Heiresses of Russ 2011 Read online

  Heiresses of Russ 2011

  The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction

  •

  edited by

  JoSelle Vanderhooft

  and Steve Berman

  Published by Lethe Press at Smashwords

  Copyright © 2011 JoSelle Vanderhooft and Steve Berman.

  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.

  Published in 2011 by Lethe Press, Inc.

  118 Heritage Avenue • Maple Shade, NJ 08052-3018

  www.lethepressbooks.com • [email protected]

  isbn: 1-59021-395-5 / 978-1-59021-395-7 (library binding)

  isbn: 1-59021-396-3 / 978-1-59021-396-4 (paperback)

  e-isbn: 1-59021-400-5 / 978-1-59021-400-8 (digital book)

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design: Alex Jeffers.

  Cover image: Olena Vizerskaya.

  “Ghost of a Horse Under a Chandelier” copyright © 2010 Georgina Bruce, first appeared in Strange Horizons (August 9th, 2010) • “Storyville 1910” copyright © 2010 Jewelle Gomez, first appeared in Saints & Sinners (Queer Mojo) • “Her Heart Would Surely Break In Two” copyright © 2010 Michelle Labbé, first appeared in Scheherezade’s Bequest, Issue 9 • “Black Eyed Susan” copyright © 2010 Tanith Lee, first appeared in Disturbed by Her Song (Lethe Press, 2010) • “Thimbleriggery and Fledglings” copyright © 2010 Steve Berman, first appeared in The Beastly Bride (ed. by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, Viking, 2010) • “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” copyright © 2010 Rachel Swirsky, first appeared in Subterranean, Summer 2010 •The Children of Cadmus” copyright © 2010 Ellen Kushner, first appeared in The Beastly Bride (ed. by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, Viking, 2010) • “Rabbits” English translation copyright © 2010 Csilla Kleinheincz, first appeared in Expanded Horizons, October 2010, and previously appeared in Hungarian in Roham Magazine and the author’s short story collection Nyulak, Sellők, Viszonyok • “The Guest” copyright © 2010 Zen Cho, first appeared in Expanded Horizons, October 2010 • “The Egyptian Cat” copyright © 2010 Catherine Lundoff, first appeared in Tales of the Unanticipated, Vol. 30, 2010 • “World War III Doesn’t Last Long” copyright © 2010 Nora Olsen, first appeared in Collective Fallout, July 2010 • “The Effluent Engine” copyright © 2010 N. K. Jemisin, first appeared on her website on January 19, 2010

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  JoSelle Vanderhooft

  Ghost of a Horse Under a Chandelier

  Georgina Bruce

  Storyville 1910

  Jewelle Gomez

  Her Heart Would Surely Break in Two

  Michelle Labbé

  Black Eyed Susan

  Esther Garber / Tanith Lee

  Thimbleriggery and Fledglings

  Steve Berman

  The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window

  Rachel Swirsky

  The Children of Cadmus

  Ellen Kushner

  The Guest

  Zen Cho

  Rabbits

  Csilla Kleinheincz

  The Egyptian Cat

  Catherine Lundoff

  World War III Doesn’t Last Long

  Nora Olsen

  The Effluent Engine

  N. K. Jemisin

  The Storytellers and Editors

  Myth, Transformation, and Women Loving Women in 2010

  Introduction

  by JoSelle Vanderhooft

  When Steve Berman, the publisher of Lethe Press, and I started putting together the inaugural volume of Heiresses of Russ—so-named in honor of recently departed Joanna Russ, arguably the most important feminist and lesbian essayist and fantasy and science-fiction author of the last century—I did not anticipate that we would ultimately assemble something like a lesbian version of Ovid’s Metamorphosis…if Ovid’s lesbian Metamorphosis had been shot in the arm with 30 ccs of third-wave feminism, spun around on a postmodern tilt-a-whirl, and given an overwhelming palette and an endless blank canvas.

  But so we did.

  The dozen stories you hold in your hands now, gentle reader, are all about transformations—of the grandiose kind, the subtle kind, the literal and the figurative kinds. Now, of course, transformation is to fantasy what salt is to good eating; Ovid knew this and so did folklore’s anonymous originators and adaptors, long before modern fantasy was a spark in Granddaddy Tolkien’s imagination. Whether it’s Daphne turning into a laurel tree or the seven brothers in the Grimm tale “The Three Ravens,” transformations and transmogrifications are nothing new, though I would argue that they are perennially interesting.

  And for that matter, that they are important for queer individuals, and lesbian and bisexual women in particular.

  Despite the gains that the LGBTQ movement has made across the planet, many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and otherwise queer youth growing up feeling like they are damaged, evil, dirty, and—perhaps most traumatically—alone. And while heterosexism makes anvils of us all, I think that cisgender lesbians and bisexual women experience a particularly nasty side of it. As women, we’re expected not just to love men, but to hunger for the joys of motherhood and childbearing, domesticity, and everything labeled “feminine” or “girly.” Oh, yes, even in 2011, even as I sit here writing this. It’s difficult to quit those Victorian habits, you know. As Jewelle Gomez’s most famous creation, the vampire Gilda, discovers in “Storyville 1910.” And while many lesbians and bi women do want these things, we don’t want them in the socially appropriate way. And freeing ourselves from those internal and external pressures takes courage, patience, and the willingness to leave the familiar and embrace the unfamiliar.

  In short, our conflicts with heterosexism (emphasis on the sexism) reshape us, and transform us from the inside out—hopefully in positive ways. It’s a horrible crystal with many hideous faces, and nearly all of the protagonists of these twelve stories spend time looking into its depths. The fact that some of them spend time as birds, cats, does, and imposter princesses is simply a larger metaphor for the transformations that queer women face in life.

  The confusions and frustrations of being—and becoming—adolescent lesbians provide the framework for Georgina Bruce’s “Ghost of a Horse Under a Chandelier” and Steve Berman’s arresting retelling of Swan Lake, “Thimbleriggery and Fledglings.” In the first, a creative young writer and artist named Zillah struggles to shape her own coming-out story—and her romance with her best friend, Joy—with the inspiration of her favorite comic book character, the “radical black, woman-loving superheroine” Ursula Bluethunder, and the help of a magic book that can make her attempts real. “Thimbleriggery” casts Odile, the “black swan” daughter of the sorcerer von Rothbart, with the “white swan” Odette (here called Elster) as lovers, in a story about father-daughter conflict, heterosexual privilege, and the power dynamics of sorcery, with results that are as tragic as they are triumphant.

  Likewise, Ellen Kushner’s “The Children of Cadmus” recasts the myth of Actaeon, the ill-fated son of Aristaeus and Autonoë of the equally ill-fated House of Cadmus whom virgin goddess Artemis turned into a stag for spying on her while she bathed. Here, Kushner focuses equally on Actaeon’s lesbian sister Creusa, and in doing so touches upon the issues of gender presentation and gender identity with which lesbians frequently wrestle, particularly when they identify as butch or
as another identity typically codified as male.

  Sometimes, the transformation is a little less obvious. Rachel Swirsky’s outstanding novella “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” takes the theme of transformation in several different directions—all of them as unsettling as they are thought-provoking. The Lady in question is Naeva, a powerful sorceress from a matriarchal society that could well be a more sinister version of Sally Miller Gearhart’s Wanderground. Here, men are “worms” kept only for their sperm, and most childbearing is left to a subclass of women called “broods.” When a treacherous spell imprisons Naeva in the limbo of the spirit world, she must wrestle—in deeply imperfect, problematic, and ultimately human ways—with values dissonance in an ever-changing world and the flaws of her own deeply sexist civilization. To get any more specific would ruin the surprises, so let me just say this: this tale deserved its Nebula Award.

  Finally, in the haunting, Colette-inspired “Black Eyed Susan,” author Tanith Lee herself undergoes a transformation into the voice of Esther Garber, a Jewish lesbian writer who takes a job as a maid in what appears to be a French hotel during the 1930s. Here she encounters a spectral woman whose presence ties into both the hotel’s mystery and the threads of unspoken desire that bind its staff.

  And, of course, for stories where protagonists do not directly transform, the societies around them are often in flux. N.K. Jemisin’s “The Effluent Engine” posits a world where the Haitian revolution ultimately succeeded and the fledgling nation is now struggling to maintain its independence against U.S., British, and French forces who would like to see it crushed. Meanwhile, the revolution and steam technology are changing the world for Haitians and black Americans alike, including the lesbian daughter of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Meanwhile, Nora Olsen’s “World War III Doesn’t Last Long” follows the transformation of a relationship between two lesbians against the backdrop of a nuclear war.

  These are just some of the transformative journeys taken by the stories in this series that will be an ongoing tribute to the spirit of Joanna Russ’s oeuvre. It is my hope that these stories help you to explore not only what it means to identify as a lesbian, but more broadly what transpires when exterior forces transform us while interior forces question everything we thought we knew about what is right and good with the world.

  JoSelle Vanderhooft

  Fort Lauderdale, FL

  Autumn 2011

  Ghost of a Horse Under a Chandelier

  Georgina Bruce

  The way to get where Zillah goes is written in a book. Zillah keeps the Book hidden in a bookcase, slipped in amongst the others. Sometimes she loses the Book, and then she has to search through the bookcase, turn her room upside down, and squeeze her hand down the back of the bed looking for it. Other times the Book stands out, a bright red stripe glowing among the black and brown and cream-coloured spines.

  It’s easy to lose the Book because it’s always changing. There isn’t an author’s name on the cover. And every time Zillah opens the Book it’s different. Everything is different, even the title.

  Today, it starts like this.

  •

  The ballroom of the Grand Hotel by candlelight is amber and sepia, drifting into darkness at the edges like an old postcard. It smells of stale water, tallow, and dust. The ruby carpet is threadbare and shiny, and the plaster has been knocked off the walls, leaving bare brick in places, water-stained and sick. But in the candlelight the room still has a certain romance.

  Hanging from the ceiling is a skeleton of a chandelier; the crystal gone, the bronze peeled away. But tonight, as if for a special occasion, there are candles in all the empty holders, and they glow pale yellow, smelling of scorched hair as they burn away the cobwebs on the steel bones.

  Under the chandelier, a horse flicks her grey and silver tail, stamps her feet and snorts. Steam pours from her nostrils and rises up to the ceiling in billowing white clouds. The horse is made of fragile, wavering lines, which soon dissolve into the shadows.

  •

  Zillah has never told anyone about the Book, but she thinks that she might one day tell Joy. If there is anyone trustworthy in the whole wide world, it must be Joy.

  After school they sit in the library together, their knees touching under the thick wooden desk, and scour history books and comic books for lesbian heroines. They find very few, but they know they are there, somewhere, hidden behind the flourished capes, buried beneath the piles of burnished trophies and medals won by men.

  “We could be lesbian heroines,” says Zillah. “We could be in a comic book.”

  “Artists are all sicko pervs,” says Joy.

  “You’re an artist,” says Zillah. She shows Joy what she’s reading, pushing the book over the table.

  It is Ursula Bluethunder, Zillah and Joy’s favourite comic book. Ursula Bluethunder is a radical black, woman-loving superheroine, whose mission is to establish a lesbian separatist nation with money that she steals from banks using her superior intelligence, strength, and martial arts skills. She likes hanging out in libraries, too.

  Joy sighs. “I want to live in New Free Lesbiana. I wish Ursula Bluethunder was in here right now, browsing in the reference section.”

  “She might want one of these books.” Zillah leans forward, over the desk. “She’ll come over and say, hey you women, have you got…this, er,” she flips over a book to read the cover, “Women in England, 1760-1914, and we’ll be like, sure, take it….”

  “No, she’ll be like, hey are you two lesbians? I’ve got my horse outside, let’s go!”

  “Yeah, and then you’ll be all like, stop, stop! I need to get my passport….”

  “And she’ll go, no need, young lesbian, for New Free Lesbiana is open to all women who love women!”

  “Women who love women,” says Zillah, smiling.

  And the librarian raises her head and tuts at the two girls, who giggle, covering their faces with their books.

  •

  Joy’s drawings are full of character and strong, confident lines. Even Zillah’s mom, who doesn’t believe in giving the girls any praise in case they become conceited, has to admit that Joy’s got talent, although she doesn’t understand why she wastes it drawing comic books instead of proper pictures.

  Sometimes Joy draws Zillah. She draws quickly, soft pencil flickering over the creamy paper, and in a few strokes she manages to capture Zillah’s likeness, her way of sitting, the frown line between her eyes when she’s thinking. Zillah blushes red under Joy’s appraising looks, gets hot cheeks and sweaty palms. When Ursula Bluethunder is attracted to someone, she never hesitates for a second. She makes her feelings plain. Zillah can’t imagine what it would take to be like Ursula Bluethunder. She doesn’t have the guts.

  And Joy says, “What’s up with you?” and Zillah says, “Nothing.” But then the drawing shows her all lit up in a hot flushed energy field, and Zillah can’t meet Joy’s eye.

  The two girls are in Zillah’s bedroom, which is in the attic. It has its own door with a little staircase behind, and then at the top of the staircase, an archway where Zillah has hung up a silvery beaded curtain, so that when you walk through the silver falls all around you in a tinkling rush. Zillah has painted the room in indigo and silver and hung up blue-violet tie-dyed throws she bought from the North Laine, and put candles everywhere, and crystal teardrops and coloured glass. There’s a big mattress with a patchwork throw and a limbless teddy called Tigsy that Zillah laughs at but secretly still loves.

  Joy is sticking her pictures onto pieces of card. She’s making a comic book called The Hotel. The Hotel is full of ghosts, broken connections and failed love affairs. The drawings are murky and sepia, water-stained and shadowy. In The Hotel, Zillah is a Seeker. That means she can find ghosts, and talk to them. Her job is to seek out the lost souls of women who love women, and help them to find peace with her everloving kiss.

  “There’s the horse,” Zillah says, pointing to one of the pict
ures, and Joy nods, concentrating on what she’s doing. All Joy’s drawings have horses in them. She and her mom have stables and they ride horses on the Downs at the weekends. Their favourite horse is called Andrea Dworkin. Joy’s mom named her after her heroine. Joy loves Andrea Dworkin best, but she rides all the horses. She has to, because people pay to keep their horses in the stables and have them ridden by Joy and her mom. It’s no hardship, because Joy loves horses.

  Zillah doesn’t see the point of having a horse and paying someone else to ride it. On the other hand, she’s hoping that Joy will invite her over one weekend and teach her how to horse ride.

  “I don’t get it,” says Zillah, after a while of looking over Joy’s shoulder. “Is it supposed to be like a fairytale or something?”

  “I guess,” says Joy, her head bent over the pages, braids falling across her face. “I guess it’s kind of personal.”

  “Oh. I liked the one where we grow gills and dive under the sea and free mermaids from the evil Patriarch Fish.”

  “An artist has to grow,” says Joy, mocking herself and meaning it at the same time. “I can’t keep drawing Fish People. It’s boring.”

  “I liked the Fish People.” Zillah flips through the stiff cut-and-pasted pages. “You’re not even in this one.”

  “I’m in there somewhere,” says Joy. “Look harder. You’re the Seeker.”

  But Joy puts down the drawings and Zillah lies back on the bed, putting her feet in Joy’s lap. Joy strokes the tops of her feet. She squeezes her toes and rubs her soles, pressing into the sensitive spots, and Zillah tries not to squirm, or breathe too heavily, like some kind of perv. Is this a friendly foot rub, or a sexy one? Do people give friendly foot rubs? Is there a cure for being in love with your best friend? She wishes she was Ursula Bluethunder. She wishes she was brave and fearless and never confused. She has her eyes closed, concentrating on the sensations that run up from her feet to her thighs and the feeling of getting wet between her legs, and she can’t help letting out a small sigh.