Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  He writes: “My fondness for science fiction and my fondness for my adopted country are parallel passions. Both have lapsed from time to time. I sometimes travel beyond the borders of both, sometimes with a sense of relief. But I keep coming back. Isn’t that the definition of home?” The Science Fiction Encyclopedia says of his works: “He expresses with vigor and imagination the great Canadian theme (for the sense of being on the lonely side of a binary has sparked much of the best Canadian SF) of geographical alienation.”

  He lays claim only to four short stories, all published in science fiction magazines in the late 1980’s, of which this is one.

  * * *

  I remember how it was that night we decided to kill Toby Torvis.

  It was an average night at Toby’s Roadhouse out on Route 16. Probably you don’t know Toby’s, but you know some place like it: slat roof and gravel parking lot and halide lights that draw the summer bugs in big old clouds, freight trucks whooshing in from the Route and settling down on their repellor shields like dogs curling up to sleep; inside, the drummer and the fiddler and the guitarman up on a wood stage with colored spotlights slung from the rafters and a blue haze of smoke and noise and—this night—me out front dishing up “Rose of Cimarron” or “Tennessee Waltz” in a gingham dress like the preachers’ wives wear on TV (only sexier about the neckline). I am, of course, a Phony Girl, a Lonely Nell. My given name is Idella; there is no last.

  Toby’s Place belonged to Torvis: Toby Torvis, a beer barrel of a man who hated his customers and hated us who worked for him even more. From the stage I could see him shadowing Jack the barman, making sure the drinks weren’t too generous. Sometimes Torvis shaved the service so tight it drove customers away, saving nickels and dimes at the expense of dollars. But Torvis didn’t care. For a man like that, being miserable is its own reward.

  And I could see Lafe, too, as the stage lights dimmed and the band unplugged for a break.

  Lafe is the other Phony here, a Barroom Cowboy. He has his own table next to the jukebox. Sometimes I’d see him shooting pool, all by himself because the clientele wouldn’t play with him; more often he’d be doing his bounden duty, sweet-talking some half-drunk and goggle-eyed country girl till she was pink in the face and damn near swooning.

  It’s in the nature of the work we do.

  Lafe is handsome as a holostar, and I am, I guess, pretty enough, and we liked each other a lot. I admired his big jaw and his twinkly blue eyes, his razor-creased trousers and his starched white shirt. Right at that moment I wanted to go sit with him—share that dingy round little table with him and sit together proud and contented. But of course, Torvis wouldn’t allow it. We had our jobs to do. So I climbed down from the stage and went and sat at my own table, drinking cold tea from a whiskey glass and lighting up a big welcome-howdy smile I did not feel when a feed wholesaler name of Cortney pulled up a chair by my side.

  “Pretty girl,” he sighed. “My, but you a pretty girl.”

  I was not so depressed that I could not appreciate a man who calls me that. This one was fat and wore big Buddy Holly glasses; but I like a man who calls me “girl” or “woman.” The prissy ones get real upright about it.

  It was coming on 1:00 A.M., and I had done a final set, when Cortney got around to the inevitable suggestion. I pointed out the plain silver band round his ring finger and said, “You’re a married man, ain’tcha?”

  And he blushed very prettily and began a sob story. And so it goes. I paid not much attention.

  Over at the other table, Lafe had attracted a mousy woman with gristly cords up her neck and hair like a leaky hayrick. He flashed me one long, careless look, and I returned it … we were done before either Whole Human noticed a thing. But it was unprofessional. And I think Torvis might have seen.

  Before long I was back in my trailer in the rear lot of the Place, listening to the roar of the traffic on the Route while this man Cortney worked off the memories of his wife. He was sweet and excitable, and it didn’t take too long. When he finished, we performed the ritual: he pulled his pants on and said how he loved me but he’s got a woman and three kids; and I got teary but tough and told him I understood, making it sound like I really didn’t.

  And he went home consoled and self-congratulatory, and isn’t that the purpose of it all?

  That’s what they told us, at least, down on the Farm.

  It was half past two, and I desperately wanted to sleep; but old Torvis came knocking at the door and rousted me up.

  He stood there with his hands on his big belly and his eyebrows humped up like two caterpillars. “There’s men inside,” he said, “who would like to meet you.”

  “Aw, come on, Mr. Torvis. In my contract it says—”

  “You work for me,” he said, “or you don’t. That’s the long and short of it. So get your flabby ass back into that pretty little dress and get inside.”

  He’s wrong about the contract, but there was nothing I could do about it. As a Fake Person, I don’t have what you call recourse to the law. It made me spitting mad, and I thought again of my roommate from the Flesh Farm, Laurel Anne, and how she had one day thrown a pot full of chicken noodle soup right in the face of our Dialect Coach. How good Toby Torvis would look drenched in chicken stock and noodles! But I did what he said.

  When I stepped down, there was a ruckus over by Lafe’s trailer. A Jealous Husband banging on the door and kicking at the siding. A big one, drunk enough to be mean. Torvis just watched, chewing a fat cigar.

  The door swung open. First the wife stumbled out, staring at her husband with big admiring eyes. Then he pushed her behind him, and Lafe came down.

  The Jealous Husband said a lot of nasty things and then punched Lafe right in the face.

  Lafe fell down. Lafe is big, but he can’t do much to protect himself: they wrote that into his wet program. Wouldn’t do to have an outraged Fake beating up some hapless Whole Human. That is not in the scenario.

  The human man stalked away with his wife.

  I wanted to run over to Lafe, but Torvis dragged me back into the Place. That’s bad business sense, too, not taking care of his investments.

  All for naught. The action had pretty much died down inside. A trucker bought me tea till he collapsed.

  Out back, I helped Lafe into my trailer and sponged his bruises.

  “Torvis told him,” Lafe said sadly. “I mean, I’m prepared to face this sort of thing. But I’m supposed to be safe in the trailer. Torvis told him where I was.”

  “He’s a mean rotten son of a bitch,” I said, holding Lafe’s pretty face in my two hands, sponging it. “We oughta kill him.”

  And I saw the light go on in Lafe’s eyes.

  Laurel Anne, I thought, you would be proud of me now!

  * * *

  Well, it’s all so much like a sad old song, isn’t it! The songs I sing every night, which come down to one song, which is the Cheater’s Blues. And how much we expect from this life, and how much we get.

  The word on us Fakes and Phonies is that we do a service to the true and good order of things. Torvis reminded us of that now and then, though in a leering, nasty tone of voice. Didn’t matter. I believed him. The TV preachers talk about the sacred values of the Family, and Love and Marriage and the Happy Ending, and I believe them, too.

  But the devil is in Whole Humans like a stain that won’t wash out; and we (Phonies like Lafe and me) are here to ensure that those bad impulses don’t do permanent damage. Say a married man like that nice Mr. Cortney needs to sow some wild oats. A thing like that could ruin his entire life, set him on the road to Sin Black as Night … unless he comes to me.

  I give him all he’s longing for, not just the physical aspect but the lingering looks and the heartbreak and the little good-byes that stab and burn. And in the morning he can go back to his wife and negotiate forgiveness from her and the Lord. And I don’t suffer because I have no human soul.

  Lafe performs much the same service for women like, pres
umably, Mr. Cortney’s wife; except that an irate husband has the option of punching him out. Another service we provide.

  Happy to Serve was the motto at the backwater Georgia flesh farm where I was bred. Job satisfaction is burned into my neocortex, along with the Role I perform. What with all that, I guess I should have been happy, right? And was I?

  Oh my Lord, no.

  Lafe and I discussed this one Tuesday night in my trailer. Torvis had closed up and gone home, and there were crickets chirping away in the hour before dawn. “We’re not getting anywhere,” Lafe said, his eyes half open in the dark. “And we’re not getting younger. If we had a decent contract, we might have been able to buy ourselves out by now. Buy our freedom and maybe take out a franchise on some roadhouse of our own somewhere.” The standard dream. “But Torvis leeches away our salaries on his so-called expenses. And we get screwed.” In any sense of the word.

  “But, Lafe, if we actually—you know—”

  I could not bring myself to say it.

  “I’ve got it all figured out,” Lafe said. “Torvis is vulnerable because of what he is. He’s an old bull with no family that’ll speak to him and no friends and no possessions but the Place. And I know where he keeps his records. We kill him, and I’ll doctor the books to make it look like we bought him out and he just moved on. We get all we want all at once.” His eyes were like saucers, and he hugged me. “You and me together, Idella.”

  It’s forbidden for Fakes to marry. Marriage is a sacred institution, and we were grown in vats like meat, not born. But if we owned the Place, or appeared to, nobody would say boo if we shared a back room.

  And I thought again of Laurel Anne. My best friend back at the Farm, she had kept me up late hours whispering all sorts of sedition. How Fakes were just as good as people, and how it didn’t matter how we were born; that we had the same needs and rights as Whole Humans, even in spite of the wet programming they read into our skulls. It wasn’t fair, she said, to make us live out Roles all our lives, Lonely Nells and Barroom Cowboys and Pretty Boys and all. We had our rights, and someday we would rise up and demand them.

  Well, this was not quite that. But it was something.

  “O.K.,” I said. “But I couldn’t—I don’t think I could—”

  “It’s all right, my love,” Lafe said, still holding me. “I understand. I’ll do it. I’ll kill him.”

  And I thought for some reason of that old ballad they taught me back at the Farm:

  But I’ve treasure of the promise

  That you made me in the lane

  When you said we’d be together

  When them roses bloom again …

  First time we tried, it was less than a week later.

  It was an average night. I did my two sets with the band and kept a customer happy. Guy named Idaho Charlie rode the mechanical bull for twenty-five minutes, and would of rode longer except his bladder ruptured. The take was good, the till was busy, and the beer was flowing like—well, beer.

  We had no specific plan, but I knew the tension had been building up in Lafe; he was tight as a piano wire. He had gone so far as to snub a couple of customers, drinking by himself and looking hostile. Torvis had dressed him down for it earlier in the day. But Lafe had not reformed, and now Torvis appeared long enough to hail him into his office with a rude and contemptuous gesture.

  Lafe stood up and took a last sip of real whiskey—steeling himself, I thought excitedly. It would not be uncommon for Torvis to hide in that office until all the Whole Human employees had packed up and gone home: Torvis was a secret drinker on top of everything else. So there would be no bad appearances if Lafe picked this moment to put an end to our torment.

  I was onstage for my last set of the evening. I stumbled through the ballads and moaners dutifully, but I could not conceal my anxiety. The drummer complained that I was rushing the tempo. I apologized and jumped down, waiting for Lafe to emerge.

  Lafe did not.

  Time passed. A burly out-of-towner in a Teamsters uniform settled down opposite me. “You’re the Nell,” he said gruffly, “right?”

  I told him to buzz off. I purely dislike Whole Humans who treat me like some kind of prostitute. I am a Lonely Nell; the program won’t run right unless the customer is maybe a little bit in love with me. Silly one-night love, maybe; misplaced yearning, sure, drunken affection … but not this mean-tempered randiness. If Torvis had been around, I might have had to comply. But maybe Lafe had solved that problem already.

  When I couldn’t wait any longer, I went to the door of Torvis’s back office. Maybe Lafe was dead, I thought, stricken. Maybe Torvis had killed him. Maybe they had killed each other.

  The door was unlocked.

  I opened it a crack and saw Torvis slumped across his desk.

  I slid inside.

  Lafe was there, white as a ghost, trembling, a big kitchen knife in his hand—

  But the blade was clean.

  “He’s drunk,” Lafe groaned. “He passed out while he was talking. Oh, Idella … I should have done it … but the programming … I just can’t…”

  I saw that he was on the brink of tears, and in spite of the disappointment, my heart went out to him. Poor Lafe! That’s the deepest kind of conditioning a Fake Person gets, the conditioning that prevents a Barroom Cowboy from committing violence. A Cowboy is different from a Nell: some men wouldn’t tolerate his behavior even from a Fake, if not for the fact that he posed no threat at all.

  But conditioning is not perfect; I had hoped Lafe would be able to break free long enough to kill Torvis.

  Apparently not.

  I pried the knife gently out of his hand and tucked it into the deep pocket of my skirt. “Come on, baby.” And I led him, still trembling, back to his trailer.

  Torvis had begun to snore.

  * * *

  It cast the whole project into doubt.

  Laurel Anne had belabored this point often back at the Flesh Farm. What we are, she said, is what we want to be, and to hell with the Roles. Wet programming impresses only a tendency on the brain, she said, not an obligation. Most times what we are programmed to be is what we expect to be, and so we fall into the habit of complicity. But there is always a choice.

  So said Laurel Anne. But I thought of Lafe, reduced almost to tears with the knife in his hand, helpless.

  We did not speak of it. But the issue remained between us like a weight. When I could think of nothing else to do, I called up Laurel Anne’s name and code from the Artificials Directory and got her most recent address and terminal number: a barroom in L.A.

  I had to steady my hand to punch out the numbers. I had not seen Laurel Anne in twenty years. We had corresponded a little, but that trailed off after a time, though we still got off Christmas cards some years. Would she even recognize me?

  But then her face was all over the CRT, somewhat wrinkly and careworn, but the same old Laurel Anne for all that, really still awful pretty. I smiled bravely, but when she said “Idella?” I could not hold in the tears any longer. I guess I didn’t know myself just how much I had been suffering. “Honey,” she said, “what’s wrong with you?”

  So I told her the basic stuff about Torvis and how I wasn’t making any money or getting any younger. There’s not a whole lot of options for an aging Nell. The best I could hope for would be maybe nursemaiding a crèche-lot of kids out on some farm; the worst did not bear thinking about.

  Laurel Anne clucked appreciatively. “I know what you mean. It’s not much better where I am. You just gotta face it, kiddo: the game is rigged in favor of the house. I can’t help much, but if you need some cash—”

  “Lord, Laurel Anne, I didn’t call you to cadge money off you!” And I thought how nice she kept her pure blonde hair. Her own color.

  She creased her eyebrows. “What, then? Not that I mind chatting, God knows. It’s your nickel.”

  I told her about Lafe.

  She sucked in her breath. “Idella, that’s dangerous stuff. A Cowbo
y—wow! They’re not the most reliable types in the world, you know what I mean?”

  “Oh, Lafe’s O.K. He’s loyal. You know what you told me about Programming and all. No; Lafe’s not the problem. See—”

  And I explained about our little plan.

  She was silent for a long time after I finished. I wondered for a sickening moment if she had changed beyond redemption, if maybe the world had broken her down—maybe this was not the Laurel Anne I remembered from the Farm.

  But then her consternation lifted like a cloud passing from in front of the sun, and she smiled a big wicked smile that made her look twenty years younger. “Honey,” she said, “my advice to you is—what the hell. Go for it.”

  I laughed and she laughed.

  “Lafe’s a problem, though,” I said. “His Cowboy conditioning. He can’t bring himself to hurt the old son of a bitch.”

  “There’s two solutions I can think of,” Laurel Anne said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well—first off, keep in mind you’re not a Cowboy.”

  I saw what she meant. “Oh, but—no, I couldn’t—I have my own conditioning, you know—”

  She waved it away. “There’s another possibility. I guess this Lafe of yours isn’t up to direct violence. But maybe you can make some arrangements. You understand? See that ol’ Toby has an accident. That way Lafe doesn’t have to be there when it happens.”

  I sighed happily. “Laurel Anne, you are a genius.”

  She grinned again. “Just happy to get in on the action.”

  We chatted awhile; then Laurel Anne said, “O.K., gotta go.” And she added something wicked and obscene.

  “Invite me to the wedding,” she said.

  * * *

  Lafe and I sat up late making plans.

  “Very bright girl, this Laurel Anne,” he said.

  “Oh Lafe, do you suppose it’ll really work?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “And we’ll have the place?”

  “Sure thing.”