Northern Stars Read online

  “All this time I’ve been pouring my heart out to you and you’ve been wearing that machine’s face! You don’t even have the decency to show me your goddamned eyes!”

  Clarke steps back, startled. Ballard rises from the bed and takes a single step forward. “To think you could actually pass for human before they gave you that suit! Why don’t you go find something to play with out in your fucking ocean!”

  And slams the hatch in Clarke’s face.

  Lenie Clarke stares at the sealed bulkhead for a few moments. Her face, she knows, is calm. Her face is usually calm. But she stands there, unmoving, until the cringing thing inside of her unfolds a little.

  “Yes,” she says at last, very softly. “I think I will.”

  * * *

  Ballard is waiting for her as she emerges from the airlock. “Lenie,” she says quietly, “we have to talk. It’s important.”

  Clarke bends over and removes her fins. “Go ahead.”

  “Not here. In my cubby.”

  Clarke looks at her.

  “Please.”

  Clarke starts up the ladder.

  “Aren’t you going to take—” Ballard stops as Clarke looks down. “Never mind. It’s okay.”

  They ascend into the lounge. Ballard takes the lead. Clarke follows her down the corridor and into her cabin. Ballard dogs the hatch and sits on her bunk, leaving room for Clarke.

  Clarke looks around the cramped space. Ballard has curtained over the mirrored bulkhead with a spare sheet.

  Ballard pats the bed beside her. “Come on, Lenie. Sit down.”

  Reluctantly, Clarke sits. Ballard’s sudden kindness confuses her. Ballard hasn’t acted this way since …

  … Since she had the upper hand.

  “—might not be easy for you to hear,” Ballard is saying, “but we have to get you off the rift. They shouldn’t have put you down here in the first place.”

  Clarke does not reply. She waits.

  “Remember the tests they gave us?” Ballard continues. “They measured our tolerance to stress; confinement, prolonged isolation, chronic physical danger, that sort of thing.”

  Clarke nods slightly. “So?”

  “So,” says Ballard, “did you think for a moment they’d test for those qualities without knowing what sort of person would have them? Or how they got to be that way?”

  Inside, Clarke goes very still. Outside, nothing changes.

  Ballard leans forward a bit. “Remember what you said? About mountain climbers, and free-fallers, and why people deliberately do dangerous things? I’ve been reading up, Lenie. Ever since I got to know you I’ve been reading up—”

  Got to know me?

  “—and do you know what thrillseekers have in common? They all say that you haven’t lived until you’ve nearly died. They need the danger. It gives them a rush.”

  You don’t know me at all …

  “Some of them are combat veterans, some were hostages for long periods, some just spent a lot of time in dead zones for one reason or another. And a lot of the really compulsive ones—”

  Nobody knows me.

  “—the ones who can’t be happy unless they’re on the edge, all the time—a lot of them got started early, Lenie. When they were just children. And you, I bet … you don’t even like being touched…”

  Go away. Go away.

  Ballard puts her hand on Clarke’s shoulder. “How long were you abused, Lenie?” she asks gently. “How many years?”

  Clarke shrugs off the hand and does not answer. He didn’t mean any harm. She shifts on the bunk, turning away slightly.

  “That’s it, isn’t it? You don’t just have a tolerance to trauma, Lenie. You’ve got an addiction to it. Don’t you?”

  It only takes Clarke a moment to recover. The ’skin, the eyecaps make it easier. She turns calmly back to Ballard. She even smiles a little.

  “No,” she says. “I don’t.”

  “There’s a mechanism,” Ballard tells her. “I’ve been reading about it. Do you know how the brain handles stress, Lenie? It dumps all sorts of addictive stimulants into the bloodstream. Beta-endorphins, opioids. If it happens often enough, for long enough, you get hooked. You can’t help it.”

  Clarke feels a sound in her throat, a jagged coughing noise a bit like tearing metal. After a moment, she recognises it as laughter.

  “I’m not making it up!” Ballard insists. “You can look it up yourself if you don’t believe me! Don’t you know how many abused children spend their whole lives hooked on wife beaters or self-mutilation or free-fall—”

  “And it makes them happy, is that it?” Clarke asks with cold disdain. “They enjoy getting raped, or punched out, or—”

  “No, of course you’re not happy!” Ballard cuts in. “But what you feel, that’s probably the closest you’ve ever come. So you confuse the two, you look for stress anywhere you can find it. It’s physiological addiction, Lenie. You ask for it. You always asked for it.”

  I ask for it. Ballard has been reading, and Ballard knows: Life is pure electrochemistry. No use explaining how it feels. No use explaining that there are far worse things than being beaten up. There are even worse things than being held down and raped by your own father. There are the times between, when nothing happens at all. When he leaves you alone, and you don’t know for how long. You sit across the table from him, forcing yourself to eat while your bruised insides try to knit themselves back together; and he pats you on the head and smiles at you, and you know the reprieve has already lasted too long, he’s going to come for you tonight, or tomorrow, or maybe the next day.

  Of course I asked for it. How else could I get it over with?

  “Listen,” Clarke says. Her voice is shaking. She takes a deep breath, tries again. “You’re completely wrong. Completely. You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  But Ballard shakes her head. “Sure I do, Lenie. Believe it. You’re hooked on your own pain, and so you go out there and keep daring the rift to kill you, and eventually it will, don’t you see? That’s why you shouldn’t be here. That’s why we have to get you back.”

  Clarke stands up. “I’m not going back.” She turns to the hatch.

  Ballard reaches out toward her. “Listen, you’ve got to stay and hear me out. There’s more.”

  Clarke looks down at her with complete indifference. “Thanks for your concern. But I can go any time I want to.”

  “You go out there now and you’ll give everything away, they’re watching us! Can’t you figure it out yet?” Ballard’s voice is rising. “Listen, they knew about you! They were looking for someone like you! They’ve been testing us, they don’t know yet what kind of person works out better down here, so they’re watching and waiting to see who cracks first! This whole program is still experimental, can’t you see that? Everyone they’ve sent down—you, me, Ken Lubin and Lana Cheung, it’s all part of some cold-blooded test…”

  “And you’re failing it,” Clarke says softly. “I see.”

  “They’re using us, Lenie—don’t go out there!”

  Ballard’s fingers grasp at Clarke like the suckers of an octopus. Clarke pushes them away. She undogs the hatch and pushes it open. She hears Ballard rising behind her.

  “You’re sick!” Ballard screams. Something smashes into the back of Clarke’s head. She goes sprawling out into the corridor. One arm smacks painfully against a cluster of pipes as she falls.

  She rolls to one side and raises her arms to protect herself. But Ballard just steps over her and stalks into the lounge.

  I’m not afraid, Clarke notes, getting to her feet. She hit me, and I’m not afraid. Isn’t that odd …

  From somewhere nearby, the sound of shattering glass.

  Ballard is shouting in the lounge. “The experiment’s over! Come on out, you fucking ghouls!”

  Clarke follows the corridor, steps out of it. Pieces of the lounge mirror hang like great jagged stalactites in their frame. Splashes of glass litter the floo
r.

  On the wall, behind the broken mirror, a fisheye lens takes in every corner of the room.

  Ballard is staring into it. “Did you hear me? I’m not playing your stupid games any more! I’m through performing!”

  The quartzite lens stares back impassively.

  So you were right, Clarke muses. She remembers the sheet in Ballard’s cubby. You figured it out, you found the pickups in your own cubby, and Ballard, my dear friend, you didn’t tell me.

  How long have you known?

  Ballard looks around, sees Clarke. “You’ve got her fooled, all right,” she snarls at the fisheye, “but she’s a goddamned basket case! She’s not even sane! Your little tests don’t impress me one fucking bit!”

  Clarke steps toward her.

  “Don’t call me a basket case,” she says, her voice absolutely level.

  “That’s what you are!” Ballard shouts. “You’re sick! That’s why you’re down here! They need you sick, they depend on it, and you’re so far gone you can’t see it! You hide everything behind that—that mask of yours, and you sit there like some masochistic jellyfish and just take anything anyone dishes out—you ask for it…”

  That used to be true, Clarke realizes as her hands ball into fists. That’s the strange thing. Ballard begins to back away; Clarke advances, step by step. It wasn’t until I came down here that I learned that I could fight back. That I could win. The rift taught me that, and now Ballard has too …

  “Thank you,” Clarke whispers, and hits Ballard hard in the face.

  Ballard goes over backwards, collides with a table. Clarke calmly steps forward. She catches a glimpse of herself in a glass icicle; her capped eyes seem almost luminous.

  “Oh Jesus,” Ballard whimpers. “Lenie, I’m sorry.”

  Clarke stands over her. “Don’t be,” she says. She sees herself as some sort of exploding schematic, each piece neatly labelled. So much anger in here, she thinks. So much hate. So much to take out on someone.

  She looks at Ballard, cowering on the floor.

  “I think,” Clarke says, “I’ll start with you.”

  But her therapy ends before she can even get properly warmed up. A sudden noise fills the lounge, shrill, periodic, vaguely familiar. It takes a moment for Clarke to remember what it is. She lowers her foot.

  Over in the Communications cubby, the telephone is ringing.

  * * *

  Jeanette Ballard is going home today.

  For over an hour the ’scaphe has been dropping deeper into midnight. Now the Systems monitor shows it settling like a great bloated tadpole onto Beebe’s docking assembly. Sounds of mechanical copulation reverberate and die. The overhead hatch drops open.

  Ballard’s replacement climbs down, already mostly ’skinned, staring impenetrably from eyes without pupils. His gloves are off; his ’skin is open up to the forearms. Clarke sees the faint scars running along his wrists, and smiles a bit inside.

  Was there another Ballard up there, waiting, she wonders, in case I had been the one who didn’t work out?

  Out of sight down the corridor, a hatch creaks open. Ballard appears in shirtsleeves, one eye swollen shut, carrying a single suitcase. She seems about to say something, but stops when she sees the newcomer. She looks at him for a moment. She nods briefly. She climbs into the belly of the ’scaphe without a word.

  Nobody calls down to them. There are no salutations, no morale-boosting small talk. Perhaps the crew have been briefed. Perhaps they’ve simply figured it out. The docking hatch swings shut. With a final clank, the ’scaphe disengages.

  Clarke walks across the lounge and looks into the camera. She reaches between mirror fragments and rips its power line from the wall.

  We don’t need this any more, she thinks, and she knows that somewhere far away, someone agrees.

  She and the newcomer appraise each other with dead white eyes.

  “I’m Lubin,” he says at last.

  Ballard was right again, she realizes. Untwisted, we’d be of no use at all.

  But she doesn’t mind. She won’t be going back.

  MOTHER LODE

  Phyllis Gotlieb

  In his chapter on “The Establishment of Canadian Science Fiction (1958–83)” in his scholarly history, Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, David Ketterer begins: “Unquestionably, Phyllis Gotlieb was the key figure during this ‘establishment’ period of Canadian SF, in spite of the fact that she is better known as a poet.… The quantity and quality of her SF output were unrivaled. Indeed, such was the paucity of real competition, it might be argued that from the sixties to the early eighties Phyllis Gotlieb was Canadian SF. From a purist point of view, she may still be.” Not until the work of William Gibson and Donald Kingsbury in the 1980’s did another SF writer in Canada have anywhere near the impact on the world SF community of Phyllis Gotlieb (and not until the 1980’s was there any real consciousness in the world community that Spider Robinson, living on a commune in Canada, had become a Canadian SF writer). She has published five books of poetry, written five radio plays, and a mainstream novel, Why Should I Have All the Grief? (Toronto, 1969). But the majority of her writing has been SF.

  Gotlieb’s first SF story was published in 1959 and her first novel, still her most famous, Sunburst in 1964 by Fawcett Books in the U.S. Many other excellent stories appeared over the next thirty years, including her Nebula Award nominee novella, “Son of the Morning,” which became the title story of her only short story collection in 1983. Only one of her stories was originally published in Canada; all the rest first appeared in the U.S. SF magazines and original anthologies, until the late 1980’s and the advent of Tesseracts, the second volume of which Gotlieb coedited. She also published five more SF novels between 1976 and 1989. She is unquestionably the dean of Canadian SF writers.

  It is extraordinarily appropriate, given the evolution of Canadian SF in the 1980’s and beyond, that the leading writer was a woman and a poet, especially given that the other leading figure to whom Canadian SF writers could look in the eighties as a role model was Judith Merril. Each of them in her own way stood for an intimate connection of SF to contemporary literature. And for a distinctly political commitment. Both had grown and flourished in the American SF publishing field (still the leader in SF publishing) and could lend authority to a nascent SF movement in the mid-eighties.

  We have chosen “Mother Lode” for this book as a representative of Gotlieb’s finely crafted SF and as an example of her mastery of the conventional forms of standard science fiction in the early 1970’s. It is notable that the central character is a competent, intelligent woman, the one unconventional element in this quietly subversive story.

  * * *

  The Amsu spend their lifetime foraging in a zigzag course between the ice rings and the asteroid moons of Epictetus VI, called Apikiki by most of its inhabitants. The local name provokes laughter among some visitors, but the Amsu do not. They are a kilometer in length, and occasionally the young and ignorant ones try to engulf a ship; since they are protected by GalFed, these incidents lead to embarrassing complications.

  Amsuwlle was old and wise: she ate ore, drank ice and kept on course. When the Surveyor Limbo, a fast cruiser, docked with her on short notice, she extruded her siphon, planted it smartly over the lock door with a solid flump, paced the ship without wobble or quiver till the door opened, and flooded the lock with cold water.

  :Good luck.: Threyha was Sector Co-ordinator and ESP on the Limbo. She sent a last picture of herself from her tank, waving a languid scaly hand.

  :Thank you.: For nothing. Elena Cortez was waiting in a wetsuit with oxygen tanks; the current whirled her like a top and pulled her into the tube. It sealed behind her and retracted, pleating as it went, to the vast phosphorescent chamber of Amsuwlle’s gorge.

  She spun in the dim turbulence, fighting ore chunks and luminous gas bubbles and trying to muffle an explosion of awful panic. Out! Out! Out!

  :What a pity to cause you such inconvenie
nce.:

  A valve opened close by and decanted her into a spherical cavity; the rocks and liquids sucked out, the wet walls squeezed her gently, :Never fear, Zaf is here!: the sinus filled with gas, and she hung in its center, then spiraled toward the wall and landed in a puddle of silt. Amsuwlle had begun to spin.

  :The air is quite good, my dear. Welcome aboard!:

  She pulled off the mask. There was air all right, cold and damp; it smelled of stale water and wet metal, with an overtone of tart cool flesh like a melon’s and no hint of decay. She unbuckled the tanks, shivering, scrubbing at her face with cold crinkled hands to wipe away the sweat of fear and embarrassment. She watched the faint ripples of light on the walls, listened to the whish and slap of water, the suck and blubber of valves, and seven or eight hearts going boom, whicker, thack, flub, tickatick with no ascertainable co-ordination, as if a clockmaker had set all his timepieces going at once and the grandfathers, alarms, turnips, electrics, chronometers went on telling their own time.

  A round red glow of light grew on the dark wall before her, and something like a black arm came through, tipped with two horns instead of fingers, one of them hung with a penlight.

  “Well, Zaf, I am a terrible coward. Anyway, it is good to see you again.”

  Zaf pulled his length through the valve. He was about the size and thickness of a python, and except for his gleaming blackness and his horns, looked much like an annelid worm. He smelt faintly of sulfur compounds.

  “A great pleasure,” he said, and dipped his anterior end. It had a mouth and behind that a silver light-sensitive band. The air was not good for him: he was strapped with a tank, and tubes ran into several of his gill slits; with the free ones he manipulated air into speech. He was an ESP but also the soul of tact; he used his strange warble to communicate with all speaking creatures.

  A Solthree pushed his way through, a tall heavy man with red hair and beard. “I’m Roberts,” he said. “I suppose Zaf’s told you who we are. Jones is spraying and Takashima’s sleeping. God, it’s cold in here.” He rubbed his hands, twitched his eyes in every direction except hers. “You’ll want a change and a hot drink. No alcohol on board, I’m afraid.”