Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  June turns on the TV. Martha realizes, with some surprise, that it is New Year’s Eve. A pair of talking heads are discussing the Year 2000. With the end of the millennium only twelve months away, the media are obsessed with predictions, retrospectives. It is hard for Martha to imagine what may lie around that thousand-year corner. She finds it odd—and in a curious way exciting—that by a mere accident of birth she may live to see the next millennium.

  “The biggest New Year’s Party in a thousand years,” says June, when the commercial comes on. Her voice is wistful. “I always did like a good party.”

  Martha smiles at her, remembering that she was fond of parties too, when she was younger. There seems so little point in them now.

  “Perhaps,” she says, “we will be allowed a glass of champagne.”

  June chuckles. “Maybe one small glass. The last for a thousand years.”

  That’s enough to set them off. They take turns describing what they will eat and drink on the Eve of the Millennium—a stream-of-consciousness recitation of forbidden delights.

  “Chocolate mints,” says June. “Pecan pie. Truffles.”

  “Amaretto cheesecake,” Martha adds. “Christmas pudding with rum sauce. Tawny port.”

  Pointedly, Dorothy puts on her earphones. Martha and June, caught up in their game, ignore her.

  “Fish and chips. Bangers and mash.” “Guinness stout. Roast suckling pig.” “Crab croquettes and oyster stew.”

  It’s so long since Martha has eaten anything unwholesome, she has to stop and think. “Sour cream and hot mango chutney.” Then—an inspiration—“Sex-in-the-Pan.”

  “Sex in anything,” says June, and howls with laughter.

  Dorothy seems to take their foolishness as a personal affront. Lips pressed into a thin line, she thumbs rapidly through a fresh copy of Christian Health.

  * * *

  They sit up to see the New Year in, and afterwards Martha sleeps soundly, even though there are tests scheduled for the morning. These ones don’t sound too awful. Blood-sugar again, cholesterol check, an eye and ear exam; and—absurdly, it seems to Martha—tests for the various sorts of social diseases.

  Still, she is awake hours before the first robots rumble down the hall with breakfast. She knows, instantly, that something is wrong. She sits up, switches on her overhead light. In the far bed, Dorothy is heavily asleep. The other bed, June’s bed, is empty.

  The bathroom, Martha thinks; but no, the door is ajar and the light is out. Could June have been taken ill in the night? A sudden heart attack, like her father? Has Martha somehow slept through lights, buzzers, running feet, the clatter of emergency equipment? But when that happens, don’t they always draw the bed curtains?

  Dorothy is awake. “Where’s June?” she asks immediately, smelling trouble.

  Martha shakes her head. She feels on the edge of panic. Should she push her bell? Call for a counsellor? Go out and search the corridors?

  And then suddenly June is back, waltzing into the room in boots, hat, coat, humming gently to herself. The cloud of cheap perfume that surrounds her is not strong enough to drown the smell of liquor.

  “June, where have you been?” Martha realizes, to her dismay, that she sounds like a mother interrogating a wayward teen-aged daughter.

  June grins and pulls off her toque. “Should old acquaintance be forgot,” she sings, “and never brought to mind … I went to a New Year’s party.”

  Dorothy gives a snort of disbelief. “How could you have gotten out of the building?”

  “Who was to stop me? Only robots on night shift, and one duty counsellor. Only reason nobody walks out of here, is nobody thinks to try.”

  She flops across her bed, arms outflung, short skirt riding up over pale plump knees. After a moment she sits up and tries, unsuccessfully, to pull off her boots. “Oh, shit, Martha, can you give me a hand?”

  She slides down on the mattress so that both feet are dangling over the edge. Kneeling on the cold tiles at June’s feet, Martha takes hold of the left boot and tugs hard. It’s a frivolous boot—spike-heeled, fur-cuffed, too tight in the calf. Dorothy watches in outraged silence.

  Martha rocks back on her heels as the boot comes off with a sudden jerk. She hears June give a small, contented sigh.

  “Oh, Christ, Martha, what a ball I had! There’s this little club on Davie … I wish you’d been there too, there were these two guys…” June sighs again, as the other boot comes off. “But I knew you wouldn’t come, there was no use asking, you’re too afraid of old creepin’ Jesus, there…”

  Dorothy, white-faced with fury, stalks into the bathroom and slams the door.

  “June, what did you do?” Martha hears her voice rising, querulously; and thinks, I sound like my mother did; I sound like an old woman.

  “Christ, honey, what didn’t I do? I drank. I ate. I danced. I smoked.” Her s’s are starting to slur. She rolls over, luxuriously, and adds something else which is muffled by her pillow.

  “I beg your pardon?” Martha asks.

  June sits up. Loudly enough to be heard at the end of the hall, she announces, “I even got laid.”

  “Shhh,” Martha says, instinctively. Then, “June, how could you? All the tests we have to take today—blood sugar, cholesterol…”

  “AIDS,” says Dorothy grimly, through the bathroom door.

  “Oh, June. Oh, my dear.” Martha is just now beginning to realize the enormity of what June has done.

  There are footsteps in the corridor as the dayshift arrives. Martha feels like crying. Instead, she searches through June’s bedside drawer for comb, make-up, mouthwash; and silently unbuttons June’s coat.

  * * *

  On Wednesday the test results are announced. One at a time they are called to the Chief Examiner’s office for their reports. Dorothy returns, smug-faced and unsurprised, and puts on her street clothes. Martha’s name is called. Sick and faint with anxiety, she makes her way through the maze of corridors. She has passed, but with a warning.

  June is gone for a long time. “I thought from the first,” Dorothy remarks, as she waits for the Chief Examiner to sign her out, “that June lacked any sense of self-respect.”

  Martha doesn’t often bother to contradict Dorothy’s pronouncements, but this time it seems important to set the record straight. “You don’t mean self-respect,” she says. “You mean self-preservation.”

  Then the door opens, and June comes in. She has applied her blusher and lipstick with a heavy hand; the bright patches of red look garish as poster-paint against the chalk-white of her skin. She stares blankly at Martha as though she has forgotten where she is. Gently, Martha touches her arm.

  “June? What did they say?”

  “Nothing I didn’t already know.” June’s voice shakes a little, but her tone is matter-of-fact. “Sugar in the blood—incipient diabetes. Gross overweight. High cholesterol count. Hypertension. Just what you’d expect.”

  “They can treat all those things. They don’t have to Reassign you.”

  June shrugs. “Not worth it, they say. Bad personal history. And there’s my pa.”

  “Quite right,” says Dorothy. How Martha has learned to loathe that prim, self-congratulatory voice. “If people won’t take responsibility for their own health…”

  “Better to get it over with,” June says. “It’d be no fun at all, hanging around for Reassessment.”

  And then—awkwardly, and oddly, as though it is Martha who is in need of comfort—she pats Martha’s shoulder. “Never mind, Martha, love, that was a hell of a good party the other night. And there’s something I want you to remember, when your time comes. Once you know for sure, once you make up your mind to it, then you can spit in their eye, because there’s bugger-all more they can do to you.”

  Dorothy pins her hat on her grey curls and leaves. Martha’s papers are signed; she could go too, if she wished, but she has decided to stay with June. She knows she won’t have to wait long.

  Soon they hear
the hum of trolley-wheels at the end of the hall. Martha holds June’s hand.

  “Listen, the news isn’t all bad,” June says, with gallows humour. “The kidneys are still okay, and the lungs, and a few other odd bits. There’s quite a lot they can Reassign. Maybe to some pretty young girl. I like that idea a lot.”

  Then the trolley is wheeled in.

  “A short life and a merry one,” says June. She winces slightly as the counsellor slips the needle into her arm. “Remember to drink a glass of bubbly for me, at the big party.”

  Martha nods, and squeezes June’s hand as June slides away.

  XILS

  Esther Rochon

  Translated by Lucille Nelson

  Esther Rochon lives in Montreal and turned to writing after studying mathematics. Her first SF novel, En hommage aux araignées (1974), is in fact the second novel of a trilogy, the first volume of which has been published only in German as Der Träumer in der Zitadelle (1977). She became a major figure in francophone Canadian SF and has three times won the Grand Prix de la Science-fiction et du Fantastique (for L’Épuisement du soleil [1985], Coquillage [1986], and L’Espace du diamant [1990]). The last of these books, her fifth novel, completed her trilogy. Her collection of short fiction, Le Traversier, was published in 1987.

  David Ketterer, in his Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, says, “it was Coquillage (which also won a Prix Boréal [translated as The Shell, 1990]) that first gained Rochon mainstream attention. This extraordinary SF fable, which describes how a man and his son become intimately involved in a tortured love affair with a monster, a shellfishlike alien, achieves a most effective ambivalence of desire and repugnance.” He goes on to say, “Influenced by her interest in Eastern religions and philosophies, Rochon’s work is further characterized by a musical tone, irony, a clear vision of evil, and an astonishing ability to find the beautiful.”

  Clearly, Rochon works for the most part independent of the traditions of American SF. Her work is poetic, fantastic, on the border between fantasy and SF in a manner very different from the speculative fiction of her anglophone Canadian peers.

  * * *

  Walking in the dirty slush along the half-cleared sidewalks of Côte des Neiges Road, a string of Xils flickering around me, some as high as skyscrapers, I ask myself what people think of us as they inch along in rush hour traffic. They’ve rolled up their windows, afraid a ravenous Xil will shoot out a sucker to siphon off their blood. And they’re right. Anyway, it’s the law. Every so often you see signs that read “Passage de Xils/Xils Crossing,” with a skull and crossbones underneath. In the area around Forest Hill, which has fallen on hard times, the few inhabitants only go out in cars or body suits.

  Because I am a Guardian I have no protection.

  When I was a girl, no one lived in Montreal, which for years had been a Xil hunting ground. Then, as they still do, they played around in the marshes of the Town of Mount Royal, flashing between this world and another perhaps slightly more their own. They killed the people in the city when they arrived, except those who fled (what traffic tie-ups on the bridges!). I lived on the back river with my parents, in one of the hastily constructed refugee camps. I went to school in Saint-Eustache.

  From time to time a helicopter would fly over Montreal, nostalgically surveying the abandoned city infested with derisive and blood-thirsty Xils. No one knew how to begin living there again. Many tried, since the resources of the metropolis were essential to the province’s economy. It was only when the Xils attacked New York that a way was found: there people were more resourceful; the situation didn’t get out of hand. Body suits were invented. They noticed that the Xils never went into houses where the doors and windows were tightly closed; it was as though Xils didn’t perceive interiors. They shared their discovery with us since our economic interests are off-shoots of theirs. The army, well protected, went into Montreal to clean up the streets and prepare the return of the exiles, while the factories started manufacturing body suits. My parents were glad to come back to the Island, even though their neighbourhood—Hochelaga-Maisonneuve—had been declared uninhabitable. After our return I went walking around there. The officials refused to let it be renovated, probably because it’s such a nice area. They preferred to pile people on top of each other in large buildings where the anti-Xils and anti-asocial controls were easier to enforce. Whatever the reasons, we set up camp in Place Ville Marie, in huge old office buildings lit by fluorescent lights.

  You could spend weeks without going outside: schools, stores, work, everything was located in the same gigantic building. Occasionally a horde of Xils would materialize on Dorchester Boulevard, right under our windows; some looked like dinosaurs, others like spaghetti. They flickered to change shape; that’s how they swallowed people up. I admired them and at the same time found them stupid. I was ten years old.

  Later, by myself, I started to go out. The body suit was comfortable, especially in winter. Walking: in the sleet, among the Xils. I went as far as the port, afraid of being raped by men as well as being attacked by Xils. Even so I left the body suit open. But nothing happened to me; my fears weren’t realized. I went to the port, to the edge of the river the Xils wouldn’t cross: were they afraid of open spaces? Once, I crossed over by way of the Jacques Cartier bridge. How glad I was to be on the other side. I was expected in Montreal so I went back, stopping halfway to put on my helmet. A herd of Xils had gathered at the beginning of the bridge. Every year they were getting more stupid. The cars honked. The Xils, like dumb animals, stayed on the ramp and the middle of the median, waving their hands about (those that had them) or playing in the litter. Furious, a woman got out of her car to insult them. They moved away from her. I couldn’t get over it: she had no protection and they hadn’t killed her.

  A while later the Guardian Organization started and I joined up. We don’t wear body suits. That way it’s easier for the Xils to pick us out. It’s somewhat dangerous; there are accidents. It attracts loners. Soon I’ll be twenty-five years old. I’ve been a Guardian for six years and I’ve never been hurt. It’s a question of paying attention, using the whistle or, if necessary, the whip.

  As a teenager I despised both the Xils and those who feared them. I haven’t changed much. As I walk along Côte des Neiges Road, on my left, in their cars, are the despised people; on my right, flickering wildly, the equally despised Xils. Ill-tempered, I protect them from each other, perpetuating a petty world of bureaucrats and secretaries. So the expansive recklessness of the Xils does not mix with the narrowness of people. So the intelligence of people does not mix with the stupidity of Xils. I am a Guardian. I am paid to prevent contact. So Xils and people can coexist without knowing each other. How trivial.

  I like to walk. Montreal weather agrees with me. That’s what led me to take this job. I blow on the whistle a few times to keep a large pink Xil shaped like a balsam pine from going among the cars. They obey me because they know I’ll feed them. My body would give them only a little food; by following me, obeying me, they can get much more, every day. Stupid, yes, but not so stupid they don’t know what’s in their own best interest.

  They change shape too much; I never recognize them. I don’t know how many there are altogether. Perhaps they are all part of a single being, who enters our world in several different places, just as my fingers easily penetrate the water in a bowl. This being undoubtedly pays little attention to the activities of its body-parts immersed in our world. One can imagine it chatting with its neighbour: what we see as Xils, shapechangers, in continual motion, are in reality the hairs on its leg, voracious ones in this species. Or those of its genitals. Now there’s a thought, to screw this evening.

  My Xils are like kids in daycare who, lost in daydreams, blindly follow their daydreaming monitor. People daydream in the traffic jam beside me. Côte des Neiges daydreams.

  Good thing the day’s winding up. I put my Xils out to pasture in the cliff-side field near Guy, where the autoroute meets up with Dorche
ster Boulevard. Nice spot. It was clear, you could see as far as the United States. Some took to the air. Every so often they like music. A group gathered around a transistor radio that I stuck in the snow. From my chilly little hut I looked over my band of loafers: idle Xils that have lost their ferocity. I guard them, just in case. Two or three were dancing.

  There are other Guardians in Montreal, one for each neighbourhood. We have a union. We’re poorly paid, so we’re mostly women. I doubt the people in the cars have more interesting jobs. A city of civil servants, kept in place by bogeymen: Xils, bosses, and various fears parrotted by the media. Inane. Each weekend we make up love stories, or literary squabbles, or something else, to convince ourselves we exist: “I’m hurt,” “I’m angry,” and so on. My secretary friends spend their paychecks on clothes. I don’t expect that one day the world will get more real. Daydreams, complaints; if my reality is not here, where is it?

  At the entrance to the cemetery I turn right. Some of the Xils give little sharp cries; they spread out in the empty space in front of the graves. They know the road. A protective belt of old willows will soon screen us from the traffic.

  Other Xils, led by other Guardians, join us. We meet in front of a building dominated by a cement cross, on the hillside, and we wait, shivering. A few humans surrounded by a crowd of Xils. Music plays. Snow and electric guitar. The Xils dance, lighting up in the dusk. Below in the main arteries of Côte des Neiges rush hour is ending.

  Seven o’clock. The doors of the old crematorium open. The corpses from the day, on stretchers, are rolled outside. For Xils, like people, it’s time for supper. But not for Guardians.

  I go home while the first Xils, satiated, fall asleep, fly away or disappear. I live nearby, in Rockhill. I’ll make myself some chicken soup.