Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

“You and me? Together?”

  “For eternity,” he said, and kissed me so sweetly I could have cried.

  * * *

  We used a length of steel wire Lafe extracted from an old holoset in the junk pile Torvis kept back behind the Place. He greased it so it wouldn’t shine in the dark.

  Torvis had beer delivered in big steel kegs once a week. He stored them in the cold room down under the Place, a nasty timber and concrete basement with the floorboards of the barroom creaking and swaying above it. Here was the crux of the plan: every Friday night, providing he was sober enough to do so, Torvis would go down into that hole to count the kegs. “Consumption’s up,” he would say, grousing because he’d have to put in a bigger order; or, “Consumption’s down,” grousing ’cause business was off.

  Friday before he arrived, we snuck in through his office and down a ways into that lightless place where the beer was kept. The stairway was rickety and narrow and smelled of old malt. First Lafe unscrewed the light bulb at the bottom so it would look to have burned out. Then he came back up to the second stair or so. He had bought some of those steel eyehole screws from the hardware store up in Lawson. He drove one into the supports at each side of the stair. Then he threaded the steel wire between them, tying it off as tight as he could. Then he twisted the screw eyes a couple more times each until the wire hummed like the high E string on an electric guitar. He gave it a final slick of shoe polish, and we backed to the top of the stairway.

  The wire was invisible.

  Lafe was shaking; I held his hand.

  “This is it, girl,” he whispered. “This is our ticket. Keep your fingers crossed.”

  It was a nervous night, you might imagine. I felt elated, optimistic, sick—all at once. I suppose I was feeling some of what Lafe must have felt when he hovered over the body of Torvis with that big meat knife in his hand. Back at the Farm there was a motto we heard almost as often as Happy to Serve, which was You Can’t Cheat Fate. Maybe that is so, I thought. But you can by God try. I sang, up there on the stage with the band behind me, the same old songs that are precisely the story of my life, Loved and Lost and the Guy Who Left Me Behind; but I sang them, I would pledge, with a special poignancy that night. Let Me Be in Your Arms Tonight, I sang (and Lafe smiled his big white smile, all alone at his table); I Shouldn’t But I Love You; This Is Sin But It Feels So Good.

  Oh yes.

  Torvis did not appear in public that night.

  We had been for a couple of weeks circulating rumors among the staff that he was planning to sell out. I suppose those rumors accelerated during the evening. Any ordinary evening, Torvis usually appeared at least once to guarantee that the bar was churlishly tended, or to badger the waitresses and put his fat hands on their behinds.

  But he did not.

  Time passed and after a while everybody went home and it was not long before dawn, and still Torvis had not appeared.

  The entrance to the cellar is strictly through Torvis’s private office.

  I looked at Lafe; Lafe looked at me.

  “He could be drunk,” Lafe whispered.

  “We have to know,” I said. “We have to at least know.”

  So we tiptoed through the dark and silent, sawdust-scattered barroom to Torvis’s door. Which was not locked.

  It was dark inside.

  I found the light switch.

  Torvis was sitting there, grinning like a maniac, the trip wire dangling in his hand.

  “Well, by God, it would be you two.” He waved us in, almost a friendly gesture. “There’s nowhere to run to, so you might as well sit and chat for a time.”

  Lafe entered the room stiff-legged, eyes wild, as if his brain weren’t firing on all cylinders. And me behind, hot in the face, angry and scared both at once.

  Torvis perched on the edge of his desk, one hand curled around a bottle of Southern Comfort. There was a bruise on his cheek and some blood around one ankle, so I guessed the trip wire had worked—just not well enough. He had fallen down the stairs, but it hadn’t killed him. And now he knew.

  “Well, well, well. I guess I should have expected this. You buy cheap Fakes, you get what you pay for.” He laced his link-sausage fingers across the belly of his yoke shirt. His string tie was askew. “I should have knowed.”

  “We didn’t—” Lafe stammered hopelessly; “—you don’t think—”

  And I fingered the knife I had been carrying in my big dress pockets since I prized it out of Lafe’s hand that day.

  “Don’t make it worse,” Torvis said, turning grim for the first time. “Wouldn’t have worked anyhow. I guess you thought you could take over the Place. Kill me and take over the Place and live as if you were real people. Hah! Oh, you could of killed me, I guess, if this chickenshit plan had worked out. Killed me without facing me, ’cause you can’t do that—just some underhanded trick. But even if it worked, where are you?”

  His hand lingered about the telephone terminal. I guessed he was going to call the local Artificials Board, and we would be processed dogfood, me and Lafe both, before the next nightfall.

  “Because you’re not human,” Torvis said gleefully. He grinned, his face like a big beet-red Halloween pumpkin. “There’s the flaw! It all comes out in the Programming, don’t it? You can’t dodge a Program!”

  You Can’t Cheat Fate.

  I guess it was the words that set me off: made me think of the Farm, and of Laurel Anne, and of poor Lafe’s programmed helplessness. Torvis had already started punching out numbers on the terminal, chuckling crazily to himself, when the knife came down. Again. And again. In my hand.

  We hid him in that cold, dark basement back of the beer kegs.

  * * *

  “Got a surprise for you,” Lafe said one night after the ruckus had died down and we were alone in the Place again. Our Place, as I had lately begun to think of it.

  “Surprise?” I asked.

  And he opened up the front doors in a grand gesture, and Laurel Anne waltzed in.

  Comes to the same thing, seems to me. We play out our roles, and we want what we’re so often promised: our One True Lover, our Happy Ending.

  I thought all this while I cried into Laurel Anne’s pretty blond hair. Lafe said, “She needed a job. We need a new Nell. And we can pay her double salary until she buys herself free.”

  I looked at her. She nodded, grinning. “’Course,” she said, “that’s not the main reason I’m here.”

  “The main reason—?”

  “Didn’t want to miss your wedding.”

  I wept all over again.

  Laurel Anne sang “When Them Roses Bloom Again,” alone up onstage in the empty barroom, and Lafe and I said the vows about forsaking all others and death do us part and so forth, and he put a Cracker Jack ring on my finger; and he was my cowboy bridegroom and I was his jukebox bride.

  * * *

  Well, business picked up after that. Torvis was unmissed and unmourned. Lafe took over accounting. Laurel Anne stood in as Nell, though I continued to sing the songs every night.

  The sad old songs. The ballads in waltz time.

  Sad and true. Fate is a tricky and mean opponent, they seem to say; he sneaks up from behind.

  I stood up onstage and watched them glide across the dance floor.

  My old friend and my true love. His hand was on the shoulder of her taffeta gown, his other hand pressed her tight, and his eyes—those gorgeous Cowboy eyes!—were all lit up with love.

  While the band played in 3/4 time.

  (LEARNING ABOUT) MACHINE SEX

  Candas Jane Dorsey

  Candas Jane Dorsey is one of the mature writing talents to have emerged in the last decade from Canadian SF. She is currently president of the Writers Guild of Alberta, and concurrently president of SF Canada (Speculative Writers Association of Canada, of which she is a founder). A former social worker and teacher, she had worked in freelance writing and editing in Edmonton, Alberta, the city of her birth, and published three books of poetr
y before her first SF book, a collection of her stories: Machine Sex and Other Stories (1988). Another collection, of erotic poetry, appeared in 1992. Only six of the thirteen stories had been published prior to the collection, and four of those had appeared in little magazines, not in SF publications. The blurb on the small-press trade-paperback first edition of her collection promised “a brilliant new voice in SF” from the publishers of the Tesseracts series. And indeed the stories, such as “Sleeping in a Box” (which won the 1989 Aurora Award for best short-form work in English), “Willows,” and the title story here reprinted, fulfilled that promise.

  She writes: “In 1994 Dorsey’s publishing history transcends the mundane literally, when a short story [“Johnny Appleseed on the New World”] is included on a CD-ROM travelling on a spaceship to Mars. Fame and posterity thus assured, Dorsey is now working on fortune—as well as a new book of short fiction, a novel, and a nonfiction book on sex and society.” Dorsey, like Andrew Weiner, Terence Green, and Margaret Atwood, seems more influenced by feminist than traditional hard SF, more influenced by British than U.S. SF. She is one of the central figures in speculative fiction (as distinct from American SF) in Canada. Her attitudes are further illuminated by the essay elsewhere in this book.

  * * *

  A naked woman working at a computer. Which attracts you most? It was a measure of Whitman that, as he entered the room, his eyes went first to the unfolded machine gleaming small and awkward in the light of the long-armed desk lamp; he’d seen the woman before.

  Angel was the woman. Thin and pale-skinned, with dark nipples and black pubic hair, and her face hidden by a dark unkempt mane of long hair as she leaned over her work.

  A woman complete with her work. It was a measure of Angel that she never acted naked, even when she was. Perhaps especially when she was.

  So she has a new board, thought Whitman, and felt his guts stir the way they stirred when he first contemplated taking her to bed. That was a long time ago. And she knew it, felt without turning her head the desire, and behind the screen of her straight dark hair, uncombed and tumbled in front of her eyes, she smiled her anger down.

  “Where have you been?” he asked, and she shook her hair back, leaned backward to ease her tense neck.

  “What is that thing?” he went on insistently, and Angel turned her face to him, half-scowling. The board on the desk had thin irregular wings spreading from a small central module. Her fingers didn’t slow their keyboard dance.

  “None of your business,” she said.

  She saved the input, and he watched her fold the board into a smaller and smaller rectangle. Finally she shook her hair back from her face.

  “I’ve got the option on your bioware,” he said.

  “Pay as you go,” she said. “New house rule.”

  And found herself on her ass on the floor from his reflexive, furious blow. And his hand in her hair, pulling her up and against the wall. Hard. Astonishing her with how quickly she could hurt how much. Then she hurt too much to analyse it.

  “You are a bitch,” he said.

  “So what?” she said. “When I was nicer, you were still an asshole.”

  Her head back against the wall, crack. Ouch.

  Breathless, Angel: “Once more and you never see this bioware.” And Whitman slowly draws breath, draws back, and looks at her the way she knew he always felt.

  “Get out,” she said. “I’ll bring it to Kozyk’s office when it’s ready.”

  So he went. She slumped back in the chair, and tears began to blur her vision, but hate cleared them up fast enough, as she unfolded the board again, so that despite the pain she hardly missed a moment of programming time.

  Assault only a distraction now, betrayal only a detail: Angel was on a roll. She had her revenge well in hand, though it took a subtle mind to recognise it.

  * * *

  Again: “I have the option on any of your bioware.” This time, in the office, Whitman wore the nostalgic denims he now affected, and Angel her street-silks and leather.

  “This is mine, but I made one for you.” She pulled it out of the bag. Where her board looked jerry-built, this one was sleek. Her board looked interesting; this one packaged. “I made it before you sold our company,” she said. “I put my best into it. You may as well have it. I suppose you own the option anyway, eh?”

  She stood. Whitman was unconsciously restless before her.

  “When you pay me for this,” she said, “make it in MannComp stock.” She tossed him the board. “But be careful. If you take it apart wrong, you’ll break it. Then you’ll have to ask me to fix it, and from now on, my tech rate goes up.”

  As she walked by him, he reached for her, hooked one arm around her waist. She looked at him, totally expressionless. “Max,” she said, “it’s like I told you last night. From now on, if you want it, you pay. Just like everyone else.” He let her go. She pulled the soft dirty white silk shirt on over the black leather jacket. The compleat rebel now.

  “It’s a little going away present. When you’re a big shot in MannComp, remember that I made it. And that you couldn’t even take it apart right. I guarantee.”

  He wasn’t going to watch her leave. He was already studying the board. Hardly listening, either.

  “Call it the Mannboard,” she said. “It gets big if you stroke it.” She shut the door quietly behind herself.

  * * *

  It would be easier if this were a story about sex, or about machines. It is true that the subject is Angel, a woman who builds computers like they have never been built before outside the human skull. Angel, like everyone else, comes from somewhere and goes somewhere else. She lives in that linear and binary universe. However, like everyone else, she lives concurrently in another universe less simple. Trivalent, quadrivalent, multivalent. World without end, with no amen. And so, on.

  * * *

  They say a hacker’s burned out before he’s twenty-one. Note the pronoun: he. Not many young women in that heady realm of the chip.

  Before Angel was twenty-one—long before—she had taken the cybernetic chip out of a Wm Kuhns fantasy and patented it; she had written the program for the self-taught AI the Bronfmanns had bought and used to gain world prominence for their MannComp lapboard; somewhere in there, she’d lost innocence, and when her clever additions to that AI turned it into something the military wanted, she dropped out of sight in Toronto and went back to Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, on a Greyhound bus.

  It was while she was thinking about something else—cash, and how to get some—that she had looked out of the bus window in Winnipeg into the display window of a sex shop. Garter belts, sleazy magazines on cheap coated paper with Day-Glo orange stickers over the genitals of bored sex kings and queens, a variety of ornamental vibrators. She had too many memories of Max to take it lightly, though she heard the laughter of the roughnecks in the back of the bus as they topped each other’s dirty jokes, and thought perhaps their humour was worth emulating. If only she could.

  She passed her twentieth birthday in a hotel in Regina, where she stopped to take a shower and tap into the phone lines, checking for pursuit. Armed with the money she got through automatic transfer from a dummy account in Medicine Hat, she rode the bus the rest of the way ignoring the rolling of beer bottles under the seats, the acrid stink of the onboard toilet. She was thinking about sex.

  As the bus roared across the long flat prairie she kept one hand on the roll of bills in her pocket, but with the other she made the first notes on the program that would eventually make her famous.

  She made the notes on an antique NEC lapboard which had been her aunt’s, in old-fashioned BASIC—all the machine would support—but she unravelled it and knitted it into that artificial trivalent language when she got to the place at Rocky and plugged the idea into her Mannboard. She had it written in a little over four hours on-time, but that counted an hour and a half she took to write a new loop into the AI. (She would patent that loop later the same year and put the
royalties into a blind trust for her brother, Brian, brain damaged from birth. He was in Michener Centre in Red Deer, not educable; no one at Bronfmann knew about her family, and she kept it that way.)

  She called it Machine Sex; working title.

  * * *

  Working title for a life: born in Innisfail General Hospital, father a rodeo cowboy who raised rodeo horses, did enough mixed farming out near Caroline to build his young second wife a big log house facing the mountain view. The first baby came within a year, ending her mother’s tenure as teller at the local bank. Her aunt was a programmer for the University of Lethbridge, chemical molecular model analysis on the University of Calgary mainframe through a modern link.

  From her aunt she learned BASIC, Pascal, COBOL and C; in school she played the usual turtle games on the Apple IIe; when she was fourteen she took a bus to Toronto, changed her name to Angel, affected a punk hairstyle and the insolent all-white costume of that year’s youth, and eventually walked into Northern Systems, the company struggling most successfully with bionics at the time, with the perfected biochip, grinning at the proper young men in their grey three-piece suits as they tried to find a bug in it anywhere. For the first million she let them open it up; for the next five she told them how she did it. Eighteen years old by the phoney records she’d cooked on her arrival in Toronto, she was free to negotiate her own contracts.

  But no one got her away from Northern until Bronfmann bought Northern lock, stock and climate-controlled workshop. She had been sleeping with Northern’s boy-wonder president: by then for about a year, had yet to have an orgasm though she’d learned a lot about kinky sex toys. Figured she’d been screwed by him for the last time when he sold the company without telling her; spent the next two weeks doing a lot of drugs and having a lot of cheap sex in the degenerate punk underground; came up with the AI education program.

  Came up indeed, came swaggering into Ted Kozyk’s office, president of Bronfmann’s MannComp subsidiary, with that jury-rigged Mannboard tied into two black-box add-ons no bigger than a bar of soap, and said, “Watch this.”