by Glenn Grant
A long time ago, in books, on the radio and in school, people talked about our greatness, the dignity of Man. I have even read authors who found something noble in the situation of people here. It’s flattering, but it’s not what I’ve seen. Xil or human, I know no one worthy of respect. Perhaps we would inspire it if we could learn how to do it. I would like that, but it’s impossible. I live on an island of pettiness. Wind and snow make me dream of heroism. They are awe-inspiring. Not me. But sometimes …
In a little bit (why not?) I’ll dress up like a secretary; I’ll put on an outfit that pleases me: tragic colours and scarves that float in the wind. I’ll go to the Xils, alone in the middle of the night. I’ll wake up one or two if possible, offer them sunflower seeds or french fries, like squirrels. Or perhaps some wine. It’s about time we hung out together. They, like Montreal, are beautiful. Some have webbed feet, others look like needles that have just been threaded.
I’ll wear my purple coat. They will flicker in violet and bright red. At night, in the winter, the sky is pink. The snow in the cemetery is sprinkled with ashes from the office-tower incinerators, forever burning our mountains of garbage. If the Xils don’t recognize me and take fright, my blood will be one more bright colour in the landscape, my body will be their sustenance. The crows returning from the south will join them in the dawn. I think however they will know who I am, that at least, if we can’t talk, we can be beautiful together.
STOLEN FIRES
Yves Meynard
Yves Meynard, like Jean-Louis Trudel and Élisabeth Vonarburg, is a well-known ambassador for francophone SF at conventions across Canada and in the United States. He lives just south of Montreal in Longueuil, and has recently completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science.
Since 1986 he has published more than twenty-five SF stories in French and English, mostly in the magazines Solaris and imagine.… He was one of the three finalists for the 1992 Grand Prix de la Science-Fiction et du Fantastique Québécois, and he was the winner of the 1993 Grand Prix, for the entirety of his published work in 1993. His novella, “L’Enfant des Mondes Assoupis” (“Child of the Sleeping World”), won the 1992 Aurora Award for best short work in French. The short story “Convoyeur d’âmes” (“Soul-carrier”) won the 1993 Boréal Award. He was coeditor, with Claude J. Pelletier of lanus Publications, of the original SF anthology Sous des soleils étrangers and of two books by Daniel Sernine (the two-volume collection of Sernine’s Carnival sequence, which includes the story in this book).
In either language, his fiction typifies a tendency in Québécois SF towards lyricism and extended metaphor, verging on allegory.
“Stolen Fires” was originally written for Glenn Grant’s magazine, Edge Detector.
* * *
Rails have been set to cincture the world, east to west to east, along the equatorial lowlands. There are many other lines, in all directions. Only this one runs forever, looping back upon itself.
On the rails, in the middle of the region the toponymists have named New Caucasus, a train is running, in the direction of Sternstadt, the hub of the network. The train is several hundred cars long: from one end of it you can barely see the other.
Its locomotive is a screaming woman. Steel hair sweeps back from her steel eyes; steel arms piston at her sides; her gaping steel mouth howls as it devours the thick air.
She roars over the rails at a terrific pace. It is as if she wanted to outrace the setting sun; indeed, she nearly does. The already sluggish passage of the World’s furnace through the heavens is slowed fourfold: sunsets last more than a full workshift.
Apart from the steel woman, who may or may not count, there is only one living being aboard the train: a man, who spends the voyages in the control cabin built at the back of the locomotive, where the organic lines of her body flow into rectangular contours. For long Hours, the man works, checking and rechecking the status of the energy systems, feeding the furnace the fuel it demands, wiping the glass dials clean with a moistened cloth. One Hour in every four he may rest. At those times, he usually sits quietly and drinks vodka, which is allowed so long as it is not done to excess. The man needs very little sleep. Also, he has no name. The former is essentially a consequence of the latter.
Wasps and vipers, fangs and stings, the bite of alcohol after a long Day’s work. For this Hour, the man without a name sits atop the metacoal tender and watches the angels fly alongside the train.
Why they do it he does not know. Every voyage, as soon as he has left Sternstadt behind the horizon, they appear. Where they come from he cannot tell. It is almost as if they were escorting him. Their stiff wings beat rapidly, but they fail to keep pace with the train’s progress.
The man enjoys watching them. He knows they do no harm. He feels a touch of pity for them, of embarrassment for the grueling pace he sets. Sometimes he toys with the idea of slowing down the train, if only for a brief while, so that they will be able to keep up with it. Perhaps they would appreciate his kindness, he tells himself. But he never entertains this thought for long: after a short time, he begins to feel pain in his head, and busies himself with the locomotive to make the ache stop.
He has, after all, a schedule to maintain; how could he think of running late?
The man chases away that idea and returns to his contemplation of the angels. One of them is very close, indeed closer than he has ever seen one come. It is a large male, full of the strength and temerity of all young men. It is actually flying faster than the train is running. It advances (for all its speed, it seems almost to crawl), flying low above the wagons. It is so very close … It has reached the edge of the tender! The man stares in disbelief as the angel grasps the rail with its hands and feet, and climbs aboard.
The man without a name is stunned. He eases down from the pile of golden-red metacoal, approaches the angel. He is careful and slow, not wanting to scare it away. But the angel does not seem timid; it remains immobile, only its thin chest heaving with breath, as it watches the man (its eyes are entirely black, with a smoky gleam in them from the sun).
The man is close to the angel now. He marvels silently at its face, whose incredibly falcate nose and deep wrinkles belong to a fairy-tale crone; at the mating-hooks protruding from its haunches; at the design on its chest, a set of whitish lines on the blue scales, like a ritual scar: a tilted lemniscate struck by a broken diagonal.
The angel still watches the man, without a quiver, or a sign of fear; it runs the long fingers of one hand through its mop of feathery hair (all six of its digits have four joints). And then it speaks.
—Are you a man of words?
The man’s jaw goes slack. He had never thought that angels could talk—although perhaps, once, someone he only dimly recalls might have told him something about it; but certainly he never believed.
—I look for a man of words, says the angel. I will hear a story. Tell me a story, Other (its voice is like the wind whistling through the branches of the hag-pines that line the railway).
A story? The request is even more surprising than the fact of the angel speaking.
—What … which story do you mean? the man says stupidly.
As he speaks, the man without a name feels a slight ache in his brain. Then he stands quite still, and tells himself—clearly, in words that echo loudly through his head—that this is the end of his shift, that he has a full Hour to himself, that nothing he does hurts the Company in any way. And after a moment the pain goes away, like water drunk by a patch of dry sand—diffused, but still wholly there, under the surface.
—A story, any story, the angel has been saying with apparent urgency. Tell me a story, Other.
The man hesitates; but the request is not for something forbidden, and he does not wish to refuse if it means the angel will go away. So he nods slowly, sits down amidst the nuggets of metacoal. The angel smiles as if with relief (its teeth are thin, numerous, and pointed) and sits likewise. It folds its stiff butterfly wings so that they offer as little surface to t
he wind as possible. Were it to deploy them fully, thinks the nameless man, the wind of their passage would propel the angel backwards and away in an instant.
Now the man thinks of asking a price for the storytelling. But what could the angel give him—and what does he need that the Company does not provide? He cannot even ask for an exchange of names, lacking one of his own. So, somewhat gracelessly, he begins:
—This is a story from long ago. I heard it from someone on the railway, I think. I don’t remember when.
The angel hunches its head forward on its long neck and clutches a nugget of metacoal in its spidery hands. The man without a name begins his tale.
* * *
THE TALE OF THE YOUNG MAN AND HIS LOVE
Not long after the Company came to the world, there was a young man who lived in one of the cities of the plain.
In those Days, the mantle of the World still had holes in it: there were many places in the World which would poison you if you went there unprotected. The young man’s father was a monitor: his duty was to check the poisoned places, to gather data for the life-weavers, those who planned the mantle’s growth, its slow conquest by assimilation. The young man’s mother had been one of the life-weavers. She had died many years back, from a native illness that had escaped from the glass tubes where she had been studying it.
The young man went to school at a lyceum of high repute in Sternstadt, thousands of kilometers away from his home, so that he could rarely return home. Before his mother’s death, the young man had looked forward to those infrequent visits; too much so he felt. When he became an adult, he might be called on to leave his home for a new one halfway across the world; and so strong ties were discouraged by the Company.
But now he feared his return home, for after his mother’s death, his father had grown slowly but thoroughly insane. In all ways now he acted as if his wife had never died, and this terrified the young man, who began to find excuses not to come. After a while, he realized that his father did not need any justification from him for his absences, and he ceased to bother. And in some way that was worse than all of his father’s madness.
Now when the young man was twenty, a year away from the Employment Examinations, he fell in love. It isn’t very surprising that his love was the exact opposite of his father’s. His mother had been a quiet and dependable woman, and his father’s love for her a quiet and dependable thing. The young man fell in love with a vain young woman whose future as an Employee was doubtful; he quarrelled with her all the time, only to make up in tears before the Day was half-done.
In his own painful way, he was probably happy.
Not long after he met the young woman, the young man began to neglect his studies. The Day of the Examination approached, and he failed to prepare properly: he scored less than ever before. His mentors warned him as sternly as they could; but he did not listen. In desperation the mentors tried to call the young man’s father, to make him talk sense into his son; but he was away on a mission.
He never came back.
His body was found in one of the poisonous areas, not far from his lifter. A spine from a needlegaunt had struck though a fault in his xenosuit’s fabric: the venom had killed him in an instant.
Everyone was sad at the news: the young man’s father had been a good Employee, even after his wife’s death. Everyone thought there would be a full funeral, as always for those Employees who die in the line of duty. But the investigation revealed that the damage to the fabric had been deliberate. The death was ruled to be a suicide. The young man’s father was cremated and all his wealth reverted to the Company, as its laws said it must. It was also decreed that his name would not be written on the Pioneer’s Monument.
Something happened to the young man then, like the phase-shift that announces a fusion engine has gone into self-generating mode. All of a sudden, he returned to his studies. He did not seem to be making any special efforts, but at the Examination, his marks were the highest the lyceum had seen in a generation.
He was admitted into the ranks of the Employees, but this was not the end of his rise. One of his few friends said his intelligence had “bloomed like a flame” and now he would have said it wanted to devour the whole world of knowledge. The young man took the most demanding courses, and passed them easily; he made several brilliant suggestions on the research problems where he was put as an assistant; in his spare time, he designed improved life-weaving machines.
They called him a genius. The Company put him on the Planetology program, with the master planners for the development of the World. No one else had ever achieved those ranks so young; his reputation was made, his wealth was assured. The stigma of his father’s madness and death had been washed from him.
The one thing that reflected poorly on him was his continuing relationship with the frivolous young woman: as anyone would have foretold, she had failed to become an Employee. She was immensely below his status, yet he remained with her, despite their incessant quarrels. His money supported her. And after all, it was a minor thing: geniuses are allowed to be eccentric, and some people said it reflected well on him, to be supporting a young woman who otherwise would have been drafted into the Reproduction Corps.
So the young man was set for the future, and his name was certain to be carved deep on the Monument. No one could have foretold what was to happen.
The young man was right at the peak of his career; he was involved in nearly every project at the highest level, which meant he knew many of the secrets of the Company. That was when he rebelled. He had never forgiven the Company for its ruling on his father’s death; and now he intended to make war on it.
With his wealth, he had built a hidden castle in the mountains, where no one could find him; he fled to it in a stolen flier, along with tons of equipment. The young woman went along with him.
From the castle, he waged war with the Company. In all the places he had worked, he had left software-bombs to irretrievably destroy data, or mechanical ones that would wreck priceless experiments, if not entire laboratories. But he didn’t stop there. He blew up the rail network that linked the cities. He introduced chaos into the computers that controlled the automated outposts. He had even brought genetic equipment with him, and with it he tried to undo the efforts of the life-weavers, by adapting the local life to compete with Man-life, by creating diseases to attack the plants, and microorganisms that changed the atmosphere back to what it had been.
For years he fought his war; he did terrible damage to the Company, and they could not stop him. But then something else happened that hadn’t been foretold. The young woman fell sick. It was a sickness the young man couldn’t cure. Only the Company could heal her.
And so he communicated with the Company. He made a deal with it: if it saved his love, he would stop his war and give himself up.
The Company agreed; and its word was binding. It saved the young man’s love in the way that only it could have saved her; so the young man surrendered.
He thought the Company would punish him by killing him, but the Company could not take his life. Instead, it forgave him: it took him back as an Employee, and the young woman as well.
And they lived happily ever after.
* * *
The man falls silent. The angel watches him fixedly, the lump of metacoal still held tightly in its hands. Feeling a sudden spasm of unreasoned fear—water moistening the surface of the sand—the man rises to his feet, goes forward to check on the locomotive.
But all is well. In the depths of the furnace, the metacoal nuggets catalyze the cool fusion of light nuclei; as they become exhausted, they disaggregate and fall to a fine powder that is evacuated and dispersed beneath the engine, coating the rails as with gold dust. The hopper is full, the reaction temperature squarely within the green portion of the alarm spectrum, the cybersystem murmurs softly “all is well.” The nameless man is not needed; he is still on his Hour-long break. The sun will not set for a long time yet.
He returns to
the tender. To his surprise, the angel is still there. Dimly the man feels there may yet be something to be accomplished. What more does the angel expect?
—Now I will tell you a story, Other, says the angel. (Its face is set in a strange expression that might be sadness, or even grief.)
The man settles down uncomfortably. He does not think he wants to hear a story. He thinks of telling the angel this, but holds his tongue. He realizes that the angel is not paying him back, but rather that he is bound to listen to its tale, that he is the one making the payment.
* * *
THE TALE OF THE ANGEL
Some of us were present when the Others first came to Earth, in ships of metal that flew without wings. We were puzzled, and somewhat afraid. A few conquered their fear and went to observe more closely, perhaps to speak with the Others, if they should know how to speak.
Those were captured and put in cages. The Others did not listen to their talk, they only talked amongst themselves, and then they cut their prisoners with metal knives and wounded them with needles. Later, our captive brethren escaped; when they bore their tale to the rest of us, it was decided never to approach the Others again.
At first we thought it would be easy; but the Others grew in numbers, as more and more dropped down from the sky; and they built castles of metal and surrounded them with gardens under glass.
And soon something strange happened: the land around the castles of the Others became poisonous. Plants withered, animals died, and when we ventured there, we could not breathe the air for long.
What could we do to change things? There was nothing that could be done to the metal and glass of the men. So we retreated to the high mountains, where the air was thin, but still pure. And from the mountaintops we watched the Others spread onto the world like a bloodstain.
* * *
One day a ship without wings came to one of the mountains where we lived. Many were afraid and said this was the end, the Others had come to take us all and cut us apart with their metal. Many said nothing but gathered up their hunting bows and their best blades.
