Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  “How—”

  :Very easily. When she let go that second egg and all that loose protoplasm, she left a beautiful trail … and when a Khagodi cannot outthink an Amsu, it will be a wet day in the desert. Now hurry please.:

  While they were gathering themselves together as best they could, she got a good hard hold on Amsuwlle’s ganglia and nerve networks and sent her slowly back on course. Then she flashed a few orders, and the mesenchyme slavishly arranged themselves in neat layers to replace valves and membranes. :What a mess. She is not going to be the same.:

  “Neither will we,” said Zaf.

  :That can be discussed later. You are going to ride her to rendezvous.:

  They left Zaf in the dayroom. “I suppose I will not see you again for a long time, Elena,” he said sorrowfully.

  :You will see each other in fifteen days at debriefing,: Threyha said from the entrance. :Sentimental farewells are not in order.:

  There were no sentimental farewells for Amsuwlle. Elena and the men dragged themselves aboard the Limbo without a word.

  * * *

  Threyha did not have or need a voice. Her telepathy was a stentorian bellow, but always under perfect control. While she was still in the lock of her tank, waiting for it to fill with her own world’s mixture of waters, she directed a beam of thought. :Elena.:

  :Leave me alone. You deceived me. Par Singri is not sick.: She was scrubbing herself with a cloth, trying to get off the layers of silt, sweat, dried protoplasm and other accretions of her term on Amsuwlle.

  :Zaf was too proud to ask you personally when he was so frightened, and I wanted him on egalitarian terms with you.:

  :Now you will have him punished.:

  :Of course not. But I cannot allow him to make himself any sicker. I have a good Psychman, a methane breather with eighteen legs and blue eyes in his knees, who will cure him of the notion that his shape is too peculiar to be of use to GalFed…: She waved her arms through the water to freshen it. :This stuff is always stale slop no matter how they aerate it … spare me from people with feelings of inferiority! Only man of his planet in GalFed! We have invited fifteen of his cousins to join us; likely they will accept, and then he will boss them unmercifully.:

  :What of me? I have not done very well.: She thought of the great wounded creature, half killed with kindness, wrenched out of shape and aching with bewilderment.

  :You spoke when necessary and shut up otherwise. It’s what you are paid for. I will put forward your recommendation that we implant the Amsu with robot monitors and except for emergencies service them at rendezvous. Otherwise let them take care of themselves. Now you deserve a good sleep, because in twelve hours you are going to board Amsumar: we have a low-priority emergency—:

  “Oh, no!”

  :—from the ESP, who happens to be my nephew; he is a bright sensible boy but a bit frantic. It will take you a day or two to cool that, and we will be back in good time to meet with Zaf and Amsuwlle. You would say there is nothing like getting into the water again to cure a fear of drowning.:

  :Threyha, why do you not simply take over the universe?:

  :I hate authority. And of course no other Khagodi would obey me. One last thing: aside from my nephew the crew on Amsumar are all female beetle types from Procyon-something, and you will not have to worry about being considered a—what do you call it? Jinx or Jonah?:

  “One is as good as another,” said Elena, and fell asleep.

  HOME BY THE SEA

  Élisabeth Vonarburg

  Translated from the French by Jane Brierley

  Élisabeth Vonarburg, teacher, SF writer, and critic, was born in France and moved to Canada in 1973. She began to write SF stories in the 1970’s and her first novel, Le Silence de la cité (1981 — The Silent City, 1988) won two prizes in France—she was the first writer outside of France and the first woman to win the Grand Prix de la SF française. She was the fiction editor of Solaris for eleven years, and has been an indefatigable advocate of French Canadian SF. David Ketterer calls her “the leading figure in Quebec SF today.” Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers calls her “a prime mover in the establishment of a French Canadian school of science fiction and its blossoming into a unique Québécois independent current of culture.”

  Vonarburg learned to speak English from listening to Joan Baez records in the 1960’s, and writes articulate criticism in English. But she writes fiction in French. Her recent essay “So You Want to Be a Science Fiction Writer?” gives an extensive autobiographical and critical look at writing SF in a language other than English: “… when I began writing SF, at eighteen, I felt energized, not crushed, by the American tradition(s), I felt buoyed, not embarrassed, by the French one(s), and I never thought that literature and SF were two distinct categories.”

  Her first story in English translation was published in the first Tesseracts volume; then the publisher asked her for a novel and she had one, previously published in France, to translate (The Silent City). She makes the point that outside the U.S. and perhaps the U.K., there is no such thing as a career in SF for writers. “What if you are a young Québécois SF writer, descendent of French conquerors who have been conquered, living an uncertain francophone life in a predominantly English-speaking continent, and reading almost nothing but American SF? (And what if you are a young Québécois allophone?) Well, you write stories about Captain John McSmith, born in New York, commanding the Starship Counter-prize and conquering the universe. Not one European aboard the ship, never mind a Québécois. And you don’t do this by choice, with a neat historical-or-something explanation for this absence, but by sheer (hysterical) blindness, simply because you cannot see Québécois in the stars: you’re not even sure what it is to be Québécois now, then what could it be in the future! Of course, you can always write about Aliens who are underdogs, or living in the cracks of a not so future dominating culture which is not yours—and you do, and if you are a woman, why, that sort of makes sense too.”

  Her SF is feminist but not polemical, and deeply concerned with psychology. As is, for example, “Home by the Sea.”

  Images of sorrow, pictures of delight

  Things that go to make up a life …

  Let us relive our lives in what we tell you

  (Home by the Sea, Genesis)

  “Is it a lady, Mommy?”

  The small girl looks at me with the innocent insolence of children who say out loud what adults are thinking to themselves. A skinny, pale, fair-haired child of five or six, she already looks so like her mother that I feel sorry for her. The mother gives an embarrassed laugh and lifts the child onto her lap. “Of course it’s a lady, Rita.” She smiles excuse-her-please, I smile back oh-it’s-nothing. Will she take advantage of it to launch into one of those meaningless, ritual conversations whereby neighbors assure each other of their mutual inoffensiveness? To cut her off, I turn toward the window of the compartment and look purposefully at the scenery. Heading to the north the train follows the system of old dykes as far as the huge gap breached four years ago by the Eschatoï in their final madness. The scars left by the explosions have nearly disappeared, and it almost seems as though the dyke were meant to stop here and that the waters had been allowed to invade the lowlands as part of some official scheme. We cross the narrows by ferry, and are once more in the train, an ordinary electric train this time, suspended between the two wide sheets of water, to the west rippled by waves, to the east broken by dead trees, old transmission towers, church spires, and caved-in roofs. There is a mist, a whitish breath rising from the waters like a second tide ready to engulf what is left of the man-made landscape.

  Is it a lady? You obviously don’t see ladies like me very often in your part of the world, little girl. Cropped hair, boots, army fatigues, a heavy jacket of worn leather; and the way I was sitting, grudgingly corrected when you and your mousy mother came in—a real lady doesn’t sprawl like that, does she, even when she’s by herself. The lady actually likes to be comfortable, believ
e it or not, and in her usual surroundings she doesn’t have to worry much about what people think. The lady, little girl, is a recuperator.

  But she couldn’t tell you this; she didn’t want to see your big, stupid eyes fill with terror. All the same, you don’t get to see a real live bogeywoman every day. I could’ve told you a few things. Yes, I know, If you’re not good the Recuperator will get you, and he’ll say you’re not a real person and put you in his big sack. As a matter of fact, we don’t put human specimens in our big sacks right away, you know; only plants and small animals. Big animals are injected with tracers once they’ve been put to sleep for preliminary tests. If the Institute researchers discover something especially interesting, they send us back for it. I could’ve told you all this, little girl, you and your mother, who would probably have looked at me with superstitious fear. But who cares what recuperators really do, anyway? They go into the contaminated Zones to bring back horrible things that in other times might have been plants, animals, humans. So the recuperators must be contaminated too, mentally if nothing else. No, no one apart from the Recuperation Agency cares what the recuperators really do. And no one, especially not the Institute, wonders who they really are, which suits me just fine.

  “Why did they break the dyke, Mommy?” asks the small girl. She’s sensed that it would be a good idea to change the subject.

  “They were crazy,” says the mother curtly. Not a bad summing up. Fanatics, they were—but it comes to the same thing. You see, they thought the waters would keep rising, and they wanted to help the process along: The End of the Damned Human Race. But the waters stopped. So did the Eschatoï, by the way; it was one of their great collective suicides. But this time there weren’t enough of them left to start the sect afresh—nor enough energy in the new generations to be fanatic. The prolife people have simmered down too. Even the Institute doesn’t believe in its own slogans any more. The Rehabilitation of the Marvelous Human Race. But that’s just it: the human race isn’t reproducing itself well or adequately. It probably wore itself out with its frenetic activity during the Great Tides and seismic catastrophes at the end of the last century. Now it’s going downhill, although no one dares say so straight out to the Institute and its people. True, there are fewer earthquakes, fewer volcanic eruptions, the sun breaks through the clouds more often, and the waters have stopped rising, but that’s nothing to get excited about; it’s not a human victory. Just a blind, natural phenomenon that peaked by pure chance before destroying what was left of the human race. And I, little girl, I who am not human, I collect what the Institute calls specimens in the contaminated Zones—specimens that are also, in their way, what is left of the human race.

  I who am not human. Come on, now, didn’t I get over that long ago? But it’s a habit, a lapse, a relapse. I could’ve answered you just now, little girl, by saying, “The lady is an artifact, and she’s going to see her mother.”

  But that very word requires so much explaining: Mother. At least I have a navel. A neat little navel, according to the medic who checked me out before my abortive departure for Australia and the Institute. The current artifacts have large, clumsily made navels that the scanner immediately picks up as not being the real thing. But you, now, it’s almost invisible, extraordinary, what technical skill your … And there he stumbled: mother, creator, manufacturer? He came out of his scientific ecstasy, suddenly conscious that after all someone was listening who hadn’t known the truth. None of the other tests had ever revealed anything! But this Medical Center is connected to the Institute, and new detection methods have been developed that didn’t exist when you were, er … (he cleared his throat—he was very embarrassed, poor man) made.

  Yes, she made me like this so I could pass for a human being. Almost. In spite of everything I thought then, she surely didn’t foresee that I’d learn about it this way. I probably wasn’t meant to know until the end, with its unmistakable signs. Why? Am I really going to ask her? Is this why I came? But I’m not really going to see her. I’m passing by, that’s all. I’m on my way to the Hamburg Zone.

  Oh, come on! I know damn well I’ll stop at Mahlerzee. I will? I won’t? Am I still afraid, then? That cowardice that made me burn all my bridges, swear never to ask her anything, when I found out. But it wasn’t only cowardice (you see, little girl, the lady always tends to exaggerate, to be too hard on herself). It was a question of survival. It wasn’t because I was afraid or desperate that I ran away after the medic’s revelations. I didn’t want to see the others waiting for me outside. Not Rick, especially not Rick … No, if I remember rightly, that lady of fifteen years ago was in a fury—still is—in spite of everything. A huge fury, a wild, redeeming fury. Surely this was why, on coming out of the Medical Center, she found herself heading for Colibri Park. It was there that she’d first seen the Walker.

  Colibri Park. The first time you go there you wonder why it’s not called Statue Park. Of course, there is the transparent dome in the middle of the main lawn, enclosing its miniature jungle with hummingbirds that flit about on vibrating wings, but what one really sees are the statues. Everywhere, along the alleys, on the lawns, even in the trees, believe it or not. The young lady first came there with Rick, her lover, and Yevgheny, the typical streetwise city boy who teaches small-town greenhorns the score. The lady was sixteen. She’d barely been a month in Baïblanca. One of the youngest scholarship students at Kerens University. A future ornament of the Institute. The fledgling that had fled the nest, slamming the door as she went, so to speak. And all around her and her lover, there were the wonders of Baïblanca, the capital of Eurafrica. I could say it was El Dorado for us, but you probably wouldn’t know what El Dorado is.

  Yevgheny had pointed out, among the people strolling by, the Walker—a man moving slowly, very slowly. He was tall and could have been handsome, had something in his bearing been as imposing as his height. But he walked listlessly, you couldn’t even call it sauntering. And then, as he passed them by, that blank face, those eyes that seemed to be looking far off, perhaps sad, perhaps merely empty … He’d been walking like this every day for almost ten years, Yevgheny had said. The sort of thing old men do … That was it, he walked like an old man. But he didn’t seem all that old, barely in his thirties.

  “He was never young, either,” Yevgheny said. “He’s an artifact.”

  And I’d never heard the word. How had my mother managed to keep me from ever hearing it? At least Rick seemed as stupid as I was. Yevgheny was delighted. “An artifact—an organic work of art. Artificial! Obviously you don’t see them running around the streets of Mahlerzee or Broninghe.”

  This one wasn’t doing much running either, Rick remarked. Yevgheny smiled condescendingly: this artifact was at the end of the road, used up, almost finished.

  He made us go past the Walker and sit on one of the long benches facing the central lawn. Then he launched into a detailed explanation. Not many of these artifacts were made nowadays; they’d gone out of fashion, and there had been incidents. During their fully active period, they were far more lively than the Walker (who moved slowly, so slowly, toward the bench). Very lively, in fact. And not everyone knew they were artifacts, not even the artifacts themselves. Thirty years earlier, the great diversion in the smart circles of Baïblanca was to bet on who among the new favorites in the salon of this or that well-known personality was an artifact, whether or not the artifact knew, whether or not the artifact’s “client” knew, whether or not either would find out, and how either would react. Particularly the artifact.

  There were Sheep and there were Tigers. The Tigers tended to self-destruct deliberately before their program terminated, sometimes with spectacular violence. A biosculptor had made a fortune this way. One of his artifacts had reacted at knowing what it was by setting out to kill him; there was always some doubt about the precise moment when an artifact stopped working completely, and the biosculptor gambled that his would self-destruct before getting him. He almost lost his bet. Instead, he m
erely lost both arms and half his face. It wasn’t serious: the medics made them grow back. After several premature deaths among the elite of Baïblanca in those inopportune explosions, the government put a stop to it. This didn’t keep the biosculptors from continuing for a while. Artifacts popped up now and then, but no more Tigers were made; the penalty was too stiff.

  Yevgheny rattled all this off with a relish that disgusted the young lovers. They didn’t know much about Baïblanca yet; they had heard the Judge-mentalists fulminating against the “New Sodom,” and now they understood why. This decadent society wasn’t much better than that of the Eschatoï, the dyke-destroyers whom it had survived … Rick and Manou understood each other so well, little girl. They were so pure, the brave new generation. (Oh, what high-flown debates we used to have, late into the night, about what we’d do for this poor, ailing world once we were in the Institute!)

  With Yevgheny, they watched the Walker reach the bench and sit down beside the blue-clad sleeper. Yevgheny began to laugh as he felt the lovers stiffen: the Walker wouldn’t do anything to them even if he heard them, which wasn’t likely! It was an artifact, an object! But didn’t he say they sometimes self-destructed? “I told you, they aren’t making any more Tigers!”

  The final moments of the Sheep weren’t nearly as spectacular. They became less and less mobile, and finally their artorganic material became unstable. Then the artifacts vaporized, or else … Yevgheny rose as he spoke, and went over to the sleeper in blue. Bending his index finger, he tapped her on the forehead. “Or else they turn to stone.”