Year’s Best SF 15 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

have to leave now, before the sun gets any lower. It’s a long journey to Crib Lake.” There was a doctor at Crib Lake. I remembered seeing his shingle when we passedthrough that town. Some rural bonesetter, probably, a doughty relic of the mustard-plaster era. But better than no doctor at all.
    Percy’s voice sounded weak; but what he said was, “We’re not finished here yet.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, not finished?”
    â€œWe’ve been invited inside,” he said. “To see Ephraim’s son.”
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    Some bird, perhaps a mourning dove, called out from the gathering shadows among the trees where the meadow ended.
    I did not want to meet Ephraim’s son. There was a dreadful aspect to the whole affair. If Ephraim’s son was in the barn, why had he not come out at the sound of gunshots and voices? (Ephraim, as far as I could tell, was an old man, and his son wasn’t likely to be an infant.) Why, for that matter, was the barracks closed and locked? To keep the world away from Ephraim’s son? Or to keep Ephraim’s son away from the world?
    â€œWhat is his name?” I asked. “This son of yours.”
    â€œJordan,” he said.
    I had married Maggie not long after I got back from Cuba. I had been trying to set up my photography business at the time. I was far from wealthy, and what resources I had I had put into my business. But there was a vogue among young women of the better type for manly veterans. I was manly enough, I suppose, or at least presentable, and I was authentically a veteran. I met Maggie when she came to my shop to sit for a portrait. I escorted her to dinner. Maggie was fond of me; and I was fond of Maggie, in part because she had no political convictions or fierce unorthodox ideals. She took the world as she found it.
    Elsebeth came along a year or so after the wedding. It was a difficult birth. I remember the sound of Maggie’s screams. I remember Elsebeth as a newborn, bloody in a towel, handed to me by the doctor. I wiped the remnant blood and fluid from her tiny body. She had been unspeakably beautiful.
    Ephraim wore the key to the barn on a string around hisneck. He applied it to the massive lock, still giving me suspicious glances. He kept his rifle in the crook of his arm as he did this. He slid the huge door open. Inside, the barn was dark. The air that wafted out was a degree or two cooler than outside, and it carried a sour tang, as of long-rotten hay or clover.
    Ephraim did not call out to his son, and there was no sound inside the abandoned barracks.
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    Had Ephraim once held his newborn son in his arms, as I had held Elsebeth?
    The last of the Liberty Lodges were closed down in 1888. Scandal had swirled around them for years, but no sweeping legal action had been taken. In part this was because the Lodges were not a monolithic enterprise; a hundred independent companies held title to them. In part it was because various state legislatures were afraid of disclosing their own involvement. The Lodges had not proved as profitable as their founders expected; the plans had not anticipated, for instance, all the ancillary costs of keeping human beings confined in what amounted to a jail (guards, walls, fences, discipline, etc.) for life. But the utility of the Lodges was undisputed, and several states had quietly subsidized them. A “full accounting,” as Percy called it, would have tainted every government south of the Mason Dixon Line and not a few above it. Old wounds might have been reopened.
    The Ritter Inquiry was called by Congress when the abuses inherent in the Lodge system began to come to light, inch by inch. By that time, though, there had been many other scandals, many other inquests, and the public had grown weary of all such issues. Newspapers, apart from papers like the Tocsin , hardly touched the story. The Inquiry sealed its own evidence, the surviving Lodges were hastily dismantled, and the general