Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  “Very well, but let’s not stay here.” If he was a provocateur, he was toying with her. She preferred the alternative. “And hide your hardware.” He started at that, but obediently pulled the hood over his head.

  She launched into a brisk walk, head lowered against the wind. He half-ran to catch up and he asked:

  “Going to the Marcotte house?”

  She did not answer and she continued to lead the way till she turned into the empty lot. She was suddenly reassured by his ignorance of her true destination.

  The mob had burned down the house of the Marcottes. The snow was resurrecting it, outlining the concrete foundation and the broken stumps of walls, piling up around the heaps of rubble. The living-room had been there, she guessed, at the back of the house; she could picture the parents watching their kids at play in that wide backyard which extended down to the water’s edge. One of the parents would have yelled out from time to time to warn the children away from the water.…

  She followed the winding path of flagstones which ended on the threshold of the ruined house, but she did not continue. Stepping on the concrete flooring always made her feel as if she were desecrating a tomb. Instead, she led the way around the side.

  Strangely enough, she had no such compunction about treading the ground where they had buried the bodies. It was a backyard as wide as a playing field, extending down to the water. The snow was driving down with a renewed fierceness and she could not even see to the edges of the field as she peered into the whirling snowflakes.

  It had been during the last war but one, when the Franco-Maghrebis had overwhelmed the Maritime Confederacy—after Québec had unexpectedly joined in the fighting, capturing Edmonston and pushing down to Fredericton, breaking the back of Maritime resistance. As the combined armies had moved down to Saint John, closer and closer to the F.S.A. border, the war scare had spread to the whole of New England. Several Lowell families—Bédards, Merciers, Royers—guilty of being too ostentatiously francophone, had been rounded up as spies, had seen their houses burned, and had been shot later that night. Nothing more was known. The leaders of the mob had never been identified. The dead do not testify.

  Pat had even had trouble finding the spot where the Marcottes and the others were buried. Nobody knew, or was willing to tell a stranger. The remaining francophones around town were afraid to talk. She’d plugged into the Net for unending days and nights in the hope of catching a hint. Finally, she’d used her Net expertise to assemble a slightly illegal interception program; it scanned every private and public electronic conversation for a month before coming up with the slightest of allusions. It had been enough, though.

  She stopped in the middle of the field and turned towards Marc. The snow curtained them off from prying eyes.

  “Well, Marc, who are you? You don’t have a Québec accent.”

  “I was born and raised in Pelham, in what was New Hampshire, but I trained as a roving trouble-shooter, a specialist of Net patch-up jobs. I was in Amherst when the invasion started. Since then, I’ve been moving, struggling to keep a Net channel open, but I’m running out of luck, and time, and money.”

  “Alors? Que veux-tu?” she asked, eyes narrowing. She did not need more complications to interfere with what had seemed to be such a simple mission.

  “Que tu viennes avec moi, Patline. Come with me: I said I was a gatekeeper, but that’s only part of the truth. This last war was just another installment in the conflict between North America and Europe, but the fighting, the bombings, the troop movements are merely the overt war. Another war has begun, Pat, and this one is invisible. It’s a war for control of the Net.”

  He brushed some snow off the rim of his hood and added: “I’m a soldier now in this underground war. On one side, there are the Franco-Maghrebis, who want to shut down all access to the continental Net where debate is free, information is cheap, and gems are stirred in along with the manure. On the Net, you can debate the Koran, the Sharia, and whether Mohammed was forewarned of the ozone layer’s weakening or not. Without the Net, the Franco-Maghrebis can feed you all the news they want you to have. On the other side, a group is forming, rather undefined—it includes all Netters, à la limite. We take action against the disruptor viruses of the Franco-Maghrebis; we try to locate their taps on the lines; we buy new hardware when the Franco-Maghrebis confiscate what’s already there; sometimes we simply play the role of reporters or researchers—what is on the Net is as important as having the Net.…”

  “So, why me?” she asked. “And isn’t there a section of the F.S.A. army that deals with electronic skirmishing?”

  “The military experts have enough to do with defending the access to their own files. As for you, we saw what you did to find the burial spot—an ingenious little program—and we’d like to have you. Especially since you speak French—French-speaking programmers are as rare as vacuum tubes nowadays on our side, and we expect to face a lot of datastream in French from now on. Would that affect your loyalties? Having to work against Québec programmers, I mean?”

  “I didn’t notice the F.S.A. having any qualms about old loyalties when they nuked the British Fleet to keep the Franco-Maghrebis from getting it intact,” she answered drily. And any loyalty she felt for Québec was very old indeed.

  “Good, good. But there is another reason. My reserve funds are practically worthless now that the area is occupied, and I know that you will be getting some hard currency soon.”

  She almost smiled. It was true; she’d sent for the memorial money from the Nouvelle Patente as soon as she’d found the killing field.

  “Yes, Marc, but there’s still that old question: why should I trust you?”

  “We were both caught behind the lines. I think we have to trust each other.”

  “I don’t know about that. I don’t even know what side of the line I was on originally.…”

  “We need that money!” he pronounced. “The Franco-Maghrebis will be selling the hardware they took from the F.S.A. army. It’ll be a bit battered, but with universal compatibility, we can use it to replace the hardware the Franco-Maghrebis have been confiscating left and right since the beginning of the occupation. I’ve got to be in Springfield in three days for the auction, impersonating a Montréal resaler.”

  “So, you want me to start by committing larceny.… The money is being entrusted to me to build a memorial.”

  “A memorial to the dead. What I’m offering you is a memorial to the living. Pat, I believe that the Net is vital if we are to have any hope for the future.”

  “Come to my place tomorrow, Marc,” she said, as she strode away. She had to think.

  “Et cette nuit? I just arrived in town and I have nowhere to sleep.”

  “Va voir Laura Daigle, 46 rue Merrimack.”

  Surprise was in his eyes for a twinkling, and Patline realized that she’d spoken in her natural tone of voice instead of her usual rough whisper. She stroked her beard in contemplation as she turned her back and walked down to the waterside, where there was a path.

  A few houses further, behind the decaying hulk which had been some kind of school decades ago, she found the small Catholic shrine—a grotto of concrete where glowed candles the last of the faithful came to light. The Way of the Cross, with its faded inscriptions in French, ended at the top of the concrete mound. She climbed the steps to check the surroundings. Nobody in sight.

  However, when she walked back down to the mouth of the grotto, a shape appeared in the greyness. She stopped and then looked around for more, but the man was alone. He did not acknowledge her presence as he stepped up to the altar. In his threadbare windbreaker, he had the look of a refugee from the Mexican state of Alta California—blond, bronzed, and breathtakingly thin.

  Aware of the man’s scrutiny, she kneeled in front of the crucifix and barely remembered how to cross herself. The Doyle family had been Catholic once, but she had always scorned keeping up appearances when the heart did not believe.

  She turned a
fter a suitable pause to the small table with a Holy Bible and a ledger, both plastic-wrapped. She opened the latter, flipping past the pious scrawlings in Spanish, Greek, or Polish, went to the back page, and blinked at finding a sealed envelope stuck to the inner cover. The agent aboard the Omaha train had instructed her to look for messages there. Even back then, the inner councils of the F.S.A. had expected a war with the Franco-Maghrebis before Christmas and had expected to lose. They had already been preparing resistance, and she’d let herself be persuaded to take part in order not to jeopardize her cover as a Canadian Net programmer hired for a small job in Lowell. She had checked the mail drop a hundred times, and this was the first there was anything.

  “Don’t you know your own name?” The voice boomed into her ear.

  “I’m sorry. I was thinking.” She grasped the old pen, and wrote down her name with a flourish. As she put back the pen, she smoothly detached the envelope and pocketed it.

  “What’s in the envelope?” Was there the slightest hint of a Québec accent in the blond man’s voice. She smiled faintly:

  “It’s a greeting card I got today for my birthday. Didn’t you see me take it out of my pocket to let it dry?”

  “No, I guess not.” He did not pursue the matter. “Did you spot a strange man on your way here? Medium height, grey hair, in a brownish parka?”

  “Couldn’t see much, with the wind.” She was suddenly sure that he was an agent of the Sûreté militaire.

  “Of course.… Can you speak French?”

  “Oh, juste un peu,” she forced out with a quaver. The man’s eyes seemed to weigh for a moment the build of a potential recruit. He probably judged her too scrawny to be worth his time, and he dismissed her:

  “You should come to Québec; it’s impossible to learn to speak French right elsewhere, and French can’t survive outside it. Good jobs for bilinguals, too.”

  She assented mutely, and he moved off into the snow-filled gloom. She hesitated, filled with renewed mistrust of everybody and everything. Were Marc and this man part of some subtle ploy by the Sûreté? Who could she trust? Even if Marc was for real, didn’t her commitment to the Nouvelle Patente or the F.S.A. resistance come first? She glanced at the Bible, and, on a whim, as she mocked herself inside, she opened it to a random page and bent down to read.

  “5. And the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, Rechab and Baanah, went, and came about the heat of the day to the house of Ishbosheth, who lay on a bed at noon. 6. And they came thither into the midst of the house, as though they would have fetched wheat; and they smote him under the fifth rib: and Rechab and Baanah his brother escaped. 7. For when they came into the house, he lay on his bed in his bedchamber, and they smote him, and slew him, and beheaded him, and took his head, and gat them away through the plain all night.”

  From the Second Book of Samuel.… She felt the words indict her for impudence in seeking advice she didn’t believe in, anyway, and yet she had to grin at the ironies. Advice about backstabbing, as if she needed it! The dilemma was in choosing which back to stab! She remembered some of her grandfather’s Michif and shouted it suddenly to the unseen sky:

  “Kishay Menitou! Weechihin!”

  There was no answer, and in fact her grandfather’s prayers had rarely been answered. She left.

  When she got home, a man in uniform was waiting on her doorstep, and she almost shrank from him. Her grandfather had drummed into her an instinctive abhorrence of police; Zachary Allard had relished telling how his crooked nose had been broken by police officers unfriendly to Métis. The beating had prompted his move from the Prairies to northern Ontario.

  However, even if the Sûreté militaire was on her tail, the man was older than the average security officer, and he started by handing her a package. She went inside, locking the door behind her—the courier could wait a bit before being paid—and pulling down the blinds, and then opened the package to find a roll of silver écus. Enough to build a fitting memorial to the Marcottes and the other victims of the March massacres.…

  She invited the courier inside and served him some of her quickly vanishing stock of maple brandy. Whatever happened, she would be able to leave Lowell, quit living in disguise, and return to a freer land. What would she look like without a beard? She found she’d forgotten.…

  “À la vôtre!” They clinked glasses. He reminisced about the first Independence Battalions of Québec. He claimed he had been in one of them when it marched down St-Denis street in Montréal, in disordered ranks of paunchy volunteers who brandished antiquated Glock light machine guns and sang Gens du pays with a terrified fervour, cheered on by the throng packed on the sidewalks and in the cafés. They had felt like heroes, surely doomed, but tears of joy streamed down their faces as they realized that the age-old dream of a nation was coming true. Québec was standing up after four centuries of colonization.

  Pat muttered something under her breath about betraying part of their past, but she knew Québec had been given little choice. Its people had dreamed of a peaceful country, that would never aspire to play the game of weltpolitik, but they had been compelled to arm and to defend themselves, till the logic of history led them to do unto others what had been done to them.

  He did not hear her. They had been hoarse with shouting and singing, and they all thought they would be sent up the Outaouais to liberate Hull from the Canadian Army. However, his battalion had been ordered to stay and wipe out the Westmount pockets of resistance. The house to house fighting had been ugly, against older men and women who refused to be third-class citizens and sang an anthem composed by a French-Canadian as their houses burned around them.… He came back from the past as if burnt by it, and asked suddenly what happened when dreams two hundred years old came true? She did not answer. Precious few dreams had come true for her.

  She sang old songs with him, careless for once. Let the neighbours hear them singing in French! They danced a bit, to old tunes from the twentieth century that he remembered hearing when they were nearly new. He was the first to fall asleep.

  That left her to contemplate alternatives. Going back to Canada. Staying in Lowell to help the F.S.A. resistance—the traditional work of spying, sabotage, and guerilla warfare, glamourous but deadly. Leaving with Marc.

  Past, present, future. It was too neat. She had lain on her cot to reflect, and she fell asleep in the middle of remembering the moose she had killed.

  * * *

  When she woke up the next morning, she found an old razor and shaved. The epicene ambiguity of the new face she discovered as she cleared the last of the stubble startled her. She stared at herself for a moment without being able to decide who she recognized, and then went to the door to watch the street. Refugees were coming in from the war zone.

  The snow had changed into a cold, pattering rain. Standing on her doorstep, she watched the little groups of men and women shuffle down the street, towards the town center. A man dressed in the same rags, arms empty, came towards her door.

  “Are you ready to go?” he asked.

  “I know I cannot go back, but what hope do you offer me?” She wanted more than the lonely glory of joining the F.S.A. resistance, clinging to a sense of separateness and tight-knit camaraderie as she had done all her life. Yes, she wanted more, she wanted a change.

  “The name of the game is survival, Patline. Look at us! You come from Canada, I from the good old U. S. of A., and a hundred years ago nobody would have bet that we would still speak French to each other. Why? Because we were the pioneers of the electronic community. No ghettoes for us, no Little Italys, no Chinatowns. We can be found across the continent, but we are invisible. Our grandparents used to come home from a day at work in English or Japanese, and light up the television, turn on the radio, plug in the modem.… Et ils pouvaient alors se parler en français. No borders. One community from sea to sea to sea. Something France only allowed briefly over there—remember the Minitel crackdown? But even if the Franco-Maghrebi tanks roll to the Pacific, we have a
chance, I say, as long as the Net survives and continues to carry more information than a thousand AIs could filter.”

  “Do you really think they’ll invade the F.S.A.?”

  “Why not? For us, America is a broken-down dream. Both sides lost when the old United States decided to tackle the new Russia. But for Europeans, America is still the next best thing to a second chance.”

  She smiled, and pushed the door open. Her travel bag, with the roll of écus secured in a hidden pocket, was on the other side. She shouldered it, and heard reproving ghosts wail. You need to be alive to remember, she almost said, but she simply turned towards Marc. “Let’s go.”

  “What do you want me to call you?”

  It was a new life, after all. They would look for Pat Doyle if he disappeared … they would find a courier asleep in her flat. She remembered an old book:

  “Call me Maria.…”

  * * *

  The boy’s hair is black and curly, and his skin remembers the Mediterranean sun he was born under. He is called Esmail, Tahar … maybe Ahmed. He has grown up in the narrow alleys of the new housing built within the walls of the old fort on the hill, once surrounded by houses, now isolated by the rising sea at each high tide. His father is a colonel in the garrison of this place called Halifax.

  When he’s sent to bed, he clutches a pocket comp and later burrows under the blankets before turning it on and accessing the children’s Net. The first time he innocently logged on, he was caught by his parents and only kept the comp because it was indispensable for his studies.

  The lure of the forbidden is strong. He’s learned to be careful. There is a hierarchy of Nets, accessed through gates requiring ever more intricate passwords. He has followed fierce electronic debates, which have made him blush at times and introduced him to heresies he had never heard of. Yet, his greatest shock was the revelation that one of the more articulate and thoughtful of the Netters, only identified by a nom de guerre, was in fact his own younger sister, whom he had always ignored.