Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  Stearns looked down, gasping. “There.” Just inside the door lay what might almost have been a pile of old sticks, brown and charred, and a broken ceramic bowl with fragments of metal. “There,” he repeated. “That’s all there is now. We can bury him. Let’s go down.”

  Megan followed him without speaking, and the pressure of her silence made him start to explain. “He was destroying the documentation when I caught him. I must have been in a hurry, because I didn’t have time to use a recorder. I’d immobilized him and was using the easy-out to feed straight into my implants. He’d hidden the data, the Viking data, behind layers of defences. Some of the last ones were just sets of his own memories, including those of what he’d just been doing. Before I realized what I was getting, I broke through into the Viking files. I got some of the data, but the last defences triggered. The easy-out almost shorted, but I didn’t quite have my brain fried because most of the power surge must have been directed into his last defence, the one that blew the back of his skull away. I think there was a can of petrol open nearby.…”

  Megan did not look at him. “So now you know who you are.”

  “I know what I did. I know who I was working for.… Come on.” He headed back toward the motel.

  Cavendish met them on the way. “I’ve got the information you wanted.” He looked from Stearns to Megan and back. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced. But something tells me you’ve just made a discovery.”

  “We found a body, that’s all,” Stearns muttered. “I think you know whose it was better than I do.” He looked quickly at Megan, but she was staring vacantly past his shoulder.

  “So now you know the price of the past,” Cavendish said. “Makes it harder to maintain self-sacrificial postures, doesn’t it? If you’d known what happened in those years, you’d have known that there’s no part of us we cherish so much that we can’t be made to betray it.”

  “Right,” Stearns said, stepped close. He pinned Cavendish’s arm with his gloved hand, and with his right pressed the muzzle of the Beretta to the back of Cavendish’s neck.

  Cavendish inhaled sharply. His eyes flickered, then his face went blank, his shoulders sagged. “All right,” he whispered. “It’s time. Perhaps you should be the one.”

  Stearns’s hand began to tighten. He saw Cavendish sprawled among the dusty weeds, his skull a broken chalice. He snarled and pushed Cavendish away. “Find yourself another henchman.” He dragged air into his lungs, held it, and then breathed out heavily. “When you bring the next shipment, I want an extra stock of antibiotics. Twice the usual load. We’ve got a casualty here. Okay?”

  Cavendish massaged the back of his neck. “I could tell you your name. I could find out where you were born.”

  “Leave this batch with Sammy. And remember the extra antibiotics. Next time.”

  Stearns watched Cavendish walk slowly back to the Renault, Sammy two paces behind. At his shoulder, Megan said, “I’ve got to go. The bike’s still at the motel.”

  “Right.” He did not look at her. “Will you be back?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “All right.”

  When she had gone, he went back and looked at the burned building. Ghosts of flames prickled over his skin. Always, the body remembered what the mind could forget. Body or brain, he thought: two of us died there. He traced the join where his artificial cheek met his skin, and thought of metal sockets in a skull. He remembered arms, real and prosthetic, equally firm against his back, and moonlit snow, and red embers in the fireplace of a darkened room.… And one of us lives. He turned and began to walk back to the museum on Stockhausen Square.

  OUTPORT

  Garfield Reeves-Stevens

  Garfield Reeves-Stevens is from Toronto and has been an active participant in SF Canada. He has written several novels of SF and horror fiction; with his wife Judith, two Star Trek novels, Memory Prime and Prime Directive, both best-sellers; an ecological thriller; and a series of fantasy novels, The Chronicles of Galen Sword. While devoting his principal efforts to novels, he has written a number of short stories, including “Outport,” which was originally done for Lesley Choyce’s anthology, Ark of Ice.

  * * *

  You can smell the ice and you can smell the fear and sometimes the fear’s so strong you can’t tell one from the other. And sometimes, it’s just the excitement of the passengers who don’t know enough to be afraid yet. Going into the outports. What’s left of them. Looking for the survivors.

  “Never did know why they called them survivors.” Burl Finn asks the question. He’s an American. They all are, seven of them this time, the passengers. Only ones who can afford the trip. Only ones desperate enough to want to take it. This one, Burl, made his money building the dykes around Florida. A lot of them did. Getting rich not by making something new but by saving what was old. There’s too much that’s old left in this world.

  Burl’s drinking beer from a small can in his huge gloved hand. He’s a big man. They all are. Food’s easy to get down south. Not like St. John’s where we sailed from. Not like the outports where we’re going. Things still grow outside down south, under the UV nets at least. Burl drinks some more and then he belches. The sound’s swallowed by the mist and the pulse of the ship’s engines churning. But the stink of the ice and the fear is overcome for the moment.

  “’Cause they’re still here,” I say, close enough to the truth. I don’t like Burl. I don’t like any of them. But I’m leaning on the railing with him just the same, watching the sea out here grey and thick, carved by the ship’s bow like molten glass, almost solid. I can believe that someone might walk across this water. I wish someone would. It would be an easier path to salvation than what I’m doing now.

  “Not for long,” Burl says, sort of snorting. He horks down what’s left of the beer like he’s cleaning out his nose through the back of his throat, like the beer’s part of him, some liquid made by his body that he’s reclaiming, recycling. The plastic can splinters easily in his glove and he tosses the shards over the side, and they spin like ice crystals all the way down. If there were fish left out here, those shards probably would’ve killed a few, when they’d tried to swallow them. But that’s nothing to worry about anymore. The Banks aren’t what they used to be and most of the fish are long since sucked up into the factory ships that used to sweep these waters worse than the ice does now.

  There’re fish inshore of course. Lot’s more than there used to be, too, back when the outports were real fishing villages, not any ever big enough to be towns, not without roads, no way in and out in the winter. It’s just that those inshore fish can’t be caught. Not by the survivors anyway. They’ve got too much else to think about. Too much else to do. Getting ready for a summer when the ice won’t melt at all. Supposed to be soon now. Winter all the time.

  Burl doesn’t care about any of that, though. Not that I’ve tried telling him what it used to be like, the way my father and mother told me it was. I’ve tried telling them before, other passengers, other trips, but they never were much interested. Used to bother me then, when I was younger and I thought it was important that they understand what was going to happen to them, when it happened to them. But it doesn’t anymore. Makes it easier, really. Part of the process.

  We stand there for a long while till Linda gives me a call from the cabin. Shore’s coming up, she says. Can’t hear the breakers in the fog, not over the engines, but the cliffs of Newfoundland like black clouds are suddenly there, a storm front roiling up, solid, twisted, puckered like something that’s grown in place, like some of the plants down south that still hold out on their own, without protection, no matter what the UV does to their DNA. They know about DNA in the outports. The survivors know what’s important. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be survivors, would they?

  Linda cuts back on the engines and we almost coast. She’s looking for markers, something familiar. Can’t use the radar or fix on the NavStars with the Maritime Command in the same water
s. The big red ships, all metal and composites, with brilliant white lines across their hulls blinding like ice when the sun breaks through the fog, they don’t really care about us, as long as we don’t rub their noses in it. They know what we say we’re doing, and they know what it is we really do, and either way you look at it, it’s illegal. But if you look at it just one particular way, you can’t say it’s wrong. And after the summer comes when the ice won’t melt at all, who’s going to care?

  “Should we get the stuff ready?” Burl asks. The black wall of rock has changed his mood, made the beer courage go away.

  “Leave it be for a while, yet,” I tell him. “Maritime Command’s got better things to do than search us if they find us out here, but if we’ve got the guns on deck, they won’t have any choice but to board us and take us in.”

  Burl nods at that. I know he’s relieved. Jerry Bright, his partner, is still belowdecks, sleeping off last night. Jerry’s not nervous, not like Burl. Jerry fought in the Mex-American. When he gets drunk enough, he tells us he was first across the Rio Grande, first to march into Mexico City. Wish I had a dollar for every American I’ve met said he was the first to do those things. I could buy another boat or ten. A couple of others are belowdecks with him. I saw them using their knives to cut crosses into the soft ends of bullets to make them break apart when they hit. The others are in the galley complaining about the cold. And this the summer.

  “I hear sometimes it’s easy,” Burl says after a while.

  I pretend to not know what he’s talking about.

  “You know,” he says, “that they know how bad things are getting so they, they just like, leave the children there, on the shore, and you just have to leave something in exchange. You know, guns, food, even whiskey.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that, too,” I tell him. It calms him down a bit. Burl wasn’t in the Army, but he knows there’s a hell of a difference between a Mexican regular and what he’s going to find out on those rocks. The Mexicans were fighting for a wasteland, stripped bare by the exodus from Central America, fried by the sun, scourged by disease. It was a country already lost and no matter what the American politicians said, it wasn’t a police action to restore order to their neighbour to the south, it was a war to keep the starving millions on their own side of the border until nature had run her course. The Mexicans didn’t have a whole lot of reason to fight. They’d already lost.

  Of course, nature doesn’t stand a chance out on those rocks and Burl knows it. The survivors aren’t fighting for a wasteland. They’ve been a colony, a Dominion, a colony again. Even been another country’s province for awhile. But the land never changed through all of that. And the people never changed. They’re fighting for a future, same as always. And as long as the ice keeps ploughing down from the north, keeps the mist and the fog in the air to shield this place from the UV, there will be a future here. Something new, like the name says.

  And by being new, that makes it something that Burl and Jerry and none of their countrymen can understand. I’ve seen it happen to them. Their thoughts are like their country now, constrained by dykes that will never withstand the thousand-year patience of the sea. Their dreams are walled in by armed borders that might, for now, be keeping disease out, but just as certainly choke off what little life remains within, a tourniquet applied too tight and too late. At some level the Americans know that.

  At some level their government lets enough of them out beyond their iron borders to search for the life they know they need. Searching here, in Australia, through what’s left of the EC. Just like the Maritime Command lets my boat cross the Banks, the US Coast Guard blinks when men like Burl and Jerry slip out to sea. Looking for survivors, they say. But in Australia, and through what’s left of the EC, all they ever find are those who have survived and now are only waiting without purpose. Out here, they find those who are survivors, and still survive. None of my passengers has ever understood that difference until it was too late.

  Linda angles the boat closer toward the shore and now the breakers sound over the barely idling engines. Burl grabs the railing hard as we rise and fall with the growing grey swells.

  “Are we getting close?” he asks.

  “Seems so,” I say, though the bright patch of fog that’s the sun is still high enough over the cliffs that I know we won’t be setting off for an hour or two. I tell Burl so.

  “It’s better at night?” he asks.

  “That’s right,” I say. “Especially for the children.”

  That always works on these passengers. After all, they say, that’s what they’re doing it for. Never for themselves. Never for the adoption bounties. Not even any mention of their country’s gene pool slowly evaporating in the heat of a century’s worth of toxic, mutagenic pollution. This is all for the children, they say, the poor, poor children, thinking that the children of the outports need rescuing from their bleak dismal life among the rocks and the ice, as if for some reason they’d enjoy the new and better bleak and dismal life of a country that already has begun to live by night, afraid of the sun, choking on its own waste, its own past, inflicting genetic instability to the point of sterility to all that were trapped within the delimiting borders first forged by geography, now set even more immutably within a fixed inertial intellect.

  Burl stumbles away from the railing toward the cooler and pulls another can of beer from the coldpacks. As if keeping the beer exposed to the air wouldn’t keep it cold enough, as if just the fact that it is summer is enough to require beer to be chilled. They do that a lot, I’ve found, ignoring reality for what they know is real.

  “Watcha see, Linda?” I call out.

  Through the window of the cabin I see Linda wave one hand ahead and down, flashing three fingers. I track the cliffs according to her instructions and spot the grey smudge of what we call Old Mike’s cabin, the first of the landmarks we need to find our way. The cabin is in ruins, really, little more than a bleached jumble of timber atop the rocks. But it lets us know we’re close to Dunder’s Cove.

  “That where we’re going?” Burl asks, beer in hand. I can tell the difference between the stink of ice and fear now. He’s truly scared. As if he knows what’s going to happen.

  “Just an old shack,” I tell him and he believes me. It’s easier. “Lots of old things on the cliffs out here.”

  “But you know where we are, don’t you?”

  I nod. There’s not much left to hide from him anymore.

  “So there’s an outport near?” He likes that word. Uses it a lot. Maybe it sounds alien to him, as if the trip has taken him to another planet, as if he won’t be facing humans, as if that makes it easier, too.

  I nod again.

  Burl stares at the cliffs and the fog. I wonder if they remind him of the walls he’s built against the sea down south, and how useless those walls will be. “How do you find them?” he asks me.

  That’s one of the things still to hide, until we get close to shore and the sun gives way to night. My passport doesn’t say so, and I’ve learned a mainland accent, but I know how to find the outports because I was born here. Because my mother and father were born here, as were their own. Because the folds of these cliffs are the folds of my skin and the crash of the breakers is the pounding of my heart and because the ice that’s ploughing down from the north in unending sheets that soon will defeat the summer for the next ten thousand years is my soul. Cold, perhaps, with features hidden, but more enduring than the sea it engulfs.

  Burl waits for my answer, knowing I have one, but Jerry’s down below with the guns and the others are cutting their bullets into dum-dums and we’re not yet in position so I can’t tell Burl what he wants to know.

  So I tell him, “Sometimes you see a boat, a dory, going into the outports. Old and creaky, tied up some places, dragged up in others, usually hidden, not very well. Sometimes you see just splinters from where the ice took hold. Sometimes you see a building, too, like that one. Most of them are wood, like the boats, dragged
over from the west, the valleys, back when what roads there were, were clear, when there were still forests.”

  Burl nods in time to the rise and the fall of the deck. I like to think he senses the life of the land and the sea here. Something he’s not familiar with. Something new.

  I tell him that the real outports are long since flooded. That the buildings we see are the ones that were built high enough. Scattered like barnacles across black rocks all craggy and sculpted and ragged. As if the ice took hold of the land once and splintered it, too. Eventually, the ice will reach to Florida. I see Burl understands that, that he knows the true worth of his useless dykes, though he says nothing.

  “Sometimes you see lots of buildings,” I tell him, and this is true. You see them underwater. When there’s not much ice. Whole villages caught like paintings melting in rain. Rippling a bit where the water’s clear. Disappearing softly, with no lines, no borders or boundaries, where the water’s murky. Those buildings, trapped like that, quiet and still, make me think of waiting. The feeling of waiting, looking down off the side of the boat with the passengers. There have been a great many Burls over the years. I haven’t liked any of them. Though sometimes, I have felt sorry for a few. I don’t know yet if I will feel sorry for this Burl.

  Burl looks over the railing, beer held forgotten in his hand, as if trying to peer beneath the waves and the years, trying to see the past. Typical, I think.

  They used to walk those ghost streets, narrow, twisting, the first survivors did. Their parents, anyway, before the ocean rose up, swallowing the outports like the factories swallowed the fish. Lobsters live in those streets now, scuttling, and crabs. And the fish. Lots of fish inshore where the factories can’t get them, lazy schools of them weaving through the streets like flocks of slow birds, silvery white reflections of the gulls that used to follow the factories, back when there were gulls.