Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  For the first time in almost twenty years, Jauro would make a decision without consulting Fromto. But Mindooru was right—this one was his alone. This, too, was part of manhood—it felt like his first boar hunt.

  He straightened his shoulders, and peered around until his eyes found Thorta’s face—a tiny patch of horrified whiteness among the women. He sent her a smile, but shook his head when she began to come forward. He knew that words would lodge in his throat like fishbones. May you rule this land for many years, my darling, as woman and man, and raise daughters and sons to our line. He could never say that aloud. I love you no less than I ever did, even if I haven’t said so lately! Nor that. Once, maybe. Not now.

  He thought of Lallia and the unborn child he would never see; and he thought of the snow-locked ranges, of the storms, of frost and starvation.

  He looked down at the sniveling wreck of his father. At least he would be spared that!

  Fromto would do his duty.

  All around the hall stood the angry knots of men, muttering angrily—the grizzled survivors, the best warriors, companions who had shared wet ditches with him, shared triumph and terror. They had bled together, these men and he. They wanted to bleed more.

  Go home now, he wanted to tell them. Go home to your flocks and fields, to your plows and nets. Go home; live in peace; grow in wisdom.

  But they would be shamed if he said that. And what of the younger adults, the women who would be warriors for his daughter? They were huddled in other groups with the children who would be their wives. The widows would change first, of course; that was the gods’ way of restocking the fyrd. I hope you all live out your lives in peace, he thought, but I don’t expect it.

  He unbuckled his sword and thrust it at Mindooru, which almost dropped it. “Here, father!” Jauro raised his voice, remembering the elder was deaf. “You taught me to use this, remember? Long ago. You taught me too well!”

  He turned back to the priestly envoy and the searching eyes, and he forced out the lying words: “I confess my treason.”

  He saw relief then, and something else he could not place. It was not a return of arrogance. Not contempt. Not pleasure. Surely not admiration?

  As he strode out to die for his loved ones, Jauro reflected sadly that this also was sometimes part of being a man.

  REMEMBER, THE DEAD SAY

  Jean-Louis Trudel

  Jean-Louis Trudel has degrees in physics and astronomy, and is presently studying for a second M.A. in philosophy and history of science at the University of Toronto. He writes SF both in French and in English. He has also written cultural commentary and SF criticism for several publications, in French and in English, in Canada and the U.S., including The Ottawa Citizen, Solaris, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and Locus.

  His fiction in English has appeared in Tesseracts, volumes 3 and 4, Ark of Ice, and On Spec. He is also the author of more than a dozen stories in French, published in imagine…, Solaris, and in Canadian and Belgian anthologies. He has also collaborated with Yves Meynard on several stories, and they are presently at work on a novel. Trudel’s three novels in French include Le Ressuscite de L’Atlantide, serialized in imagine … from 1985–87; his recent young adult novel, Aller simple pour Saguenal (1994); and Pour des soleils froids, (Paris: Fleuve Noir Anticipation, 1994).

  Trudel’s contribution to the organizing of conventions, and the editing and publication of SF newsletters in Canada, as well as his frequent reports and reviews in English of francophone SF for U.S. publications, have made him an important figure in the interactions of the French and English Canadian SF communities. The story included here, “Remember, the Dead Say,” is a Quebec Separatist story in English, a common topic for satire or violent partisan fantasies (David Ketterer devotes a few pages to this subgenre of Canadian literature). It is too obvious, and yet too delicate and complex a topic for many Canadian SF writers (see Vonarburg’s comments). Trudel is up to the task in this unique and thought-provoking—and perhaps elegaic—piece.

  * * *

  The child is blond, a boy with golden hair and eyes of an indefinite grey-blue which have no more tears to shed since Daddy was killed by a sniper’s bullet. He is called Brendan, Devin … maybe Gerald? He is running. In fact, he’s been running towards the river and safety for two days, ever since he left his family’s cottage in the northern hills, among the pines. He has run across the city streets strewn with shattered bricks, in the midst of the smoking ruins of wooden bungalows and the blasted shells of low-rises, and the river was always in front of him, getting closer and closer.

  But no, now he is running across the cold terrazzo tiles of a shopping center, from floor to floor, running down to the dirty concrete of the parking levels. No shoppers there, no cars here. Only people huddled in small groups, sprawled on mattresses or sleeping bags, jealously standing guard over small hoards of boxes and cans. As he runs, he shouts:

  “Les avions! Les avions s’en viennent!” The Canadian jets, the F-18 S1 fighter-bombers; where S stands for “smart.…”

  The boy has run alongside the stony trench of the boulevard linking the main bridges, where the last defenders are encamped with mortars, a few remaining APCs, and howitzers. The boy knows that the pilots won’t distinguish between the desperate troops and the neighbouring buildings where Hull’s former citizens have found shelter from the shelling and the small arms fire. Even though the office towers are festooned with red crosses.

  And the bombs that will glide down laser paths, finding the sky-lights over the shopping center’s atrium or the stairway shafts of the parking, will not pick and choose among their victims. The boy runs in the last shadows of the federal buildings. On the other side of the deserted stretch of pavement, if he jumps over the fallen poles of the streetlights and somehow scrambles down the grassy slope, there is an arm of the Ottawa river. On the other side, OttawaOntarioCanada.…

  The planes shriek across the sky and the boy leaps from the shadows.

  * * *

  She combed the snow out of her beard.

  The driving snow was definitely freakish for December in Lowell, O.T. It might not have seemed so out of place in January, when flurries harried the town for two or three days a year, outlining the scaly bark of the palm trees with filigrees of dirty white and then melting in a few hours, leaving a puddle in every pothole. She was much too recent a newcomer to remember when Massachusetts winters had entailed more snow than sleet.

  The old comb had lost teeth and its black plastic was scarred, but she stowed it carefully in a back pocket after wiping it. She dared not lose it. She avoided stores where the monitors might see past the beard or the mikes might catch the hint of accent in her roughened voice. Besides, she rather liked its battered condition; it reflected her own predicament.

  She forced herself to walk on, plowing into the cold wind. Overhead, azure bunting decorated with golden fleurs-de-lis fluttered in the gusts, faded black letters proclaiming in French the fiftieth anniversary of Québec’s war of independence. The sidewalk was broken in places, covered with icy patches elsewhere, and she concentrated on her footing. A broken leg would mean a visit to the hospital, and unavoidable discovery.

  Beards had been a fad before the latest series of wars, like breasts for men, furred tails, cat’s eyes or werewolf teeth. She’d chosen a beard to match her mousy brown hair, back then, and this unadventurous choice had proven wise in unforeseen ways. Alterations could not be reversed without elaborate genosurgery—though she had contemplated permanent depilation—and most genochemists had died during the years of destruction. The genochemists had not relied on anything as gross as massive testosterone injections. Growing a beard on a woman had not been the point, that was old hat, but rather doing it without affecting the body’s delicate biochemical balance.

  Now though, the beard allowed her to masquerade as a man and to walk the streets unchallenged. The law of the Franco-Maghrebi Coalition was the Sharia and it imposed the veil on all women
past a certain age, as well as seclusion except for absolutely necessary errands—not that either was really unwise with the Sun blasting ultraviolet at an ozone-poor Earth. Only the women among the troops of Québec, the Coalition’s sole North American ally, enjoyed a special dispensation.

  The old thoroughfare that paralleled the river came to an end at another waterway. The nineteenth-century town center of Lowell was now behind her and so she bore left, recalling the directions whispered to her aboard the rickety Amtrak train she had taken to Omaha, capital of the Free States, an oasis amid an encroaching desert. She’d spent two days in Omaha, waiting for the eastbound train, doing the things expected of any Canadian tourist. A quick videocamming of the Whiter House, a brief tour of the Senate in session, and a peek from afar, sans camera, at the rebuilt Pentagon.

  That had been but a few weeks before the war: the quick Franco-Maghrebi thrust from the occupied Maritime Confederacy, the nuking of the Albany staging point of the F.S.A. First Army, the overrunning of the defenses along the Hudson wasteland, the indecisive battle around Syracuse, and, two months later, the signature of the ceasefire in forlorn Ottawa by delegates from Marseilles and Omaha, witnessed by Canadian officials from Winnipeg.

  By then, she’d arrived in Lowell. She’d lived the war through the Net, as she accessed the last screams of the dying, the encrypted communications of the military, the grainy battlefield pics, the verbal confrontations of supporters of both sides, and even sometimes the streams of biomonitor data, each packet crowded with the life of a man or woman, and each packet practically meaningless for an eavesdropper like her, safe in the basement of an aging clapboard house. She’d been astonished to discover a few last pacifists, and gripped by the unfolding battles, and pained by the suffering of the wounded keying in to reaffirm they still existed: whatever it was, if it were modulated electronically, it eventually left a residue on the Net, like the sediment of the centuries descending upon the ocean floor.

  In those days, she’d craved the Net and its raw emotions to help her forget that she was afraid. The empty streets outside had seemed to expect, to want soldiers to come walking through the wind-blown leaves of early autumn, and yet everyone was afraid of spotting the first green uniform that would change all their lives forever. However, Lowell was too small and too close to radioactive Boston, smitten in an earlier war fought with deadlier weapons and with other enemies, avenged by smouldering towns called Kazan and Smolensk. The Franco-Maghrebi columns had by-passed unimportant Lowell and, in the end, the first forces to enter it had come from Québec after the ceasefire had fixed the zones of influence for a time. Since then, most voices on the local Net had died away.

  “Do you speak French, mister?”

  “Excusez-moi, mais parlez-vous français?”

  “Assalaamu aleikoum, tifnam arabi?”

  “Please, please, do you speak Arabic?”

  She almost broke her stride, memories fragmenting and whirling away. The supplicants lined the street in front of the Québec military headquarters. They waved sheets of plastic inscribed in the Roman or Arabic alphabets. She looked straight ahead and walked on, tried not to betray her knowledge of French, steeled herself against flinching.

  She knew what the documents were. The same had been sent to everybody with a surname which seemed either French or Arabic in origin. Notices of retroactive recognition of citizenship, as they were called by the occupiers. Draft notices, she called them, since military service went with citizenship for Québec or the Franco-Maghrebis. Anyway, such was their real purpose and they were couched in such ornate French or flowery Arabic that the recipients, sons of long-ago immigrants who’d only learned a few words of their ancestral languages in childhood, if at all, could hardly decipher their meaning.

  She walked faster. If her name had not been Pat Doyle, she might have received one. In Kapuskasing, her family had spoken French for over a century. At times, her mind reeled from the welter of her identities, which burdened her with a dozen masks. Francophone in English-speaking Canada, Métis in a land owned by others, and now a Canadian in Lowell, formerly a city of the F.S.A., but now an “Occupied Territory” of the Franco-Maghrebi Coalition.

  As a Canadian, she could be shot as a spy; as a francophone, drafted; as a Métis, who could claim kinship with the rich farmers of Denendeh, interned as an illegal alien.…

  And she didn’t even know for sure what the Sharia dictated for women using men’s clothing. On the whole, she preferred to be an American, even in an occupied city.

  A Québécois patrol came towards her and she bobbed her head up and down in submission as she changed sidewalks. The long coat in which she shivered hid well the curves still left in spite of a starvation diet, but there was no percentage in taking chances.

  The soldiers did not spare a glance. Thin scraggly men were the norm in Lowell.

  Québec! She mastered an urge to spit on the pavement they had walked on. She’d come to Lowell to find the mass grave of distant relatives, the Marcottes, on behalf of La Nouvelle Patente, the one organization that had linked francophones in Canada, Denendeh, the Maritime Confederacy, and the F.S.A. During the previous war, the Marcottes and others like them had been shot as Québec spies, for a country they’d never even visited. Only babies had been spared, put up for adoption, and lost in the records. They were safe somewhere, she hoped: Louis, Richard, Julie.… Only a small atrocity begotten by others begotten by hatreds born of a long twisting history, which only the victors could afford to forget: if she found the grave, she was to send back for money with which to build a memorial.

  And then she’d met the stranger aboard the train who’d whispered to her of coming wars and defeats.

  Defeat, she knew. You lived, you cried, and then you got used to it.

  Pat had flung her teen-age years at the burning forests of northern Ontario, like so many others in Kapuskasing, refusing to let the futility of it erode her youthful determination. The fires had become more and more frequent as the greenhouse effect worsened. She remembered the smell of smoke that stayed in the clothes, the black grit getting in the eyes, the resin scent that would not wash off her hands after mere hours of work. A few days were enough for a fire fighter to merge with the fire she was fighting, growing into a creature of wood and sooty air, of water and black earth, arms an extension of axe-handles or shovels.

  They’d saved villages like Val-Rita and towns like Longlac, but she’d quit after shooting the last buck—she’d been with a younger cousin, David McCaughey, scouting the woods downwind of a late-summer fire. The overworked planes were supposed to come, but such pledges were written on the wind, and a fire-break had to be planned. She had a gun, in case the fire chased something dangerous out of the woods and into their path. The afternoon had been hot, the air heavy, and they’d tried for a short-cut, scrambling down a wooded slope to the edge of a small lake. And then they’d seen the buck. It bellowed in pain. The animal’s pelt hung in blackened tatters and its antlers seemed to smoke still. They’d never seen a moose this far south.

  It stood there for what seemed like forever, its cries of anguish echoing back from the hills. David had pulled at her arm, wanting to go on and detour around the wounded beast. She hadn’t budged, moved in spite of herself and struggling with an obscure feeling of recognition. Then, in one swift motion, she had shouldered the gun and shot.

  The next day, she had handed in her resignation from the fire-fighting squads. The moose had stayed behind, maybe, when others had moved north away from sweltering summers and the increasing human presence. Maybe it had come back. But there was no going back, and the forests could not be saved as long as the climate continued to get hotter.

  That was the first time she had tasted bittersweet defeat, the bitterness of losing mingled with the relief that came with no longer having to fight.

  “À quoi tu penses?”

  “Kawkwy!”

  She reddened as she realized she’d answered in Michif, which had been the
language of her Métis grandfather, and then paled as she realized the question had been put to her in French. Lost in the past, she’d stopped to shelter in a doorway of the Archambault funeral home. She glanced up at the man who had spoken:

  “Who are you?”

  At the same time, she withdrew her hands, numbed by the cold, into the arms of her coat. The lining held a dozen fléchettes, tipped with Tabun-filled capsules.

  “Je sais qui tu es, Patline,” he said.

  She almost gasped. He’d used her full name.

  “What do you mean?” she replied.

  “Tu es Patline Doyle, tu as grandi à Moonbeam et tu as été envoyée par la Nouvelle Patente pour arranger la construction d’un monument commémoratif à la mémoire des victimes des massacres de mars.”

  “What are you saying? I was born and raised in Manchester, up north, in New Hampshire,” she said, unwilling to admit defeat too quickly. Only a provocateur would speak French so openly. The man threw back the hood of his coat: a tiara of metal and glass imprisoned his skull. Greying hair showed through in places, but the device seemed to be a melded part of the head. The face was lined with furrows born of worry or fear, but the deep-set eyes burned into hers.

  “I’m Marc Gendreau, a gatekeeper of the Net,” he laughed tiredly, “and we cracked the secret access codes of the Nouvelle Patente a long time ago. I probably know more about the organization than you. I even know about that Arab draft dodger you hid in your basement for a week.… Je suis recherché par la Sûreté militaire.”

  She sighed, at once impressed and alarmed. If Québec’s counter-intelligence police were truly hunting for him.…

  “How did you find me?”

  “You used your pocket comp to check the weather forecast when you were in front of the church. I traced your call to the nearest relay and I guessed where you were going.”