Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  It was very simple, really. If orgasm was binary, it could be programmed. Feed back the sensation through one or more touchpads to program the body. The other thing she knew about human sex was that it was as much cortical as genital, or more so: touch is optional for the turn-on. Also easy, then, to produce cortical stimuli by programmed input. The rest was a cosmetic elaboration of the premise.

  At first it did turn him on, then off, then it made his blood run cold. She was pleased by that: her work had chilled her too.

  “You can’t market that thing!” he said.

  “Why not. It’s a fucking good program. Hey, get it? Fucking good.”

  “It’s not real.”

  “Of course it isn’t. So what?”

  “So, people don’t need that kind of stuff to get turned on.”

  She told him about people. More people than he’d known were in the world. People who made her those designer drugs, given in return for favours she never granted until after Whitman sold her like a used car. People like Whitman, teaching her about sexual equipment while dealing with the Pentagon and CSIS to sell them Angel’s sharp angry mind, as if she’d work on killing others as eagerly as she was trying to kill herself. People who would hire a woman on the street, as they had her during that two-week nightmare almost a year before, and use her as casually as their own hand, without giving a damn.

  “One night,” she said, “just to see, I told all the johns I was fourteen. I was skinny enough, even then, to get away with it. And they all loved it. Every single one gave me a bonus, and took me anyway.”

  The whiskey fog was wearing a little thin. More time had passed than she thought, and more had been said than she had intended. She went to her bag, rummaged, but she’d left her drugs in Toronto, some dim idea at the time that she should clean up her act. All that had happened was that she had spent the days so tight with rage that she couldn’t eat, and she’d already cured herself of that once; for the record, she thought, she’d rather be stoned.

  “Do you have any more booze?” she said, and he went to look. She followed him around his kitchen.

  “Furthermore,” she said, “I rolled every one of them that I could, and all but one had pictures of his kids in his wallet, and all of them were teenagers. Boys and girls together. And their saintly dads out fucking someone who looked just like them. Just like them.”

  Luckily, he had another bottle. Not quite the same quality, but she wasn’t fussy.

  “So I figure,” she finished, “that they don’t care who they fuck. Why not the computer in the den? Or the office system at lunch hour?”

  “It’s not like that,” he said. “It’s nothing like that. People deserve better.” He had the neck of the bottle in his big hand, was seriously, carefully pouring himself another shot. He gestured with both bottle and glass. “People deserve to have—love.”

  “Love?”

  “Yeah, love. You think I’m stupid, you think I watched too much TV as a kid, but I know it’s out there. Somewhere. Other people think so too. Don’t you? Didn’t you, even if you won’t admit it now, fall in love with that guy Max at first? You never said what he did at the beginning, how he talked you into being his lover. Something must have happened. Well, that’s what I mean: love.”

  “Let me tell you about love. Love is a guy who talks real smooth taking me out to the woods and telling me he just loves my smile. And then taking me home and putting me in leather handcuffs so he can come. And if I hurt he likes it, because he likes it to hurt a little and he thinks I must like it like he does. And if I moan he thinks I’m coming. And if I cry he thinks it’s love. And so do I. Until one evening—not too long after my last birthday, as I recall—he tells me that he has sold me to another company. And this only after he fucks me one last time. Even though I don’t belong to him any more. After all, he had the option on all my bioware.”

  “All that is just politics.” He was sharp, she had to grant him that.

  “Politics,” she said, “give me a break. Was it politics made Max able to sell me with the stock: hardware, software, liveware?”

  “I’ve met guys like that. Women too. You have to understand that it wasn’t personal to him, it was just politics.” Also stubborn. “Sure, you were naive, but you weren’t wrong. You just didn’t understand company politics.”

  “Oh, sure I did. I always have. Why do you think I changed my name? Why do you think I dress in natural fibres and go through all the rest of this bullshit? I know how to set up power blocs. Except in mine there is only one party—me. And that’s the way it’s going to stay. Me against them from now on.”

  “It’s not always like that. There are assholes in the world, and there are other people too. Everyone around here still remembers your grandfather, even though he’s been retired in Camrose for fifteen years. They still talk about the way he and his wife used to waltz at the Legion Hall. What about him? There are more people like him than there are Whitmans.”

  “Charlotte doesn’t waltz much since her stroke.”

  “That’s a cheap shot. You can’t get away with cheap shots. Speaking of shots, have another.”

  “Don’t mind if I do. Okay, I give you Eric and Charlotte. But one half-happy ending doesn’t balance out the people who go through their lives with their teeth clenched, trying to make it come out the same as a True Romance comic, and always wondering what’s missing. They read those bodice-ripper novels, and make that do for the love you believe in so naively.” Call her naive, would he? Two could play at that game. “That’s why they’ll all go crazy for Machine Sex. So simple. So linear. So fast. So uncomplicated.”

  “You underestimate people’s ability to be happy. People are better at loving than you think.”

  “You think so? Wait until you have your own little piece of land and some sweetheart takes you out in the trees on a moonlit night and gives you head until you think your heart will break. So you marry her and have some kids. She furnishes the trailer in a five-room sale grouping. You have to quit drinking Glenfiddich because she hates it when you talk too loud. She gets an allowance every month and crochets a cozy for the TV. You work all day out in the rain and all evening in the back room making the books balance on the outdated computer. After the kids come she gains weight and sells real estate if you’re lucky. If not she makes things out of recycled bleach bottles and hangs them in the yard. Pretty soon she wears a nightgown to bed and turns her back when you slip in after a hard night at the keyboard. So you take up drinking again and teach the kids about the rodeo. And you find some square-dancing chick who gives you head out behind the bleachers one night in Trochu, so sweet you think your heart will break. What you gonna do then, mountain man?”

  “Okay, we can tell stories until the sun comes up. Which won’t be too long, look at the time; but no matter how many stories you tell you can’t make me forget about that thing.” He pointed to the computer with loathing.

  “It’s just a machine.”

  “You know what I mean. That thing in it. And besides, I’m gay. Your little scenario wouldn’t work.”

  She laughed and laughed. “So that’s why you haven’t made a pass at me yet.” She wondered coldly how gay he was, but she was tired, so tired of proving power. His virtue was safe with her; so, she thought suddenly, strangely, was hers with him. It was unsettling and comforting at once.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe I’m just a liar like you think everyone is. Eh? You think everyone strings everyone else a line? Crap. Who has the time for that shit?”

  Perhaps they were drinking beer now. Or was it vodka? She found it hard to tell after a while.

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “You should know. The sweet young thing who has AIDS and doesn’t tell you. Or me. I’m lucky so far. Are you? Or who sucks you for your money. Or josses you ’cause he’s into denim and Nordic looks.”

  “Okay, okay. I give up. Everybody’s a creep but you and me.”

  “And I’m not so sure about you.
”

  “Likewise, I’m sure. Have another. So, if you’re so pure, what about the ethics of it?”

  “What about the ethics of it?” she asked. “Do you think I went through all that sex without paying attention? I had nothing else to do but watch other people come. I saw that old cult movie, where the aliens feed on heroin addiction and orgasm, and the woman’s not allowed orgasm so she has to O.D. on smack. Orgasm’s more decadent than shooting heroin? I can’t buy that, but there’s something about a world that sells it over and over again. Sells the thought of pleasure as a commodity, sells the getting of it as if it were the getting of wisdom. And all these times I told you about, I saw other people get it through me. Even when someone finally made me come, it was just a feather in his cap, an accomplishment, nothing personal. Like you said. All I was was a program, they plugged into me and went through the motions and got their result. Nobody cares if the AI finds fulfilment running their damned data analyses. Nobody thinks about depressed and angry Mannboard ROMs. They just think about getting theirs.

  “So why not get mine?” She was pacing now, angry, leaning that thin body as if the wind were against her. “Let me be the one who runs the program.”

  “But you won’t be there. You told me how you were going to hide out, all that spy stuff.”

  She leaned against the wall, smiling a new smile she thought of as predatory. And maybe it was. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ll be there the first time. When Max and Kozyk run this thing and it turns them on. I’ll be there. That’s all I care to see.”

  He put his big hands on the wall on either side of her and leaned in. He smelled of sweat and liquor and his face was earnest with intoxication.

  “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “As long as there’s the real thing, it won’t sell. They’ll never buy it.”

  Angel thought so too. Secretly, because she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of agreement, she too thought they would not go that low. That’s right, she told herself, trying to sell it is all right—because they will never buy it.

  But they did.

  * * *

  A woman and a computer. Which attracts you most? Now you don’t have to choose. Angel has made the choice irrelevant.

  In Kozyk’s office, he and Max go over the ad campaign. They’ve already tested the program themselves quite a lot; Angel knows this because it’s company gossip, heard over the cubicle walls in the washrooms. The two men are so absorbed that they don’t notice her arrival.

  “Why is a woman better than a sheep? Because sheep can’t cook. Why is a woman better than a Mannboard? Because you haven’t bought your sensory add-on.” Max laughs.

  “And what’s better than a man?” Angel says; they jump slightly. “Why, your MannComp touchpads, with two-way input. I bet you’ll be able to have them personally fitted.”

  “Good idea,” says Kozyk, and Whitman makes a note on his lapboard. Angel, still stunned though she’s had weeks to get used to this, looks at them, then reaches across the desk and picks up her prototype board. “This one’s mine,” she says. “You play with yourselves and your touchpads all you want.”

  “Well, you wrote it, baby,” said Max. “If you can’t come with your own program…”

  Kozyk hiccoughs a short laugh before he shakes his head. “Shut up, Whitman,” he says. “You’re talking to a very rich and famous woman.”

  Whitman looks up from the simulations of his advertising storyboards, smiling a little, anticipating his joke. “Yeah. It’s just too bad she finally burned herself out with this one. They always did say it gives you brain damage.”

  But Angel hadn’t waited for the punch line. She was gone.

  Peterborough, Rouyn, Edmonton

  1986–1988

  TOWARDS A REAL SPECULATIVE LITERATURE: WRITER AS ASYMPTOTE

  Candas Jane Dorsey

  Candas Jane Dorsey is one of a handful of Canadian SF writers who had grown up seemingly overnight since the mid-1980’s and who are beginning to gain recognition worldwide. She was first published in the small press in Canada and became a fixture of the Tesseracts anthologies, and her own first collection, Machine Sex and Other Stories (1988), was published in trade paperback in Canada and then printed in England by The Women’s Press. As coeditor of Tesseracts (1990), she wrote an afterword to that volume which represents perhaps the most coherent and lucid statement on what it means to be a SF writer in Canada today.

  * * *

  Thinking back: thinking forward. Speculative fiction in Canada: how it used to be; how we define it; how it is going to be.

  Used to be so simple. SF stood for science fiction and it was a Genre. Genres are formulaic, predictable, one thing or another, so it was easy to see SF as a strobe, a binary flash, on-off-on-off, beyond control. That kind of periodicity in lights can trigger electrical storms in the brain. But what is a state of speculation, “on” or “off”? “On,” like a light, a current, a performer; “off,” like a racer, a rocket or a firework? And what storms did it aim to generate in what brain? What was a preferable state, on or off? Binary, the dialectic, then seemed essential to modern scientific method—but now even computers are not binary, are based on neural nets and parallel processing: now a computer circuit can speak Sanskrit, encompass four valences (on, not on, maybe both, maybe neither). All this defines another kind of speculative prose.

  What remains the same is that speculative writing is revolutionary, ghettoised, trivialised, falsely lionised, popularised and all those affixed words used by whatever fictions are speaking at the time to describe a simple phenomenon. Paul Tillich wrote: “The boundary is the best place to acquire knowledge.” It has also been the best place to spin it off—the ragged edges of a jellyfish, the aurora at the earthly edge of the sun’s corona, galaxies spinning out matter. Waiting: eventually, someone will look up.

  Meanwhile—those cosmic rays tear through those of us who write, and some of the electrical storms in us are not very pleasant either.

  What became clearer all the time was that truly speculative writing is always that asymptotic line on the graph which spends its career approaching, never arriving; always in transit between two imaginary points: take-off and destination; and therefore always beyond the binary, free to understand its fallacy. An impulse in progress is only the length of a synaptic gap, yet able to traverse light-years as quickly as any subatomic particle. But never the comfortable arrival, never the relaxed armchair and footstool at journey’s end, never at home though always coming home. To live that way for a writer is not easy, even before the confrontation between what Guy Kay calls “practitioners seeking quality” and those whose idea of speculative fiction is a genre ghetto of adolescent wish-fulfillment and coming-of-age rituals.

  (By the way, it is fine writing a groundbreaking literature if everyone knows it: if one knows one can be shot for it, or threatened with shooting, or, more happily, just lionised. Salman Rushdie is now a worldwide symbol of one collision of fixed boundaries. He is one of us, you know: saints don’t fall from airplanes, and the fact that such fancies can threaten the raison d’étre of nations is just what I’m talking about: here we are on the cutting, maybe even killing edge. Few pettinesses can withstand the onslaught of myth—they must either suppress it or be destroyed, c.f. Jung, William Irwin Thompson, and Harlan Ellison. If we accept we’re rewriting humankind’s essential stories, we risk hubris; but if we don’t, we risk losing our value and our self-respect.)

  Over the years the predicaments became clear, then were left behind. Once, Canadian SF writers’ main problem was trying to live with one foot in and one out of the world of—pardon the expression—free enterprise: selling south of the border, and what happened to our work there. We saw that Gibson, Wilson, de Lint and Gotlieb made it into US print, but had garish space-girl covers on their books only slightly less often than Piers Anthony or a shared-world novelist. Those in the CanLit mainstream didn’t know these names? Yes, and tens of thousands of SF fans in Canada, faces
three-quarter turned to the glitter of the US pulp mass market, and in the main scarcely aware of the glimmer of brilliance at home, had never heard of the speculative writers of the Canadian tradition (which is mine, and so I always took it for granted): Sheila Watson, George Elliott, Robertson Davies, Rudy Wiebe, Marion Engel, Gwendolyn MacEwan, Jack Hodgins, Timothy Findley—and so many more. If one was lucky, one or two of them had already heard of Margaret Atwood before the movie was made of her Handmaid’s Tale. C’est tout. (And as for the Québécois SF writers, find an anglo of any stripe who knew Élisabeth Vonarburg and already you had found a rarity. Welcome to multiculturalism—a rant for another time.)

  There we were. Different countries. Couldn’t get the average SF fan snob to even IMAGINE there was a Canadian literary tradition of speculation, alienness, exploration of frontiers in and outside self (a tradition by the way which did decades ago what US writers call postmodern in the SF world)—let alone read the stuff. Couldn’t get the average academic CanLit snob to read anything with a lurid cover, or even in trade paperback format, let alone to admit an impressive body of great writing there in that “genre ghetto” SF. “Scifi,” they liked to call it, very snotty and righteous; “mundane,” the SFans liked to say, equally snide.

  Yet out of this forest of mixed motives, out of this nation of enclaves, there has been coming for years now a fine, varied, growing, unique literature of speculation. Not monolithic or even binary, but full spectrum, multiplex, intense. And the boundaries we used to perceive, and along with which we used to range ourselves, are changing, are even—hurrah!—disappearing. Academics and fans meet at Canadian conventions devoted to reading the writers of home; all of them know something about the others’ purview, and all of them know something about the synthesis: which is the land where we live, the land of Canadian speculative fiction, defined by all the influences and certainly not simply binary. One might almost call it multicultural, and happily so (for a change). Because meanwhile (circle round again), some of us have been simply writing. Ask us what. Those of us canny enough to have disguised ourselves in the garish face-paint of the American pulp tradition know all their labels and say things like “heroic fantasy” and “technowizardry” and “cyberpunk.” Others of us keep our skirts closely gathered around us in that territory, not to become infected, and call it “magic realism” and “postmodernism” and perhaps in a daring moment “fantastic” or even, radically, “speculative.” Then there are some of us with two names or two minds or with a kind of schizy double vision, who began to walk the strange land between. Walking the border, the boundary if you will, as if it were a tightrope, our toes clinging to the narrow line through the special soft shoes one must wear to do tricks on the high wire. The best of us, of course, are those flying up from the wire to do aerobatics above all categories. And in the last five years or so, all of us have been finding the boundary zone widening to become a whole country, comfortable enough to live in.