Songs From the Stars Read Online Free PDF

gear behind the eagle saddle. "Lou arrived yet?"
    "Not yet," Teddy said, as Sue climbed into the saddle and began strapping in. It seemed to Sue that he was not exactly eager to meet her eyes.
    "What's wrong, Teddy? What's the bad news now?"
    "Worst possible," Teddy grunted. "The Lightnings are now claiming we knew about the atomic power cores when we bought the radios."
    "WHAT?" Sue screamed. "Those lying brain-burned sons of bitches!" Bloody fucking hell! If Clear Blue Lou ended up believing that, he might very well decide to disband the tribe! And I could end up in karmic rebirth!
    She studied Teddy, who seemed to be studying her most peculiarly.
    "You don't believe that shit, do you!" she demanded. "Do you think for a moment that I'd—"
    "Of course not!" Teddy interrupted none too convincingly. "But... uh, maybe Gloria might have, uh, gotten a little carried away..."
    "No way! I made that deal myself, remember?"
    "Then why—"
    "It's a set-up, it's got to be!"
    "But who—why—?"
    "Who do you think made the power cores?" Sue asked sharply. "As for why..." She nodded toward the east, shrugging. "That's what I'm going to find out," she said. "Now please untether this thing."
    Teddy slipped the hitching rail bolt. "I'd never fool with atomic power," Sue told him earnestly. "That black, I'm not. You do believe me?"
    But the eagle shot skyward before she could hear his response, and Sue found herself contemplating what the electronic villagers would have called her "image" with a new sense of unease. If my reputation is so gray that even my own people can half believe I'd knowingly fool with atomic power, how am I going to convince Clear Blue Lou that the Lightnings are lying? And why would they tell a lie that convicts them of black science out of their own stupid mouths?
    The eagle bobbed upward along the mountain face where the string of wagons groaned laboriously toward La Mirage. Rapid though her rise was relative to these groundlings climbing in the dust, it seemed achingly slow to Sunshine Sue. She valved the last of her helium into the wing and nosed the eagle skyward. The eagle began to climb even more rapidly but still not fast enough.
    "What's going on up there?" Sunshine Sue demanded aloud, craning her neck upward.
    Muttering imprecations, she began to pedal.

La Mirage
    Clear Blue Lou's eagle soared along the ascending meadow, and then was buffeted upward and backward for a moment as it crested the lip of the plateau and hit a sudden swirl of freer air. After this dramatic fanfare, it regained its forward momentum, and in a few minutes, Lou was floating high above La Mirage.
    From this perspective, the name of the town seemed a poetic image of innocent purity. La Mirage was the lone handiwork of man in a vast vision of primeval grandeur. The colorful buildings and groved avenues seemed to spring like magic mushrooms from the center of an oval meadow rimmed on three sides by a sheer drop into immensity. The ascending cordillera east of the town formed a dwarfing backdrop that reversed Lou's aerial perspective, an amphitheater of the gods looking down from on high on man and all his tiny works. Here the upland meadow unraveled into a seemingly infinite complexity of canyons that began as fingers of brown raking the green plain below, and then climbed and branched and grew in scale as they became the texture of the mountains towering away high above his eagle.
    Lou circled over the center of La Mirage and began to recompress helium with his pedals, descending in a lazy spiral that was also a dance of arrival for the benefit of the town below.
    How serene it looked from this deceptive viewpoint, how in harmony with the wilderness to which it served as a humble human grace note. And what a mirage that vision of bucolic tranquility really was!
    The town streamed eastward from Market Circle like the thinning corona of a comet about its head. West of the Circle toward the abyss, it quickly petered out into residential