Songs From the Stars Read Free Page A

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