The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women

by Alex Dally MacFarlane

  I felt her cold hand – then realized it was Bel, shaking me awake.

  “Come on! I’ve bribed you an hour’s talk!”

  “Wh … ?” I started to say, then received a spare robe full in the face, and with it the realization of where we were going.

  “Hurry! Wrap yourself up!” she said.

  Doubly shrouded we slipped into the darkness of the street, the mountain air chill even in summer. The village at first seemed asleep, with the mountains looming over it as if over a cradle, the gleam of snow at their peaks like watchful eyes. But as we moved swift and silent as Loris, I noticed cracks of light under shutters, heard babies’ cries or soft talk, and saw distantly, in the gap between two buildings, a group of men carousing around a bonfire, among them Fowlds.

  “He’ll get slipped a philtre and good and proper fucked,” Bel commented.

  “That’s what he wants,” I said.

  After what seemed an age Bel finally led me into a dark doorway I slowly realized was a back entrance to the Courthouse. Inside, someone waited for us, their robe thrown completely over their head, almost like Bel beekeeping. The apparition led us up stairs of scavenged Tech concrete to the second floor, where a door was unlocked for us, then locked behind us.

  Sadry was awake, spinning Lori wool on a spindle, the Highland cure for fidgets, or using up time. I could see for the first time her scars, and her composed, indeed, queenly mien. Idris slept, her head on Sadry’s knee; she stirred as we approached, knuckling her eyes. For a long moment there was silence, before Bel fumbled under her robe and produced delicacies: fresh Lori cheese, fruit, cured meat.

  “Greetings Bel Innkeeper, greetings Northerner,” Sadry said, her voice neutral as she accepted the gifts.

  I had nothing to offer, but nonetheless pulled out my tape recorder from under my robes. Idris goggled at the device, then said to Sadry: “What, our words to be set down and used against us?”

  “For an interview,” I said, alarmed, “It’s standard practice.”

  “I didn’t agree to a Tech toy,” Sadry said. She looked at Bel. “Your intermediary never mentioned it …”

  Idris reached forward, as if to snatch away the device, and I clutched it, inadvertently activating Record. She spoke, her voice a snarl, rising … until Bel clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “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 pharmacopeic 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 mass 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 pissweak 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 passed 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 nobody 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 neighbouring House had found the charred form of Iain, a metal candleholder and 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 nobbled 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 circumstances. 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 lock-up, 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, dispassionate 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 this mountain herstory was part of me, and I was a serpent eating my own tale.

  TOMORROW IS SAINT VALENTINE’S DAY

  Tori Truslow

  Elijah Willemot Wynn: A Life • Chapter 7

  Your Strangenesses are numberless

  For each I love you all the more

  It is not me that turns from you

  But my unenchanting form.

  —Catherin Northcliffe, The Mortal Lover, 1891

  Merish song was attributed unique physical qualities even in folklore, and as with much folklore this has proved to have a factual root. We now know that their songs move through the air as particles rather than as waves, penetrating and becoming stuck under the shells of moon-floating molluscs. A layer of tissue forms over the song-grain, and a kind of pearl is formed. What remains unexplained is the remarkable fact that shells containing these pearls have recently been found on mortal shores, and when held to the ear have echoed mer-songs from over a hundred years ago.

  —Tony Peacock, “Defining Elemental Sound”,

  Modern Faery Studies, June 2008

  After the lecture tour and all the controversy that bubbled in its wake, it was suggested to Wynn by his colleagues that he leave England for a time. Not surprisingly, he embraced this advice and made preparations to visit the Tychonic Institute in Denmark. Before he could leave, however, came the announcement that was to open a new door for him, one that would lead to so many captivating insights and the promise of lasting good relations between humans and merfolk. Had he lived longer, history might have followed a very different course. But whatever did happen to Elijah Willemot Wynn? Previous biographers have latched onto wild conspiracies, but in the light of cutting-edge new research, the facts speak for themselves. We are now entering a darker chapter in his life: the academic alienation and the increasingly bizarre theories leading up to his disappearance – but alongside that, the unorthodox personal life, and at the start of it all: New Year’s Day, 1880.

  On that day, it was announced that at long last members of the public would be able to buy tickets for the Great Ice Train. Wynn was among the first to book his place. It was the moment he had dreamed of all his life: the journey to

  the moist star,

  Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands.1

  The train departed on Friday the thirteenth of February – a date now infamous in history. Horace Hunt, who was also on that fatal journey, recorded it in his memoirs:

  We stood shivering in our thick coats on that desolate Northern platform … the train rose out of the water like a ghost. We stood, gaping idiotically at it – but not Elijah. He mounted the step and strode into the carriage. Emboldened, we followed – several slipped and fell on the frozen steps, but at last we were all aboard. I had followed Elijah into the first carriage. Directly before us was the captain’s car, completely filled by the intricate engine, pipes connecting jars and tanks of strange half-substantial things. The sea glowed all around us … we gazed up through the ceiling to our destination and felt a queer tug as the Moon opened her pores. A watery clicking came from the engine; the enchanted molecules of unfrozen water thrummed through the sides of the train as it was lifted with all its captive passengers into the heavens. We were utterly silent, awestruck by the sight of the Arctic sea beneath, the vast starry expanse above, all seen through the pipes and gears of ice in the glass-green walls of this glacier shaped so much like a train.

  We gathered speed and were soon moving faster than the fastest locomotive on Earth. The rattling was just as loud as any train at home, so loud that I thought the carriages would splinter and leave us in the void above our darkened planet. To be sitting on the thick silver fur that lined seats of ice with all that space and darkness in every direction was beyond belief. I suppose I sat gaping at the sublimity of it for some time, but I eventually roused myself and had started to form some great thought that might have changed the course of philosophy and religion, when I saw the lunar surface was growing closer and closer ahead – why was the captain not slowing us down? He paid no heed to the shapes so frantically dancing in the engine’s bulbous jars – the smoke in one tank had materialised into a tangling of cuttlefish which all turned jet-black – the captain had gone as pale as the Moon’s face, staring as if he could not comprehend where he was … 1

  Hunt and Wynn were among a small handful of survivors. Many were killed by great shards of ic e as the train shattered; many more when the wet lunar air entered their lungs. Before Kristoffersen’s successful refining of sailor’s stone, the only way mortals could survive on the moon was to receive a kiss from a merwoman. An explorer of those early days recalled “a row of sirens, lovely naked bodies with hideous scaly legs and flat disklike eyes, waiting on the platform to bestow their briny kisses of life”.2 The train crashed outside the city’s dome, with no platform and no waiting merwomen. As the moon was soaking up seawater, however, merfolk would have been appearing in their moon-forms nearby. Some noticed the peril of those still living and rushed to plant kisses on the men who held their breath.

  Wynn was reached by a young mermaid who had been gathering sea-flowers for her garden, who

  Bedecked with microscopic nacre scales

  Outshined the galaxy’s starry spray.1

  Dizzy and bruised, he let her take him into the dome.

  The city, until six years before, had been mobile, washing between moon and sea with the tides. Since the construction of the dome, the merfolk could enjoy the same permanence there as in their enchanted sea-palaces – but the moon-form of their city was then a tight cluster of palatial seashells and nothing more. This would remain as the centre of the new town, but the settlement that Wynn crashed in front of was at that time still a network of industrious, rough-cut hamlets and villages around a gilded heart.

  Wynn’s rescuer and her family lived in an isolated crater by the dome’s circumference. He limped across the short distance, his feet lacerated by the fragmented train. Thus it was that he arrived at the setting of his most vivid passages: badly crippled and leaving a trail of misty blood in the air.

  They are citizens of Melzun, a family of gardeners toiling to make this young city beautiful. They live in a hollow fringed by thick multihued polypi, surrounded by glimmering rockpools and pearly boulders that serve as anchors to the long-tendrilled flowers that caress this strange, moist, salty air.

  At the bottom of the hollow, lined with living sponge, my pretty little saviour and her sisters laid out food in silver bowls. They eat lying down on their stomachs, which appears uncomfortable – but I think they are used to grazing on their bellies. We ate elongated mushrooms that reminded me of oysters, and some of the polypi from their garden – gelatinous and red; I was apprehensive of them at first but they were delicious,
although it is impossible to describe the flavour; they tasted bright – and fruits rather like oranges, but turquoise, with a taste something like spiced rum. It seems everything that grows here takes on a subtle salty taste, but it is not unpleasant.

  I spoke very falteringly in the mertongue, trying to somehow explain that I needed to find the RAEI [Royal Anthro-Elficological Institute] building. They insisted that I rest till I am recovered from the accident – they will take me to the town when I am better. So here I sit on a bed of slowly beating sponge, gazing out of this hole at the sky where sleeping nautili float weirdly in the starlight, writing this – though I don’t know when I’ll be able to send it …

  (Letter to Robert Creschen, 1880)

  His wounds healed well, “with the aid of an unpleasant, squirming unguent”, though even then the long journey on foot to the gilt shell-buildings of central Melzun must have been painful. Wynn forgot his discomfort as they drew nearer, becoming wildly excited by the symptoms of mer–human cooperation he saw around him. Man-made streetlamps held blue mer-conjured fire and drew “silent fish on gossamer wings to kiss their own reflections”. He was equally impressed by the old shell-buildings and those newly built in more human styles – in particular, the waterhouse, stocked with “great tanks of clean water that we mortals may drink, but securely sealed so no merman will touch it and dissolve”. He got as far as the first step leading to the RAEI and stopped, enraptured, at the sight of an omnibus rounding the corner, “exactly like a London bus, but with wheels encircled by delicate anemone fronds and pulled by a beast rather like an overgrown mackerel in the shape of a horse” (Letter to Nellie Bell, 1880).

  The Institute, however, was a bitter disappointment, stuffed to the top with stuffy government scholars who squinted at fins through lenses and made futile attempts to render merish architecture on paper. They did not warm to Wynn, regarding him as an amateur and his ideas dangerous. He endured their old-fashioned methods and their comments on his lack of alchemical knowledge for a month, before deciding that he would make more progress living amongst the merfolk and observing the routine of their lives. He returned to the family that had shown him such kindness on his arrival.