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she hasn't."
    "But how and why and by whom?"
    "How?" Levan snorted. "The Lightnings sold her the radios and then tipped off the Eagles, who for some reason got a sudden attack of righteous whiteness and denounced her. Why? The answer to that one is who, and we both know who really made the piece of black technology that's at the heart of this situation, now don't we?"
    "The Spacers deliberately set up Sunshine Sue?" Lou said. It didn't make sense. "But why would they want to ruin the Sunshine Tribe?"
    Levan lit a pipe of reef, puffed, shook his head, and spoke more slowly. "It could be part of something really sinister, Lou. Everything's at a standstill already. What if the karma of this situation forces us to disband Word of Mouth and ban Lightning-type components generically? Imagine Aquaria without solar cells or eagles or Word of Mouth and with everything else that comes out of La Mirage smeared black with the scandal..."
    Lou took Levan's proffered pipe, toked deeply, and tried to make sense out of it. Without the La Mirage free market, Aquaria's supply of electronic components would dwindle away to a trickle of inferior imitations. It might even be worse, since only the mountain williams "knew" how to produce these goods at all. In short, without what was permitted to sleaze through La Mirage, Aquaria's white civilization would be crippled. Without the venial gray sins that were committed here, virtue would be unworkable.
    "It doesn't add up," Lou said. "Why would the Spacers help us build a white technology on the sly and then create a situation that cripples it?"
    Levan shrugged. "My soul may be well flecked with gray, but I'm no Spacer," he said. "Could this be preparation for some kind of invasion? Cripple our technology and then—"
    "It could never happen," Lou blurted instinctively. "We'd never let—" He stopped in mid-sentence, for the flow had brought him to a clearly flashed vision of the likely truth in all its subtle awfulness.
    "I smell a satori," Levan said, eyeing him narrowly.
    "Could be," Lou said slowly. "I mean, if we're forced to dismantle half our technology to prove our righteous whiteness to ourselves, we just won't do it. Instead, we'd have to admit self-consciously that our vaunted white science has a black lining, that without a certain amount of black science, the law of muscle, sun, wind and water is unworkable. They may have caught us in a nasty karmic paradox."
    Even Levan the Wise, Levan the Cool, blanched at this prospect. After all, his whole life had been spent in the maintenance of the very necessary ambiguity that these Spacer machinations seemed designed to resolve into disaster, the vital illusion that was the spirit of La Mirage. And from the look of the town, that wire-walking act was getting pretty shaky already.
    "Is this karma punishment for our sins, Lou?" Levan sighed half seriously.
    Lou laughed ruefully. "Somehow," he said, "I can't see the Spacers as the avenging angels of righteousness. Perhaps they seek to make the temptations of black science more open and watch as we're forced to blacken our souls to survive. They make much more sense playing the snake."
    Levan sat up, leaned forward, and tried to assume a grandfatherly pose. "Whatever you do, you must also restore the harmony of La Mirage, my young master," he said. "You know how this town feels about you, Lou. You won't let your people down, will you, my son?"
    "Would I do that?" Lou said, and he meant it. But he also knew that he would be beyond the bounds of such affection and loyalty when the voice of justice spoke through him.
    After a dose of what awaited her at the Sunshine Tribe's transport depot and tribal hostelry in the eastern suburbs of La Mirage, Sunshine Sue decided to avoid the Market Circle headquarters of the tribe for the moment. Everyone she wanted to avoid was clamoring to see her, and everyone else was asking her politely to keep her distance.
    After a quick meal, she had grilled Gloria Sunshine