Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  “Why do they do it?” Burl asks.

  “Do what?” But I know what he means.

  “Just give them up.”

  “Give what up?”

  “The children,” he says.

  I stare at the cliffs. We’re getting closer to where we need to be. “They don’t give them up, Mr. Finn. You’ve got guns,” I remind him.

  “But you said, sometimes, they just, they just leave the children there, for the ships to take.”

  “I said, I’ve heard the stories.”

  “Then they don’t?” he asks. “Leave the children?”

  Sometimes, I find it painful to be around these people. “Under current conditions, what would you do?”

  “I’d do what was best for the children.”

  “I assure you that that is what they do, too.”

  The poor man smiles in relief. That’s another common trait among them, the stubborn insistence that there’s only one way of looking at things. Their way. I don’t try and set him straight.

  By the time the patch of sun has passed behind the cliffs, all the passengers are gathered on the foredeck, sidelit by running lights. Four have blackened their faces with camouflage paint. They’re the ones used to be in the Army. All of them wear laden equipment belts, local transponders, and carry their rifles. All of them pose like commandos prepared to take on a vicious enemy. But they’re only doing this for the children.

  Linda and I keep them occupied with a transponder and weapons drill while John and Eleanor wrestle with the launching gear aft, dropping the dinghy into the dark water with enough splashing and grinding of winch gears to drown out the other sounds from the ocean.

  We check the transponders twice so that no one will lose his way, we tell them. Linda starts talking about using the handheld infrareds to see where the fires have been burning. The passengers listen attentively, in love with their technology.

  “Above all, be safe,” Linda tells them. “Don’t fire unless you have to.” But by the intensity of their eyes, we see that the four with the painted faces have no intention of restraining themselves. To them, this is not an adoption run, this is not an attempt to rescue the poor children of the decaying world to bring them to safety within Fortress America. This is a hunt, pure and simple, a make-good for the killing fields lost now that Mexico is uninhabitable. They’re right, of course, but they have the wrong idea of who is to be the hunted.

  Linda looks to me but John still hasn’t given the signal from the winch. “Let’s check those safeties one more time,” I tell them. “We want this to go as smoothly and as quickly as possible.”

  Burl gurgles with a beer laugh. “So you can get back home and spend all the money we paid you!”

  I laugh with them, though the money’s already spent and what it bought is sitting in the hold.

  I hear the winch grind for a moment when I know it shouldn’t. Eleanor stands by the aft railing, lit by a floodlight fastened to the top of the cabin. She flashes two fingers.

  “The dinghy’s almost ready,” I say. Then I tell them that the sea is choppy and I’d feel a whole lot safer if they’d just unload until we hit shore. Stop any chance of an accidental discharge.

  One of the men with a painted face is unhappy at the suggestion but I point out that everyone on shore will be hiding away from the cliffs. No one’s going to attack while we’re in the dinghy, heading for land. He hears the truth in my voice and reluctantly disarms his weapons.

  By now, of course, the Dunder’s men have worked their way up the netting from their dory. I sense them moving in the shadows of the unlit half of the ship as Linda and I wave our disarmed passengers aft, keeping them distracted.

  The Dunder’s men are silent but they make no other attempt to hide now. Their dingy white jackets and pants, padded thickly for insulation and protection, almost glow in the darkness of the deepening night. Even their faces are encased in white sacks. An old tradition brought back to life to forestall any identification, in case any passengers escape.

  But no passengers ever escape.

  Burl goes down easily with one blow. The rest except for two ex-soldiers follow in seconds. Those two men whirl at the first sign of the silent attack, assuming positions of martial arts combat.

  But they are not facing other soldiers. They’re facing pale apparitions who scream at them with wailing indrawn breaths, even as they swing their bladed pikes.

  One ex-soldier goes over the railing and hits the sea. I mourn the loss of his equipment, but the cold will claim anyone in that water within minutes and I have long ago learned to respect the cold and give it its due.

  The other ex-soldier goes cleanly, his final breath leaving his severed trachea like a mummer’s wail, bubbling just a bit at the end like Burl finishing a beer.

  The attack takes less than thirty seconds. The passengers hadn’t been expecting it, so of course it is easy.

  We work the rest of the night offloading the supplies we bought with the passengers’ payments. Book disks. Tools. Seeds for the greenhouses. The transactions were all in cash so there are no records and no trail. Burl and Jerry and the five others will be just another group of Americans who have slipped illegally from their country to disappear in the dying world. Perhaps, as sometimes happened, a brother or friend will come looking for them. And when and if that happens they will have no difficulty in hiring a ship to take them up through the ice, searching the outports. This land, this sea, this ice, my home, is admirably efficient in dealing with those who don’t respect it.

  I explain this to Burl as he sits tied on the deck, just as the sun rises, a pale glow in the mist. Without his beer, Burl looks more frightened than ever. He cringes when Linda says everything’s been offloaded.

  “What happens to us now?” he asks. His lips are tinged with blue. It’s the summer and it’s getting that cold.

  “You get offloaded, too,” I tell him. I help him to his feet. He is unsteady. “You’ll finally get to see an outport.”

  “What happens then?” His teeth are chattering. This is not his climate, not his world. He really might as well be on another planet, or from one.

  “That’s up to the doctors,” I explain. The other passengers are being led to the railing. If they have cooperated, then the Dunder’s men untie their hands to let them climb down the rope ladder to the dory more easily.

  “Why doctors?” he asks. I don’t know yet if I should untie Burl’s hands. The ship rocks up and down with the swells, the pulse of life.

  “To see what you can add to the community, Mr. Finn. It’s very small, very self-contained, and sometime soon is liable to be cut off by a winter that will last for centuries.”

  He tells me he doesn’t understand what I’m saying.

  “Contributions to the gene pool,” I tell him. “We’ve found that not all of you are as badly affected as you think. In time, given a proper diet, a rest from contaminants, there’s a chance that you’ll produce healthy sperm again.”

  “You’re going to breed us?” He seems shocked by the suggestion.

  “You’ve taken so much from this world, Mr. Finn. Isn’t it time you put something back?”

  His cheeks go splotchy, angry red against the stark white of his skin. “And if I can’t? If I can’t?”

  I’m always surprised when they don’t figure it out for themselves. “One way or another, you will,” I tell him. “Food’s hard to get up here. But we do get it.”

  He trembles badly, tied hands resting on the rail. I watch his eyes as they go to the sea, as if they look beneath its grey surface, struggling to find ghost cities of the past, as if he knows that the past is his only future. And in that moment, I sense something more about Burl Finn, something hidden. Perhaps he’s had an operation, perhaps an accident or exposure to something so toxic that his gametes will never run clean and error free. Whatever, he seems to know that there will only be one way he will give something back to the world. I think of him sucking on his beer, as if he wer
e recycling his own fluids.

  “Why?” he asks.

  I know that he knows the answer, but I tell him anyway. “For the children. For the future.”

  “But like this?”

  “Like what?” I ask him gently.

  His wide, panicked eyes are so easy to read. Kidnapping, they say, theft, murder, cannibalism. A dozen other terms of one world’s horror. Another world’s necessity.

  “This!” he says by way of briefer explanation. “How can you?”

  I didn’t like him throughout the trip, and standing with him by the railing, with no more reason to hide anything at all from him, my mission done, I find that I still don’t like him. But I do, at last, feel sorry for him. I look at the slow pulse of the sea long enough that his eyes are drawn to it as well, and at that moment, I cut through the rope that binds his hands, giving him his final freedom. The dory creaks below us, beneath the waiting rope ladder. The fog is rose and yellow with the dawn.

  “We’re not jetsam, not dredges, not the forgotten waiting for our time to be over,” I tell him. “We’re not like you are.” I step back from him, knowing what he must do even before he does. “We are survivors. Always have been. And will be.”

  Tears freeze to his cheeks in the cold wind of this summer morning. There’s ice nearby, beyond the fog, closing in, inexorable, enduring. “What about me?” He forms the words but doesn’t say them.

  I shake my head. “You might have been able to ask that once. Perhaps. But no longer.”

  A Dunder’s man, impatient, wails up from the dory, white arm waving Burl down and down.

  Burl doesn’t look at me again. I smell the ice waiting offshore. And his fear. This time, they are the same again, brought into balance.

  Burl Finn goes over the railing, spinning like a large shard of something old and fragile. And when he hits the thick grey surface of the water, it parts for him, drawing him down to the ghost streets of the outports that so fascinate him. I wonder if in his last moment he thinks that there still might be an escape for him, that the water might hold and that he might walk upon it. Sometimes, I get that impression from my passengers. That that’s the type of people they think they are.

  But not this time.

  He leaves only a ripple, and only for an instant. And then there is only the splash of the sea against the boat’s hull as the Dunder’s men push off with the last of my passengers, heading for shore.

  I wave a final time to them, then signal Linda to swing us out.

  The sun almost breaks through the fog then, and on the wind that comes to me, I scent the continent of ice that grows out there, coming from the north, invincible.

  I stand at the railing, eager to meet it.

  It smells like home.

  JUST LIKE OLD TIMES

  by Robert J. Sawyer

  Robert J. Sawyer is Canadian Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and The Canadian Encyclopedia’s authority on science fiction. He has written and narrated documentaries on SF for CBC radio and reviewed for The Globe and Mail. He is the author of six science fiction novels, all published in the U.S. since 1990, and a number of short stories that have appeared in magazines and original anthologies in Canada and the U.S. since the early 1980’s. Golden Fleece (1990), his first novel, expanded from a 1988 magazine story, won the Aurora Award for best long-form work in English in 1991. “Just Like Old Times” first appeared in the original anthology Dinosaur Fantastic and was reprinted in On Spec. It is the epitome of the clever, entertaining science fiction that is the hallmark of Sawyer’s work.

  * * *

  The transference went smoothly, like a scalpel slicing into skin.

  Cohen was simultaneously excited and disappointed. He was thrilled to be here—perhaps the judge was right, perhaps this was indeed where he really belonged. But the gleaming edge was taken off that thrill because it wasn’t accompanied by the usual physiological signs of excitement: no sweaty palms, no racing heart, no rapid breathing. Oh, there was a heartbeat, to be sure, thundering in the background, but it wasn’t Cohen’s.

  It was the dinosaur’s.

  Everything was the dinosaur’s: Cohen saw the world now through tyrannosaur eyes.

  The colours seemed all wrong. Surely plant leaves must be the same chlorophyll green here in the Mesozoic, but the dinosaur saw them as navy blue. The sky was lavender; the dirt underfoot ash gray.

  Old bones had different cones, thought Cohen. Well, he could get used to it. After all, he had no choice. He would finish his life as an observer inside this tyrannosaur’s mind. He’d see what the beast saw, hear what it heard, feel what it felt. He wouldn’t be able to control its movements, they had said, but he would be able to experience every sensation.

  The rex was marching forward.

  Cohen hoped blood would still look red.

  It wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t red.

  * * *

  “And what, Ms. Cohen, did your husband say before he left your house on the night in question?”

  “He said he was going out to hunt humans. But I thought he was making a joke.”

  “No interpretations, please, Ms. Cohen. Just repeat for the court as precisely as you remember it, exactly what your husband said.”

  “He said, ‘I’m going out to hunt humans.’”

  “Thank you, Ms. Cohen. That concludes the Crown’s case, my lady.”

  * * *

  The needlepoint on the wall of the Honourable Madam Justice Amanda Hoskins’s chambers had been made for her by her husband. It was one of her favourite verses from The Mikado, and as she was preparing sentencing she would often look up and re-read the words:

  My object all sublime

  I shall achieve in time—

  To let the punishment fit the crime—

  The punishment fit the crime.

  This was a difficult case, a horrible case. Judge Hoskins continued to think.

  * * *

  It wasn’t just colours that were wrong. The view from inside the tyrannosaur’s skull was different in other ways, too.

  The tyrannosaur had only partial stereoscopic vision. There was an area in the centre of Cohen’s field of view that showed true depth perception. But because the beast was somewhat wall-eyed, it had a much wider panorama than normal for a human, a kind of saurian Cinemascope covering 270 degrees.

  The wide-angle view panned back and forth as the tyrannosaur scanned along the horizon.

  Scanning for prey.

  Scanning for something to kill.

  The Calgary Herald, Thursday, October 16, 2042, hardcopy edition: Serial killer Rudolph Cohen, 43, was sentenced to death yesterday.

  Formerly a prominent member of the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Cohen was convicted in August of thirty-seven counts of first-degree murder.

  In chilling testimony, Cohen had admitted, without any signs of remorse, to having terrorized each of his victims for hours before slitting their throats with surgical implements.

  This is the first time in eighty years that the death penalty has been ordered in this country.

  In passing sentence, Madam Justice Amanda Hoskins observed that Cohen was “the most cold-blooded and brutal killer to have stalked Canada’s prairies since Tyrannosaurus rex…”

  From behind a stand of dawn redwoods about ten metres away, a second tyrannosaur appeared. Cohen suspected tyrannosaurs might be fiercely territorial, since each animal would require huge amounts of meat. He wondered if the beast he was in would attack the other individual.

  His dinosaur tilted its head to look at the second rex, which was standing in profile. But as it did so, almost all of the dino’s mental picture dissolved into a white void, as if when concentrating on details the beast’s tiny brain simply lost track of the big picture.

  At first Cohen thought his rex was looking at the other dinosaur’s head, but soon the top of the other’s skull, the tip of its muzzle and the back of its powerful neck faded away
into snowy nothingness. All that was left was a picture of the throat. Good, thought Cohen. One shearing bite there could kill the animal.

  The skin of the other’s throat appeared gray-green and the throat itself was smooth. Maddeningly, Cohen’s rex did not attack. Rather, it simply swiveled its head and looked out at the horizon again.

  In a flash of insight, Cohen realized what had happened. Other kids in his neighbourhood had had pet dogs or cats. He’d had lizards and snakes—cold-blooded carnivores, a fact to which expert psychological witnesses had attached great weight. Some kinds of male lizards had dewlap sacks hanging from their necks. The rex he was in—a male, the Tyrrell paleontologists had believed—had looked at this other one and seen that she was smooth-throated and therefore a female. Something to be mated with, perhaps, rather than to attack.

  Perhaps they would mate soon. Cohen had never orgasmed except during the act of killing. He wondered what it would feel like.

  * * *

  “We spent a billion dollars developing time travel, and now you tell me the system is useless?”

  “Well—”

  “That is what you’re saying, isn’t it, professor? That chronotransference has no practical applications?”

  “Not exactly, Minister. The system does work. We can project a human being’s consciousness back in time, superimposing his or her mind overtop of that of someone who lived in the past.”

  “With no way to sever the link. Wonderful.”

  “That’s not true. The link severs automatically.”

  “Right. When the historical person you’ve transferred consciousness into dies, the link is broken.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And then the person from our time whose consciousness you’ve transferred back dies as well.”

  “I admit that’s an unfortunate consequence of linking two brains so closely.”

  “So I’m right! This whole damn chronotransference thing is useless.”

  “Oh, not at all, Minister. In fact, I think I’ve got the perfect application for it.”

  * * *

  The rex marched along. Although Cohen’s attention had first been arrested by the beast’s vision, he slowly became aware of its other senses, too. He could hear the sounds of the rex’s footfalls, of twigs and vegetation being crushed, of birds or pterosaurs singing, and, underneath it all, the relentless drone of insects. Still, all the sounds were dull and low; the rex’s simple ears were incapable of picking up high-pitched noises, and what sounds they did detect were discerned without richness. Cohen knew the late Cretaceous must have been a symphony of varied tone, but it was as if he was listening to it through earmuffs.