Free Songs From the Stars by Norman Spinrad

that the Spacers are whitely righteous? After you kidnap him?"
    "But we're not going to kidnap him," Harker said. "You're going to seduce him."
    "I'm going to what?" Sue shouted self-righteously. But it was mostly for show. What else could her part in this "scenario" be? They hardly needed her for muscle, now did they?
    "You don't think you can do it?" Harker said slyly. "Rest assured, computer comparison of your personality profiles predicts a high probability of success. And you'll have the advantage of studying his profile, as well as the advice of Company motivators."
    "If I want to seduce someone, I can do it by myself!" Sue snorted in outraged feminine pride.
    "Your self-confidence is heartening," Harker said dryly.
    "So I seduce Lou and then what?" Sue sighed, realizing after the fact that the sorcerer had trapped her again. "You must really think I'm something if you believe I can simply lead a perfect master to you by his crotch." She laughed. "Well, just maybe I can," she owned. "But you don't really believe that even I can make a perfect master think with his cock. Not when it comes to something like this!"
    "The scenario doesn't require that," Harker said. "Inevitable logic has convinced you to follow the scenario, and the logic of the truth will cause Clear Blue Lou to reach the same conclusion when you go through karmic rebirth with him and input what you have learned with the force of shared truth."
    "WHAT!" Sue roared. "Karmic rebirth! You double-crossing bastard, you promised you'd get me out of this mess you put me into!"
    "I said nothing of the kind."
    "You certainly didn't say that this scenario of yours had set me up to be found guilty!"
    "Why fear a mere Aquarian ceremony when in fact the real karmic rebirth has already taken place?" Harker said knowingly. "Hasn't your destiny already been transformed? Doesn't a new persona as creator of the new global electronic village already await you? Haven't you already transcended your previous karma? No, Sue, it is Lou who will freedom of the spirit?"be reborn. He'll taste your truth—the truth we have given you—and he will choose to follow the scenario too."
    "And I'm supposed to trust all that?"
    Harker shrugged. "The scenario is behavioristic," he said. "Your trust is not required. Your motivation does not enter the equation. You'll follow the scenario because you must. You will undergo karmic rebirth with Clear Blue Lou. That sequence is already locked in."
    "You really are an evil son of a bitch, aren't you?" Sue said softly, not without a certain painful admiration for his strange unprecedented style of low cunning. The Spacers really were sorcerers. No one had ever been able to... to control her very karma like this!
    "But I can still choose not to get it on with Lou," she said wanly, trying to salvage some remaining illusion of free will.
    Harker shook his head. "Locked in too," he said. "The programmed confrontation has too much libido behind it. Out of thousands of possibilities, the computer picked you as the woman most likely to fascinate Clear Blue Lou."
    He grinned a sly grin at her, and for the first time, Sue detected a human vibe, nasty though that vibe was. "And of course Clear Blue Lou was chosen as the perfect master most likely to fascinate you," he said.
    "You shit..." Sue whispered. This... this cold demon has programmed a love affair between me and Clear Blue Lou, and he's told me up front there's nothing I can do about it. And gods help me, I believe him!
    But Clear Blue Lou was, after all, a perfect master. Might not he have the power to free both of them from this mind-fuck scenario? She suddenly realized that in Clear Blue Lou, the Spacers were flinging her together with the strongest possible ally she could have against their power. If she could make him one.
    Or was that thought part of the scenario, too?
    "You think of everything, don't you?" she said.
    Harker laughed. "You're beginning to look forward to it, aren't you?" he