Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  “Well, it can do more than talk, it can do … well, almost anything. That’s communication, buster!” I was a rotten student, and so defensive of the society that I had come from.

  Later I could see the problems with holos. Take the university for example. Most of the kids don’t ever show up for class, but send their holos instead. Shimmering light visions sit in the seats, answer questions, make passes at each other behind the teacher’s back. A lot of weirdness goes on. The profs are so adept at holos and have such sophisticated transmitters that very few people can tell if it is a holo or an original who’s up front lecturing on astrophysics and neuro-palaeontology.

  We’ve become a very leisurely society. It causes a lot of hardship. I’d hate to tell you about how many cases the shrinks have to deal with where the originals get themselves confused with their own holos or where somebody makes so many improvements over himself through a holoversion that they call it quits altogether. I mean, once you’ve perfected yourself and it’s not you, then what? I don’t think Mellaghy or Bustrom ever use holos, at least not for teaching. But even they don’t know how to read. Mellaghy argues that he doesn’t really think most of us are even physically capable of it. He says it’s more or less something we’ve evolved out of, like the primitive way that men and women used to have sex.

  According to Dolph, that’s a lot of bull. Dolph claims to have fathered his own kid. I mean physically. She lives alone in a tiny geocell on Ganymede, where she writes poetry. I don’t know how Tess became a poet. Or why. Dolph was a confessional novelist. He was happy that I wanted to stick with novels and short fiction.

  “One poet in the family is enough,” he said.

  “What do you mean, family?” I said.

  “I just mean figuratively,” he said as he brought down the heavy blade of the self-fashioned paper cutter. Dolph had to manufacture all of his own paper. “As far as I know, I’m the only paper manufacturer in the solar system,” he’d brag. Which is probably true since he does supply Tess and Sister T. and, of course, me.

  Without a doubt, I have more paper in my possession than anyone on Earth. Sister Theresa, of course, has a small stock. She’s neither a novelist nor a poet, but has taken on the dubious role of literary critic. She uses words and paper more sparingly. And every other writer alive depends on her judgment—all three of us.

  Sister T. has angered me more than once with her criticism. “Put more oomph in it,” she’d say. “More life. Develop characters, not just stereotypes.” Or “a sensitive mind and spirit, but your work lacks the necessary grace and cohesiveness,” would be another one of her comments to a piece I had laboured on for months.

  Theresa’s claim to fame is that she has read real “books.” Not too many scholars hold credence to the fact that there ever was such a thing as widespread use of books. Could you imagine a writer writing for more than a handful of readers? I think the old girl has a good imagination, but what the hell, that’s what it’s all about, eh? (She’s also requested that I “clean up the language.” However, I learned from Big Dolph himself and he’s responsible for my vocabulary.)

  In the end, I always forgive her for all her insults, which are always well-meaning. And I can’t afford to alienate the reading audience that I have. Bustrom has offered to try to help me turn my first novel, Two and a Half Watts Against Eternal Night, into a holovision performance creating composite characters and all. Imagine the audience I’d have! But alas, Dolph would kill me and Tess might never forgive me. That I couldn’t afford.

  Tess does have a few of her mother’s traits. She can be critical. She reduced me to tears when she commented on my recent book, The Nocturnal Mission. She called it “sophomoric and shallow.” I had tried to write a humorous book about nickel mining on an asteroid, but I don’t think I could quite pull it off. And like Theresa, Tess doesn’t use much paper. You know how long it takes the old-style cargo ships to get from the moon to Ganymede. And Dolph’s complaining that it’s getting harder to locate the right supplies.

  In case I haven’t mentioned it, I’m in love with Tess. Love, that is, as I understand it. None of this bullshit about priming up a perfect holoversion of yourself and transmitting it over to a chick’s house where she has to quickly get out the tape of herself at her best. You might as well be watching DV. I’m not even sure these college kids bother with romance anymore at all. Not with holos or anything. It’s one more thing that might as well be called irrelevant.

  But I picture Tess tucked away in her little geocell on the outskirts of nowhere on Ganymede writing out her short heart-wrung poetry on tiny portions of paper. She writes about love and rocks and stars; if you ask me, it is a little corny and she suffers from all those faults that she accuses me of. But it takes me a lot more words to accomplish the faults. And I’ve never read what Sister Theresa has to say about her daughter’s poetry.

  Someday, I was sure, Tess and I would get our lives woven together somehow and settle down, maybe right there on Ganymede and do nothing but write and make love in the primitive style, which must have been the way that Dolph and Sister T. did it if Tess is their composite daughter. It all still baffles me, I assure you.

  It also occurs to me that we’re all getting rather old and could be producing much more if we were taking advantage of the technology at hand. I’m pushing ninety and probably halfway through life, and, let’s face it, most of society thinks that I’m a good-for-nothing. It’s productivity that counts. New devices, new fuels, new methods for bouncing around the universe. Everyone is always trying to get somewhere. And it all involves spending money. Success, as you know, means not how much money you’ve made, but how much you can spend.

  That’s why I almost got my writer-in-res post at the university taken away from me. Lord knows, I wouldn’t have been replaced. They were pissed at me for sitting on my butt and doing nothing but scratching ink spots on paper. I tried to explain that this was my fifth and perhaps greatest novel, Vindictive Destinies. Ninety-four per cent of the faculty said it was a lot of crapola. And good old Mellaghy and Bustrom, loyal to the word and to me to the end, finally came up with something. They had been sniffing around in some ancient computer tapes. “Half the friggin’ things turned to dust when we tried to run them through the IBM replica,” Mel complained. They always came across old stuff that was valueless and irrelevant, and nobody paid them much attention anyway. But this tape concerned a research vessel sent off towards Epsilanti 5 in what most scholars call prehistory—thousands of years before holos. Well, according to the dynamic duo, this ship was going so slowly that they (or their descendents) were probably still at it.

  The response from the faculty senate was unanimous: “So?”

  “So,” Bustrom responded, “people in those days read. They read books. If they’re still out there, their descendents that is, why not overtake them with a little care package. Mellaghy’s got the co-ordinates. We can send a micro-warp cargo most of the way there, freeze it down to sub light and pull up alongside. They’re sure to pick it up.”

  The faculty thought it was absurd, of course. But it was expensive and they could get a gumment grant for any project that was new and costly, so it was passed by a majority. We got quite a lot of publicity and we were all thought to be crackpots which seemed to cheer up the whole school in a way. Sister T. and Tess had their doubts about it and thought that I was being corrupted by “crass commercialism.” But I have to admit I was tempted by the thought of having an audience larger than three. You can imagine how absurd it appeared to most; trying to communicate with the descendents of the ancients rambling around in space for who knows how long in a decrepit old space tub. And I stewed for weeks over which one to send. I only had one manuscript of each and I had sworn never to let anyone read them in a form other than in the actual print. Tess, Theresa and Dolph had all read all my work and there wasn’t really anyone else to read here, so I figured I had little to lose. I sent off Two and a Half Watts. The micro-warp was equipped
with a homer on it so it was just a matter of sitting back and waiting for the reviews. In the meantime I began a romantic novel called The Girl Within the Cloud which I intended to woo dear Tess with. If the university wanted to keep me on, they’d have to let me work out of the auxiliary campus network in the University of the Outer Planets. I wasn’t about to sit around Earth for much longer. Tess was out there writing sonnets somewhere and I intended to be with her.

  “Very quaint,” Dolph had said, “but I’m proud of you.”

  Tess wrote back that she wasn’t opposed to the idea but that for her, love could only be real if it was physical. So I promised her that it would be physical. I hoped I would figure out something when I got there.

  Sister T. asked me if I was sure I knew what I was getting into and reminded me that Tess had been conceived “the primitive way” and that I might find her different.

  Well, I had some doubts, I admit. But when word came back from the Epsilanti 5 crew concerning Two and a Half Watts I felt like I could do anything. There were apparently a hundred descendents on the ship and they understood the language, they were in fact, readers. A Captain J. T. Morganthal wrote back, “… a moving masterpiece, had me crying and laughing, the best thing read on this vessel in generations.… Send more!”

  So we sent off Mission and Destinies and even one that I had kept hidden in a drawer for years. Mellaghy and Bostrum went on locating more and more derelict ships and I was commissioned to produce at least one novel a year for each. What bliss!

  They talked Dolph into sending off a dozen manuscripts to a supposed ancient colony of Earthlings in the Horsehead Nebula along with introductions by Sister T. concerning the state of the literary art on Earth. (In her view, we were achieving an unprecedented peak of interest in the novel.) But I was having a hard time convincing them of the validity of “publishing” poetry. (That’s what we called the new wave of manuscript exports.) Particularly, they had their doubts about Tess, who had been, of course, conceived by the primitive method; whatever that exactly was, few people had any idea. But in the end, Mellaghy and Bustrom came through again. It was always possible to convince Earthlings to dump money into space since the potential still seemed to exist, whereas another dollar spent on Earth was like throwing good money after bad. After all, a worn out planet is a worn out planet.

  And I have been assigned my long-sought-after writer-in-res post on Ganymede. I’ve decided not to send a holoversion ahead first to get things settled there and make artificial acquaintance with Tess. Instead, I will arrive with nearly half a ton of paper and a century’s supply of pens and ink.

  Tess has recently sent me a poem about the view of Jupiter from her back door, something that speaks of eternity and vigilance. Something called an ode.

  Bustrom arrived the other day almost in tears. He thought he was the messenger of bad news, but I already knew. When I leave the university, I’ll be able to take my paper and my ink, but there’s no way to take along the circuits from my cubicle that keep me going. I have to leave behind my longevity. I’ve been unplugged before. Not that I’ve wandered around outside on this planet like the freaks. I just write better when I’m unplugged. Without all the hormone stabilizers, you go up and down better. A writer shouldn’t be up all the time. It makes for lousy prose.

  So I’ll move to Ganymede and lop off a hundred years. Living that far off the beaten path of the neural networks, I could never depend on good reception. Besides, Tess has never been plugged in. Dolph and Sister T. planned it that way. Like Dolph explained it: “Sometimes you get more out of a short life.”

  I’ve got fifteen—maybe twenty—years tops. Tess is only thirty. She’ll outlive me to go on writing ballads, elegies, epics even. That doesn’t bother me a bit. I’ll have had my shot at literature. My novels will be out there skidding through space in those faster-than-light bookmobiles, seeking out generations of lost readers sent wandering through darkness in the primitive years. They are waiting to be illuminated by my manuscripts. “Immortality by any other name.…”

  USER FRIENDLY

  Spider Robinson

  Spider Robinson began publishing SF stories in 1973, the year he moved to Canada, and was cowinner of the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in SF in 1974. By the early 1980’s, he had won the Hugo Award three times, the Nebula once, and become one of the leading reviewers of the SF field. He has written seven novels (the best known is Stardance, written in collaboration with his wife, Jeanne Robinson) and published five collections of short fiction (three of which comprise his humorous series set in Callahan’s saloon).

  Robinson is a writer of wit and energy, given to puns and allusions. Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers refers to his use of dialogue and internal monologue as a style more lyric than narrative, and goes on to claim that “the lyric quality of Robinson’s SF is his means of fusing social critique with technological optimism, two themes that do not easily join in the hard SF universe.…” “User Friendly” is a fine example of Robinson’s fiction, and is perhaps his most specifically Canadian piece.

  * * *

  When he saw the small, weatherbeaten sign which read, “Welcome to Calais, Maine,” Sam Waterford smiled. It hurt his mouth, so he stopped.

  He was tired and wired and as stiff as IRS penalties; he had been driving for … how long? He did not really know. There had been at least one entire night; he vividly remembered a succession of headlight beams coring his eyeballs at some time in the distant past. Another night was near, the sun low in the sky. It did not matter. In a few more minutes he would have reached an important point in his journey: the longest undefended border in the world. Once past it, he would start being safe again.…

  He retained enough of the man he had once been to stop when he saw the Duty-Free Store. Reflex politeness: a guest, especially an unexpected one, brings a gift. But the store was closed. It occurred to him distantly that in his half-dozen trips through these parts, no matter what time he arrived, that store had always been closed. The one on the Canadian side, on the other hand, was almost always open. Too weary to wonder why, he got back into his Imperial and drove on.

  He had vaguely expected to find a long line-up at the border crossing, but there was none. The guards on the American side ignored him as he drove across the short bridge, and the guards on the Canadian side waved him through. He was too weary to wonder at that, too—and distracted by the mild surge of elation that came from leaving American soil, leaving the danger zone.

  It was purely subjective, of course. As he drove slowly through the streets of St. Stephen, New Brunswick, the only external reminders that he was in Canada were the speed limit signs marked in metric and the very occasional bilingual sign (French, rather than the Spanish he was used to in New York). Nonetheless, he felt as though the invisible band around his skull had been loosened a few notches. He found a Liquor Commission outlet and bought a bottle of Old Bushmill’s for Greg and Alice. A Burger King next door reminded him that he had not eaten for … however long the trip had lasted so far, so he bought something squishy and ate it and threw most of it up again a few miles later.

  He drove all the rest of that evening, and long into the night, through endless miles of tree-lined highway interrupted only seldom by a village speed-trap, and once by the purely nominal border between the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and he reached the city of Halifax as the sun was coming up on his left. Dimly he realized that he would shortly be drinking Old Bushmill’s and talking, and he expected both to be equally devastating to his system, so he took the trouble to find the only all-night restaurant in Halifax and tried eating again, and this time it worked. He’d had no chance to change his money, but of course the waitress was more than happy to accept Yankee currency: even allowing him a 130% exchange rate, she was making thirty-seven cents profit on each dollar. The food lifted his spirits just enough that he was able to idly admire Halifax as he drove through it, straining to remember his way. It had been man
y years since any city in America had looked this pleasant—the smog was barely noticeable, and the worst wino he noticed had bathed this year. As he drove past Citadel Hill he could see the Harbour, saw pleasure craft dancing on the water (along with a couple of toothless Canadian Forces destroyers and a sleek black American nuclear sub), saw birds riding the morning updrafts and heard their raucous calls. He was not, of course, in a good mood as he parked in front of Greg and Alice’s house, but he was willing to concede, in theory, that the trick was possible.

  He was still quite groggy; for some reason it seemed tremendously important to knock on the precise geometrical center of Greg’s door, and maddeningly difficult to do so. When the door opened anyway it startled him. His plans stopped here; he had no idea what to do or say next.

  “Sammy!” His old college buddy grinned and frowned simultaneously. “Jesus, man, it’s good to see you—or it would be if you didn’t look like death on a soda cracker! What the hell are you doing here, why didn’t you—”

  “They got her, Greg. They took Marian. There’s nothing I—”

  Suddenly Greg and the front of his house were gone, replaced by a ceiling, and Sam discovered that he was indoors and horizontal. “—can do,” he finished reflexively, and then realized that he must have fainted. He reached for his head, probed for soft places.

  “It’s okay, Sam: I caught you as you went down. Relax.”

  Sam had forgotten what the last word meant; it came through as noise. He sat up, worked his arms and legs as if by remote control. The arms hurt worse than the legs. “Got a cigarette? I ran out—” He thought for a moment. “—yesterday, I think.”

  Greg handed him a twenty-five-pack of Export A. “Fill your boots. Have you eaten more recently than that?”

  “Yeah. Funny—I actually forgot I smoked. Now, that’s weird.” He fumbled the pack open and lit a cigarette; his first puff turned half an inch to ash and stained the filter. “Did I drop the bottle?”