The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  At that he smiled, slowly this time. He said nothing, but he raised his glass to me. I raised mine, imitating him, and we drank.

  Next day he had the books delivered to our school. When we opened and shelved them, we realized we had a great treasure. “There’s nothing like this at the University,” said one of the teachers, who had studied there for a year.

  There were histories and anthropologies of Werel and of the worlds of the Ekumen, works of philosophy and politics by Werelians and by people of other worlds, there were compendiums of literature, poetry, and stories, encyclopedias, books of science, atlases, dictionaries. In a corner of one of the crates were my own few books, my own treasure, even that first little crude “History of Yeowe, Printed at Yeowe University in the Year One of Liberty.” Most of my books I left in the library, but I took that one and a few others home for love, for comfort.

  I had found another love and comfort not long since. A child at school had brought me a present, a spotted-cat kitten, just weaned. The boy gave it to me with such loving pride that I could not refuse it. When I tried to pass it on to another teacher they all laughed at me. “You’re elected, Rakam!” they said. So unwillingly I took the little being home, afraid of its frailty and delicacy and near to feeling a disgust for it. Women in the beza at Zeskra had had pets, spotted cats and foxdogs, spoiled little animals fed better than we were. I had been called by the name of a pet animal once.

  I alarmed the kitten taking it out of its basket, and it bit my thumb to the bone. It was tiny and frail but it had teeth. I began to have some respect for it.

  That night I put it to sleep in its basket, but it climbed up on my bed and sat on my face until I let it under the covers. There it slept perfectly still all night. In the morning it woke me by dancing on me, chasing dustmotes in a sunbeam. It made me laugh, waking, which is a pleasant thing. I felt that I had never laughed very much, and wanted to.

  The kitten was all black, its spots showing only in certain lights, black on black. I called it Owner. I found it pleasant to come home evenings to be greeted by my little Owner.

  Now for the next half year we were planning the great demonstration of women. There were many meetings, at some of which I met the Sub-Envoy again, so that I began to look for him. I liked to watch him listen to our arguments. There were those who argued that the demonstration must not be limited to the wrongs and rights of women, for equality must be for all. Others argued that it should not depend in any way on the support of foreigners, but should be a purely Yeowan movement. Mr. Yehedarhed listened to them, but I got angry. “I’m a foreigner,” I said. “Does that make me no use to you? That’s owner talk—as if you were better than other people!” And Dr. Yeron said, “I will believe equality is for all when I see it written in the Constitution of Yeowe.” For our Constitution, ratified by a world vote during the time I was at Hagayot, spoke of citizens only as men. That is finally what the demonstration became, a demand that the Constitution be amended to include women as citizens, provide for the secret ballot, and guarantee the right to free speech, freedom of the press and of assembly, and free education for all children.

  I lay down on the train tracks along with seventy thousand women, that hot day. I sang with them. I heard what that sounds like, so many women singing together, what a big, deep sound it makes.

  I had begun to speak in public again when we were gathering women for the great demonstration. It was a gift I had, and we made use of it. Sometimes gang boys or ignorant men would come to heckle and threaten me, shouting, “Bosswoman, Ownerwoman, black cunt, go back where you came from!” Once when they were yelling that, go back, go back, I leaned into the microphone and said, “I can’t go back. We used to sing a song on the plantation where I was a slave,” and I sang it,

  O, O, Ye-o-we,

  Nobody never comes back.

  The singing made them be still for a moment. They heard it, that awful grief, that yearning.

  After the great demonstration the unrest never died down, but there were times that the energy flagged, the Movement didn’t move, as Dr. Yeron said. During one of those times I went to her and proposed that we set up a printing house and publish books. This had been a dream of mine, growing from that day in Hagayot when Seugi had touched her words and wept.

  “Talk goes by,” I said, “and all the words and images in the net go by, and anybody can change them, but books are there. They last. They are the body of history, Mr. Yehedarhed says.”

  “Inspectors,” said Dr. Yeron. “Until we get the free press amendment, the Chiefs aren’t going to let anybody print anything they didn’t dictate themselves.”

  I did not want to give up the idea. I knew that in Yotebber Region we could not publish anything political, but I argued that we might print stories and poems by women of the region. Others thought it a waste of time. We discussed it back and forth for a long time. Mr. Yehedarhed came back from a trip to the Embassy, up north in the Old Capital. He listened to our discussions, but said nothing, which disappointed me. I had thought that he might support my project.

  One day I was walking home from school to my apartment, which was in a big, old, noisy house not far from the levee. I liked the place because my windows opened into the branches of trees, and through the trees I saw the river, four miles wide here, easing along among sand bars and reed beds and willow isles in the dry season, brimming up the levees in the wet season when the rainstorms scudded across it. That day as I came near the house, Mr. Yehedarhed appeared, with two sour-faced policewomen close behind him as usual. He greeted me and asked if we might talk. I was confused and did not know what to do but to invite him up to my room.

  His guards waited in the lobby. I had just the one big room on the third floor. I sat on the bed and the Sub-Envoy sat in the chair. Owner went round and round his legs, saying roo? roo?

  I had observed often that the Sub-Envoy took pleasure in disappointing the expectations of the Chief and his cohorts, who were all for pomp and fleets of cars and elaborate badges and uniforms. He and his policewomen went all over the city, all over Yotebber, in his government car or on foot. People liked him for it. They knew, as I knew now, that he had been assaulted and beaten and left for dead by a World Party gang his first day here, when he went out afoot alone. The city people liked his courage and the way he talked with everybody, anywhere. They had adopted him. We in the Liberation Movement thought of him as “our Envoy,” but he was theirs, and the Chief’s too. The Chief may have hated his popularity, but he profited from it.

  “You want to start a publishing house,” he said, stroking Owner, who fell over with his paws in the air.

  “Dr. Yeron says there’s no use until we get the Amendments.”

  “There’s one press on Yeowe not directly controlled by the government,” Mr. Yehedarhed said, stroking Owner’s belly.

  “Look out, he’ll bite,” I said. “Where is that?”

  “At the University. I see,” Mr. Yehedarhed said, looking at his thumb. I apologized. He asked me if I was certain that Owner was male. I said I had been told so, but never had thought to look. “My impression is that your Owner is a lady,” Mr. Yehedarhed said, in such a way that I began to laugh helplessly.

  He laughed along with me, sucked the blood off his thumb, and went on. “The University never amounted to much. It was a Corporation ploy—let the assets pretend they’re going to college. During the last years of the War it was closed down. Since Liberation Day it’s reopened and crawled along with no one taking much notice. The faculty are mostly old. They came back to it after the War. The National Government gives it a subsidy because it sounds well to have a University of Yeowe, but they don’t pay it any attention, because it has no prestige. And because many of them are unenlightened men.” He said this without scorn, descriptively. “It does have a printing house.”

  “I know,” I said. I reached out for my old book and showed it to him.

  He looked through it for a few minutes. His face was curiou
sly tender as he did so. I could not help watching him. It was like watching a woman with a baby, a constant, changing play of attention and response.

  “Full of propaganda and errors and hope,” he said at last, and his voice too was tender. “Well, I think this could be improved upon. Don’t you? All that’s needed is an editor. And some authors.”

  “Inspectors,” I warned, imitating Dr. Yeron.

  “Academic freedom is an easy issue for the Ekumen to have some influence upon,” he said, “because we invite people to attend the Ekumenical Schools on Hain and Ve. We certainly want to invite graduates of the University of Yeowe. But of course, if their education is severely defective because of the lack of books, of information.…”

  I said, “Mr. Yehedarhed, are you supposed to subvert government policies?” The question broke out of me unawares.

  He did not laugh. He paused for quite a long time before he answered. “I don’t know,” he said. “So far the Ambassador has backed me. We may both get reprimanded. Or fired. What I’d like to do…” His strange eyes were right on me again. He looked down at the book he still held. “What I’d like is to become a Yeowan citizen,” he said. “But my usefulness to Yeowe, and to the Liberation Movement, is my position with the Ekumen. So I’ll go on using that, or misusing it, till they tell me to stop.”

  When he left I had to think about what he had asked me to do. That was to go to the University as a teacher of history, and once there to volunteer for the editorship of the press. That all seemed so preposterous, for a woman of my background and my little learning, that I thought I must be misunderstanding him. When he convinced me that I had understood him, I thought he must have very badly misunderstood who I was and what I was capable of. After we had talked about that for a while, he left, evidently feeling that he was making me uncomfortable, and perhaps feeling uncomfortable himself, though in fact we laughed a good deal and I did not feel uncomfortable, only a little as if I were crazy.

  I tried to think about what he had asked me to do, to step so far beyond myself. I found it difficult to think about. It was as if it hung over me, this huge choice I must make, this future I could not imagine. But what I thought about was him, Yehedarhed Havzhiva. I kept seeing him sitting there in my old chair, stooping down to stroke Owner. Sucking blood off his thumb. Laughing. Looking at me with his white-cornered eyes. I saw his red-brown face and red-brown hands, the color of pottery. His quiet voice was in my mind.

  I picked up the kitten, half grown now, and looked at its hinder end. There was no sign of any male parts. The little black silky body squirmed in my hands. I thought of him saying, “Your Owner is a lady,” and I wanted to laugh again, and to cry. I stroked the kitten and set her down, and she sat sedately beside me, washing her shoulder. “Oh poor little lady,” I said. I don’t know who I meant. The kitten, or Lady Tazeu, or myself.

  He had said to take my time thinking about his proposal, all the time I wanted. But I had not really thought about it at all when, the next day but one, there he was, on foot, waiting for me as I came out of the school. “Would you like to walk on the levee?” he said.

  I looked around.

  “There they are,” he said, indicating his cold-eyed bodyguards. “Everywhere I am, they are, three to five meters away. Walking with me is dull, but safe. My virtue is guaranteed.”

  We walked down through the streets to the levee and up onto it in the long early evening light, warm and pink-gold, smelling of river and mud and reeds. The two women with guns walked along just about four meters behind us.

  “If you do go to the University,” he said after a long silence, “I’ll be there constantly.”

  “I haven’t yet—” I stammered.

  “If you stay here, I’ll be here constantly,” he said. “That is, if it’s all right with you.”

  I said nothing. He looked at me without turning his head. I said without intending to, “I like it that I can see where you’re looking.”

  “I like it that I can’t see where you’re looking,” he said, looking directly at me.

  We walked on. A heron rose up out of a reed islet and its great wings beat over the water, away. We were walking south, downriver. All the western sky was full of light as the sun went down behind the city in smoke and haze.

  “Rakam, I would like to know where you came from, what your life on Werel was,” he said very softly.

  I drew a long breath. “It’s all gone,” I said. “Past.”

  “We are our past. Though not only that. I want to know you. Forgive me. I want very much to know you.”

  After a while I said, “I want to tell you. But it’s so bad. It’s so ugly. Here, now, it’s beautiful. I don’t want to lose it.”

  “Whatever you tell me I will hold valuable,” he said, in his quiet voice that went to my heart. So I told him what I could about Shomeke compound, and then hurried on through the rest of my story. Sometimes he asked a question. Mostly he listened. At some time in my telling he had taken my arm, I scarcely noticing at the time. When he let me go, thinking some movement I made meant I wanted to be released, I missed that light touch. His hand was cool. I could feel it on my forearm after it was gone.

  “Mr. Yehedarhed,” said a voice behind us: one of the bodyguards. The sun was down, the sky flushed with gold and red. “Better head back?”

  “Yes,” he said, “thanks.” As we turned I took his arm. I felt him catch his breath.

  I had not desired a man or a woman—this is the truth—since Shomeke. I had loved people, and I had touched them with love, but never with desire. My gate was locked.

  Now it was open. Now I was so weak that at the touch of his hand I could scarcely walk on.

  I said, “It’s a good thing walking with you is so safe.”

  I hardly knew what I meant. I was thirty years old but I was like a young girl. I had never been that girl.

  He said nothing. We walked along in silence between the river and the city in a glory of failing light.

  “Will you come home with me, Rakam?” he said.

  Now I said nothing.

  “They don’t come in with us,” he said, very low, in my ear, so that I felt his breath.

  “Don’t make me laugh!” I said, and began crying. I wept all the way back along the levee. I sobbed and thought the sobs were ceasing and then sobbed again. I cried for all my sorrows, all my shames. I cried because they were with me now and were me and always would be. I cried because the gate was open and I could go through at last, go into the country on the other side, but I was afraid to.

  When we got into the car, up near my school, he took me in his arms and simply held me, silent. The two women in the front seat never looked round.

  We went into his house, which I had seen once before, an old mansion of some owner of the Corporation days. He thanked the guards and shut the door. “Dinner,” he said. “The cook’s out. I meant to take you to a restaurant. I forgot.” He led me to the kitchen, where we found cold rice and salad and wine. After we ate he looked at me across the kitchen table and looked down again. His hesitance made me hold still and say nothing. After a long time he said, “Oh, Rakam! will you let me make love to you?”

  “I want to make love to you,” I said. “I never did. I never made love to anyone.”

  He got up smiling and took my hand. We went upstairs together, passing what had been the entrance to the men’s side of the house. “I live in the beza,” he said, “in the harem. I live on the women’s side. I like the view.”

  We came to his room. There he stood still, looking at me, then looked away. I was so frightened, so bewildered, I thought I could not go to him or touch him. I made myself go to him. I raised my hand and touched his face, the scars by his eye and on his mouth, and put my arms around him. Then I could hold him to me, closer and closer.

  Some time in that night as we lay drowsing entangled I said, “Did you sleep with Dr. Yeron?”

  I felt Havzhiva laugh, a slow, soft laugh in his belly, whic
h was against my belly. “No,” he said. “No one on Yeowe but you. And you, no one on Yeowe but me. We were virgins, Yeowan virgins.… Rakam, araha.…” He rested his head in the hollow of my shoulder and said something else in a foreign language and fell asleep. He slept deeply, silently.

  Later that year I came up north to the University, where I was taken on the faculty as a teacher of history. By their standards at that time, I was competent. I have worked there ever since, teaching and as editor of the press.

  As he had said he would be, Havzhiva was there constantly, or almost.

  The Amendments to the Constitution were voted, by secret ballot, mostly, in the Yeowan Year of Liberty 18. Of the events that led to this, and what has followed, you may read in the new three-volume History of Yeowe from the University Press. I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man’s and one woman’s love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free.

  STARSHIP DAY

  Ian R. MacLeod

  British writer Ian R. MacLeod is another writer who is in contention, along with authors such as Greg Egan, Paul J. McAuley, and Stephen Baxter, for the title of hottest new writers of the nineties to date. Although he has yet to publish any novels, perhaps giving prolific novelist Egan an edge, MacLeod’s work continues to grow in power and deepen in maturity as the decade progresses, and he published a slew of strong stories in the first years of the nineties in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Amazing, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, among other markets. Several of these stories made the cut for one or another of the various “best-of-the-year” anthologies, including appearances here in our Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Annual Collections. In 1990, in fact, he appeared in three different best-of-the-year anthologies with three different stories, certainly a rare distinction. He has completed his first novel, and is at work on another. Upcoming is his first short story collection. MacLeod lives with his wife and young daughter in the West Midlands of England.