to the cloud chambers. Seers and mages were holding forth in a stoned-out manner. Someone was playing a guitar and a few fancy dancers were going into a clothes-throwing frenzy.

Lou loaded a pipe with reef and turned away from the table, taking his first smoke of the night. "May I?" said a tall blond lady as she plucked the pipe from his mouth. It was Little Mary Sunshine.

"Saw you talking with North Eagle over there," she said, taking a puff. "And I heard about your wonderful little threesome last night. So..." She leaned an elbow on his shoulder, propped her head in her hand, and blew breath-scented smoke at him.

"So I thought you might be in a less righteous mood tonight," she said. "I mean, you've already gotten it on with a Sunshine and an Eagle, and you've already had your little talk with North, so don't you think maybe it's my turn?"

"What did you have in mind?"

She glanced around the room conspiratorially. "Is there someplace we can be alone?" she said nervously. "I want to show you something."

Huh? Lou thought. Just when I'm ready to ride with the wind that's blowing, I find out I'm reading the signals wrong?

"Uh, upstairs," he said, and he led her through the crowd and up the staircase, acutely aware as it was happening that people were making up their own minds about what they were seeing. Have I been had?

Inside the cloud chamber, Lou put his hands on his hips, and cocked his head at Little Mary Sunshine suspiciously. "Now what was it you wanted to show me?" he said.

Little Mary Sunshine seemed to be choking back a giggle as she stared soulfully into Lou's eyes. "This," she said, flipping off her blouse proudly to display a superb pair of naked breasts with purposefully erect nipples.

Lou broke up. He couldn't help himself. "Oh ya got me!" he cried, collapsing into giggles. He bent over and addressed Mary's nipples as if they were the eyes of her face. He pointed an admonishing finger between them. "But I don't want to hear a word about Eagles or Sunshines or sorcery!" he said. "Keep your mouth shut and attend to business!"

Little Mary laughed. "That's not going to be easy," she said, tumbling him backward onto the softly padded floor of the cloud chamber.

It took quite a while for Little Mary Sunshine to attend to business, and she didn't keep her mouth shut most of the time either, but true to the spirit of bedfriendship, she refrained from attempting to use: their fleshly intimacy to influence him on behalf of her tribe afterward.

Paradoxically, Lou was feeling warmer toward Little Mary as they came down the stairs together, and perhaps through her, toward the Sunshine Tribe itself. Maybe she had achieved what she set out to do by running no number at all. And if that had been her number in the first place, well, who could deny the sweetness of that...?

Apparently everyone who might have a stake in whatever it was Clear Blue Lou might be feeling.

A sea of eyes tracked them down the stairway, and the fact that the measuring glances were doing their poor best to be covert only made the seething vibes that much more obvious. Clear Blue Lou has gotten it on with the Sunshine Tribe—that was where it was at as far as all these non-detached observers were concerned. North Eagle muttered imprecations to three of his fellow tribesmen at the headfood table and then pointedly turned his back. Sunshines flashed vibes of tribal appreciation in the direction of Little Mary. Levan smiled knowingly in his booth, apparently pleased by his interpretation of the implications. Eagles measured the reactions of Sunshines and Sunshines measured the Eagles reacting to them. Though on an obvious level, Lou had indeed been had by the Sunshine Tribe—and quite royally too, thank you—on a higher level, the cause of justice had been well served by the pleasures of the flesh. The vibes had been intensified, and Lou's vision of justice was beginning to come together.

The karma of the Sunshines tasted sweet in his mouth, whereas the karma of the Eagles tasted sourer every moment. Such had been the general perception of La Mirage all along, but now Lou was synced into that vibe, the aesthetic conviction that seemed to contradict the legalistic facts of the situation. The Eagles had stained their tribal karma knowingly, whereas the karma of the Sunshine Tribe gave off no foul odor of self-knowledge of evil. If the Sunshine Tribe had knowingly dealt with sorcery, the sin had been Sunshine Sue's alone; her people believed in their own innocence.

There was no reason why an erection could not dowse out justice and every reason why a giver of justice should allow himself to be a natural man.

Lou kissed Little Mary a chaste public good-bye, pulled a vibrational cloak of privacy around himself, secured more reef and wine, and commandeered a solitary booth from which vantage he could observe the configurations of the ripening party.

The common room was jammed now, and he suspected there was little going on in the cloud chambers above. The buffet was beginning to look ravaged, spirits were flowing like there was no day after, and a fogbank of reef had rolled in. Eagles and Sunshines gathered by themselves in little groups; the vibes were now too intense for them to mingle. Indeed, most of the partyers were divided up into groups and factions, tables, booths, and clots of them; soothsayers and mages, mavens and magnates, craftsmen and astrologers, locked in private paranoid realities. The vibes were keening toward longed-for karmic release, and the energy level was building.

Thus there was an audible mass intake of breath and then a babble of frenzy when the Lightnings entered the Court of Justice.

Two mountain william men and four women, all naked to the waist, their chests draped with long necklaces of beads and medallions and animal bones. The men wore fringed pants of crudely tanned buckskin and the women short skirts of the same material. All six of them had long manes of untidy hair, and their eyes were reddened, their pupils enormous. They floated through the mob scene as if they were in their own reality, and the people of La Mirage gave them plenty of body space.

As well they might. Not only were they mountain Williams, not only were they fried to the eyeballs, they were the people who had created this foul karma, and they were self-admitted servants of sorcery. Waves of sullen anger not un-tempered with a certain paranoid dread swept the Garden of Love. The villains of the hour had arrived.

But the Lightnings seemed unaware of the protective aura of danger they gave off; they slithered around like nervous serpents anticipating the booted heel. Lou stood up and commanded their presence with an imperious crook of his finger. By the time they reached his booth, everyone in the room had focused in on this confrontation. A tide of bodies surged forward. The blond male Lightning whirled around to glare at the hostile circle of eyes. His black-haired mate cringed and spun him around. The Lightning women were totally elsewhere, swaying to unheard music.