The Lincoln Train by Maureen F. McHugh (F&SF, April 1995) opens with the young female narrator and her mother on a train station platform waiting to be transported to Oklahoma in the mid-1800s. As the narrative unfolds we learn that, in this alternate world, Lincoln didn’t die but was seriously injured and incapacitated. Subsequently, his deputy Seward ordered that “recalcitrant Southerners” be deported (although it seems that the narrator and mother’s offence was to allow their slaves to remain living with them after emancipation).
When the train arrives there is a crush during which the narrator’s mother dies, but she is told by a soldier to leave the body behind and get on the train. On board she is befriended by a young woman who, when they arrive at their destination (spoiler), secrets her away through a door, but only after a madwoman runs down the platform screaming that the deportees are being starved on the reservations.
The narrator subsequently learns she has been saved by Quakers, who are running a version of the Underground Railroad for deported Southerners. They tell her they will help her get to her sister.
The final paragraphs of the story have her offer to help their organisation, but she is refused as she is a “slaver” and thus “evil”. I wasn’t entirely convinced that the Quakers would have been so explicitly judgemental about her.
This is a predominantly descriptive, slow-paced story, and feels a little like an extract from a longer work. It’s fairly good, I guess, but I’m mystified as to how it won a Hugo Award.
*** (Good). 5,500 words.