Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction Read online

  Table of Contents

  HEIRESSES OF RUSS 2016

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION A.M. Dellamonica

  GRANDMOTHER-NAI-LEYLIT'S CLOTH OF WINDS Rose Lemberg

  THE OCCIDENTAL BRIDE Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  THE DEVIL COMES TO THE MIDNIGHT CAFE A.C. Wise

  AND WE WERE LEFT DARKLING Sarah Pinsker

  A HOUSE OF HER OWN Bo Balder

  LOVE IN THE TIME OF MARKOV PROCESSES Megan Arkenberg

  WHERE MONSTERS DANCE A. Merc Rustad

  HUNGRY DAUGHTERS OF STARVING MOTHERS Alyssa Wong

  FABULOUS BEASTS Priya Sharma

  THE WOLLART NYMPHS Melissa Scott

  THE NEW MOTHER Eugene Fischer

  ELDRITCH BROWN HOUSES Clare Humphrey

  THE TIP OF THE TONGUE Felicia Davin

  WHEN CAN A BROKEN GLASS MEND? Sonya Taaffe

  A RESIDENCE FOR FRIENDLESS LADIES Alice Sola Kim

  THE DEEPWATER BRIDE Tamsyn Muir

  DOUBT THE SUN Faith Mudge

  About the Contributors

  Published in 2016 by Lethe Press, Inc.

  www.lethepressbooks.com • [email protected]

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59021-658-3

  Library Binding ISBN: 978-1-59021-677-4

  Introduction © 2016 by A.M. Dellamonica / The Occidental Bride © 2015 by Benjanun Sriduangkaew, first appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine September 2015 / “Love in the Time of Markov Processes” © 2015 by Megan Arkenberg, first appeared in Daughters of Frankenstein: Mad Lesbian Scientists (ed. by Steve Berman, Lethe Press) / “A House of Her Own” © 2015 by Bo Balder, first appeared in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, September-October, 2015 / “The Tip of the Tongue” © 2015 by Felicia Davin, first appeared in Lightspeed, June 2015 / “Eldritch Brown Houses” © 2015 by Claire Humphrey, first appeared in Daughters of Frankenstein: Mad Lesbian Scientists (ed. by Steve Berman, Lethe Press) / “A Residence for Friendless Ladies” © 2015 by Alice Sola Kim, first appeared in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, March 2015 / “Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds” © 2015 by Rose Lemberg, first appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, #175 / “Doubt the Sun” by Faith Mudge, © 2015 first appeared in Daughters of Frankenstein: Mad Lesbian Scientists (ed. By Steve Berman, Lethe Press) / “Where Monsters Dance” © 2015 by Merc Rustad, first appeared in PodCastle, #385 / “Fabulous Beasts” © 2015 by Priya Sharma, first appeared in Tor.com, July 27, 2016 / “The Devil Comes to the Midnight Café” © 2015 by A.C. Wise, first appeared in The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again (Lethe Press) / “Where Can a Broken Glass Mend?” by © 2015 by Sonya Taaffe, first appeared in Not One of Us #35

  Cover art: ‘Three Blind Sisters’ by Mathieu Degrotte

  Cover and ebook design by Inkspiral Design

  for PUBQ

  You know who you are.

  “WHY LESBIANS?”

  It was a question I put to an author this spring, an author whose story, by chance, ended up being the first thing I read for this anthology of short fiction, a book whose focus I’d define as stories by lesbian authors or about lesbian characters and concerns.

  The thing was, though, Heiresses of Russ wasn’t in the picture yet, back in the spring. I hadn’t yet been invited by the marvelous Steve Berman of Lethe Press to be this year’s guest editor of the anthology. Rather, I had seen the story more or less by chance. I hadn’t particularly sought it out; it was part of the larger body of what I was reading at the time. I’d found it tense and intriguing, a surprise and delight on multiple levels. It was delightful enough, in fact, that I had fixed on the notion of assigning it to one of my UCLA classes. I find it fiendishly hard to keep my reading lists current, relevant and diverse.

  Suddenly there the author was, in my sights and prime for interrogation. I smelled teachable insights, much as a shark scents blood in the water. And so... “Hey! You there! Why lesbians?”

  Okay, it didn’t go exactly like that. And anyway you’re probably thinking: why the hell not lesbians?

  You’re right, obviously. This isn’t the sixties anymore. To mangle the advertising slogan, we’ve come a fuckuva long way, babies. We can get married now, in a lot of countries; we can legally adopt our children. I would never have believed either political victory possible back in the days when Joanna Russ was creating works like The Female Man, or We Who Are About To. If you’d asked me in 1980, I probably wouldn’t have believed it possible to even find fifteen or so works of published short speculative fiction by or about lesbians…at least not if they all had to be published within the same calendar year.

  That’s not to say there weren’t SFF collections and anthologies. There were, and they’re great, and I’d seriously consider going into that in detail…but Melissa Scott has done a brilliant job of laying out that history in the 2014 Heiresses of Russ intro. Instead of parroting her, I’ll say this: you should really check her essay out if you’re curious. Like this intro, it’s merely the appetizer course on a banquet of fictional awesomeness.

  The “Why lesbians?” story, by the way, is Eugene Fischer’s “The New Mother.” I’ll leave the answering of that question to you as the story unfolds among these pages or in your e-book reader. Or buttonhole him at a con. I’m sure he absolutely loves that.

  Where was I? Right! A yearly Best Of Speculative Lesbians. This series has run now since 2011. And in 2015, at least, there were enough qualifying stories that it was necessary to do a first cut, just to get the list of potentials down to forty or so of the most likely works.

  This seems, to me, frigging miraculous.

  Lesbians talk a lot, at times, about invisibility. We talk about how there haven’t been a lot of lesbian women on genre television, for example, and how any recurring queer character who does turn up tends to get killed off as soon as audiences get good and attached to her. We talk about femme lesbians being invisible because they’re taken for straight women, and butch lesbians being misgendered…it’s an ongoing thing, this way we have of flying under the radar. It’s a conversation with a lot packed into it—gender conformity and misogyny and homophobia and sometimes racism and transphobia, and all sorts of other things besides. But at its core was and is a feeling that we’re largely absent from the cultural conversation.

  This may be less true every day, but certainly if I had seen lesbian fiction of any kind before I was in high school, it wasn’t SF. In fact, it was that other kind of lesbian story, the stuff that came in brown-wrapper magazines from the naughty shelf in the drug store, if you know what I mean, stuff for whom I was emphatically not a target market.

  Then, when I was about fifteen, a poet who lived in the same small town as I did gave me Suzy McKee Charnas’s Walk to the Walls of the World and Motherlines.

  “This kid needs her mind blown,” he must’ve been thinking. I’ll never know for sure, but I’ll always be grateful. Even if I did feel I had to sneak it into the house so nobody would see what those women were getting up to, by way of stimulating parthenogenesis.

  Discovering Joanna Russ, getting to wallow in The Female Man and How to Suppress Women’s Writing and The Adventures of Alyx came later, after I’d made my way to university. It was, of course, only the beginning. Afterwards,
the discoveries came closer together: I found Melissa Scott and Laurie Marks and Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge, L. Timmel DuChamp and Tanya Huff (not necessarily in that order) and plenty of others besides.

  Russ, though, Russ was special. I encountered her right when I was still the shiniest of shiny things, a newly-out and madly in love lesbian, boggle-eyed at my luck in having found the love of my life, busily writing barely-publishable SF and practicing feminist activism and trying to figure how much, if at all, my gayness might hamper my career.

  Now, flash forward to 2016. As I embarked on selecting these works, it was inevitable that I would wonder what my hero might have made of this antho that bears the Russ name, and of the seventy or so authors who have graced the series pages since 2011. I wonder what she would have thought of all the remarkable written treasures I got to sort through this year, both those I chose and those I had to, very regretfully indeed, set aside.

  Would Russ have believed how many stories with lesbians have been featured, of late, in publications as long-running, lauded and well-regarded as Asimov’s, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction? Wouldn’t everyone like to let her know about the stories that have made the recent Hugo and Nebula ballots, or been honored elsewhere? Would she boggle at the range of stories, the way they run like a rich vein through all three sister-genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror? Or at the sheer wealth of having some works where queer identity is central to everything that happens in the piece, and also those where it is not incidental—never incidental—but simply one of a number of elements in play, a single instrument within the symphony of the characters’ humanity?

  This antho has stories by women, stories by men, and stories by people who aren’t even on our increasingly tired either/or gender binary. It has stories about mothers and lovers and brides and heroes, aliens and monsters and robots and runaways, vengeance-seekers and defenders of the downtrodden. They thrilled me, these stories. Tamsyn Muir thrilled me with “The Deepwater Bride” by standing Lovecraftian tropes on their squiddy ear in a way that was both funny and tragic. Sarah Pinkser injected otherworldy longing and loss into a story that could, sans aliens, have been a story about some of my closest friends. A.C. Wise drove me crazy by (without knowing it) obliging me to choose one, just one favorite story from her remarkable collection The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the Day Again. Priya Sharma horrified and astounded me with “Fabulous Beasts.”

  The work we as a community are writing today makes me wish Russ was still with us, that she could bring all her wit, anger, critical focus and humor to bear on the world as it is now, and that she could see the remarkable openness that is bursting outward--not without opposition, I grant you—but exploding nonetheless, within our field. I am sure she had an idea of what a lesbian story might be (because we all must, mustn’t we?) and I am curious how close or how far these particular pieces might come. I fantasize about arguing with her, long into the night, over the close calls and hard choices that this embarrassment of riches presented to me.

  I wonder this because you can’t do a project of this nature without having your preconceived notions tested, refined... and, simultaneously, trampled into the dust. I said at the outset of this essay that Heiresses of Russ was for stories by lesbians, or about lesbians and their concerns. This is a wide net to cast and a dry definition, I know. But we have created so much, and stretched so far, in our exploration of magic, the dark and the future. We are not invisible, but we will not be pinned down, either.

  And so I will leave with this: reading for this anthology brought me to the conclusion that we are infinite, like the universe that spawned us. We may sometimes look back, but our reach is ever expanding.

  I hope you enjoy reading by the light these authors have cast to us here on Earth.

  A.M. DELLAMONICA

  Summer 2016

  GRANDMOTHER KEPT HER cloth of winds in the orange room, a storage chamber painted in fire and lit to a translucent glow by dozens of floating candlebulbs created by the older women’s magic. As a small child, I remember hiding between the legs of a polished pearwood commode, safe and stuffy-warm behind the ancient embroidered material that draped it, hiding—just to be sure—also behind the veil of my hair. Grandmother-nai-Leylit would come in always just before the afternoon meal, and her smell—saffron and skin and millet dough—spread through the room like perfume. Her shuffling steps rang for me a music more exalted and mysterious than the holy sounds of the dawnsong that drifted each morning from behind the white walls of the men’s inner quarter.

  I would watch from the darkness of my veils as grandmother unlocked the walnut cupboard, one of many pieces of storage in the room. She would pull from it, her brown age-spotted hands shaking slightly, a basinewood box ribbed in razu ivory and guarded by nails of hammered iron. Gently, as if deep in prayer, she would lift the lid and pull from the box an invisible cloth.

  Lacking the magic of deepnames myself, then and now, I could not see what she held, but I could hear a faint crinkling, a movement of small threads of air as they restlessly wound around each other. I watched grandmother bury her face in this cloth, inhale it, pull her kaftan sleeves up and trace the length of it along her bare lower arms, before with a sigh she would put it back.

  A few years later my brother was born, and my mothers left again for a trading venture through the southern deserts. I did not see a trace of them nor hear any word before I grew too big to hide under the pearwood commode. Then a letter, torn and filthy, arrived from the south to say that my mothers were now staying in Zhaglit-Beyond-Walls, a place nobody in the quarter had heard of.

  My brother Kimriel, now three, did not talk. With my mothers so far and the day of his entrance to the men’s inner quarter only a year away, we were growing more and more anxious. The scholars would not admit a wordless child, but all our teaching and cajoling led to nothing.

  One day, grandmother-nai-Leylit brought us children openly into the orange room. Kimriel wailed and struggled in my arms, his face bewildered, eyes darting from one strongbox to another. I hoped, I prayed she’d let him touch the fabric made of wind. I wanted miracles, I wanted him to touch the cloth and break out in a torrent of blessed speech, in great sentences of Old Khana that only the scholars know. I wanted to shake the gatekeepers of the inner quarter, men bearded and veiled and unknown to me, to shout at them to let my Kimi in; I knew, I knew even if they refused to believe, that behind the white walls of the men’s domain there waited for him a greatness. He’d been named after the men’s god, the singer, Kimrí, Bird’s brother, and like the goddess Bird I yearned to shelter him under my wings from all that hurts, and then to send him triumphantly forth. But I did not know how to help him.

  When grandmother-nai-Leylit opened the cupboard and the box and pulled out the cloth of winds, Kimi’s eyes focused on it. Even as a young child that had not yet taken magic he could see it, hinting at an aptitude greater than mine by far. Grandmother-nai-Leylit guided his hands to touch the cloth, but no great torrent of speech burst forth from Kimi’s mouth. It took me a moment to realize he’d fallen silent—not wailing, mumbling, or fidgeting even. His small fingers held tightly to what I could not see; a homecoming.

  When Kimi turned four, the traditional age for a male child to depart the women’s quarters and pass through to the men’s domain, the scholars would not take him. Another four years they granted him, four years of reprieve during which he could begin to speak and gain acceptance to the men’s side of the quarter, where to learn his Birdseed letters and the deeds of holy artifice. I watched over him, watchful as Bird. Unnoticed by grandmothers and protected from the idle questions of other girls and women by the fierceness of my glare, Kimriel would spin around and around, his face gleeful, his arms spread wide as if he would fly.

  My friend Gitit-nai-Lur took to following us to the courtyards nestled under the outer walls of the quarter. Outside these rough-hewn gray boulders lay the city of Niyaz, fabled with its trade
and splendor, anointed in persimmon perfume. Everything about it frightened and enticed us—the Niyazi men oiled their beards and donned brightly colored garments; behind these walls they walked unveiled and spoke loudly. The women, radiant in billowing silk dresses and adorned in beads, were stripped of magic according to an age-old tradition. This deed, so repulsive and incomprehensible to us, was to them joyous, marking passage from childhood into adulthood. In time we’d step out of the quarter as grownups, as traders. We would venture into the city, and out of it, through the carved Desert Gate. But it was not yet our time.

  In courtyards so close and yet so far from that world, we would watch Kimi’s grounded gyre; Gitit would mutter words in the trade tongues of the desert, which she was trying valiantly to learn. I’d help her sometimes. Languages came easily to me. Under the shadow of the walls we’d say spidersilk, basinewood, glass, honey crystal to each other in Maiva’at and Surun’ and Burrashti. In these words lived for us the dream of all what lay beyond the quarter, beyond even the city—the desert embroidered in heat, the people in their tents of leather strung with bells and globes of fireglass. We spoke of flatweave carpet, madder, garnet, globes of fireglass and of each other in that heat, protected by the benevolence of the ancient trade routes.

  Kimi got used to my friend. Gitit learned to draw on her deepnames and send forth bubbles of multicolored air. Kimi would laugh when they landed on his fingers and winked out like tiny candlebulbs or fireflies.

  GRANDMOTHER-NAI-LEYLIT FOUND IT more and more difficult to walk. She made a spare set of keys for my other grandmother, grandmother-nai-Tammah. I would bring Kimriel to the orange room when he was inconsolable, and my other grandmother, tall and willowy under her shawls of spidersilk gauze, would pull the cloth of winds out of the casket for Kimi. The weave of the rustling winds calmed him. It made him happy. It made me happy with the kind of happiness that comes from wanting a person you love to be content in a hundred ways that have nothing to do with aspirations of propriety.