Somewhere behind Ellie a hand went up. Ellie knew one had because Mrs. Smith smiled. “Yes, Richard. What’s your answer?”
Dick Hickman said, “They should come together so that everybody will be happier. That’s what I think.”
Betsy Broadwick said, “Sometimes a lot of work takes more people.”
Ellie whispered, “What is it, Dormanna?”
Mrs. Smith smiled again. “I can see you’re thinking, Ellie. Tell the rest of us, please. Stand up.”
Ellie stood. “I think the best reason for people coming together like that is so they won’t fight each other. Only sometimes they come together but they fight anyway. That’s the worst kind of fighting, because when anybody fights like that she’s really fighting herself.”
Softly, Mrs. Smith’s hands met over and over again, applauding a dozen times or more. “Wonderful, Ellie. That’s a perfectly wonderful answer. Don’t sit down yet.”
Ellie had begun to.
“Do you have an answer for our other question, too? I’d love to hear it.”
Ellie hesitated, gnawing her lip. “I guess sometimes it’s oil wells or gold mines or something. Only lots of rich countries don’t have any of those. Then it’s mostly the people, good people who work really hard.” She paused, listening and longing to sit. “It’s freedom, too. People who are free can do the kind of work they want to, mostly, like if they want to farm they can do it if they can get some land. It’s people who want to farm who make the best farmers. So freedom and good laws.” She sat.
She remained seated that afternoon, when school was over. When the last of her classmates had trooped out, Mrs. Smith said, “I believe you want to talk to me. Am I right, Ellie? What do you want to talk about?”
“I cheated, Mrs. Smith.” It was said very softly. At Mrs. Smith’s gesture, Ellie rose and came to stand beside Mrs. Smith’s desk. “Those answers you liked so much? I—I … Well, I’ve got this imaginary playmate today and she told me.”
Mrs. Smith smiled. “You have an imaginary playmate?”
“Yes, ma’am. I dreamed about her, only when I woke up she was still there. Still here, I mean. She wanted to go to school with me. I think she’s still with me right now.”
“I see. You don’t know?”
Miserably, Ellie shook her head.
“Can I see her?” Mrs. Smith was still smiling.
“I don’t think so.” Ellie sounded doubtful and felt the same way. “She’s real little and rose-colored, and she’s in my hair. Her name’s Dormanna.”
“You don’t have head lice, do you, Ellie? Are you telling me you have head lice?”
Ellie shook her head. “No, ma’am.”
Mrs. Smith got a comb from her purse and parted Ellie’s hair several times anyway.
“Did you find Dormanna?” Ellie wanted to know.
“No. No, I didn’t. I didn’t find any head lice, either. I’m glad of that. Now listen to me, Ellie. Are you listening?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You didn’t cheat. Answers you get from an imaginary playmate count as yours. You said we needed good laws.”
Tentatively, Ellie nodded.
“That’s one of them. Suppose I were to say that Paris is a beautiful city with wonderful churches and museums, and someone were to say, ‘You cheated, Mrs. Smith. You’ve never been to Paris. You got that out of a book.’”
“That’s not cheating,” Ellie protested. “We learn things from books. That’s what books are for.”
“Exactly.” Mrs. Smith nodded. “Learning from an imaginary playmate isn’t cheating either. What you learn is coming from a hidden part of your mind. So it’s yours, just as a fact I learn from a book becomes mine.”
Betsy Broadwick had been picking wildflowers outside while she waited. “You’re smiling,” she said.
“It’s okay,” Ellie told her. Ellie’s smile became a grin. “Everything’s all right.”
“We missed the bus.”
“We can walk home,” Ellie said. “The snow’s gone, and everything’s beautiful.”
A tiny voice in Ellie’s ear chirped, “Try to remember this, Ellie. Even when you are grown-up like your mother and Mrs. Smith, you will want to remember this.”
“I won’t forget,” Ellie said.
Betsy stopped picking to look around at her. “Remember what?”
“To pick flowers for Mom,” Ellie said hurriedly. “You’re picking those for your dad, aren’t you?”
Betsy nodded.
“Well, I think my mom would like some, too.”
Betsy gestured at the patch of wildflowers.
“You found those,” Ellie said, “and you were picking them. I didn’t want to make you mad.”
“You can pick too. I won’t be mad.”
Ellie picked. They were blue cornflowers and white-and-yellow daisies for the most part. When she got home, she put them in a mason jar with plenty of water before she presented them to her mother.
When supper was over and the washing-up was done, Ellie went upstairs to do her homework at the little table in front of her window.
That was when Dormanna, who had been quiet for a long, long while, spoke again. “Will you do me a favor, Ellie? It will only take you a brief time, but it will be a very big favor for someone as small as I am. Please? Isn’t that what you say?”
“When we want a favor?” Ellie nodded vigorously. “Sure, Dormanna. Anything you want.”
“Open the window? Please?”
“I’m supposed to keep it closed at night,” Ellie said as she opened it, “but it’s not night yet. Pretty soon it will be.”
“I will be gone long before your star sets.” For a moment, Dormanna was silent. “Will you remember this day, Ellie? The flowers and the sunshine, and me riding in your ear?”
“Forever and ever,” Ellie promised.
“And I will remember you, Isn’t She A Caution. Is it all right if I call you that again? Here, at the end? Already it has made me feel better.”
Ellie nodded. There was something the matter in her throat. “There won’t be any more imaginary friends, will there? You’re the last, and when you’re gone that will be over.”
“I must rejoin all the other parts that make up our whole. Each of us returns with new data, Ellie, and the data I bear will be good for all your kind.”
Ellie was not entirely sure she understood, but she nodded anyway.
“You spoke to Mrs. Smith of people coming together, many tribes uniting to create a great and powerful nation. We do that, too. We come together to make a great and powerful us. It is because we do it that I was able to tell you what I did. Look to the sky and you may see us, all of us as one.”
Quite suddenly, there was a rose-colored Dormanna with many tiny limbs hanging in the air before Ellie’s eyes. It said something more then, but though Ellie had good ears, she could not quite make out the words.
Very swiftly, Dormanna sailed out the window. Ellie had just time enough to wave before Dormanna vanished into the twilight. Ellie was still looking for her when she saw her mother. Her mother had come out of the house carrying a flower, and it was one of the daisies Ellie had picked, not one of the wild roses Mr. Broadwick had brought that evening.
While Ellie watched, she pulled off a petal and let it fall. Then another; and it seemed to Ellie that her lips were moving, though Ellie could hear no words.
Another petal … Then she froze, staring up into the darkling sky.
Ellie looked, too, and saw a thing impossibly huge with a thousand writhing arms, a thing darker than the clouds that for half a breath blushed rose as if dyed by the setting sun.
Ellie’s mother never forgot the vast sky-thing as long as she lived. Neither has Ellie, who for some reason recalls it each time she kisses one of her granddaughters.
HOLMES SHERLOCK: A HWARHATH MYSTERY
Eleanor Arnason
Eleanor Arnason lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. “I fell in love with science fiction in
the 1950s, while living in Design House # 2 behind the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.” Growing up in a cutting-edge house-of-the-future may have influenced her. The early TV show Captain Video certainly did. Since 1973, when she published her first story, she has published six novels, two chapbooks, and more than thirty short stories. Her fourth novel, A Woman of the Iron People, won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Mythopoeic Society Award. Her fifth novel, Ring of Swords, won a Minnesota Book Award. Her short story “Dapple” won the Spectrum Award. Other short stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Sidewise, and World Fantasy awards. “Holmes Sherlock” is one of a group of stories which pretend to be fiction written by the hwarhath, an alien species first portrayed in Ring of Swords, after they encounter humanity. Another hwarhath story, “The Woman Who Fooled Death Five Times,” also came out in 2012. A collection of non-hwarhath short stories, Big Mama Stories, came out in 2013, and another of Icelandic fantasy stories, The Hidden Folk, is forthcoming.
“Holmes Sherlock: A Hwarhath Mystery” was published on the excellent, short-lived Eclipse Online, another project of editor Jonathan Strahan. The droll, mature, deadpan voice of the hwarhath fits the Holmes template to a T. This is a story with wit and real Holmesian charm.
THERE WAS A woman who fell in love with the stories about a human male named Holmes Sherlock. Her name was Amadi Kla, and she came from a town on the northeast coast of the Great Northern Continent. It became obvious, when she was a child, that she was gifted at learning. Her family sent her to a boarding school and then to college in the capital city. There she learned several languages, including English, and became a translator, working for a government department in the capital.
She did not translate military information, since that was done by hwarhath men in space. Nor did she translate technical information, since she lacked the requisite technical knowledge. Instead, she translated human fiction. “There is much to be learned from the stories people tell,” the foremost woman in her department said. “If we are going to understand humans, and we must understand them since they are our enemies, then we need to study their stories.”
The fiction came out of computers in captured human warships. At first the Department of Translation picked stories out of the human computers randomly. Most were as bad as the novels read by hwarhath young men and women. But it turned out that the humans made lists of important stories, so their young people would know the stories they ought to read. Once these lists were found, the Department began to pick out famous and well-considered works for translating.
The foremost woman said, “It may be possible to learn about a culture by reading trivial fiction. There are people who will argue that. But humans are not a trivial species. They are clearly dangerous, and we should not underestimate them. If we study their least important work, we will decide they are silly. No one who can blow apart a hwarhath warship is silly.”
After nine years in the capital, Kla began to long for the steep mountains, fjords and fogs of her homeland. She requested permission to work from home.
“This is possible,” the foremost woman said. “Though you will have to fly here several times a year for meetings.”
Kla agreed, though she did not like to fly, and went home by coastal freighter.
Her hometown was named Amadi-Hewil. It stood at the end of a fjord, with mountains rising above it. Most of the people belonged to one of two lineages, Amadi or Hewil, though there were some members of neighboring lineages; the government kept a weather station on a cliff above the fjord. The two men who cared for the station were soldiers from another continent. Of course they were lovers, since there were no other men of their age in the town. Almost all young males went into space.
Most of the people in the town—women, girls, boys, old men and old women—lived off fishing. The cold ocean outside their fjord was full of great schools of silver and copper-colored fish, insulated with fat. There was a packing plant at the edge of the town, that froze the fish or put it in cans; smaller operations made specialty foods: dried seaweed and smoked or pickled marine animals.
The town had rental apartments and rooms for fishers whose family homes were farther in the mountains. Kla decided to take one of these, rather than move back into one of the Amadi houses. She had gotten used to living on her own.
Her room was furnished with a bed, a table and two chairs. There was a bathroom down the hall. She had a window that looked out on a narrow street that went steeply down toward the harbor. There were plenty of electrical inlets, which was always good. She could dock her computer and her two new lamps on any wall. A shelf along one side of the room gave her a place for books and recordings. She settled in and began to translate.
It was in this period that she discovered Holmes Sherlock. There was little crime in her town, mostly petty theft and drunken arguments. But there was plenty of fog, rain and freezing rain. The street lamps outside her window glowed through grayness; she could hear the clink and rattle of carts pulled by tsina, coming in from the country with loads of produce.
The human stories seemed to fit with her new life, which was also her childhood life. Much human fiction was disturbing, since it dealt with heterosexual love, a topic the hwarhath knew nothing about. Holmes Sherlock lived decently with a male friend, who might or might not be his lover. While the male friend, a doctor named Watson John, eventually took up with a woman, as humans were expected to, Holmes Sherlock remained indifferent to female humans.
The stories were puzzles, which Holmes Sherlock solved by reason. This appealed to Kla, who was not a romantic and who had to puzzle out the meaning of human stories, often so mysterious!
After a while, she went to a local craftsman and had a pipe made. It had a bent stem and a large bowl, like the pipe that Holmes Sherlock smoked in illustrations. She put a local herb into it, which produced an aromatic smoke that was calming when taken into the mouth.
Holmes Sherlock wore a famous hat. She did not have a copy of this made, since it looked silly, but she did take an illustration that showed his cape to a tailor. The tailor did not have the material called ‘tweed,’ but was able to make a fine cape for her out of a local wool that kept out rain and cold. Like Holmes Sherlock, Kla was tall and thin. Wearing her cape, she imagined she looked a bit like the famous human investigator.
For the rest, she continued to wear the local costume: pants, waterproof boots and a tunic with embroidery across the shoulders. This was worn by both women and men, though the embroidery patterns differed.
Twice a year she flew to the capital city and got new assignments. “You are translating too many of these stories about Holmes Sherlock,” the foremost woman said. “Do it on your own time, if you must do it. I want stories that explain humanity. Therefore, I am giving you Madame Bovary and The Journey to the West.”
Kla took these home, reading Madame Bovary on the long flight over winter plains and mountains. It was an unpleasant story about a woman trapped in a life she did not like. The woman—Bovary Emma—had a long-term mating contract with a male who was a dullard and incompetent doctor. This was something humans did. Rather than produce children decently through artificial insemination or, lacking that, through decent short-term mating contracts, they entered into heterosexual alliances that were supposed to last a lifetime. These were often unhappy, as might be expected. Men and women were not that much alike, and most alliances—even those of women with women and men with men—did not last a lifetime. The hwarhath knew this and expected love to last as long as it did.
Bored by her “husband,” a word that meant the owner of a house, Bovary Emma tried to make herself happy through sexual liaisons with other human males and by spending money. This did not work. The men were unsatisfactory. The spending led to debt. In the end, Bovary Emma killed herself, using a nasty poison. Her “husband” lived a while longer and—being a fool with no ability to remake his life—was miserable.
A ridiculous novel! Everyone in it seemed
to be a liar or a fool or both. How could humans enjoy something like this? Yes, there was suffering in life. Yes, there were people who behaved stupidly. But surely a story this long ought to remind the reader—somewhere, at least a bit—of good behavior, of people who met their obligations, were loyal to their kin and knew how to be happy.
Maybe the book could be seen as an argument against heterosexual love.
When Kla was most of the way home, she changed onto a seaplane, which landed in her native fjord and taxied to dock. The fishing fleet was out. She pulled her bag out of the plane and looked around at the fjord, lined by steep mountains and lit by slanting rays of sunlight. The air was cold and smelled of salt water and the fish plant.
Hah! It was fine to be back!
She translated Madame Bovary and sent it to the foremost woman via the planet’s information net. Then she went on to Journey, an adventure story about a badly behaved stone monkey. But the monkey’s crimes were not sexual, and it was obvious that he was a trickster, more good than bad, especially after he finished his journey. Unlike Bovary Emma, he had learned from experience. Kla enjoyed this translation, though the book was very long.
While she was still working on the monkey’s story, she met a woman who lived on another floor of her rooming house. The woman was short and stocky with pale gray fur and almost colorless gray eyes. She was a member of the Hewil lineage, employed by the fishing fleet as a doctor. She didn’t go out with the boats. Instead, sick and injured fishers came to her, and the fleet paid her fees. Like Kla, she preferred to live alone, rather than in one of her family’s houses. She walked with a limp, due to a childhood injury, and she enjoyed reading.
They began to meet to discuss books. The doctor, whose name was Hewil Mel, had read some of Kla’s translations.
“Though I don’t much enjoy human stories. They are too strange, and I can’t tell what the moral is.”
“I’m not sure there is one,” Kla said and described Madame Bovary.
“I will be certain to avoid that one,” Doctor Mel said firmly. “Do you think your translation will be published?”
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