Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 49

"Hush," she said. "Would you wake the guards? When the Northerner is like me, and like you!"

Idris's eyes rolled.

I said, my voice trembling, now I was so near to my goal, and yet not there yet: "I...we...my friends...we monitor...looking for...breakers of the rules...even in such a male-dominated society...you see, it's so important that you exist, we need a record...of women loving women...that's why I want your story!"

The gaze of these two girl lovers met, considering my plea.

I started the interview story-eater style, using the polite Highland opener of recounting my latest dream. One dream demands another, and so Sadry responded with her ghost story, continuing the theme of Nissa, which recurred as if haunting the conversation:

Sadry: My father said he got sick of it, Bryn moping, Nissa storming, and Yeny in the middle (who was not his lover) unable to make up his mind. So he went off herding....

Idris: It saved him from a dose of worm-cure!

[I thought of my dream again. If Bel had not shaken me awake, I possibly might have continued the dream, with Nissa-Sadry one snowy night serving her in-laws a Bulle herbal remedy, but combined with what from the pharmacopoeic texts in the library she knew to be sleeping pills.

Presumably she wanted everyone in the House to sleep long enough for her and her lover to elope.

Murder meant feuding, and ma.s.s murder surely a civil war. Her bad luck then, or her curse, as the Highlanders said, that the pills were contaminated, or when combined with the herbs, toxic. Ten people died at Erewhon, two more when Nissa's flight ended in an avalanche-incidentally saving, as the Bulle woman had noted, that House from a ruinous bloodprice.]

Me: What saved Mors?

[They eyed me. This I knew was the nub of the case, whether the story of Nissa had repeated with Sadry.]

Idris: He was called away to Mediate, in a dispute over some Lori.

Me: And with only two men left in the house, you acted.

Idris: They got drunk as pigs.

Me: On p.i.s.sweak Highland beer?

Idris [defensively]: Maybe they had mead.

Me: That's a luxury. You said Celat was poor.

Sadry: What is this? An interview or an interrogation?

Bel: It will help you! And you need help.

[Long pause]

Me: What happened?

Idris: I cooked for my brothers that night, and then went upstairs with sop for Sadry. We could hear roistering below, and I barred the door of the Queen's room with what I could find and move...without Mors to mediate, Sadry wasn't safe.

Sadry: The House went quiet.

Idris: I went down to see what was going on, and found my brother Iain pa.s.sed out at the table. Idye was the same, sprawled in the courtyard. Without losing a moment, I went out to the field where our two best and biggest Lori grazed. I brought them into the courtyard, found halters and saddlecloths, then tied them by the door, while I went into the house for my queen.

Sadry: I could barely walk, so she near carried me downstairs, and got me onto the Lori.

Idris: I went upstairs to get extra robes against the night air, but having a sudden idea, grabbed rags,and a haybale I had been using to re-stuff a pallet. With them I formed a mock Sadry under the blanket in the Queen's room.

Sadry: That done, just like that! We stole away into the darkness, heading for Erewhon.

Idris: [hesitant] We don't know what happened next.

Me: I hear Idye was too drunk to remember a thing.

Idris: I was right to take her! Iain went into the Queen's room!

Me: He was fuddled.

Sadry: He meant harm.

Idris: But in igniting the dummy Queen, he harmed n.o.body but himself.

Me: And the House.

[I thought again of the Inn fire, of the log imploding in a shower of sparks. Celat House and its flammable rubbish had burnt like Bel's kindling, leaving ashes-in which Mors and a party from a neighboring House had found the charred form of Iain, a metal candleholder and a long-bladed hunting knife by his side. Idye had survived, simply because he had slumped in the courtyard, out of the flame's reach.]

Sadry: We defended ourselves.

Me: I understand that, but to the extent of doing a Nissa?

Idris: That is for the court to decide.

Bel: We should stop now. The guard's shift ends soon, and I could only afford one bribe!

And she turned the recorder off. End of conversation, with the two defendants, but not with Bel, for when we got back to the Inn she stoked the fire and poured out beer for us.

I took a couple of mouthfuls, and said: "This stuff really is feeble. I reckon Idris n.o.bbled her brothers'

beer!"

Bel shrugged. "All the village thinks so, but with what?"

Now it was my turn to shrug. "I've seen a pharmacopoeia book in a museum. It described everything the Tech culture took for their ailments. So, if something drastically increased the effects of alcohol, Sadry would have known it and told Idris."

Bel pulled off her outer layer of robe. "Maybe."

"But how did they get hold of it?" I wondered.

"The House was full of Scavenged goods, remember?"

"Good point. Anything could have been stored there." I rolled out on the rug again, watching flames.

Bel hunkered down beside me. "Well, if we are play judges, and have solved the mystery, what do we do now, given the important difference between this case and Nissa's? Idris and Sadry survived, and that means they are answerable for bloodprice."

"Even for an accidental death," I replied, with a sinking feeling.

"And the fratricide makes it worse. Not to mention burning the House, and stealing Idris, the one thing Celat had to barter on the marriage market."

I supped more beer. "Extenuating circ.u.mstances. Sadry escaped enforced marriage."

"But she also broke the Rule."

"Into little pieces," I finished, putting down the mug. "They don't stand much of a chance, do they?"

Bel put her hand on my shoulder. "That was why I took you to the lockup, to collect their story, and disseminate it over the North."

I turned, and her grip grew firmer, kneading me.

"And, because I wanted you to be grateful to me."

I laughed and quoted Idris: "Do you mean that? Do you really mean that?"

I had come to the mountains a detached, dispa.s.sionate observer, with a story to eat. But, almost despite myself, the case study of Sadry and Idris, and the other like-minded women of the Highlands had come to involve me. Taking Bel's hand in mine, I touched her bees and felt them slightly raised-a cicatrice. Tonight, we would play Queens of the Inn, and the two bees would crawl all over my skin. And tomorrow, to celebrate, I would go to the market tattooist and mark myself with the snake-for now thismountain herstory was part of me, and I was a serpent eating my own tale.

About the Editor David G. Hartwell is a senior editor at Tor/Forge Books. He is the author of Age of Wonders and the editor of many anthologies, including The Dark Descent, The World Treasury of Science Fiction, and a number of Christmas anthologies. He has won the Eaton Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Poll and has been nominated for the Hugo Award twenty-eight times to date.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fict.i.tiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

YEAR'S BEST SF 5.

"Everywhere" copyright 1999 by Geoff Ryman. The author was specially commissioned to write this story by Artists Agency as part of its Visions of Utopia project, which enabled people in the North of England fo explore visions of a better future.

"Evolution Never Sleeps" copyright 1998 by Elisabeth Malartre.

"s.e.xual Dimorphism" copyright 1999 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

"Game of the Century" copyright 1999 by Robert Reed.

"Secrets of the Alien Reliquary" copyright 1998 by Michael Bishop. First published in the author's collection Time Pieces with a subsequent appearance in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (July 1999).

"Kinds of Strangers" copyright 1999 by Sarah Zettel. Originally published in a.n.a.log Science Fiction and Fact, October 1999.

"Visit the Sins" copyright 1999 by Cory Doctorow. Originally published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 1999.

"Border Guards" copyright 1999 by Greg Egan. First published in Interzone #148, October 1999.

"Macs" copyright 1999 by Terry Bisson. Originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1999. Reprinted here by permission of the author and his agent, Susan Ann Protter.

"Written in Blood" copyright 1999 by Chris Lawson. First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.

"Has Anybody Seen Junie Moon?" copyright 1999 by Gene Wolfe. First appeared in Moon Shots; reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

"The Blue Planet" copyright 1999 by Robert J. Sawyer. First published as "Mars Reacts!" in The Globe and Mail: Canada's National Newspaper, December 11, 1999.

"Lifework" copyright 1999 by Mary Soon Lee. First appeared in Interzone #144, June 1999.

"Rosetta Stone" copyright 1999 by Fred Lerner.

"An Apollo Asteroid" copyright 1999 by Brain W. Aldiss.

"100 Candles" copyright 1999 by Curt Wohleber.

"Democritus' Violin" copyright 1999 by G. David Nordley. First published in a.n.a.log Science Fiction and Fact, April 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Fossil Games" copyright 1999 by Tom Purdom. First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1999.

"Valour" copyright 1999 by Chris Beckett.

"Huddle" copyright 1999 by Stephen Baxter.

"Ashes and Tombstones" copyright 1999 by Brain M. Stableford. First published in Moon Shots.

Peter Crowther, ed., DAW Books.

"Ancient Engines" copyright 1999 by Michael Swanwick. First appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. "Freckled Figure" copyright 1992 by Hiroe Suga. Translated from j.a.panese by Dana Lewis and Stephen Baxter.

"Shiva" copyright 1999 by Barry N. Malzberg.

"The Queen of Erewhon" copyright 1999 by Lucy Suss.e.x.