The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

“‘Crisis situations?’ Is that anything like ‘hazardous duty’?”

She barely hesitated as she acknowledged his interruption. “Occupational benefits are also quite generous. Health coverage, vacation time, paternity leave—”

“Dental?”

Now she paused to give him a look. “And optical. Even a clothing allowance.”

He was tempted to comment on how she had used hers but decided not to get personal.

“We can also be very flexible in terms of your cover,” she went on. “Some sort of independent, low-key profession, like an accountant or a transcriber or—” She floundered suddenly and he could tell it wasn’t something that happened to her very often.

“Software engineer,” he suggested, then smiled sheepishly. “Kidding.”

“That could work, as long as it’s something nice and ordinary. Wedding albums, family albums, baby pictures, that sort of thing—”

“I really was kidding,” he said. “Software mystifies me.”

“You could even be semiretired—”

“No.” He shook his head, apologetic but firm. “If I go to work for you, I’m no longer a courier. I’m a government employee in a highly sensitive area under military jurisdiction. Once I lose my union membership, all bets are off. All I have is you.”

“That’s quite a lot,” the woman said reprovingly. “You have no idea how much.”

Actually, I do, he thought at her, but if I’m flayed and hung up in a parking garage, I won’t care about the cover story. He shook his head again.

“If we take you into the fold, we can tell you more about what you’re doing. Don’t you want to know—”

“No.” It came out louder and more emphatic than he’d intended but he wasn’t sorry. “I don’t. You’ve got me this much. I agreed to cooperate because I don’t need to be in the fold to be an encryption key. I’ll keep the secret but I don’t want to be the secret.”

The woman shook her head. “Please. You went over that line a long time ago.”

“Not quite,” he insisted. “My body, yes. But not me.”

She stood up, stretching a little. “We’ll talk again. This government doesn’t give up that easily.”

“Oh?” He raised his eyebrows. “Which government is that, anyway?”

The question caught her off guard and for a moment she stared at him, open-mouthed. Then she threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, very good,” she said, as the man opened the door for her. “Very, very good.” She started to leave, then hesitated. “And that’s really your name: Cody.”

“Yeah. My name’s really Cody.” Something flickered in his memory again but it was gone before he could think about it. He lay down on the bed and found the remote under one of the pillows.

“Well, that was fun,” he said, to no one and to whatever bugs might be listening, and turned on the TV. “Now whaddaya wanna do?”

FOR I HAVE LAIN ME DOWN ON THE STONE OF LONELINESS AND I’LL NOT BE BACK AGAIN by Michael Swanwick

Here’s another story by Michael Swanwick, whose “The Dala Horse” appears elsewhere in this anthology. In this one, he takes us to a high-tech but still troubled future Ireland, for a story about choices—and how, once made, they can never be undone.

Ich am of Irlaunde,
And of the holy londe
Of Irlaunde.
Gode sire, pray ich the,
For of saynte chairite
Come ant daunce with me
In Irlaunde.

(anon.)

The bullet scars were still visible on the pillars of the General Post Office in Dublin, almost two centuries after the 1916 uprising. That moved me more than I had expected. But what moved me even more was standing at the exact same spot, not two blocks away, where my great-great-grandfather saw Gerry Adams strolling down O’Connell Street on Easter morning of ’96, the eightieth anniversary of that event, returning from a political rally with a single bodyguard to one side of him and a local politico to the other. It gave me a direct and simple connection to the tangled history of that tragic land.

I never knew my great-great-grandfather, but my grandfather told me that story once and I’ve never forgotten it, though my grandfather died when I was still a boy. If I squeeze my eyes tight shut, I can see his face, liquid and wavy as if glimpsed through candle flames, as he lay dying under a great feather comforter in his New York City railroad flat, his smile weak and his hair forming a halo around him as white as a dandelion waiting for the wind to purse its lips and blow.

“It was doomed from the start,” Mary told me later. “The German guns had been intercepted and the republicans were outnumbered fourteen to one. The British cannons fired on Dublin indiscriminately. The city was afire and there was no food to be had. The survivors were booed as they were marched off to prison and execution, for the common folk did not support them. By any conventional standard it was a fiasco. But once it happened, our independence was assured. We lose and we lose and we lose, but because we never accept it, every defeat and humiliation only leads us closer to victory.”

Her eyes blazed.

I suppose I should tell you about Mary’s eyes, if you’re to understand this story. But if I’m to tell you about her eyes, first I have to tell you about the holy well.

There is a holy well in the Burren that, according to superstition, will cure a toothache. The Burren is a great upwelling of limestone in the west of County Clair, and it is unlike anyplace else on Earth. There is almost no soil. The ground is stony and the stone is weathered in a network of fissures and cracks, called grykes, within which grow a province of plants you will not find in such abundance elsewhere. Three are caves in great number to the south and the east, and like everywhere else in that beautiful land, a plenitude of cairns and other antiquities to be found.

The holy well is one such antiquity, though it is only a round hole, perhaps a foot across, filled with water and bright green algae. The altar over it is of recent construction, built by unknown hands from the long slender stones formed by the natural weathering of the limestone between the grykes, which makes the local stone walls so distinctive and the walking so treacherous. You could tear it down and scatter its component parts and never hear a word spoken about your deed. But if you returned a year later you’d find it rebuilt and your vandalism unmade as if it had never happened. People have been visiting the well for a long, long time. The Christian overlay —the holy medals and broken statues of saints that are sometimes left as offerings, along with the prescription bottles, nails, and coins—is a recent and perhaps a transient phenomenon.