Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  An unfamiliar word. “Worse what?”

  “Memes, you know, contagious ideas—don’t they teach memetics in school anymore? Well, no, I guess these days they wouldn’t want kids to … uh, question received ideas. Might be subversive. Huh. Well, a meme is like a gene, it exists solely to reproduce itself. Except that a meme consists of pure information, and it replicates by infecting a person’s mind and inducing them to parrot it to other people, like I’m doing now. I’m trying to infect you with the Meta-meme, the meme about memes. You don’t have to take it literally, it’s a metaphor, right? But a damned useful one.…”

  For the first time I regret pawning my old book and holodiscs for traveling money, and I ask Scred if he’d lend me his micro. He passes it to me: a new Zoetec model with a terabyte biomemory. I access its encyclopedia, and call up the entry on memetics. Good to have something to occupy my attention, other than that desolate New Sahel outside the window.

  * * *

  East of Medicine Hat, we leave the TransCanada, following an almost invisible side road into the Cypress Hills. The turnoff skirts an immense Fuji Holochrome billboard, and the glamour model’s face appears to move as we pass by. Disconcertingly, her gaze follows the viewer, then she winks.

  The road shortly arrives at the outskirts of Mount Cyprian, a vacant town long since picked clean by scavengers, decaying on a hillside stripped equally bare of topsoil and eroding into deep gullies. Hardly a brick left standing, even telephone poles uprooted and carted away. What remains is more of a 1:1 scale map than a town, a plan laid out in crumbling pavement and exposed foundations.

  Our considerable dust plume catches up to us, swallowing the trailer as we grind to a halt on the cracked playground of a dismantled grade school. When the cloud clears I can see an assortment of eighteen-wheelers, buses, RV’s, vans with campers, all scattered about the dirty streets and parking lots. Nomads wave to newcomers, hustling to erect tents, prefabs, tepees, and pressurized shelters. Fiberoptic webs are being draped between portable masts, on which satellite dishes are aimed at the southern sky, while cooking fires exchange smoke signals with the dust trails of approaching vehicles.

  “Let’s go, Fifer,” Noel shouts, suddenly outside my window. “Link to it, we need a hand.”

  Right. Stretch those legs, stupid.

  * * *

  Out in the morning sunshine, it’s already pushing thirty-five Celsius. Lyndon has unlocked a cargo section in the undercarriage of the first trailer module. All together, we haul the entire section out like a drawer, and extend the outside supports. A hefty tarp of mottled green and white polymatrix is wrestled out, exposing a densely packed trusswork underneath. Step motors begin to purr, manipulators lift the first struts into position, and everyone stands clear. These things are always fun to watch.

  The dome unfolds itself with the slow grace of a rose blooming in time-lapse, triangular units linking into orderly structures, working in a spiral until the thirty-meter half-sphere encloses the entire trailer. Lyndon, Vicki, Scred, and I climb up onto the lightweight hex-pent struts, raising the tarp and snapping it into place at the hubs. Sunlight filtering through the fabric paints the interior a dappled green like the shade under the leaf canopy of an old-growth forest.

  Windblown silicate particles patter against the skin of the dome, and a dust devil describes a vortex outside the threshold. The single broad doorway is high enough to admit the box-van, which has only just arrived.

  We’re helping to unload merchandise from the back of the van when Scred notices Sal, the driver.

  “Pssst, Fife. Tell me that’s not a guy in a skirt and blouse.… A lady with a beard, maybe?”

  “Neither, I think.” Christ, I hope none of the Norms overhear this. “Or both, rather. I mean, se’s an hermaphrodite. Probably by surgery, a sex change, like Lyndon. Or maybe se was born that way. One of the Sanpharma gene-therapy kids.”

  We drop the cases where the display tables are being set up, and head back for another load. “Jeez, Fife, but these folks are a damned strange lot of buggers. Nice enough people, sure, but…”

  “Yeah, I know.” I warn him not to call Sal a he or a she. Instead of he, him, and his, they prefer to use se, sem, and ses. And Ser in place of Mister.

  “You gotta be kidding.” Shaking his head, he deposits another case. “They think they can get everybody to adopt a—a whole new set of pronouns?”

  “Maybe not everybody, but … it sort of depends on how big this Pange movement gets. That’s their name for it: Pan-genderism. They say they want to integrate the best attributes of both genders, whatever that means.”

  Listen to me. I’ve been aware of all this stuff for years, on an intellectual level, and it worries me that I’m now having difficulty dealing with the reality. Polymarriages are very rare, not to mention transmales, Panges, and X-youth, but this Famli is an exception, even among Nomads. When this gathering breaks up, in a week or two, I think I might head on to BC with some other Famli or caravan.

  * * *

  Haji is running a fiberoptic line out to a nearby tent, where a local comnexus is being set up. His input to the Famli business is entirely digital: poetry, hypermusic, environs, video pornography. Yes, self-produced vidporn, which shouldn’t surprise me, because how else does one become an X-youth? They often find lucrative careers in the industry, and now he’s gone independent. Once again, I tell myself not to let it bother me.

  The Norms immediately begin making sales, trading the fruits of their portable biosynthesis rig: pharmaceuticals, synfuels, and polymatrix fabric. You can buy such stuff for less, from industrial sources, but the Nomads prefer to purchase from each other. It’s part of their Code, their meme-complex.

  A hand-painted sign is lifted over the dome entrance: NORM FAMLI, Biosynthetics and Netmedia. Scred shakes his head at it. “Why can’t you guys seem to spell anything right? What’s wrong with family?”

  “A family is something you’re born into,” Sue explains, leaning against the doorframe. “We use a kind of New Guinea Pidgin spelling when we define something a bit differently. A new word for a new meaning.”

  Haji has just returned with his spool of optical fiber. “Speaking of which, nobody’s come up with a new name for this sinkhole. I mean, Mount Cyprian—not much of a mountain, is it?”

  “Um, how about … Çatal Hüyük?” I suggest.

  Only Sue gets it, laughing. “Yes! That’s good: reinventing the city.”

  Noel appears from under the dome with two empty plastic water containers, and tosses one to me. “You’re drafted. C’mon, we have to go pay our respects to the local genii at the well.”

  I stumble after her, workboots crunching on the gritty playground. “What’s that, again?”

  “Never mind. A little pagan humor.” Her white shorts, T-shirt, and high-albedo skin throw off an amazing glare as she trots over debris from the grade school’s deconstruction.

  “You really into that stuff? Paganism, I mean.”

  “Well, not as much as Sal, who practices the Craft. Haji, he’s a Chaote, and Sue is a bit of a gene-mystic, like a lot of green techs. The others are avowed atheists. Me, I like what Placidus said: Creo quia absurdum est.”

  “Which means?”

  “I believe because it is absurd.”

  * * *

  Once again, the town has a main street, businesses, and shops. In the impromptu marketplace, crowds of Nomads kick up a yellow haze around makeshift stalls with canvas banners for billboards. Freshly Cultured Meat and Vegetables are advertised, sold by paunchy, squint-eyed Albertans in cowboy shirts and Stetsons, rural folk whose soil has dried up and billowed away. The proprietor of Orb-Man Aerogel Products, Florida must have high connections, selling zeegee materials manufactured in orbit. He probably used to operate out of a mall and live in a luxury condo, both now three meters under the rising seas.

  We are all refugees. The truth of the old cliché has never fully struck home before. Here there are northerners, chased so
uth by the Western Secessionist conflict; ex-Californians whose fault-straddling cities have lain in heaps ever since the Shocks; fallout victims from downwind of the Atlanta Fermi-IV reactor. Once these people were forced to move, they decided not to stop, and this is probably the only reason why they haven’t yet been rounded up and dumped into the swarming Transfer Camps.

  The authorities are out in force already, searching for proscribed bioproducts, smuggled goods, and underdocumented aliens. Our societal immune systems, here to protect us from all these virulent diseases. Not only APP and Customs, but also C-SIS types (obvious in their mirrored glasses), and even a few military, from Special Counterinsurgency Units. (And what are they doing here?)

  * * *

  Noel and I take our places in line at the water truck. Across the street is Hassan’s Holodome, a sixty-meter inflated geodesic, the largest in town. Today’s shows: Bachant’s A Thousand and One Nights, and Lunar Elegy, “Shot on location!” by the same director. (The first one is better, if only because there’s less heavy breathing. Bachant is famous for her self-indulgence.)

  A tap on my shoulder. “Excuse me,” asks the young woman who has queued up behind me, “I don’t suppose you have any organic sludge to offload, do you?”

  “I … what?” Staring at her, baffled, I try not to laugh.

  Noel steps forward and rescues me. “Yeah, I think we do. We’ve just arrived, so I doubt we’ve sold it yet. If not, it’s all yours, at local market standard. I’m Noel Norm, and this is Fifer.”

  “Hey, great. Thanks.” She quickly links to the fact that she’s talking to an X-youth, rather than a stunningly precocious ten-year-old. “I’m Adriana, from Rexdaler. That’s a small settlement, about twenty kilometers from here. We heard about the gathering and I was sent to get some extra organics and other stuff.” An easy smile, despite the heat and the airborne grit, as she points out her pickup, a blunt-nosed Subaru parked nearby.

  I can sense that she’s out of her element, like myself, suddenly aware of the Earth’s spin, not sure if she likes it, but trying to roll along with it. Wearing an oversized yellow jumpsuit, turned up at the ankles and wrists, she’s probably close to my age though it’s hard to say, with bleached blond hair cropped close, except where it sweeps over her left eye.

  “I figured you were a local.” Noel hands our containers to the water-seller, along with her Famli’s barter card. “Next time, just get in touch with the gathering’s World3 nexus. Most everything salable is on the market listings. We’d even deliver.”

  I hang about, feeling rather foolish and dumbfounded, as the girls work out the details of transferring the organics. Then we pick up our water and are struggling off through the crowded market. The plastic containers drip with condensation.

  “What … what, exactly … is organic sludge?”

  “You’ll see.”

  * * *

  With a lot of cursing and sweating, Scred and I manage to roll the monstrous tank up the ramp, onto the bed of Adriana’s pickup. The stench of concentrated sewage and treatment enzymes doesn’t seem so strong now. It was worse just after Lyndon had decanted the sludge from the trailer’s biogas plant, before he sealed it.

  Adriana wants to buy us both a drink for our efforts, which sounds like a great idea to me, but Scred checks his watch, says he’d like to have a look around the market, and takes off. So she and I stroll over to Peregrine’s, a bar-tent hung with trendy bioluminescent lighting tubes. We take our beers to a table as far as possible from the sound system, which is shaking the floor with Angel Sung’s latest insidious Chinapop earworm.

  Adriana’s telling me about Rexdaler, how they manage to live on the fringes of the Dustbowl. “It started as part of a provincial land-reclamation scheme, and grew from there. Now there’s four hundred of us, and we’ve got a few hundred hectares of greenhouses, but we don’t seem to have made much progress with the reclamation business. I can’t really say, only been there for two years. I’m from Brandon, originally.…”

  Shouldn’t project my own feelings onto her, but here they are again, reflected on her face as she glances down at the table. The biolights cast a zone of green down her right side, a wash of red across her left.

  “Isn’t that jumpsuit just a little too big?” Good work, Fife, insult her taste in clothes.

  But she laughs and tugs at a sleeve. “I know, they make me look like a scrawny kid, but I don’t fit into the smaller ones. We all wear them, saves money that way. We share clothes, food, and just about everything else. It’s that kind of life, at Rexdaler, we have to go without a few luxuries for the short term, and take a long-range view of things.”

  That kind of commitment has always impressed me. I find myself talking about my Baha’i period, in early high school, when I dropped my parent’s Lutheran faith for something more universal. For a while, I enjoyed their sense of community, but I lapsed out of that as well. “Anyhow, I’m drifting off topic. You really think you can fight the climate shift, turn back the desert?”

  “Well, actually…” She hesitates. “That’s not our main concern anymore. Sure, we keep at it, the government is paying for it, but only a few of us still take it seriously. Why should we break our backs for a change that might not even come until we’re dead? When Garver—that’s our Chairperson—when he took over, morale was at zero, but he’s given us a new purpose. He’s a great guy, you should meet him.”

  A piercing beep from her wristwatch interrupts. “Aargh. I have to be getting back to town. We keep early hours, y’know?”

  So we finish our beers and step outside.

  The Earth has rolled us into her shadow, bringing Venus out of the violet dusk. The wind is still sifting through the random streets of the market. At her pickup, Adriana hesitates with the key in the door. “I really enjoyed our chat.”

  “Yeah, so did I.”

  An uncertain pause, then: “There’s a good chance I’ll be back again, maybe tomorrow.”

  “That’d be good. You know where to find me.” Thinking, what’s the point, idiot, you’re leaving in a few days.…

  Then she’s taking those two steps, putting her hand behind my neck, and kissing me. Probably meant to be a little peck on the cheek, but it’s turned into something else, and I have to hold her, simply to stay on my feet. There’s a sense of desperation to it, makes me want to calm her somehow, but—

  —from over her shoulder, I see a shape, a dust devil, a microtornado swirling up under a floodlamp, and Jodi is in there, trapped in a whorl of sand, stumbling blindly, crying, naked and caked with dust—

  —I push Adriana away in a panic. Vaguely, I hear her asking me what’s wrong, but I’m already running, tripping over tent pegs, trying to escape back to the Norms’, getting lost, feeling the tears that are forced out by an upwelling of despair, guilt, and fear.

  * * *

  Scred finds me sitting against the doorframe of the green and white dome, trying to pull myself together.

  “Jeez, man, what’s got into you? You’re covered in dirt.” He kneels beside me and tries to check my pupils, but I push his hands away.

  “I’m straight, okay? All’s I had was a beer, just one.” I try to tell him what I saw, but it all comes out in fragments and doesn’t make a lot of sense.

  “Well, shit, just sounds like a hallucination, Fife.”

  “Of course I was hallucinating, I know that. But all I had was a beer.”

  Scred helps me to my feet. “Sure, but you can’t trust these Nomads. They could be enhancing the stuff, or somebody was filling the bar with inhalants, y’know, vaporous drugs. I’ve heard of places that do that. Makes people spend more, right?”

  “No, Scred, really, I know what it is. It got to Jodi and now it’s getting to me, man. I’m losing it—”

  “Don’t give me that shit. C’mon, be a man, will you? Let’s go inside and watch some of Haji’s vids.”

  * * *

  Afternoon, and “Çatal Hüyük” is a chaotic blur in the harsh s
unlight, a convergence zone of human advection currents. Mount Cyprian’s flanks are being slowly but visibly pulverized by the wind, and everything is layered with a thin film of loess. Aeolian depositions, a poetic term I remember from Biospheric Studies.

  Didn’t mean to sleep in, but it was a long time before I could sleep at all, and now it’s after siesta. Wandering through the market, I run into Scred, who seems hurried but wants to talk.

  “Got this for ya.” He hands me something in a small paper bag patterned with smiling blue snails. “Can’t go see a girl without some chocolates to give her, can you? Got them from a Dutch couple, over that way. They make ’em themselves.”

  “Well, thanks, man. But … after last night … I kinda doubt she’ll be back.”

  “Huh. Couldn’t blame her, could ya? But, uh, isn’t that her red Subaru, over there?” He points it out, across the street, gives me a thump on the back, and strides off.

  It takes nearly an hour, but I manage to track her down, at a hardware-dealer’s stall, where she’s picking up a large coil of high-temp superconducting fiber. Today’s overlarge jumpsuit is faded blue with black patches.

  Always the well-conditioned prairie boy, I tip my cap. “Help you with that, miss?”

  Adriana hefts the coil onto one shoulder, and tries not to smile, failing. “Didn’t mean to scare you last night.”

  “You didn’t. I mean, I think I just scared myself, is all. Acted pretty strange, didn’t I?” I offer her the bag of chocolates. “Here, I … hope this will make up for it.”

  She accepts the gift, and says she has a few more purchases to make for her collective. So together we begin a slow circle through the market, and the conversation returns to where it left off last night.

  “You said something about a ‘new purpose’ that this guy, Garver, brought about?”

  She replies slowly at first, approaching a delicate subject. “It created a lot of friction … and most of our more religious colleagues up and left because of it. But Garver convinced the rest of us.” She takes a long look at me, and becomes more fervent. “Fifer, we want to be around when all this becomes green again. In fact, we want to be alive when the next ice age happens and rolls over it all, and live to see the next interglacial after that. And we just might. We’re setting up our own biostasis facility.”