Down and Out Under the Tannhauser Gate by David Gullen (Parsec #1, Autumn 2021) has as its narrator a woman called Mercedes, who lives beside a stargate on a future Earth:
This part of the world is a landscape of steps, a white stone hill two miles wide and one mile high. Eight thousand steps with a hundred flights and platforms. At the bottom lies a human city, a ramshackle shanty thing.
At the top are the sky-high silver pillars of the Tannhauser Gate, the beautiful gate, the one we Earther soldiers tried so hard, so very damned hard, to reach.
How I hate that gate. Yet here I am, living in its shadow. Most visitors climb the centre regions of the steps. The aliens come down and the replica men go up, because now they are free they can do what they want. Them, but not us.
Cytheran guards keep everything peaceful, which is nice of them considering they made us rebuild the place when the war was over. p. 4
The story opens with Mercedes meeting a woman called Riay coming back through the gate (we later find out she is physically altered, two elbows on each arm, three fingers on her hand, etc.). She tells Mercedes she has come back to help, and Mercedes refers to her as a “priestess” at one point. We also get some back story about the war against the aliens, and some detail about the Cytheran guards that now patrol the Tannhauser gate (such as the fact they float just above the ground as they move around). We also learn that few humans are allowed to use the gates, although this does not stop many travellers coming to petition the aliens.
We later learn more about Mercedes and Jonni’s relationship (including that she is emotionally dependent on him) before three aliens arrive to see the site of the battle at the gate. Mercedes is on the point of telling them that she was a combatant when a man called Blascard arrives demanding a minnesang from the aliens—a key that will let him use the gate and travel to the thousand worlds on the other side. When he continues to make a nuisance of himself, and subsequently gets too close to the aliens, a Cytheran guard teleports him away. When Blascard later returns to the gate, he demands a key from Riay instead (one of the few humans who has been allowed to use the gate), but she offers him only the chance to learn from her.
The penultimate part of the story (spoiler) sees Jonni offer water to a group of petitioners making their way up the steps to the gate. Mercedes speaks to the group and identifies herself as Sergeant Mercedes Gantl, the last survivor of the Fighting Ninth, the military unit that attacked the gate. Then she realises that the group are Neos, ex-military who intend doing the same. Mercedes and Jonni watch their attack: Jonni gets caught in the crossfire and is badly wounded. After all the Neos are killed, a Cytheran comes over to Mercedes, who is holding a dying Jonni in her arms:
I heard a furious static burst and a hundred voices spoke in my mind.
—this was never our intent
Never.
Unforseen
—we know the difference
Unwished
Unwanted
All our <untranslatable> weep with you
He was never—
—he would ever have been—
Welcomed
A final Cytheran slid aside like a leaf on the wind and I was at the gate. The pillars went up forever, the space between a silver-grey curtain like soft rain. Beyond it lay everything we had been denied and now they were letting us through. Jonni was his own minnesang, and today, somehow, he was mine too. If I wanted, I could go through.
—no, he is only himself—
You are your own song—
Changed now.
—each becomes their own minnesang.
If you want— p. 9
The Cytheran then takes the dying Jonni out of her arms to take him through the gate, and tells her to come back when she is ready.
The last section of the story shows a changed Mercedes, no longer resentful but someone who now helps others. A year later she goes back to the gate and passes through. She spends a thousand years travelling on the other side of the gate before returning to find she has been gone for three days. She discovers that Blascard is really a teacher, helping those left behind to get through the gate. Mercedes and Blascard and Riay team up to work to that end.
There isn’t really much of a story here—it is more a series of events—but it has an intriguing setting, convincing description and characterisation, and a transcendent ending. Stock stuff maybe, but well put together. I thought this was a pretty good.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,500 words. Parsec website.