Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  The ship was not so large as the first ones we had seen. It landed on a plateau and a door opened in its side, like a hut’s. An Other walked out, and it was naked. Several of us had come out of their caves and they now pointed their bows at it and drew.

  The Other looked them in the eye, calmly. Then it spoke. It said, in the male mode, What do you want with those weapons? Please do not harm me. Do you speak?

  Later we understood he did not know the meaning of the words he had spoken. He had merely repeated the sounds one of our captive brethren had made when he had tried speaking with the Others who were about to cut them. Thus we would know he was the Prophet.

  We began to talk with him. He pointed at himself and gave his name, which is too holy to repeat. We gave him our own names, and then he made a gesture and a second Other came out of the ship. She was his mate. And thus it all began. It proceeded slowly, but we had all of Time.

  Eventually we understood one another. The Prophet told us why the Others were the Enemy. He explained how the poisoning would one day kill all of us. He said he had come to teach us the Other’s magic, if we would learn it. That this way we could fight them. He used a word: sabotage. He said that the castles were fragile, that the metal way for trains could be destroyed, that we could regain our land one day.

  We knew that he was holy, for nothing he said made sense, and at the same time, we felt it was deeply true. So we let him live and began to learn from him.

  It took years. He taught us better ways to count, and to measure distances, and so many other things our souls could not hold them all. Every day, he taught us. He filled us with the magic of the Others, and when we were full, we started the war.

  What we liked best was to make bombs, to place them next to the castles or the rails, and to make them explode. Soon the Others installed weapons that threw bullets at us, but they could not protect all the rails, and where they were not protected we destroyed them easily.

  * * *

  Careful as we were, many of us were injured by the Others’ defenses, and some died. So we began to make young again, to readjust our numbers.

  One day the Prophet went to witness one of our young being made into an adult. When we performed the Time rite, he inquired what we did.

  We answered, We do not know how the Others do it, but this is how we make her undying.

  He repeated, Undying? But all things grow old and die.

  At this we were stunned. But we do not, we said. Don’t the Others know how to work that magic?

  He had us explain. We showed him our magic, how we changed a person’s twin fires with our souls, how we made them keep always in balance, neither one devouring the other. He was amazed. He named our magic psychokinesis. He demanded that we prove our claims.

  So we did. We showed him how we could make a leaf wither with our souls, driving one of its fires hard and repressing the other. We showed him the rock mice, how by reaching with our souls we could make them die or live longer, although it demanded more effort and more care, as they were very different from us.

  The Prophet went away into the ship by himself then, even his mate could not speak to him. When he came out, he began to explain more things to us. The way stuff is made of tiny balls and how our souls made them shake, and how the shaking changed the fires in ourselves. And when he was sure we understood as much as we could, he asked us to make him eternal.

  We were very worried that it might not work; but he had showed us many things that explained how the Others were different from us, and so those whose souls were strongest among us gathered and performed the rite of Time.

  It worked. After it was done, the Prophet looked inside himself with the machines he had brought and said he would live forever.

  At this his mate grew frightened; she said things to him in their language, which many of us spoke by that time. She accused him of leaving her to die, and many other things. He answered he did not want her to be exposed to the risk, because he did not want to be parted from her. He was holy: what he said was both very right and very wrong.

  In the end he did the only thing he could do, and our wise ones performed the rite on the Prophet’s wife.

  But with her, it failed. There are little strings in the middle of the cells, where life resides. The strings of the Wife’s cells were unravelling, falling apart into little bits. It was a thing that sometimes happens with our kind: we call it the Rot. Once it starts the only merciful thing to do is to destroy the affected one. But the Prophet would not lose his wife. He used all the magic he had, but he could not stop the unravelling.

  So, in desperation, he went inside the ship, and spoke to the Enemy to bargain with them. He would give himself up to them, forever end his war, if they agreed to save his mate. The Enemy swore to the compact.

  I remember how it was just before he left us. He held his Wife in his arms as he carried her inside the wingless ship. She was white as snow; her flesh was coming loose in clumps. He took her inside, then he came back to speak to us. His words made no sense, and too much. His eyes leaked water as he spoke. He asked us to forgive him, as if he had done something wrong. And to continue the war, never to stop. And then he spoke of a future when we would live at peace with the Enemy, a time which he had seen inside his soul. And then he stopped suddenly, and retreated inside the flyer, took off and went to the Enemy.

  He was very holy.

  * * *

  The Enemy was true to their word. They had promised they would save his mate; but the Rot was too far upon her, her body’s destruction could not be halted. So they worked their magic, and took her soul and put it into a metal box.

  And then they took their full vengeance on the Prophet. They did not kill him; instead, they opened his head and maimed his brain, to shackle his soul. They made him their slave, and put him in charge of running the trains that we used to sabotage, because they knew we could not destroy the tracks that he would be crossing.

  And so they think they will win. But they will not. We fight on. We will not stop. We will live forever. He will live forever. We wait for him. He will come back to us. We have all of Time.

  * * *

  The nameless man stares at the angel. He does not understand the story. But he knows that he should not have listened to it. All the pain that he had held dispersed under the sand is bubbling to the surface.

  He puts his hands to his head. His eyes are full of tears. He staggers away from the angel, going to the control cabin, going to his duties, going to make the pain stop.

  He hears the great stiff wings being deployed behind him; as the angel is swept away by the wind of their passing, it shrieks, like someone dying in pain.

  The nameless man stumbles into the cabin. He turns to the meters and gauges, checks and rechecks every one, performs a hundred minute adjustments by hand. The pain is slowly loosing its hold on him as he drowns in his work. The man flops the switch that allows communication with the cybersystem.

  —Increase speed, he tells it. I want maximum!

  —Understood and complying, the cybersystem replies in a toneless voice.

  He opens the hatch to the hopper and shovels metacoal inside until the hopper is brimming. He shuts the hatch, checks the meters again, attentive to the slow movements of the needles, the flickering of the blue digits, as the train gathers yet more speed. Through a window he sees the steel arms become a blur of motion. The howl of the wind gathered inside the mouth rises to a near-shriek.

  Night has fallen. The pain has left him now. He cannot clearly remember what caused it—perhaps he fell asleep on his break and neglected his tasks. That cannot be allowed. He must never run late. He has a duty to the Company.

  The cybersystem indicates all is well. The nameless man goes out into the night, to breathe cooler air. He sits down on a small gray-painted metal seat. He reaches for the bottle and takes a slug of vodka, stoking the furnace of his body. He absently scratches the scar that cinctures his skull, left to right to left. On the horizon
, the hard pinpricks of light of Sternstadt have become visible. The train roars on; the woman who is the locomotive swallows the night with her screaming mouth.

  RETRIEVAL

  John Park

  John Park moved from England to Vancouver in 1970 as a graduate student and in 1976 published his first SF story professionally, in Galaxy. In 1978 he attended the Clarion SF writers’ workshop in Michigan and later that year moved to Ottawa, where he has become a partner in a scientific consulting firm. His SF career to date includes only six stories, three of them in Tesseract anthologies, and three of them in the 1990’s, which bids fair to be his most productive decade as a writer.

  “Retrieval” is reprinted from Tesseracts2.

  * * *

  Outside, they were playing cricket on Stockhausen Square. In his office on the second floor of the gutted museum, the man with the burned face pushed aside the battered electronic device he had been examining and turned to watch. The square was surfaced with gravel, except for a patch of earth in which a black, leafless poplar stood at deep midwicket. The man could remember the tree dying, long after everything had collapsed, its leaves streaming away in a morning gale.

  He watched Durkheim, the epileptic, take three skipping strides and bowl. The far wicket was an empty drum of cleaning fluid. In front of it, Ramsay, the helicopter pilot, jabbed forward with part of a door-frame as a bat, but the tennis ball broke past his elbow, and was taken head-high behind the wicket. From the two-dozen players there was not a sound or a hint of excitement. The man told himself as usual that the fact that they were playing at all was a good sign.

  He picked up the set of identity cards he had made, and began the game of choosing his identity for the month. C. L. Staples, the university lecturer? Larry D. Herbert, the painter? F. Edward Morgan, back from the East? Eliot T. Stearns, the ex-bank-clerk. That would do. The game, begun when he had tried renaming the ruined streets and buildings, was losing its attraction. Today it reminded him of what was lost.

  The device at his elbow seemed to pluck at his memory. It had been scavenged from the ruins the evening before, and he had not had time to do more than glance at it before he slept. But then a dream had woken him, and vanished, leaving a blurred memory of a man’s face. He had lain in the dark, afraid to move, thinking he was still in the hospital, with the pain about to return.

  He opened an old coffee jar and took out the prosthetic skin he used to build up the ruin of his left cheek. As he worked, he examined his face in the driving mirror from a VW bus. Whatever name he attached to it, it remained a stranger’s face with an unknown past. He wondered what it had looked like, what it had smiled at, when its smile had been more than a grimace.

  He glued on his left eyebrow and pulled a black leather glove over his shrivelled left hand. Finally he scooped his leather overcoat from the back of the chair, checked the Beretta in the right pocket, and was ready.

  Outside, at the foot of the fire-escape, he was met by a red-bearded man carrying a repeating shotgun. Stearns nodded to him. “All ready, Sammy,” he said, and took one more look across the square. The sun broke through thin cloud, and the jagged shadow of an office tower fell across the players as they changed ends. “They look happy enough for the moment. You’re sure Colin knows the water truck’s due?”

  Dumb Sammy grinned and nodded.

  “Okay then, let’s go.” Stearns could see the cloud shadows on the grey hills beyond the city, and, closer, the fractured dome of the town hall gleaming in the sun. With Sammy at his shoulder he walked briskly, with only a slight limp, whistling Jagger and Richard’s “Satisfaction.”

  * * *

  They came to the public library. A battered Renault electric was parked in the lot, a spare battery strapped to its rear bumper. “It looks as if Ernst is punctual for once,” Stearns remarked. He glanced quickly along the empty street. “Okay, let’s go in.”

  He pushed the front door open, and they walked past the looted shelves to the office. Ernst’s equipment was there on the chipped wooden desk, between the arm chairs, and the usual two alkaline batteries were on the floor beside it; but the man waiting for him was new. Stearns let Sammy go ahead of him, and slipped his hand into his pocket. “Ernst,” he said, “that’s the best facial I’ve seen in years. A whole-body job, too? In these days? I’d never have known you without the toys.”

  The man came slowly to meet him. He was middle-aged and stocky, with grey hair and a clipped moustache. He wore a leather-patched green anorak that was frayed enough to show the bullet-proof Kevlar lining.

  “Ernst has been—discommoded,” the man said. “Nothing serious, but he asked me to take over for the time being.” He held out part of a torn fifty-franc note. “You can call me Cavendish.”

  Stearns pulled out his wallet and compared his half of the banknote to Cavendish’s. He nodded. “Okay, Sammy. Just wait outside and see we’re not disturbed, please. Glad to meet you,” he said to Cavendish. “My name is Stearns. On this occasion.”

  “Ah,” the man murmured, “old habits.” Stearns frowned, but Cavendish was examining a list on a clip-board. “Now, you’re the customer for the special, I understand.”

  Stearns nodded, and Cavendish took a green plastic thermos from a tool box behind the desk and handed it over. “Enough for two, right?”

  The flask was filled with crushed ice, in which a screw-top phial was packed. Stearns picked up the phial in his fingertips, examined the serial number etched into the glass and the seal on the neck, then put it back in the ice. “Defrosted today? Okay. Now, what about the rest?”

  “Ernst’s quite a sick man, actually.” Cavendish drew a fingertip along one of the gouges in the desk. His wrist quivered and the finger went white around the nail. “He had to go to a lot of trouble to get that for you.”

  Stearns put the thermos down. “Well, well, well. After all these years. Did Ernst mention to you that I’ve got twenty-six in permanent aftershock who need the stuff, that one’s epileptic, and another three need heroin?”

  “Actually, all he mentioned was that you needed the special rather badly.”

  Stearns frowned. “If Ernst is developing capitalist ambitions, I’m afraid he’s either too early, or much too late.”

  “Whatever.” Cavendish began tapping his fingers on the desk. “If you want the rest, I have a slightly different arrangement to offer.”

  Stearns sighed. “The good Ernst, for all his faults, is not one to welsh on a deal. But I’m not sure how he reacts to being cut out by his partners. Maybe you’d know that?”

  “I know what I just told you.”

  “Then there’s no problem, is there? Shall I call Sammy in to help you pack up? Maybe we’ll meet again in more congenial circumstances.”

  Neither of them moved. “Interesting,” Cavendish said at last. He reached down and put an egg carton containing a dozen ampoules packed in blue foam plastic on the desk. “You’re quite committed to these people, aren’t you? Have you been here all along?”

  “Only as long as I can remember,” Stearns said, and began checking the ampoules. Finally he nodded. “Now we’ve finished our little courtship dance, perhaps we can get on with the main business.” He dragged one of the arm chairs back against the desk and sat down. He reached up and peeled back his hairpiece, revealing the metal insert in his scalp. “Perhaps you can help me here? I assume you’ve seen one of these before. It’s just the housing and sensor guide for the memory packs. Bring the sensor head over here and position it—there, that’s right. Now all you have to do is enter number eleven on the keyboard—”

  “—and press the little red button.”

  Stearns closed his eyes; his right hand clenched, his jaw quivered. A minute passed. Then he sat back and smiled weakly. “There we are. I’m sure Ernst would want you to enter the check codes to make sure I haven’t cheated you.”

  Cavendish worked at the keyboard. “That other deal I mentioned. I have a client interested in certain information that
may pass your way. If you come across it, it could be to both our advantages.”

  Stearns raised his eyebrow.

  “The code name was Viking,” Cavendish went on. “I can give you a hexadecimal reference.”

  After Cavendish had read off the reference, Stearns closed his eyes, leaning forward with his arms stiff. “I may have something, a cross-reference. Maybe—I’m not sure—” He shook his head and sat up. “It’s gone, if there was anything—” He broke off, and looked at Cavendish. “I’ve seen you before.”

  Cavendish peered at him, his eyes suddenly hard. “Have you now? I’m not sure I can say the same.”

  “I’ve changed,” Stearns muttered.

  “Hm. Do you know where you’ve seen me?”

  “No. It’s gone now. Just a flash of something. A dream.”

  “Interesting. Do you get these flashes often?”

  “No. I wish I did. It might mean my memory was coming back.”

  “You may be fortunate as you are. After the plagues, and some of the things that followed, not many illusions about human worth or dignity survived. But—we have to keep on going, don’t we? So—keep an ear to the ground, and if you hear anything about Viking, let me know.”

  * * *

  Stearns waited until Cavendish had loaded his equipment into the Renault and driven away before he came out to meet Sammy. He handed over the package of ampoules. “Off you go, now. Get this back safe. Colin knows what to do.”

  Stearns walked north for a block, then stopped at the corner where the salvage crew was working. They were clearing rubble from the remains of an office building. The side walls and rear were smoke-blackened but intact; the front had collapsed into the street. The foreman was looking at the motor of a blue Ford that had been under the rubble.

  “Afternoon, Carl,” Stearns said. “What have we got?”

  “Not much today, looks like. We’ll tear the motor out and have a look, but the oil’s been gone for a long time. We got the radio out, though. Pretty chewed up, but some of the boards still look good.” He went over to a bundle of sacking and handed the radio to Stearns. “Werner started this find, when he picked up that other thing in the stairwell with his metal detector. Thought he’d tripped over another bloody Claymore at first.”