Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  Was that, Hurn wondered—and not for the first time—why he had made such a great Cooper? Despite his mediocrity as an actor, there had never been anyone else to play the role.

  “Vance,” he said. “Henry.…”

  “Call me Vance. You always did. That’s who I am here. For this little command performance.”

  “Vance, why did you agree to do this?”

  “Why did you agree, Bill? And don’t tell me it was the money. You don’t care about the money any more than I do. You have all you want. I had all I needed to stay drunk.”

  “I don’t know,” Hurn said. “Smith … He just made it seem so important. Like there were millions of people just sitting around waiting for a new season of Stranger in Town. He flattered me. And he tempted me. This was my baby, remember, and the network killed it. And I suppose there was a part of me that always wanted to do this. Finish it properly, tie up all those loose ends … And yet I know the whole thing is crazy. This show will never run on a U.S. network. Not in black and white. Unless we put it straight into reruns.” He snickered. “Maybe that’s the plan. I mean, who would even know the difference? This whole thing is so—1960.”

  They had reached Maccoby’s dressing room.

  “Well,” Maccoby said, “Smith is telling the truth, in a way. There are millions of people waiting for this.”

  “In Hong Kong? North Korea? I mean, where does he expect to sell this stuff? Who are these overseas investors of his? How can he piss so much money away like water, and how does he expect to ever recoup it? The whole thing is bizarre.”

  “Oh, it’s bizarre all right,” Maccoby said. “It sure is bizarre.” He glanced up briefly into the hard blue sky. Then he said, “Well, I better get cleaned up.”

  * * *

  “You killed her,” Cooper said. “You killed her and you tried to kill me. But somehow I survived. And I crawled out of there, halfway out of my mind. And I crawled into the desert. And a wagon train found me. And they carried me along with them, and nursed me. And when I woke up I didn’t even know my name. You took it. You took away my name.”

  “Stevens,” Loomis said. “Brad Stevens.” His hand did not waver on the gun.

  “Oh, I remember that now,” he said. “I remember it all. I remember Aimee … I remember it all.”

  “I’m glad about that,” Loomis said. “I truly am. I’ve been waiting for you to remember for the most wearisome time. Not much sense in killing a person when he doesn’t even know why.”

  He tightened his grip on the trigger. “But there’s something more,” he said. “More than that. Something you couldn’t remember, because you never knew. Something I have been meaning to tell you for a long time. Longer than you could imagine.”

  “Make sense,” said the man who called himself Cooper. “Make some kind of sense.”

  “Your name,” Loomis said. “It ain’t really Stevens. Not really. The name you’ve been trying so hard to remember isn’t even your real name. Isn’t that a hoot? Isn’t that the funniest thing you ever heard?” He laughed.

  “Make sense,” said the man on the ground. “You’re still not making any.”

  “Stevens,” Loomis said. “That’s just a name they gave you. The folks who picked you out at the orphanage. Picked out the pretty little baby. That was their name. Good God-fearing folks. But they only wanted the one, and they wanted a baby, not a full-grown child. And for sure they didn’t want a gimp.”

  “I was adopted? You’re saying I was adopted? How could you know that?”

  “I was there, little brother. I was there. I was the gimp they passed over for the pretty little baby. I was only four years old at the time. But some things you really don’t forget.”

  “Brother?”

  “Right,” Loomis said. “You and me, we’re children of the very same flesh. Arnold and Mary Jane Loomis. Nobody ever changed my name. Nobody wanted the poor little cripple boy.”

  “Our parents…”

  “Dead,” Loomis said. “Indians. They killed Pa. Killed Ma, too, after they were through with her. Would have killed us, too, except they got interrupted.”

  Slowly, deliberately, the man who had been called Cooper climbed to his feet. “We were separated?” he said.

  “For nearly thirty years. You eating your good home cooking and me eating the poor-house gruel. You growing into a solid citizen and marrying and farming. And me drifting from town to town like a piece of dried-up horse dung blown around by the wind. Never finding a place I could call home. And looking, looking for my little brother. And finally I found you.…”

  “Why?” he asked. “Why did you do it?”

  “I didn’t mean to…” Loomis faltered. “It was like a kind of madness came over me. Seeing your house and your farm and your wife, everything you had and I didn’t, everything I hated you for having … But I don’t know. Maybe that was what I was intending all along, intending to make you suffer just a little of what I had to suffer. I don’t know. I don’t think I meant to kill Aimee, but when I did I knew I would have to kill you, too. And I thought I did. And then I saw you alive. And I realized that you didn’t remember, didn’t remember a single thing. So I just waited, watched and waited, until you did start to remember. So you would know why I had to kill you. And now it’s time. It’s time.”

  “You can’t stand yourself, brother, can you?” said the man who had been called Cooper. “You and you, they don’t get along at all. I can understand that. I been through a little of that myself. Not knowing who the hell I was or what I might have done or what I should be doing. But you find out. Maybe not your name, but how you should be living. If you’re any good at all, you find that out.”

  He took a step toward Loomis. “But you’re not any good, brother, and you never were. Sure, you had some lousy breaks, sure you did. But that isn’t any kind of excuse for what you did. You’re just no good to anyone, not even yourself. And if you kill me, you’ll have nothing to live for. Nothing. Because nobody will know your name and nobody will care.”

  Another step.

  “But I care, brother. I care in the worst way. You made me care. Buzzing around me like some house-fly waiting to be swatted. Waiting for me to remember. Trying to make me remember. Remember you.”

  Another step. He was only a few paces from Loomis now. He glanced down to his own gun on the floor of the stable. It was nearly within reach.

  “Stay there,” Loomis said. “Stay right where you are.”

  He took another step.

  “I remember you, brother. For what you did to me. No one else will. Kill me and you’ll be alone again, alone with yourself, the way you always were. Run away now and you’ll have something to keep you going. Fear, brother. Fear. That’s a kind of something. Something to make you feel alive. And me, too. I’ll have something to keep me going, too.”

  Loomis took a step backward. “Don’t move,” he said. “Don’t move or I’ll kill you now.”

  “What are you waiting for?” his brother asked him.

  The gun wavered in his hand.

  The man who had called himself Cooper stooped swiftly and scooped up his own gun from the floor.

  Two guns blared.

  Loomis stood straight for a moment. A strange smile spread over his face. And then, slowly, he crumpled to the floor of the stable.

  The other continued to stand, in the clearing smoke, holding his wounded left arm.

  “Damn,” he said softly. “Damn.”

  * * *

  The lights in the screening room came up. One man was applauding vigorously. Smith. All heads turned toward him.

  “Bit of an anticlimax,” Hurn said, “don’t you think? We were afraid it might be. I think, in a way, we were afraid of having to finish it.”

  “On the contrary, Mr. Hurn,” Smith said. “On the contrary. It’s absolutely perfect. Perfect. Real mythic power. A glimpse into the human condition. Into a world in which brother must slay brother, even as Cain slew Abel. Archetypal, Mr. Hurn.
Archetypal.”

  He stood up and addressed the small crowd.

  “I want to thank all of you,” he said, “for making this possible. In particular I want to thank Mr. Hurn and the one and only Vance Maccoby, without whom none of this would have been possible.”

  Maccoby grinned in a spaced-out way. Hurn could smell the drink on his breath from two rows away.

  The cure didn’t take, he thought. Well, it took for long enough.

  “I will be leaving town tomorrow,” Smith said, “and I will not be returning in the near future. So let me just say what a wonderful group of people you have been to work with, and what a great, great privilege this has been for me.”

  There was still, Hurn reflected, something rather odd about the young man. He was dressed now in what could pass as the uniform of the young Hollywood executive—safari jacket, open-collar sports shirt, gold medallion, aviator shades—and yet there was still something not quite right about it. He looked as if he had just stepped out of central casting.

  “The show,” Hurn said, as Smith headed toward the door. “When is the show going to run?”

  “Oh, soon,” Smith said. “Not in this country, at the present time, but we have plenty of interest overseas.”

  A Canadian tax shelter? Hurn wondered. One of those productions that never actually play anywhere? But surely they would not have gone to so much trouble.

  “Where?” he persisted. “Where will it run?”

  “Oh, faraway places,” Smith said, fingering his aviator shades. “Far, far away.” He disappeared through the door. Hurn would not see him again.

  “Far away,” Hurn repeated to himself.

  “Very far,” Maccoby said, staggering a little as he rose from his seat in the back row. He was quite drunk.

  “You know something I don’t know?” Hurn asked, following him from the screening room.

  “Very far,” Maccoby repeated, as they stepped into the parking lot. The smog was thin that night. Stars twinkled faintly in the sky. “About twenty light-years,” he said, looking up.

  “What?”

  “Twenty light-years,” he repeated. “Twenty years for the signals to reach them. Distant, distant signals. And then they stop. The signals stop. Before the story ends. And they don’t like that.”

  “They?”

  “Smith’s people. Our overseas investors. Our faraway fans.”

  “Wait a minute,” Hurn said. “You’re telling me that our show was picked up … out there?”

  Now he, too, craned his head to look up into the night sky. He shivered.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said.

  “Sure you do,” Maccoby said.

  “But it’s crazy,” Hurn said. “The whole thing is incredible. Up to and including the fact that they picked on our show.”

  “I wondered about that myself,” Maccoby said. “But you’ve got to figure that their tastes are going to be, well … different.”

  “Then he really meant it,” Hurn said. “When he said that our show was—what did he call it? The peak of televisual art.”

  Maccoby nodded. “He really meant it.”

  “Art.” Hurn tested the word on his tongue. “Life is short but art is long. Isn’t that what they say? Something like that, at any rate.”

  “Right,” Maccoby said absently. “Art. Or something like that.”

  He was staring now at the great mast of the TV antenna on the hill above the studio.

  “Signals,” he said again. “Distant, distant signals.”

  THE WOMAN WHO IS THE MIDNIGHT WIND

  Terence M. Green

  Terence M. Green was born in 1947, the year the World SF Convention was held in Toronto for the first time, and teaches secondary school in Toronto. He has been publishing SF since the late 1970’s and his early stories are collected in The Woman Who Is the Midnight Wind (1987). He has also published two SF novels (Barking Dogs, 1988; Children of the Rainbow, 1992), as well as articles, interviews, reviews, poetry, and stories in many U.S. and Canadian magazines, journals, and newspapers. Both novels were marketed out of category, as contemporary fiction. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia calls his stories “lean and subtle.”

  He is profiled in Canadian Who’s Who and is the recipient of a Canada Council Project Grant for fiction writing and four Ontario Arts Council Writer’s Reserve Grants. Although a majority of his works fit comfortably into the category of SF, he has managed his literary career so as to emphasize his fiction as contemporary literature. He is therefore thus far not well-known in the SF community outside of Canada. This is a shame, because his best stories are generally finely crafted SF that deserve to be considered beside the best work in the field worldwide.

  Juturna, 20–4–3

  I really should have started a journal seasons ago. Probably when I first arrived on Juturna. Or at least when Jacques died.

  But I did not.

  I am starting one now.

  I am hoping, I guess, that this may shape my life, however weakly. This is, of course, a mild delusion of grandeur. Just mild though. Nevertheless, if I choose to delude myself, very well, then I choose to delude myself. In this, I feel akin to the rest of my species.

  20–4–7

  Knowledge that a woman who has injured you is aging is, indeed, a constant vengeance.

  Since I am no longer a young woman, this observation strikes me pointedly. Being one of Juturna’s original colonists, I have been here twenty J-years. I have forgotten the formula that I knew when we immigrated, but I think that I am now about fifty Terran years old. I stopped worrying about it—mostly after Jacques died.

  Note the irony that I am the woman who has injured me—many times, in many ways. I am not sure that reflecting upon my aging can ever be adequate vengeance for my various follies.

  Am I a woman more sinned against than sinning?

  Most often I think not.

  20–4–9

  I think of Jacques often.

  He was too good for me. No politician, Jacques. No language but the language of the heart.

  Who would have guessed that I would outlive him?

  I, who connived to marry him, to have a mate to light out to the stars with.… In his innocence, he wedded me, took me unto him, as they might say classically, and together we leapt the stars to Juturna.

  This journal turns increasingly inward. I had no idea of what it might evolve into, but I think I’m surprising myself. Perhaps I am no longer young enough for the guile needed merely to catalogue the events of each day. Indeed, my days are seldom different from one another any more. Three days a week I do volunteer work at the hospital. Such work is desperately needed.

  I am the one who needs it.

  20–4–10

  Juturna—why here?

  Jacques’ work, of course. He loved the idea of being one of the top engineers on a Colony World; he was also idealistic and romantic enough to want the challenge.

  Challenge. The word seems alien to me now.

  As a Class-A World, we are fully equipped with high-tech via the Lightships that come down on the Big Continent weekly.

  I am no scientist, but I know the basics about my world. I know that Juturna is about 420 light-years from Earth in the direction of Ursa Major. I know that Juturna is the only habitable planet in our system of eight planets. I know that our sun is a K2 star, slightly cooler and redder than Sol, that Juturna is similar in size to Earth (a bit larger, actually), that the seasons are longer, that we rotate rapidly enough to stimulate a cyclone-breeding Coriolis force, so that our weather is usually quite awful. And wet.

  What else do I remember? Let me see. That our sun is not up to Sol in mass or luminosity, that we are quite close to our sun (the closest planet, in fact), that it’s a good ol’ star, about five billion years old and counting.…

  I am cataloguing at last. Is this what my journal will be?

  Somehow, I do not think that it is enough.

  20–4–12

  I am endea
vouring to treat the subject of myself best. But many questions arise.

  Should I treat the days objectively? Or should I subjectively treat my emotional reactions to the days as they pass?

  Can I indulge in a stream-of-consciousness style? Can I be all things to myself? Will I be fully honest? Or is that last the stance of a fool?

  In truth, I know that I am writing this because I am no longer young (such an understatement!). Perhaps I see this as my testament to posterity, my feeble attempt to live beyond my physical years. In my more idealistic moments, I see it as a chance to record and comment on the atomic particles of truth that I have stumbled across in my voyage through both the chronological and the light-years. In my more cynical moments, I see it as a form of therapy. It is probably, in small measure, both.

  My hands are arthritic as I write this; the dampness of the day seizes my right knee with pain. I cannot totally escape my physical self as I sit here, but perhaps I can peer further inward, down the funnel of my ego.

  Perhaps.

  Today at the hospital, for instance, I spent time with a woman who was suffering horribly from a blood disorder that is causing epidermal purpura, and swelling of the joints. She is a young woman, recently arrived with her husband. The doctors say that it is an allergic reaction to something, but they cannot pin it down.

  And how could they pin it down? Man has known Juturna for such a brief span. Adaptation of a species to an environment, as we know it, swallows aeons. Yet the Juturnans adapt to their environment daily, and prior to our arrival there was no such thing as “species”—just “Juturnans.”

  The Juturnans themselves are products of specific evolution, are they not? In this great, damp world, they are awesome in their alienness, profound in their similarity to us. The closest Terran composite would be a reptile-human, though of course they are neither reptile nor human, but merely Juturnan (can I use this word to describe a complexity?). The rain, the wetness, the vast seas—all have contributed to the evolution of these solemn creatures.

  Jacques had found them—the Juturnans—fascinating.