Free Songs From the Stars by Norman Spinrad Page B

limited little world," Harker snapped angrily, "and yet to the greatest passion of all, you're cold as ice yourself!"
    Well, well, well! Sue thought. He does have some strings after all and I must just have pulled them. "Try me, Arnold," she said.
    "I already have and you didn't even know it," he said. He looked at her speculatively. "But I'm willing to try again. Let me show you."
    Oh really? Sue thought. Well what have I got to lose? "I'm all yours," she said. "For the moment."
    But strangely, Harker didn't lead her to his bedchamber. Instead, he took her outside the cabin to a little porch on the roof of the building where a thick black tube pointed up at the starry sky. He sat her down on an upholstered bench by the tube, from which vantage she saw that it terminated in an optical eyepiece at her eye level. "Look through the telescope," Harker said, squeezing in beside her.
    Sue squinted upward into the eyepiece. A circle of stars, millions of them all crammed together, flickered skittishly in the focus of her vision. "What do you see?" Harker asked softly.
    "Stars," she said, trying to make it sound ingenuous rather than snide. "What am I supposed to see?"
    "The destined home of man," Harker told her fervently. "Not the remnants of a once-proud species scrabbling for survival on a ruined planet around an insignificant sun, but worlds without end, ours for the taking. Once they seemed finally within our reach. Then came the Smash and we threw away our chance. You talk of passion? Can you imagine the passion of keeping that dream alive all these centuries, of dedicating your life to redeeming your species no matter what the cost?"
    Sue looked away from the meaningless dancing image in the telescope and stared at Arnold Harker, sorcerer, his face blazing with energy now, wistful yet angry.
    "But you can't understand, can you?" he said bitterly. "That's the final tragedy of it all, a species that can no longer even comprehend what it's lost. We're evil black sorcerers, and that's the end of it."
    "I know what it is to dream of things that were and might yet be again," Sue said somewhat defensively. "And I admit I may have bent my virtue a bit in the process too."
    She leaned forward into his body space and watched him flinch. "But what's really black about your karma is what it's made of you, Arnold," she said. "Maybe this destiny of yours is really worth it to you, but if you ask me, you've paid too high a price to follow it. You tune out other people's feelings, and you end up turning off your own."
    She could see old Arnold blush under his beard. "You have no right to say a thing like that to me!" he whined.
    "Oh don't I?" Sue said, moving even closer, speaking her words into the air he was breathing. "What if I were to offer to sport with you right now, under these stars of yours? Could you untangle yourself from your scenarios long enough to be a natural man?"
    Harker started. He gaped. He flinched back again. He eyed her narrowly. "Practicing your technique for Clear Blue Lou?" he said snidely. "More proof that we've chosen well."
    "That's just what I mean. You're not man enough to take me seriously."
    "As seriously as you intended?" Harker said, leaning forward into her body space. "So you could then salve your wounded ego by making a fool of me in your own eyes?"
    "But I've done that already, haven't I, Arnold?" Sue said lamely, trying to cover up the shock she felt at having this creature, turned off or not, see right through her completely.
    "Really?" Harker said. "Well, then I might as well return the favor." He moved even closer, daring their lips to touch. "I'll take you up on your offer, unless of course you're not really the natural woman you pretend to be."
    And with that, he kissed her full on the lips, pressing his mouth to hers lightly, challenging her to pull away and show her true cock-teasing colors. Sue could not tell for all the world whether he was messing with her mind again, or whether this