The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Lauren sat in her bed at the inn, a mug of mulled wine in her hands, and watched Malak pace and swear. Tamlaine sat in the room’s one chair. Neither he nor Lauren had said a word since she awoke from her faint. Malak was making up for it.

  “No letter! How can there be no letter? It’s nearly Jubilee! They exchange two more and then meet again. And I’ll be there to see it—the end. How can a story go for a thousand years and have no end? It has to end, and the Society has to be there!”

  Tamlaine shook his head. “It could have ended at any time,” he murmured. Malak stopped and stared at him in obvious disbelief. Tamlaine sighed.

  “They’re just young lovers, Malak. They haven’t seen each other in almost two years. Any one of their letters could have been the last one. They could have tired of it at any time.”

  “But, but that’s—” Malak made a flinging gesture as he turned away. “They’re the Authors! And we’re helping them tell the Story!”

  Lauren took a pensive sip of the wine. Tamlaine was right, of course. Nearly every volume in the Society library contained a chapter or two of doubts, based on tone, a casual word, or even just the handwriting in the most recent letter. “Why do you think we’ve been letting the Authoress read the Commentaries? She was doubting his sincerity, and Chinen’s a little clumsy with his wording sometimes. Your great-grandmother told her about the Commentaries, the clarifications and interpretations of his letters, and all the wisdom and advice people had been writing to her for centuries, which she’d never seen. She’s read it. She knows he’s sincere. But that doesn’t mean anything. She could have met somebody new at any time. She could have lost interest…”

  “No. It can’t end like this. What are we going to do? What am I going to do? A courier without a letter? Nobody’ll take that seriously. Nobody’s going to support us. Just think of that. Where’s the Society’s money going to come from if there’s no letters?”

  Tamlaine shrugged. “There will be no Society … if it’s true that there are no more letters.” He sighed heavily. “I’ll have to draft a letter home. Of course, now that the fortress is open we could just use their wireless and I could speak to them instantly. But I don’t like doing things that way. We take our time for a reason. We’re not locksteppers.”

  “Wait, wait.” Malak was frantic. “It’s not too late, what are you saying? The Author’s father’s forbidden it, but what does that mean? We’ll just have to contact Chinen in secret. He wants to know what Margaret said! And Lauren, you’ve got her letter memorized, don’t you? We all do.”

  Tamlaine looked uncomfortable. “Margaret doesn’t mind that we open the letters. But Chinen does. He made that clear early on. If he finds out that we’ve been reading Margaret’s words—”

  Lauren laughed bitterly. “What’s he going to do about it now? Stop using us?”

  Her words hung there. The three couriers looked at one another, until finally Tamlaine nodded.

  “I’ll hold off telling the Society for now,” he said. “We’ll find an opportunity. Chinen’s bound to come outside at some point. His father can’t follow him everywhere. We’ll approach him then. If Chinen can’t read Margaret’s words, then we’ll recite them to him.”

  * * *

  It was a sound plan, but it was three weeks before the opening came. By that time Tamlaine had drafted and redrafted his letter to the Society about ten times, and Malak was beside himself with anxiety and anger. He kept threatening to just march up to Chinen’s home and demand to see him. In week two he got into a fight with Niles, and it was clear afterward that the Westerfenns suspected something.

  Lauren did domestic work, the sorts of things she’d done every day her whole life. She cooked, cleaned her clothes, mended, shopped in the market. All the while, though, she felt a faint sense of difference, of disconnection from it all. For the first time in many years, she felt the absence of someone else’s hands in the washtub with hers; the lack of a second opinion when she hefted the potatoes at the vegetable stall. It wasn’t that somebody else should be there with her; it was more that she’d suddenly remembered that someone could have been. Disquiet filled her.

  Finally one morning Chinen came to the fortress gates and stared about for a while, then went back inside. Lauren followed and found him in one of the brightly lit arcades deep within. The open roof of the fortress let sunlight down through layers of crisscrossing buildings, all piled together like a child’s building blocks and festooned with greenery and flowers. The arcade where Chinen loitered was a balconied space overhung with freshly transplanted willow trees. Chinen stood under one, pensively examining it.

  “Not the same tree,” he said as Lauren approached. “If you look closely. This is where we met, courier. Her family was visiting. Can you believe that? They were mostly shunned, but here they were. I told her I thought it was awful how we were treating them.”

  “I memorized the letter,” Lauren blurted.

  Chinen hissed in anger, started to say something—and then his shoulders slumped. “I suppose keeping our privacy was too much to ask. You’ve read them all?” Reluctantly, she nodded.

  “Then I guess you know us better than we know ourselves.”

  “You’re just a boy and a girl who’re in love,” she said. That was simple to say—and yet the Society had revolved around them for centuries. Libraries had been written about them and their love. They had become, unexpectedly, something far bigger than they knew.

  She couldn’t tell him that. “Shall I recite her words?” He nodded.

  It was the strangest moment of her life. The words she spoke now were simple, but she’d lived with them for 28 years, and with this recitation, they were done. Delivered, and gone from her. She wouldn’t have been surprised if she woke tomorrow and couldn’t remember them at all.

  Chinen faced out over the treetops and slanting shafts of sunlight, framed by glass and near and distant vistas of lockstep life. When she was finished he stood there silently for a long time, then murmured, “They’re better than we are.”

  “Sir?”

  “I’m no ‘sir.’ I’m just a kid, remember?” She ducked her head, knowing it but still unable to react to him that way. Chinen laughed bitterly. “They’d have me. They’d have me as their son. Yet my father forbids me to contact them at all. He told me he’s setting buzz-cams after me during the Jubilee. He’s going to record everything I do, everywhere I go. Margaret and I … he’ll never let us meet.”

  “I … I’m sorry.” There was another long, awkward silence. Finally Lauren knew she would have to ask right now, or she’d lose her courage forever: “Will you write a reply?”

  He shook his head. “No. No, what’s the point?”

  Later, arguments would crowd Lauren’s mind, all the things she should have said, of course. For now her mind was a blank, her mouth dry with shock.

  Chinen turned to her, at last looking her in the eye. “Thanks for delivering the letter. You know I can’t pay you…”

  That threw her. “We’ve never asked for money!”

  He winced. “I know, I know … It’s just … It all ended so uselessly, didn’t it?” He sighed, then bowed. “Thanks. Goodbye.”

  He left her standing there. Lauren felt like an abandoned tool, unnoticed by the people walking by. Then she blinked at a sudden feeling of pressure … intensity. She turned, and in the jumble of faces on the plaza behind her, saw Niles’s face for just an instant. Then he was gone.

  * * *

  Tamlaine and Malak reacted just as she’d imagined they would. The older man, having seen much in his life, sat with his head down for a while, then raised it to the sunlight and laughed. “Well,” he said. “That shows up all our pretensions, doesn’t it?”

  They were sitting on a bench in front of the inn, and being in public was the only thing that seemed to be keeping Malak from screaming. He shifted from foot to foot, pulling at his hair and sputtering. “They can’t! They just can’t!”

  “It was Ch
inen’s decision to make,” said Tamlaine. “Never ours. All we ever committed to was delivery of the letters. Anything more than that … well, we made up.”

  “I didn’t make up the honors! The privilege of being a courier! It’s … it’s all I ever wanted! And now he’s taken it? What am I going to do?”

  Tamlaine sent him a reproachful look. “Delivery takes only a few minutes of a courier’s life, Malak. You’ll do exactly what you would have done otherwise. Work, get married, be a good citizen…”

  “But without the stipend! You had it,” he accused Lauren. “You’ve had no worries for thirty years. But what about me?”

  Lauren opened her mouth to tell him that this wasn’t about him at all, but she couldn’t say that. It was; and yet, it wasn’t Chinen’s fault, because he didn’t even know the Society existed.

  Swearing and kicking at the dirt, Malak stalked away. “Niles saw,” Lauren said to Tamlaine after he was out of earshot. “I suppose it’ll be all over the place in no time.”

  “Still.” He frowned, thinking. “The Society has existed for centuries. We’d always expected it would disband when the lovers finally met again. There’re plans for that, a whole schedule, I think. People have considered how to retire the last courier. It’s not going to be arbitrary.”

  “But … Malak never had a chance to become a courier.” I’m the last. What a terrible thought!

  “He would have been.” Tamlaine stood up and stretched. “Ah, we’ll think of something. But I should go. If the news is going to spread, I need to be the one the Society hears it from. I’m going to pack. I’ll leave in the morning.”

  She saw little more of Tamlaine that day, and nothing of Malak, who was sulking somewhere in the fortress. Lauren visited the market, took a nap in her room at the inn, and, in the end, found herself wandering along the crumbled foundations of the fortress. Lockstep bots were replacing some of the cyclopean stones with new granite, and she was watching this process when she heard a tentative cough from behind her.

  It was Kiel. He stood near the edge of the plateau, framed by crooked trees and a vista of forested peaks. He might have been watching her for a few minutes, and if so, had he had that slightly worried look on his face the whole time?

  “Hello,” she said dully.

  “Is it true?” he asked. “There will be no letter?”

  She shrugged. “Doesn’t mean Margaret won’t want to send one. We’ve two years to wait for that.”

  “Will you be there?”

  Lauren gnawed at her calloused thumb, staring out over the forested landscape. The Society’s backers were likely to pull their funds if they thought that the millennial epic of Margaret and Chinen had ended in silence. Tamlaine’s optimism aside, the Society had not been expecting this turn of events. She might not be able to afford to visit Margaret’s fortress when it woke in two years. “I suppose a Westerfenn will be there,” she said bitterly. “Your cousins must be delighted at the prospect.”

  “Actually, they’re furious. They think it’s all over.”

  “They’re probably right.”

  He was staring at her in a way she couldn’t interpret. “It really has never occurred to you that this might be a good thing?”

  “What?! Why? I—I suppose for you it is. No more humiliation at seeing us make the deliveries!”

  “No, that’s not what I—”

  “Is that what you came here to do? Gloat? Well, go ahead, there’s nothing I can do about it. Bring Niles and Powen next time, we’ll set up the stage and you can parade me around for the whole town to see!”

  “Wait, Lauren, I didn’t mean—” But she’d had enough of him, and ran, ignoring his plaintive words.

  * * *

  Tamlaine was gone in the morning, and Malak was making himself scarce, which was just as well. Lauren didn’t want to talk to anybody. She had money enough to stay until the lockstep’s doors closed again, and to get home. Theoretically her stipend would transform into a pension now that Malak was officially the courier. Whether that was really what would happen was anybody’s guess; she trusted Tamlaine to argue vigorously on her behalf. After all, this wasn’t her fault.

  The day before the lockstep was to close, however, she woke to banging on her door. She opened it a crack and saw policemen in the hall. “What’s going on?”

  “Ma’am, are you an associate of a Tamlaine de Lotness? We’re told you were seen in his company.”

  She flung the door wide. “What’s happened to Tamlaine?”

  They showed her.

  It was up to her to make a final identification of the body. He’d been found at the bottom of the spire on the other side of the rope bridge, having fallen from the roadway. The body was quite battered, but what upset Lauren was the pinched look on his face. He looked disappointed, and it was that, and not the terrible battering the rocks had done to him, that she knew would haunt her.

  It wasn’t impossible for the death to have been accidental. Tamlaine was getting on in years, and the path was treacherous in places. Lauren didn’t believe that for a second, and the first thing she said when she saw the body was “Westerfenn!”

  Kiel and his cousins were nowhere to be found, but that by itself wasn’t suspicious; things were winding down in the temporary village, with people leaving in small and large parties every few hours. The Westerfenns had no reason to be here now, any more than Lauren herself did. It wasn’t impossible that they’d simply left, and maybe they had, and maybe they’d run into Tamlaine on the road purely by chance. Malak, when she finally found him and told him, shook his head.

  “They must have followed him,” he said. “They were waiting for us at the bridge, remember? If they were willing to kill us and take the letter, they’d hardly hesitate to throw one old man over a cliff.”

  The authorities promised to hunt for the cousins, but Lauren just wanted to move on. “We’ll wait for the lockstep to close,” she told Malak. “What’s an extra day at this point. And then we’ll go to the Society headquarters ourselves, and tell them the whole story.”

  They cremated Tamlaine. People who knew the story of the couriers came to the funeral, but realtimers and locksteppers generally kept their affairs separate. There was talk about whether Chinen should be invited, but in the end the consensus was not to further disturb the Author’s family. No one tried to approach him, either to tell him about the death or to invite him to the funeral.

  Lauren understood; still, as the orange flames from the pyre rose in the night, she found herself staring resentfully at the lockstep fortress that bulked behind it. The place was all lit up, with visitors still coming and going. Somewhere inside, Chinen de Conestoga was eating, or reading, or perhaps chasing some new girl. He would never know who Tamlaine had been; that he was dead; that he had dedicated his entire life to the delivery of Chinen’s letters.

  Malak was offended, and told her so as they browsed the market for travel provisions on the last day. “We gave everything to those two! And for what? In the end, we didn’t even get a nod out of them.”

  Lauren could picture herself, at Malak’s age, posturing and pouting exactly the same way. “It was never really about them,” she said, “the couriers, the Society, none of it.”

  He stared at her. “Then why? Why help them, if not for the glory of it?”

  Lauren laughed. “What glory. They’re two young people who might be in love. There was never any glory. That was the point.”

  Still he stared. With a sigh, Lauren tried one last time: “The Society existed to celebrate that very insignificance. Chinen and Margaret, they’re nobody—but so are we all. In elevating them to epic status, the Society elevated every ordinary person. We celebrated all love, no matter how ordinary or fleeting, by celebrating theirs.”

  Malak shook his head. “There’s yams over there.” He stalked away. Lauren watched him go, hands on her hips.

  “Courier!”

  She turned. Chinen de Conestoga stood a few feet away—or
was it him? Yes—it was just that he was dressed in local garb, tough traveling clothes like hers and Malak’s. He had a pack slung over his shoulder. “Great, you’re still here!” He strode up and shook her hand—or really, in his enthusiasm, her whole arm.

  “What are you doing here?” She looked around; nobody was watching. “The fortress will be shutting up in a few hours. And we’re leaving. The market’s closing—”

  “I’m going with you!”

  And he just stood there, grinning widely, while she tried to catch up. “Wait, you—” He was dressed like a realtimer. “You’re coming with … You’re running away from home?”

  “If I stay, I won’t come of age before next Jubilee. If I leave, I’ll be an adult before Father can catch up to me.” He grinned again. “And I’ll be of age by the time Margaret’s lockstep wakes.”

  Two years … it was true. Lauren looked him over, her mind a blank; then suddenly she laughed. “You’ll make a rather outsized letter.”

  Serious now, he said, “I’ll do whatever work you need. I don’t intend to be a burden.”

  But you’re the Author! Yet he wasn’t, not anymore. Oh, how is the Society going to take this one? The shock was going to kill the old men in the library, but then, Tamlaine’s message would have been enough to do that. The investors—those few romantic and wealthy souls whose support of the Society was a kind of sacrifice to love—might rebel and pull all their funding. Or they might take Chinen’s decision as the ultimate romantic gesture, and double their support. Who could tell? Lauren found herself almost dizzy with the possibilities.

  “Come on then,” she heard herself say. “Before your father finds out.”

  * * *

  They were on the bridge when the fortress doors closed. It was late evening, and sunset burnished the side of the vast building. Lauren fancied she could hear the solid thud of the iron shields falling; the rooftop panels were already shut. There was no hurry now; people would take whatever time they needed to wrap up their business in the temporary town before heading home with the goods and wealth they’d acquired during this brief trading season.