Year's Best SF 17

Rey stroked my hair. “Do you … d’you think you’d mind a visitor? Y’know, prob’ly just on weekends or holidays. I couldn’t—”

I answered him with a kiss. By the time all new business was concluded, I’d offered to build him a bath house, outside the Bi’Ome, with heaters and hot water, towels and slippers, and pure cotton clothes he could wear in the house. If he wanted to wear anything at all.

He laughed. “I think I’d better take this one step at a time.”

I couldn’t agree more, though I didn’t say so. All choked up, I simply clung to him. Finally, though, we sealed the deal with one last lingering smooch. Then I had to let him go. It should have been a simple matter of opening my front door. But it wasn’t. The doorknob fought back.

So I tried again. No go.

I took a step backward, and finally noticed the bright salmon-pink flush adorning the wall. An odd distortion on either side of the door jamb made the whole wall panel curve outward. Bulge, in fact.

Cautiously, I reached out and traced the curve on the right side with my fingertips. Hot. Fever-hot. Sore, too. I could feel it, an unpleasant ache/tickle on either side of my own throat.

Oh, no.

I turned and stared at Reynard.

He queried the smartnet. Didn’t take long. A good thing, since I’d just about quit breathing under the onslaught of sympathy symptoms.

He shook his head, and gave me this sad, sheepish sort of a smile. “I, uh … I can’t be sure, but it looks like the house might—”

“What?” I demanded. “What is it this time?”

Rey waved at the swollen door glands. He shrugged helplessly. “Mumps.”

Oh my god!

For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again MICHAEL SWANWICK

Michael Swanwick (www.michaelswanwick.com) lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His seventh novel, The Dragons of Babel (2008), was a sequel to his fantasy novel The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993). His eighth novel, Dancing with Bears: The Postutopian Adventures of Darger & Surplus, was published in 2011. His eighth fiction collection, The Best of Michael Swanwick, appeared in 2008—there are seven previous story collections, and he continues to publish several stories each year, often more than one good enough to be reprinted in Year’s Best volumes. In other words, he’s still a pretty hot writer, and one of the finest conscious craftsmen in genre fiction today.

“For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again” was published in Asimov’s. The protagonist is a young Irish American eager to find his future in space, which alien conquerors have made possible. He’s visiting Ireland to take a last look at his world. And he is unknowingly in danger of being trapped by the past, politics and sentiment and all.

Ich am of Irlaunde,And of the holy londeOf Irlande.Gode sire, pray ich the,For of saynte chairiteCome ant daunce with meIn 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 Clare, 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. There 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.

But the important thing to know, and the reason people keep coming back to it, is that the holy well works. Some holy wells don’t. You can locate them on old maps, but when you go to have a look, there aren’t any offerings there. Something happened long ago—they were cursed by a saint or defiled by a sinner or simply ran out of mojo —and the magic stopped happening, and the believers went away and never returned. This well, however, is charged with holy power. It gives you shivers just to stand by it.

Mary’s eyes were like that. As green as the water in that well, and as full of dangerous magic.

I knew about the holy well because I’d won big and gotten a ticket off-planet, and so before I went, I took a year off in order to see all the places on Earth I would never return to, ending up with a final month to spend wandering about the land of my ancestors. It was my first time in Ireland and I loved everything about it, and I couldn’t help fantasizing that maybe I’d do so well in the Outsider worlds that someday I’d be rich enough to return and maybe retire there.

I was a fool and, worse, I didn’t know it.

We met in the Fiddler’s Elbow, a pub in that part of the West which the Bord Failte calls Yeats Country. I hadn’t come in for music but only to get out of the rain and have a hot whiskey. I was sitting by a small peat fire, savoring the warmth and the sweet smell of it, when somebody opened a door at the back of the room and started collecting admission. There was a sudden rush of people into the pub and so I carried my glass to the bar and asked, “What’s