The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

He filled one cup and pushed it over toward Reedy, then poured and swallowed his own. It tasted like licorice, reminding him both of his childhood and his days as a young man in completely different ways. Reedy remained immobile.

“I’ve been thinking.” Max spoke very quietly, unbuttoning his collar. “When two men know a secret, it’s only safe if one of them is dead.” Good men had died already because of this. So would many more, likely enough, along with the bad. “Therefore you don’t know anything. Only I, and Lukinov, and Luldnov’s dead. Do you understand this?”

“I don’t know anything,” Reedy said, with just a hint of irony. She reached over and lifted the glass of ouzo with both hands.

“My department will declare you the most politically sound of officers. Intelligence will know the truth, at least at the level that matters. Drozhin will get the captain’s official report, but he’ll get another report unofficially. You’ll be fine.” He picked up an anchovy. “There will be a very difficult time, a very ugly court-martial. But you can survive that.”

“Again?”

“Again. This one will not be removed from the record due to extenuating circumstances.” Her attack on Vance had been one of self-defense. “But you’ll be exonerated. You’ll be fine. Things are changing. They’ll be better.” He believed that.

She leaned her head back and tossed down the ouzo. Max reached over and poured her another glass while her eyes were still watering. “When I got this assignment,” she said, “I couldn’t figure out if I was being rewarded for being at the top of the class in languages, despite being a woman. Or if I was being punished for being a woman.”

“Sometimes it’s both ways at once,” Max said. He bit the anchovy and found he didn’t care for the taste.

“Can I ask you one question?” asked Reedy.

Why did people always think he had all the answers? “Information is like ouzo. A little bit can clear your head, make you feel better. Too much will make you sick, maybe even kill you.” He twirled his cup. “What’s your question?”

“Did you really win your wife in a card game?”

“Yes.” He drained his glass to cover his surprise. Though he’d won her with a bluff and not by cheating.

“Why did she leave you?”

Max thought about telling her that was two questions. Then he thought about telling her the truth, that his wife hadn’t left him, that she waited at home for him, not knowing where he was or what he did, going to church every day, caring for their two grandchildren. His daughter was about Reedy’s age. But he’d kept his life sealed in separate compartments and wouldn’t breech one of them now.

“Love, like loyalty,” he said, “is a gift. You can only try to be worthy of it.”

The silence lengthened out between them like all of the empty, uncharted universe. The food sat untouched while they drank. Max could feel himself getting drunk. It felt good.

Lambing Season - MOLLY GLOSS

Molly Gloss made her first sale in 1984, and has since sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Universe, and elsewhere. She published a fantasy novel, Outside the Gates, in 1986, and another novel, The Jump-Off Creek, a “woman’s western,” was released in 1990. In 1997, she published an SF novel, The Dazzle of Day, which was a New York Times Notable Book for that year. Her most recent book, another SF novel, Wild Life, won the prestigious James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award in 2001. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Since Biblical times, shepherds “watching their sheep by night” have always seen strange things in the sky. Probably not quite as strange, though, as the celestial visitation that the compassionate shepherd of this story finds that she has to deal with…

From May to September, Delia took the Churro sheep and two dogs and went up on Joe-Johns Mountain to live. She had that country pretty much to herself all summer. Ken Owen sent one of his Mexican hands up every other week with a load of groceries, but otherwise she was alone, alone with the sheep and the dogs. She liked the solitude. Liked the silence. Some sheepherders she knew talked a blue streak to the dogs, the rocks, the porcupines, they sang songs and played the radio, read their magazines out loud, but Delia let the silence settle into her, and, by early summer, she had begun to hear the ticking of the dry grasses as a language she could almost translate. The dogs were named Jesus and Alice. “Away to me, Jesus,” she said when they were moving the sheep. “Go bye, Alice.” From May to September these words spoken in command of the dogs were almost the only times she heard her own voice; that, and when the Mexican brought the groceries, a polite exchange in Spanish about the weather, the health of the dogs, the fecundity of the ewes.