Year's Best SF 17

Carolyn Ives Gilman lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and is an internationally recognized historian specializing in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century North American history, particularly frontier and Native history. Her most recent nonfiction book is Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide. She is currently working on a history of the American Revolution on the frontier, to be published by Yale in 2013. She has published seventeen or more SF stories since 1986, and one novel, Halfway Human (1998). She is a writer in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin. Aliens of the Heart (2007) is a collection of short fiction. Her novella Candle in a Bottle appeared in 2006, and her novella Arkfall in 2009. Gilman’s latest novel is in two volumes, Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles, and is a fantasy about culture clash and revolution in an enchantment-shrouded island nation.

“The Ice Owl” was published in F&SF. It is a dense, complex far future sf story. Gilman says it is set in the same universe as her novella Arkfall, “but it’s also the same universe as a number of other stories I’ve written. My novel Halfway Human is set in this universe, and the ice owl comes from the planet where “The Honeycrafters” takes place. I’ve started calling this universe the Twenty Planets.” Thorn’s school has been burned down by a Taliban-like political movement. She seeks out a tutor, who turns out to be a secret art dealer with a complex hidden life.

Twice a day, stillness settled over the iron city of Glory to God as the citizens turned west and waited for the world to ring. For a few moments the motionless red sun on the horizon, half-concealed by the western mountains, lit every face in the city: the just-born and the dying, the prisoners and the veiled, the devout and the profane. The sound started so low it could only be heard by the bones; but as the moments passed the metal city itself began to ring in sympathetic harmony, till the sound resolved into a note—The Note, priests said, sung by the heart of God to set creation going. Its vibratory mathematics embodied all structure; its pitch implied all scales and chords; its beauty was the ovum of all devotion and all faithlessness. Nothing more than a note was needed to extrapolate the universe.

The Note came regular as clockwork, the only timebound thing in a city of perpetual sunset.

On a ledge outside a window in the rustiest part of town, crouched one of the ominous cast-iron gargoyles fancied by the architects of Glory to God—or so it seemed until it moved. Then it resolved into an adolescent girl dressed all in black. Her face was turned west, her eyes closed in a look of private exaltation as The Note reverberated through her. It was a face that had just recently lost the chubbiness of childhood, so that the clean-boned adult was beginning to show through. Her name, also a recent development, was Thorn. She had chosen it because it evoked suffering and redemption.