Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  “A cryonics society? You’re not going to freeze yourselves?”

  “Vitrification. Not exactly freezing.”

  “Whatever, I still don’t—”

  “We’ve got twenty residents who aren’t going to make it till the spring, Fifer. Most of them are geries, one is an X-youth like your friend Noel, but all of them are terminal. Garver doesn’t trust the big cryonics firms, so we’re going to care for our own. When one of us dies, they’ll go into biostasis, and the rest will keep watch over them. It’s a good plan, Fifer. Like Garver says: permanent death is just an obsolete meme.”

  “This is what all the self-sacrifice is about? What happens if they can’t revive you, if they never figure it out?”

  “Wake up, Fifer, the Breakthrough can’t be more than five or ten years down the road. Once they can make the nanomachines self-replicate, cell repair should be a simple matter.”

  “Yeah, right, nanotech will work miracles; they’ve been saying that for decades.”

  Her reply is drowned out by a distorted voice over a police megaphone. Then an exchange of automatic gunfire, over by Hassan’s. Very loud, close by. Everyone reacts, but it ends as abruptly as it began.

  The cops are soon raising a cordon of yellow tape, isolating the large tent next to the Holodome, and pushing back curious Nomads, Adriana and I among them. Rumors are spreading through the crowd like spores hitting ripe fruit.

  “Known Secessionist guerrillas, I’m not kidding. That’s what I heard on the police band.” The speaker is a yellow-haired Teknik with blue skin-stripes, wearing a wireless video headset, so he would be getting the news as it came in on the nex. “… a meeting of some kind. Must’ve been using the gathering as a cover. Six of them cornered by the SCI unit … three are dead and one wounded.”

  Two police vans worm their way up to the cordon. The APP clear a path through the crush of onlookers, then wheel the injured man out, belted to a stretcher. I’m more than a bit distressed when I see his face. It’s Scred. There’s a bloodstain seeping through the sheet over his chest, and he’s writhing and hollering, either in pain or rage or both, a horrible sound, but surely they’d sedate him or something?

  Scred. A West-Sep, for Christ’s sake.…

  Adriana has recognized him, too. “That was—”

  “Yeah, I know, let’s get out of this crowd, okay?” We manage to get across the street, but I have to stop. I feel as if reality has begun to erode like the hillside above us. I’m not sure if I can keep my footing.

  Somebody has parked their rig in the intersection just to our left. The near side of the trailer is now being folded up, revealing a self-powered PA system and a backdrop which reads: Be sure your sin will find you out. Taking advantage of the spontaneous audience, a Retributionist preacher grabs his microphone and begins railing at everybody from this mobile platform. His magnified image then appears on a three-meter flatscreen above the stage, a live video feed from an unseen camera.

  Almost unnoticed, Adriana has slipped her arm about my waist. “C’mon, let’s not listen to this suckerhead.…”

  The preacher is lunging around with a Bible in his grip, shouting about transgression, the sanctity of nature, and hiding from our guilt, but most of his congregation seems to be dispersing in boredom. Then it hits me: none of them are memetically susceptible or else they’d have long ago joined millions of others in the cult settlements, enslaved to one or another maniacal savior. Selected out.

  Somewhat nervous, Adriana opens the paper bag and hands me a chocolate, then takes one out for herself. “Hey, Fifer, let’s … let’s get away from here.…”

  I’m too fascinated to move. “Of course, these Nomads are immune.…” The only people remaining seem to be hecklers (Lyndon among them), and a few others shouting them down—“Let the man speak!”—obviously cultists planted in the crowd. Absently, I take a bite of the chocolate—

  But it’s a fucking mint cream, and I spit it out into the dirt, feeling my eyes water, histamines boiling up, the first sneeze coming on—“Asshole practical jokes”—then it hits.

  As if triggered by the sneeze, the giant flatscreen image explodes into multicolored snow, and is replaced by an unclothed barely pubescent girl straddling an older man, and yes, the girl is Noel, but with long hair and tanned skin. Between sneezes, I can see audience members reacting with either horror or laughter, but the Bible-thumper onstage is unaware that his video-send has been hijacked. He goes on raving about the Lord’s justice, even while the vid-pirate begins to dither with the explicit image. Now the preacher’s face is superimposed, in a clumsy fashion, so that it belongs to the man under the psuedogirl.

  Fistfights are breaking out in the audience between cultists and hecklers, and now the cops are moving in. Probably expecting a riot, they advance with activated staves, stunning everybody in their path. Adriana tugs at my arm, but something’s just crashed into consciousness, what I’ve known all along—

  —they’re all trying to infect my mind: the preacher, the Nomads, the Actuators and Panges, Christas and Pagans, billboard holograms, vidpornographers, Chinapop netbands, constantly abrading my defenses, trying to subvert their way inside, even Scred, even—

  —Adriana finally drags me away, down the narrow path between two camper-trailers. Wheezing and sniffling, I let her lead me along, while I experience a distinct feeling of coming down, like I’ve been beamed up on lifters all day. I remember Scred’s paranoid ideas, something about inhalants, pheromones, and hormonal triggers. But, no, he couldn’t have planned this, no way.…

  I pull her to a halt behind the place that sells aerogel products. Just trying to remain standing, I can hear the gyros screaming in my head, maintaining stability.

  Adriana wants to keep moving. “Fifer, they might’ve seen you with that terrorist, that Scred person. It’s not safe for you to hang around here. Listen, come to Rexdaler with me. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to stay, just—”

  A right cross and she lands on her side in the dirt. I nearly fold up from a pain in my hand like I’ve cracked a metacarpal, while she puts a palm to her cheek, stunned. Rasping, hoarse, I hear myself yell, “Did Garver send you here as a recruiter? Want me to spend the rest of my life nursing a stack of frozen fucking corpses? Fuck that!”

  And by the time she’s scrambled up and fled, by the time I realize what I’ve done, and the pain is flaring up, bringing tears, only then does it occur to me that I’m being hopelessly paranoid, that she probably had no intention of picking up anyone when she came here. But now it’s far too late to explain and I doubt that I could make sense of it anyway.

  Nearby, a medical chopper whines and throws up a wave of dust, carrying Scred away.

  * * *

  The storm front appears as a black smudge along the southern horizon, visible now from the windows of the Norms’ trailer rig. The dome has been folded back into the cargo section, and the constant winds howl in the vent covers on the roof. A granular hiss across the floor as the door opens, and Sue climbs into the trailer. Despite the curtains over the doors, and the insulated windows, and the electrostatic air filters, still the sand gets in.

  “Larry says we can avoid the bulk of the storm if we leave in less than half an hour.” Haji gestures to the weathermap on the screen as Sue takes the other seat. “Think we can do it?” Despite the news over World3 of the sudden storm, he’s still in good spirits, still high after invading the preacher’s video feed over the local nex. He even caught the whole riot on disc. Chaotes, they do things like that.

  Yingsiu rubs her eyes, exhausted. “We’ve almost finished the rec work. We’ll make it.”

  Outside, the shelters have been coming down, tents and domes and tepees packed away. Reclamation teams have been completing the demolition of Mount Cyprian. Leaving behind no trash heaps or waste products, they adhere to the Code: they’ve pulled up almost all of the old unused pavement in the area, and planted gene-modified desert grasses to help fix the soil.

>   “What’s the point?” I mutter. A monster sandstorm approaching from the south, and they’re planting grass?

  Although the brandykinin-blockers and syndorphins have muted the pain, I’m going to have to get somebody to look at my hand. I have this nagging vision of Adriana, driving back to Rexdaler with an ugly bruise forming under her eye. Is her home some kind of biostasis cult, or what? I imagine four hundred happy zombies, waiting to be vitrified, drugged with inhalants that have been secretly infused into their shared unisex clothing by the immortalist, Garver. It would explain why everything seemed to get more bizarre the closer I got to her, like that weird hallucination. Or am I just making excuses for myself?

  I’ve caught Scred’s contagion, his paranoia. Would he have given me mint chocolates on purpose, expecting my allergic reaction to block out the effects of the supposed aerosol drugs? And was he really here for a clandestine West-Sep conference? I don’t want to think about any of it, and I can’t bear to look out this damned window any longer.

  Black mare’s tails are stretching across the southern sky, where a featureless brown wall is consuming the horizon. The market breaks up into caravans and convoys. The last of the Norms clamber aboard, Lyndon revs up the gas-turbine engines, and we lurch back onto the road, following the box-van. The Fuji Holochrome girl winks again as we pass by. The rig sprays her with gravel and dust.

  I feel buffeted by the winds, the dust layer is being blown away, and my immune systems are faltering completely.

  Picking up Scred’s micro, I go to Larry’s interface panel, and patch into it. I load a copy of the Code from the Norms’ library into the book, then return to my seat.

  The Code begins:

  * * *

  “1.01: Gaia has taught us a lesson in mobility.…”

  THE RECKONING OF GIFTS

  James Alan Gardner

  James Alan Gardner is a technical writer in Waterloo, Ontario, who attended the Banff Writers’ Clinic in 1976 and the Clarion West Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop in the summer of 1989. He won the grand prize in the 1989 Writers of the Future contest, the first prize in the Canadian National One-Act Playwriting Competition in 1990, the 1991 Aurora Award for his story “Muffin Explains Teleology to the World at Large,” first published in On Spec and then reprinted in Tesseracts3. “Reaper” was a finalist for the 1992 Aurora for best short work in English. He published four other SF stories in 1991–92 in American SF magazines, including the novella “The Young Person’s Guide to the Organism,” which is presently in contention for a Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. In addition to his SF, he has written and published three nonfiction books between 1989 and 1993 on technical matters involving computers. Suddenly, it seems, Gardner is everywhere.

  We have chosen his most recent story, first published in Tesseracts4. “The Reckoning of Gifts,” like, for instance, Duncan’s “Under Another Moon,” is perhaps fantasy, perhaps science fiction. The world it is set in is not ours. Canadian speculative fiction it certainly is.

  * * *

  A junior cook brushes against the soup cauldron, hot, searing hot. He curses.

  The kitchen noise strangles to horrified silence. Profanity is always dangerous here on temple grounds, and the danger is multiplied a thousand-fold by the proximity of holy objects.

  The cauldron holds the high priest’s soup.

  A potboy screams out the door for an exorcist, but he knows it’s too late: the words have ripped the amniotic sac that protects our world from the chaos outside. Demons must be streaming in by the dozen, invisible demons who sniff once at the kitchen staff, then scatter in search of the tastier souls of the clergy. The potboy can almost see the demons—fanged, clawed, with naked female breasts—racing down the corridor, wiping their hands on the tapestries as they go by (the dyes fade, the threads ravel), pouring out into the herb garden to wither the foxgloves, to suck the soothing power from camomile and the flavor from basil, then on across the courtyard, kicking a few cobblestones loose to trip passers-by, pinching the horses of a bishop’s carriage, flying unseen past the warders and into the temple proper where they will crumple scrolls, tarnish chalices, and set the bells to wild jangling. Novices in catechism class will stumble over words as the demons tempt them to remember sweet berry pies, gravied beef, and a score of other foods the holy must forswear; priests hearing confession will find themselves dreaming of the feel of sins, the satisfying crunch of a fist plunged into the face of a self-righteous parishioner, or the excitement of commanding an adulteress to disrobe; and the high priest himself, Vasudheva, voice of the gods on earth, will be swarmed by demons, engulfed by them, demons raking their claws across his heart until it shreds into tatters that toss on the winds of desire.

  The junior cook faints. Others pale and scatter their clothes with salt. But the Kitchen Master simply tells everyone to get back to work. He cuffs the potboy who called for help, a good solid clout on the ear that sends the boy staggering back against a chopping block.

  “The lad’s too excitable,” the Kitchen Master tells the exorcist who appears in the doorway. “Sorry to trouble you. Nothing’s wrong.”

  * * *

  Vasudheva, voice of the gods on earth, kneels before the Twelvefold Altar. He is indeed surrounded by a frenzy of demons. When he kisses the feet of Tivi’s statue, he doesn’t think of the god’s power or wisdom; he thinks of the sensation of kissing, the soft pressure against his lips, the lingering contact, the ghost of sensation that remains as he slowly draws away. He longs to kiss the stone again, to kiss it over and over until his lips ache with bruising. His hand rises toward his mouth. He stops the movement in time, but in his imagination it continues, his fingers reaching his lips, caressing, stroking, flesh against flesh.

  Vasudheva cannot remember what he has prayed for this past half hour. Certainly not the exorcism of his demons.

  A month ago, the Assembly of Bishops assigned Vasudheva a new deacon named Bhismu: a young man of undistinguished family, chosen because he has no affiliation with the Assembly’s power blocs and can therefore be trusted not to exert undue influence on the high priest. Spending time with Bhismu shows he wasn’t appointed for his intellect, piety, or even willingness to work.

  Ah, but he is beautiful!

  His hair is a garden of soft black ringlets, his beard an effusion of delicate curls. Vasudheva’s hands long to entwine themselves, oh so gently, in those ringlets and curls, to braid, to weave, to stroke. He imagines threading his fingers through Bhismu’s beard, cupping the young man’s chin, gazing into those clear dark eyes as he leans forward and their lips meet.…

  Vasudheva dreams too of Bhismu’s hands, strong but fascinatingly dextrous when he played the reed-pipe at the Feast of the Starving Moon. Vasudheva was hypnotized by the confident rippling fingers. He thought of nothing else far into the night, until in the bleakness of morning, he wondered if he had eaten a single bite at the feast. Scripture said the moon would starve to death, disappear from the sky forever because the high priest hadn’t consumed enough on its behalf; but the moon survived, as did Vasudheva’s desires.

  He has never prayed for those desires to abate. He cherishes them. He relishes them.

  * * *

  Tonight begins the Long Night Revelries, a week of feasting and celebration in the city of Cardis. Events include the Fool’s Reign, the Virgins’ Dance, and the Renewal of Hearth Fires from Tivi’s sacred flame, but first comes the Reckoning of Gifts in the temple’s outer hall.

  It’s never a pleasant ceremony for the priests who officiate. The hall teems with unbathed commoners, men and women together, all clutching packages to their chests with fierce protectiveness. They jostle each other in the rush to receive blessings; they insult the Gifts of others and boast about their own. Every year fights break out, and sometimes a full-scale riot. Even if demons are loose tonight, it’s hard to imagine how they could add to the usual commotion.

  Vasudheva waits for Bhismu to escort him down to t
he hall. Not long ago, the high priest refused all help in getting around—though his quarters occupy the top of the temple’s highest tower, he would climb the stairs unaided several times a day, glaring at anyone who tried to assist. Now, Vasudheva goes nowhere without Bhismu’s strong supporting arm. He clings to the young man with both hands and walks as slowly as possible.

  Several powerful bishops have begun overt machinations to win support in the assembly, believing there will soon be an election for a new high priest. They are men of limited imagination; they think Vasudheva has become frail.

  The bishops would like to influence which Gift is chosen from the dozens presented in the hall tonight. Power and prestige ride on the choice, not to mention a good deal of gold. The laws of Cardis stifle innovation—change threatens order, and order must be maintained. No one may create a new device, a new art, a new process … except in preparation for the Reckoning of Gifts. In the month before the Reckoning, creators may build their inventions. On the longest night of the year, they bring those Gifts to the temple; from the dozens offered, one Gift is chosen and accepted into orthodoxy, while the others become fuel for Tivi’s flame. The successful creator is fêted in all quarters of the city, honored as a benefactor of the people and a servant of heaven. The unsuccessful ones have nothing to show but ashes.

  Needless to say, competition is intense. Every guild sponsors some Gift to better their lot—a new type of horse hitch offered by the cart drivers, a new way to waterproof barrels offered by the coopers—and scores of individuals also bring their offerings, some of them coming back year after year. One family of fisherfolk has sent the eldest child to the Reckoning each year for more than a century; they claim to be able to teach needles how to point north and for some reason they think the gods will be pleased with such tricks. Not so. The gods have consistently shown themselves to be pleased with the Gift accompanied by the largest under-the-table offering to the high priest. The only variation from one year to the next is whether the secret offering is made in gold, in political influence, or in the adroitness of beautiful women.