The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  “That is why sexual contact with hostages is universally forbidden,” Krenya said. “Tell us what you think happened.”

  Not what did happen—what you think happened. Lambert took heart.

  Anne said, “Master Culhane bade me meet him at a place…it is a small alcove beside a short flight of stairs near the kitchens…He bade me meet him there at night. Frightened, I went.”

  “Visuals,” Krenya said in a tight voice.

  The virtual square reappeared. Anne, in the same white nightdress in which she had been taken hostage, crept from her chamber and along the corridor, her body heat registering in infrared. Down the stairs, around to the kitchens, into the cubbyhole formed by the flight of steps, themselves oddly angled as if they had been added, or altered, after the main structure was built, after the monitoring system installed…Anne dropped to her knees and crept forward beside the isolated stairs. And disappeared.

  Lambert gasped. A time hostage was under constant surveillance. That was a basic condition of their permit; there was no way the Boleyn bitch could escape constant monitoring. But she had.

  “Master Culhane was already there,” Anne said in a dull voice. “He…he used me ill there.”

  The room was awash with sound. Krenya said over it, “Mistress Boleyn—there is no visual evidence that Master Culhane was there. He has sworn he was not. Can you offer any proof that he met you there? Anything at all?”

  “Yes. Two arguments, my Lord. First: How would I know there were not spying devices in but this one hidden alcove? I did not design this castle; it is not mine.”

  Krenya’s face showed nothing. “And the other argument?”

  “I am pregnant with Master Culhane’s child.”

  Pandemonium. Krenya rapped for order. When it was finally restored, he said to Brill, “Did you know of this?”

  “No, I…it was a hostage’s right by the Accord to refuse intrusive medical treatment… She has been healthy.”

  “Mistress Boleyn, you will be examined by a doctor immediately.”

  She nodded assent. Watching her, Lambert knew it was true. Anne Boleyn was pregnant, and had defeated herself thereby. But she did not know it yet.

  Lambert fingered the knowledge, seeing it as a tangible thing, cold as steel.

  “How do we know,” Krenya said, “that you were not pregnant before you were taken hostage?”

  “It was but a month after my daughter Elizabeth’s birth, and I had the white-leg. Ask one of your experts if a woman would bed a man then. Ask a woman expert in the women of my time. Ask Lady Mary Lambert.”

  Heads in the room turned. Ask whom? Krenya said, “Ask whom?” An aide leaned toward him and whispered something. He said, “We will have her put on the witness list.”

  Anne said, “I carry Michael Culhane’s child. I, who could not carry a prince for the king.”

  Krenya said, almost powerlessly, “That last has nothing to do with this investigation, Mistress Boleyn.”

  She only looked at him.

  They called Brill to testify, and he threw up clouds of probability equations that did nothing to clarify the choice of Anne over Henry as holy hostage. Was the woman right? Had there been a staff meeting to choose between the candidates identified by the Rahvoli applications, and had someone said of two very close candidates, “We should think about the effect on the Institute as well as on history…”? Had someone been developing a master theory based on a percentage of women influencing history? Had someone had an infatuation with the period, and chosen by that what should be altered? Lambert would never know. She was an intern.

  Had been an intern.

  Culhane was called. He denied seducing Anne Boleyn. The songs on the lute, the descriptions of her brother’s death, the bastardization of Elizabeth—all done to convince her that what she had been saved from was worse than where she had been saved to. Culhane felt so much that he made a poor witness, stumbling over his words, protesting too much.

  Lambert was called. As neutrally as possible she said, “Yes, Mr. Premier, historical accounts show that Queen Anne was taken with white-leg after Elizabeth’s birth. It is a childbed illness. The legs swell up and ache painfully. It can last from a few weeks to months. We don’t know how long it lasted—would have lasted—for Mistress Boleyn.”

  “And would a woman with this disease be inclined to sexual activity?”

  “‘Inclined’—no.”

  “Thank you, Researcher Lambert.”

  Lambert returned to her seat. The committee next looked at visuals, hours of visuals—Culhane, flushed and tender, making a fool of himself with Anne. Anne with the little Tsarevitch, an exile trying to comfort a child torn from his mother. Helen of Troy, mad and pathetic. Brill, telling newsgrids around the solar system that the time rescue program, savior of countless lives, was run strictly in conformance with the All-World Accord of 2154. And all the time, through all the visuals, Lambert waited for what was known to everyone in that room except Anne Boleyn: She could not pull off in this century what she might have in Henry’s. The paternity of a child could be genotyped in the womb. Who? Mark Smeaton, after all? Another miscarriage from Henry, precipitately gotten and unrecorded by history? Thomas Wyatt, her most faithful cousin and cavalier?

  After the committee had satisfied itself that it had heard enough, everyone but Forum delegates was dismissed. Anne, Lambert saw, was led away by a doctor. Lambert smiled to herself. It was already over. The Boleyn bitch was defeated.

  The All-World Forum investigative committee deliberated for less than a day. Then it issued a statement: The child carried by holy hostage Anne Boleyn had not been sired by Researcher Michael Culhane. Its genotypes matched no one’s at the Institute for Time Research. The Institute, however, was guilty of two counts of hostage mistreatment. The Institute’s charter as an independent, tax-exempt organization was revoked. Toshio Brill was released from his position, as were Project Head Michael Culhane and intern Mary Lambert. The Institute stewardship was reassigned to the Church of the Holy Hostage under the direct care of Her Holiness the high priest.

  Lambert slipped through the outside door to the walled garden. It was dusk. On a seat at the far end a figure sat, skirts spread wide, a darker shape against the dark wall. As Lambert approached, Anne looked up without surprise.

  “Culhane’s gone. I leave tomorrow. Neither of us will ever work in time research again.”

  Anne went on gazing upward. Those great dark eyes, that slim neck, so vulnerable…Lambert clasped her hands together hard.

  “Why?” Lambert said. “Why do it all again? Last time use a king to bring down the power of the church, this time use a church to—before, at least you gained a crown. Why do it here, when you gain nothing?”

  “You could have taken Henry. He deserved it; I did not.”

  “But we didn’t take Henry!” Lambert shouted. “So why?”

  Anne did not answer. She put out one hand to point behind her. Her sleeve fell away, and Lambert saw clearly the small sixth finger that had marked her as a witch. A tech came running across the half-lit garden. “Researcher Lambert—”

  “What is it?”

  “They want you inside. Everybody. The queen—the other one, Helen—she’s killed herself.”

  The garden blurred, straightened. “How?”

  “Stabbed with a silver sewing scissors hidden in her tunic. It was so quick, the researchers saw it on the monitor but couldn’t get there in time.”

  “Tell them I’m coming.”

  Lambert looked at Anne Boleyn. “You did this.”

  Anne laughed. This lady, wrote the Tower constable, hath much joy in death. Anne said, “Lady Mary—every birth is a sentence of death. Your age has forgotten that.”

  “Helen didn’t need to die yet. And the Time Research Institute didn’t need to be dismantled—it will be dismantled. Completely. But somewhere, sometime, you will be punished for this. I’ll see to that!”

  “Punished, Lady Mary? And mayhap beh
eaded?”

  Lambert looked at Anne: the magnificent black eyes, the sixth finger, the slim neck. Lambert said slowly, “You want your own death. As you had it before.”

  “What else did you leave me?” Anne Boleyn said. “Except the power to live the life that is mine?”

  “You will never get it. We don’t kill here!”

  Anne smiled. “Then how will you ‘punish’ me—‘sometime, somehow’?”

  Lambert didn’t answer. She walked back across the walled garden, toward the looming walls gray in the dusk, toward the chamber where lay the other dead queen.

  Afterword to “And Wild For to Hold”

  This is my Anne Boleyn story. It was inevitable that eventually I would write an Anne Boleyn story because she has fascinated me for forty years. Here is a woman who dared to pit her desires against those of a king, using the only weapon available to her: her sexuality. Henry VIII wanted a mistress; Anne wanted a crown. She won, and then lost it all. None of this is politically correct by the standards of our day, of course. But Anne did not have the options open to her that women have today. She could not go to college, become a stockbroker, and buy a condo in her own name.

  But how to fit Anne into a science fiction—not fantasy—story? I didn’t want to have a future time-traveler visit Anne’s time. It took far longer than it should have for me to hit on the reverse: bring Anne to the future. But why? And with what consequences?

  So that she could do the same thing again: use her sexuality to bring down a ruler and a church.

  Once I had these ideas firm in my mind, it was great fun to devise the parallels between Tudor history and my invented future. Those parallels are not exact, of course; for one thing, nobody is beheaded. Still, Culhane is Mark Smeaton, Toshio Brill is Wolsey, Her Holiness is Pope Clement. And Anne is, eternally, herself.

  “And Wild For To Hold” was nominated for the 1992 Hugo. However, it lost—to “Beggars in Spain.” I was not unhappy.

  OUT OF All THEM BRIGHT STARS

  So I’m filling the catsup bottles at the end of the night, and I’m listening to the radio Charlie has stuck up on top of a movable panel in the ceiling, when the door opens and one of them walks in. I know right away it’s one of them—no chance to make a mistake about that—even though it’s got on a nice suit and a brim hat like Humphrey Bogart used to wear in Casablanca. But there’s nobody with it, no professor or government men like on the TV show or even any students. It’s all alone. And we’re a long way out on the highway from the college.

  It stands in the doorway, blinking a little, with rain dripping off its hat. Kathy, who’s supposed to be cleaning the coffee machine behind the counter, freezes and stares with one hand holding the filter up in the air like she’s never going to move again. Just then Charlie calls out from the kitchen, “Hey, Kathy, you ask anybody who won the Trifecta?” and she doesn’t even answer him. Just goes on staring with her mouth open like she’s thinking of screaming but forgot how. And the old couple in the corner booth, the only ones left from the crowd when the movie got out, stop chewing their chocolate cream pie and stare too. Kathy closes her mouth and opens it again and a noise comes out like “Uh—errrgh…”

  Well, that got me annoyed. Maybe she tried to say “ugh” and maybe she didn’t, but here it is standing in the doorway with rain falling around it in little drops and we’re staring at it like it’s a clothes dummy and not a customer. So I think that’s not right and maybe we’re even making it feel a little bad, I wouldn’t like Kathy staring at me like that, and I dry my hands on my towel and go over.

  “Yes, sir, can I help you?” I say.

  “Table for one,” it says, like Charlie’s is some nice steak house in town. But I suppose that’s the kind of place the government men mostly take them to. And besides, its voice is polite and easy to understand, with a sort of accent but not as bad as some we get from the college. I can tell what it’s saying. I lead him to a booth in the corner opposite the old couple, who come in every Friday night and haven’t left a tip yet.

  He sits down slowly. I notice he keeps his hands on his lap, but I can’t tell if that’s because he doesn’t know what to do with them or because he thinks I won’t want to see them. But I’ve seen the close-ups on TV—they don’t look so weird to me like they do to some. Charlie says they make his stomach turn, but I can’t see it. You think he’d of seen worse meat in Vietnam. He talks enough like he did, on and on, and sometimes we even believe him.

  I say, “Coffee, sir?”

  He makes a kind of movement with his eyes. I can’t tell what the movement means, but he says in that polite voice, “No, thank you. I am unable to drink coffee,” and I think that’s a good thing because I suddenly remember Kathy’s got the filter out. But then he says, “May I have a green salad, please? With no dressing, please?”

  The rain is still dripping off his hat. I figure the government people never told him to take off his hat in a restaurant, and for some reason that tickles me and makes me feel real bold. This polite blue guy isn’t going to bother nobody, and that fool Charlie was just spouting off his mouth again.

  “The salad’s not too fresh, sir,” I say, experimental-like, just to see what he’ll say next. And it’s the truth—the salad is left over from yesterday. But the guy answers like I asked something else.

  “What is your name?” he says, so polite I know he’s really curious and not trying to start anything. And what could he start anyway, blue and with those hands? Still, you never know.

  “Sally,” I say, “Sally Gourley.”

  “I am John,” he says, and makes that movement again with his eyes. All of a sudden it tickles me—“John!” For this blue guy! So I laugh, and right away I feel sorry, like I might have hurt his feelings or something. How could you tell?

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” I say, and he takes off his hat. He does it real slow, like taking off the hat is important and means something, but all there is underneath is a bald blue head. Nothing weird like with the hands.

  “Do not apologize,” John says. “I have another name, of course, but in my own language.”

  “What is it?” I say, bold as brass, because all of a sudden I picture myself telling all this to my sister Mary Ellen and her listening real hard.

  John makes some noises with his mouth, and I feel my own mouth open because it’s not a word he says at all, it’s a beautiful sound, like a bird call only sadder. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting it, that beautiful sound right here in Charlie’s diner. It surprised me, coming out of that bald blue head. That’s all it was: surprise.

  I don’t say anything. John looks at me and says, “It has a meaning that can be translated. It means—” but before he can say what it means Charlie comes charging out of the kitchen, Kathy right behind him. He’s still got the racing form in one hand, like he’s been studying the Trifecta, and he pushes right up against the booth and looks red and furious. Then I see the old couple scuttling out the door, their jackets clutched to their fronts, and the chocolate pie half-eaten on their plates. I see they’re going to stiff me for the check, but before I can stop them Charlie grabs my arm and squeezes so hard his nails slice into my skin.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he says right to me. Not so much as a look at John, but Kathy can’t stop looking and her fist is pushed up to her mouth.

  I drag my arm away and rub it. Once I saw Charlie push his wife so hard she went down and hit her head and had to have four stitches. It was me that drove her to the emergency room.

  Charlie says, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m serving my table. He wants a salad. Large.” I can’t remember if John said a large or a small salad, but I figure a large order would make Charlie feel better. But Charlie don’t want to feel better.

  “You get him out of here,” Charlie hisses. He still doesn’t look at John. “You hear me, Sally? You get him out. The government says I gotta serve spics and niggers but it don’t
say I gotta serve him!”

  I look at John. He’s putting on his hat, ramming it onto his bald head, and half standing in the booth. He can’t get out because Charlie and me are both in the way. I expect John to look mad or upset, but except that he’s holding the muscles of his face in some different way I can’t see any change of expression. But I figure he’s got to feel something bad, and all of a sudden I’m mad at Charlie, who’s a bully and who’s got the feelings of a scumbag. I open my mouth to tell him so, plus one or two other little things I been saving up, when the door flies open and in bursts four men, and damn if they aren’t all wearing hats like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. As soon as the first guy sees John, his walk changes and he comes over slower but more purposeful-like, and then he’s talking to John and Charlie in a sincere voice like a TV anchorman giving out the news.

  I see the situation now belongs to him, so I go back to the catsup bottles. I’m still plenty burned though, about Charlie manhandling me and about Kathy rushing into the kitchen to get Charlie. She’s a flake and always has been.

  Charlie is scowling and nodding. The harder he scowls, the nicer the government guy’s voice gets. Pretty soon the government guy is smiling sweet as pie. Charlie slinks back into the kitchen, and the four men move toward the door with John in the middle of them like some high school football huddle. Next to the real men he looks stranger than he did before, and I see how really flat his face is. But then when the huddle’s right opposite my table with the catsup bottles, John breaks away and comes over to me.

  “I am sorry, Sally Gourley,” he says. And then, “I seldom have the chance to show our friendliness to an ordinary Earth person. I make so little difference!”

  Well, that throws me. His voice sounds so sad, and besides I never thought of myself as an ordinary Earth person. Who would? So I just shrug and wipe off a catsup bottle with my towel. But then John does a weird thing. He just touches my arm where Charlie squeezed it, just touches it with the palm of one of those hands. And the palm’s not slimy at all—dry, and sort of cool, and I don’t jump or anything. Instead I remember that beautiful noise when he said his other name. Then he goes out with three of the men and the door bangs behind them on a gust of rain because Charlie never fixed the air-stop from when some kids horsing around broke it last spring.