Songs From the Stars by Norman Spinrad

Spacers?" he said.
    "Spacers, demons, sorcerers, all the same thing," Nate said. "Serve 'em, and you get gifted; cross 'em, and you get cursed."
    "Theirs is the power," Buckeye said nervously. "You serve 'em like they tell you, or you end up doing what they want anyway; they don't give a shit." Lou had the feeling these williams weren't connecting up with reality at all. They didn't seem to know what they were saying, and they certainly didn't seem to realize whom they were saying it to.
    "Hey, I'm Clear Blue Lou, remember?" he said, snapping his fingers in their faces. "The giver of justice in your case? And you're sitting here totally whacked out telling me that you're servants of black science?"
    Nate seemed to come down from somewhere and realize to some extent where he was and what was happening. But Buckeye, his eyes wild and his body vibrating, continued to rave on. "We all serve the demons!" he roared. "Theirs is the power! Nobody thwarts their will!"
    The whole room was listening now, and Buckeye finally grew aware of it. "Lowlander assholes!" he shouted. "You're as black as we are! You just don't have the balls to admit it!"
    A knot of male Eagles came surging through the crowd from one direction and a mob of Sunshines from another, and scores of hands were balled into fists. Ug-ly! Lou bolted to his feet and held up his arms.
    "We don't have to listen to this shit!"
    "Not from mountain william assholes!"
    "Break 'em up, Lou!"
    "Let's have some justice now!"
    "I'll speak justice when and how I see it!" Lou roared. The tumult guttered into silence. "And I don't like what I'm seeing right now," he said more quietly. "As for you," he said to the Lightnings for the benefit of the sullen onlookers, "get your asses upstairs, all of you!"
    Talk about bearers of bad karma, these Lightnings seemed to enjoy being walking bummers! How black did this sorcery get?
    Sunshine Sue entered the Garden of Love as the recipient of the best vibes the Court of Justice had to offer at the moment, or so it seemed to her. Salutes and high signs and greetings from all and sundry, for some strange reason. The only bad vibes came from the Eagles and, unsettlingly enough, from a few of her own people who apparently still weren't convinced she hadn't gotten the tribe in over its head.
    If only they knew, she thought wanly. If only all of them knew.
    Across the crowded room, Levan was motioning her to his booth; since Clear Blue Lou was nowhere in sight and Levan could be counted upon to have all the strands of the web in his hands, she made her way through the crowd in his direction.
    "Hi Sue!"
    "We're with you!"
    "Damn Eagles!"
    Something really weird was going on. Why was everyone save the Eagles openly showing her their support? It was as if they expected her to come out clean. Even if the town's sympathies were really with her, the movers and shapers of La Mirage did not make a practice of standing too close to someone in danger of being painted black.
    And of course, she was now guiltier by far than anyone but she herself knew. She was in fact here as an agent of sorcery, whether she liked it or not. She was deeper into black science than she had thought it possible to get.
    Arnold Harker had gotten to her on levels where she didn't even know she had levels. The prize of a Sunshine World Broadcast Network would probably have tempted her into this plot even if she had real free will. But it terrified her to know that the Spacer scenario was so cogent that her will didn't enter into it at all. "The scenario is behavioristic," Harker had said. She still didn't know quite what that meant, but the vibe at least was all too clear. An utter ruthlessness that chilled the soul.
    Yet Arnold had also shown her that this ruthlessness was far from cold-blooded. The Spacers followed their dream with a burning passion, sterile and pointless though it might seem to her, a passion that seemed to have leached Harker of all other feeling. What could be blacker