Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  Aldridge will continue the story in the woods. He will continue to be the woods, he can change himself into an eagle, a crow, a trout, a weasel. Aldridge will continue to call up the cells from the city, to come and get us one by one against the walls bleached by the searchlights: his name shines in our concrete despair, every day wilder, every day stronger, despite his repeated deaths, despite the ever-victorious new military contingents. Someone else will come to take my place beside him, will relearn the use of his eyes, will roll naked and whimpering in the grass. Aldridge Clearwater. My master. My brother.

  In this story, there are the dead. Stories always need bodies to fill up the background, shovel-loads, truck-loads, container-loads, to scratch their heads over. Suzanne is the one with the blonde hair and the little-girl hips, her small fatigue-dirty face sticking out of the sleeping bag. Suzanne died in the first burst, I heard the dotted line. Bernard screamed for an hour, he yelled insults, he said the gas was getting inside his helmet. Bernard already had gangrene, his left leg stank sweet from the fourth day: the sliver went in deep, then decomposed immediately, as if it had been programmed. We had been on the lookout for a week: a thinly-disguised Chinook dropped thousands of booby traps over the firs, false twigs, false gossamer. Even the moss is phony, your hand swells up like a balloon. So there are Suzanne, Bernard, Mario; Mario died about five days earlier stepping on an anti-personnel mine. Tired head-of-the-class look, trained as a group leader, Export-A cigarettes. Suzanne, Bernard, Mario, nice and juicy, nice and dead, their swollen bits are in my memory awaiting burial.

  In this story there are lots of bodies. I am digging in the name of a Mount-Royal of corpses rotting in the corner of some waiting-room, who disappear leaving only a few spots of vomit on the sidewalk one Thursday night toward two A.M., who pretend to leaf through the magazines they can’t read in the heat of the Varimag and who feel their hands trembling when they look at the plastic cheese packages with their inflexible yellow plastic tags. I’m thinking of RED SCREAM and their anti-Catholic charades on the billboards of CYBERG at U.Q.A.M., of the anarchist cells of Vancouver, FRAGILE, KHARTOUM, of the butch karatekas of the EVE network who learned to take apart their Uzis in an old pool hall; I am digging in the name of the punk commandos of the SCHIZOID SHRIMPS, silent on their skateboards while the river waters blazed, I’m digging in the name of two pages of dead who preceded us in this forgotten corner of B.C. Bodies of all shapes, of all ages, bodies that still walk around and wait for the bus without even realizing they’re already dead. Choose your favourite shit, because, yes, yes, today, on special in the bargain basement, there are exceptional deals on large volumes, national or continental format, in the maximum bestiality mixture. I’m digging the grave at top speed, Michel has drool running over his chin, he’s gently wagging his head and singing to himself. Dawn will come soon, a few crows pass overhead softly with muffled wing-beats. His hair still smells of gas, you’d think he’d gone swimming in it. In this story, Michel will be the last body. But you know as well as I do that stories go on …

  We buried Michel this morning. He was gently drooling, hugging his knees, shivering while he watched us dig. Aldridge gave him water, he had to show him how to drink without choking, he lay there with his mouth open and water running out. May this be a lesson to the urban cells, drops of mercury between concrete blades: urban guerilla is the only solution. Even if it’s the only false solution.

  Because in the cities at least you have the impression you’re accomplishing something, you can melt into the belly of the crowd as soon as the sirens go off, you can rub your skin against someone before putting your loneliness back on. At least in the cities you can discuss, lecture, criticize in smoky university cafeterias, meetings smelling of hash and French tobacco, unmade beds on the floor against gargling old hot-water heaters. You can write harsh editorials flagellating your enemies, ridiculing those poor dogmatic, unconscious, lobotomized retards. At least in the cities you can affirm We are the Pure, We have the Truth, it’s you who are off the rails, and you can dream of your personal Utopia while you’re spray-painting a billboard …

  At least in the cities rage has some variety, the adrenaline is stronger. You can identify the precise spot or the exact moment that will make you grind your teeth, clench your fists and grimace your hatred, covering up with a facial tic or an absent look. You can sniff the odour of approaching cataclysm, decipher the code of the big lie in the inkspots on your fingers, and especially get ready for the good days with a detached look, knowing that in fact when the boots start marching, when the rockets whistle out of Place Ville-Marie, that in fact we’re going to have fun, we’ll be heroes, we knew it was coming, we’re going to soar like crazy, we’re going to live one hundred percent …

  Since we decided to leave the metro sewers, we’ve been getting shot down, group after group, co-op after co-op, cell after cell, commune after commune. We’ve been shooting ourselves down, in our own dogmatic struggles, our socio-sexo-economico-political affiliations, our nauseated partisan solo actions, too proud and too pure to use the enemy’s weapons. I know that the last white tribes, in the east of the island, were decimated in a wave of brutal violence, it took long enough to get two quickly-forgotten press releases. Nobody thought of analyzing the water; anyway, the camera team belonged to a McLOEDGER station, and the water table lies under McLOEDGER land. I know that Radio-Cadaver has stopped broadcasting since the pink trawler recorded the crimes on Lake Superior. And I know that my shit is still drying on my thighs after last night’s attack.

  We never saw anything. Absolutely nothing. The first grenade rolled right in among our warm bodies, splattered KAVOOOUM all its shrapnel in a white and purple crown. Bernard was still lifting his head to look for his glasses when the tracers sizzled yellow through the campsite. The heavy machine gun firing from prone position coughed three arpeggios, low, deep, the burst had the same heavy softness as Suzanne’s hiccups, our shadows burned red in the shrieking night. Didn’t see a damn thing. Aldridge was already moving off to the left, I’ve never crawled so fast, I’ve never crawled so hard. The second grenade fell at the feet of the sleeping bags near one of the bracelets and the gas whistled out. I kept calling my mother, the stones battered my chin and my cheeks, I was spitting in my mask feeling the warmth of my shit, the valley was singing blue in the moonlight, yellow in the gas, I was strangling on my sobs and my saliva, a whole forest of eyebrows were judging me. Bernard stopped making noises a little after that. When the last drips had dried in the earth and the wind, I returned to the campsite, going a long way round, centimeter by centimeter, bush by bush. Daniel was single-mindedly putting his transmitter back together; Aldridge was staring at a black hole in the empty mountain. Michel had his mask around his neck, smiling, the idiot hadn’t even put his mask on, his infra-red bracelet had saved him from the tracers and he hadn’t even put his mask on. His eyes were starting to go dull, his head was flopping on his neck. The MERCKZ laboratories are the elite of the pharmaceutical industry; the Alzheimer virus was cranked up to the eighth power.

  Accelerated degenerescence.

  I was forgetting the bad guys. There’s always a bad guy who won’t pull in the same direction, who persists in thinking that his drums beat the best doctrine. The lawyer, spokesman for the natives, drowned in his car. Coca-Cola buying out Warner Brothers. The IBM commandos in partnership with the Japanese zabuki killers. The takeover of Amnesty International by an angel-faced consortium. The first graft of a transmitting device in a juvenile delinquent’s skull. The raging F18s ripping apart the clip of the national anthem. The guard dogs at the turnstiles in the Metro, pensively fingering their nightsticks as the blacks go by. The indifferent satellite zooming in on the boat people’s raft. The first union lobotomy of an Australian miner. The bad guys keep it up and sign their work. And nine times out of ten they win hands down.

  In this story, the bad guy is McLOEDGER. The pride of the Canadian west, one of the glories of the new imperialism
with big Kennedy brother’s face, 3.28 billion dollars in sales, 138.56 million dollars profit. Pulp and paper, real estate, poultry, biotechnology, space research, eighteen ocean liners, two satellite communications companies, twenty-three specialized magazines, thirteen TV stations covering the six biggest markets … McLOEDGER is docile firs that grow three times as fast, plasmic computers calibrating hydroponic crops, logging camps shaving my mountains, layer after layer, skin after skin. It’s electricity produced for half the province, with its own clinics, its own portable villages, its own social workers, its travelling exhibitions of neo-impressionist paintings and its own hired killers, Mozambique vets. McLOEDGER is a magnificent logo on a background of corporate advertising and sponsorship, its head offices a crystal needle in the heart of Edmonton, its roots plunging into every stock exchange, every cutting edge of technology, every bus heading for the factories before the sun’s even up …

  And somewhere in the great crystal needle, up at the top of the cloud-defying building, someone has just placed a magnetic card on an old mahogany desk, in a room with stained-glass windows, a card that whispers to the busy gentleman that one of his elite androids has just bought it …

  It took us three hours to find it. Aldridge was sitting on his heels, humming a one-note tune, losing the thread in the wind, then catching it again, the same low note resounding in his chest. I began the dosage of pills and injections, carotene, two thousand milligrams, Ecstasy 3.2, three hundred milligrams, psilocybin, three capsules of five hundred milligrams, codeine, twenty milligrams, LSD-26, four capsules, caffeine, twenty-five milligrams. The camp was burning itself out among the respectful firs, an owl watching us think about nothing amid the corpses. The thermos had caught a bullet, there were only a few drops of tea left. I joined Aldridge on his rock, sat on my heels looking at the lemon-yellow moon, patiently waited until I found the frequency of his mantra in the shapes of the clouds, until the notes of our hatred were sounding in my throat, until my breathing was slow and strong like the breastbone of a grizzly, until the woods were breathing through the pores of my fingers, the beehive of my lungs. Then we stood up, we took off our clothes, and we set out to kill.

  Three hours picking our way through friendly branches, sniffing odours, listening to the advice of the fireflies who lit our way. Three hours to find our trail through the total black, the leaves radiated magnesium, the branches caressed my sweat, the twigs remained quiet beneath my feet. Three hours to slip between the ever-vigilant sporadic searchlights, scrutinizing every frequency and every radiation, but they couldn’t make out my aura floating from bush to bush, they couldn’t penetrate the patience which had permitted me to smash the head of the cop by the Metro turnstile an eternity ago. Three hours to drift as far as the chill of tungsten and steel, eyes in the night came to tell me no, that way, it’s over that way, even the trees narrated the Cartesian path to its radium battery. The rockets were heavy on the plates of its left shoulder, the exoskeleton supported, besides the machine-gun, a grenade launcher and a low frequency harmonics detector. Light arms, for a teleported mission, from one of the military Chinooks. Three hours to find myself face to face with a seventeen-year-old killer, asleep in his composite carcass, eyes closed behind the electronic visor embedded in the plexiglass mask. The antenna was quivering gently in the breeze, and the yellow and gold logo was waiting for the day which would soon dawn …

  An eagle passed over my head, silently, no slippage of air over his mute feathers. Behind me, Suzanne, Bernard, Mario, Jean-Marc, all my friends had joined me and were waiting. The killer was sleeping, standing against a tree, all his senses awake, his black coverall giving no reflections at all. Polarized Mylar: that’s why our own harmonics sensors had picked nothing up. So the hackers of the Boomerang group were right: the new models of android had finally left the United Technologies hangars, they were already operational on the trails of the Sertao exploited by Volkswagen, with the police commandos sweeping over the campus of Kim Sung II University; the antenna kept turning in the cold air, diligent and imbecilic. The eagle inscribed a broad circle over the head of the killer, without the slightest sound, I heard him say: now. And the talons plunged into the visor, perforated the wide-open retinas, the eagle lifted the android two meters off the ground, all its circuits frenzied, crying like a baby, eyelids pierced, and dropped it on its back, crunch, a wounded monster. And I was already on it, fist tight, fist of cement, jumping, jumping, beating it down in one long howl until I felt the softness of the earth again, until the gargling stopped …

  Aldridge and me, the eagle and the grizzly, we went back to the camp. The dawn was gentle on my face, the wind washed our tiredness away. Somewhere in the crystal a magnetic card …

  We buried Michel this morning, near the rocks overhanging the glacial lake where we all used to bathe. A copter was patrolling in the distance, looking for smoke. A third column was completing the encirclement, the crash of trees echoed from valley to valley. We had one day of life left, two if the marijuana growers decided to counterattack, seeing their crops burn in spite of the unofficial agreements; three if the army took the trouble to elaborate a big televised lie to justify six battalions armed to the teeth chasing after our bedbugs. Daniel would join the loggers, he would melt into the 35 dismal zombies waiting for the convoy to take them to the whores of Edmonton. He’d memorized the phone number of a dusty bookstore which would lead him to Calgary, and from there to Halifax, Montreal, Amsterdam, and finally from there to Oslo. This route used to be the stations of the cross of the women of the Thirteen network, back when the anti-abortionists were having public burnings …

  Bye, Daniel.

  Michel was already in the final stages; we had to clean him, roll him in a blanket and hug him, putting off the moment as long as possible. Daniel had been gone for an hour, and we hadn’t heard any shots.

  I masturbated him slowly, patiently, his head was on my shoulder and he was looking at the mountains; he came with a sob, his sperm was old, yellow and cold, old. Then Aldridge kissed him, and I was the one who pulled the trigger …

  * * *

  That’s the story. These pages were found in the private diary of a Greenpeace guerillero, when he tried to pass Forward Post B34 with false papers. It seems that as he showed his transportation pass he was whistling “Happy days are here again.” …

  PITY THE MONSTERS

  Charles de Lint

  Charles de Lint lives in Ottawa and is a musician and a major fantasy writer, popular worldwide. He is also the publisher/editor of Triskell Press in Ottawa, which publishes fantasy. His most famous novels include Moonheart, Greenmantle, and The Little Country. He has published nearly forty books since 1979. His central work is characterized by the intrusion of the fantastic into a gritty, real-world (usually Canadian) setting. “There is no doubt,” says Twentieth-Century Science Fiction Writers, “that Charles de Lint is currently one of the most popular and prolific writers currently producing fantastic literature.… He has succeeded in fusing the kingdoms of Faery with modern Canadian landscapes, producing a variety of urban fantasy, which can be very satisfying to those who reject the notion that all such stories require a greenwood setting.”

  “My prime interest as a writer,” de Lint says, “is to explore the complexities of human relationships through mythic/folkloric material against a mostly contemporary urban setting. I see the juxtaposing of the two as a way of exaggerating the dichotomy of our relationships with each other and our environment.”

  De Lint rarely strays into SF territory (he has written only one SF novel, Svaha) as he does, somewhat ambiguously, in this story. “Pity the Monsters” is reprinted from an anthology entitled The Ultimate Frankenstein.

  We Are Standing in the Storm of Our Own Being.

  —Michael Ventura

  “I was a beauty once,” the old woman said. “The neighborhood boys were forever standing outside my parents’ home, hoping for a word, a smile, a kiss, as though somehow my unearned beauty ga
ve me an intrinsic worth that far overshadowed Emma’s cleverness with her schoolwork, or Betsy’s gift for music. It always seemed unfair to me. My value was based on an accident of birth; theirs was earned.”