Free Songs From the Stars by Norman Spinrad Page A

said.
    "What kind of man are you? Don't you have any feelings? How can you treat people like this?"
    "Like what?" Harker asked ingenuously. He really didn't seem to know what she was talking about.
    "Like things! Like pawns in your game. Don't you Spacers have any respect for freedom of the spirit?"
    "Aren't we all pawns in the game of our choosing?" Harker said with a slight whine. "Haven't you chosen your own destiny for yourself?"
    "I'm beginning to wonder," Sue told him. All the more reason to open my spirit to Clear Blue Lou, she thought. Great gods, how many levels did this game have?
    It seemed to her that Harker was able to use even his own blindness to the feelings of his pawns as one more weapon. He knew they existed; he knew how feelings determined action, and how action altered feelings. He knew all too well that he was committing the sin of bending human spirits to his will by brute psychic force.
    The terrifying, and yes, sickeningly fascinating, thing about it was that he just didn't seem to care. Was that, in the end, what truly made him a sorcerer?
    After her meeting with Harker, Sunshine Sue was shown to a Spartan bedchamber where she was served an unsettling supper built around a huge slab of some unidentifiable meat. Like most Aquarians, she would dare a bit of upper-food-chain fare now and again; the poisons and carcinogens concentrated in the flesh of birds and mammals were cumulative, and it would take a steady diet of the stuff to significantly cut the lifespan. A tainted treat now and then did little harm and the danger added a gourmandizing spice. But this badly cooked Spacer meal had the plainness of commissary food cooked and eaten the same way every night. She guessed that the Spacers ate meat daily. Did that mean they just didn't give a damn about their health, or what?
    She found her door unlocked, and far too wired to sleep, she wandered about the empty cabin at will. The mountain Williams had gone, every door was closed, and the windows of the common room looked out across a dark expanse of lawn on the invisible rock wall behind the eagle's nest. She might as well have been alone in their bleeding space station, floating in the middle of nothing. Cosmic loneliness overcame her. Here she was, warped against her will into the reality of black science, with no kindred soul in all the world to tell her troubles to.
    She was almost glad when she ran into Arnold Harker as she drifted back to her room. Almost? Hell, she was glad. Maybe she could suss this dude out better if she caught him in a personal moment before they released her to do their bidding in the morning.
    Harker, on the other hand, did not seem pleased to find her wandering around in the night. "Why aren't you in your room?" was his cold greeting. From a natural man, it might have been the opening line of a come-on, but from this Spacer, it was simply an expression of distaste. I get no sexual vibe out of this man at all, she realized. Though she was far from burning with passion for the sorcerer, it irked her that he seemed immune to what experience had taught her were her obvious charms, that her femininity availed her nothing with this cold son of a bitch.
    "I might ask you the same question... Arnold," she cooed. I'll get a rise out of you yet, she decided. I'll make you come on so I can have the pleasure of turning you down.
    "I was looking at the stars," Harker said.
    "How romantic."
    "I was searching for unplotted satellites," the Spacer explained drearily. "Hundreds of them were orbited before the Smash. No immediate scientific value, but
    "So at least you have a hobby. How human of you."
    Arnold Harker frowned. His icy eyes suddenly seemed a tiny bit vulnerable. "Why are you so sure I have no feelings?" he said petulantly.
    "Because you don't care about anyone else's feelings, Arnold."
    "I'm a cold passionless manipulator, is that it?"
    "Well aren't you?"
    "You think me cold because I don't share the piddling feelings of your