The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021
- Автор: Рот Вероника, Адамс Джон Джозеф
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: HMH Books : Mariner
- ISBN: 9780358470076
- Жанр: Малые литературные формы прозы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021». Краткое содержание книги:
This year’s selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and bestselling author of the Divergent series Veronica Roth, showcases a crop of authors that are willing to experiment and tantalize readers with new takes on classic themes and by exchanging the ordinary for the avant-garde. Folktales and lore come alive, the dead rise, the depths of space are traversed, and magic threads itself through singular moments of love and loss, illuminating the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the hereafter.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 captures the all-too-real cataclysm of human nature, claiming its place in the series with compelling prose, lyrical composition, and curiosity’s never-ending pursuit of discovering the unknown.
The one who uses it does not see it.
The one who sees it does not desire it—no matter how pretty it may be.
Can you divine the answer?
A coffin.
The books say that we are immortal. I would like to correct that: we are long-lived. We can be killed. We can kill ourselves. We can die of grief. But we live very long lives. The oldest ciguapa in our clan is more than two hundred years old.
Decades feel like months: we sleep, we wake, we feed. The village gossip interests us less and less. It’s so predictable. Boring in its normalcy. The past is a photograph from someone else’s life: curling at the edges, and fading. Like the books, we have become particular about what’s worthy of memory.
We have learned to outlive the people we love.
Here’s another adivinanza:
Diligent twins
Shapers of lack
Who walk with their blades pointed forward
And their eyes pointed back.
Can you divine the answer?
Scissors (did you guess?)
In their cozy houses, surrounded by their children and their husbands, Laryssa and Benigna still talk diligently around my memory, tracing the outlines. Like us, they choose what to remember.
But what can they know of my untamed grief? Javier. In every word, an echo of his name.
Thirty years passed and Javier came back to my house, alone. My heart beat a fraught old song in my throat.
On the first night, when everyone in the village was asleep, he walked to the edge of the woods, as if looking for something. I watched him, enthralled.
He sat down on a tree stump, looked at his fine leather loafers, and checked his gold watch.
“Mamá,” he said, finally. “I know you’re here.”
Mothers do a lot of things without thinking. I walked out into the clearing.
Javier shuddered and leaped to his feet, as if to run away—then gingerly bent at the waist to hug me. I smelled nothing beyond cologne and aftershave and mosquito repellent. Who was this strange man with my Javier’s eyes? He was tall, like his father, but I was pleased to see that he carried a hint of me in the creases around his mouth, and in his dark, thick eyebrows.
“I got married,” he said, sitting back down on the amputated tree, resting his manicured hands on his knees.
I crossed my arms. I suppose it would have been too much to ask to have been invited? But I couldn’t stay angry. Not after waiting this long to see him again. I uncrossed my arms and hazarded a smile.
“I have a daughter,” he said blithely. “Her name is Celimena. After you. She’s twelve.”
“God bless her! What’s she like?” The last of my pride dissolved. I put my hands on his giant ones.
He tilted his head back, gently pulled his hands away. “I can’t understand you. You know that.”
I took a step toward the trees.
He straightened up again, as if remembering a memorized speech. “I haven’t forgotten you. I’m going to tell my wife about your disease and we’ll get you to America somehow and find you a surgeon,” he said. “Or here, even! We can take you to the best surgeon here. We have money now.”
I pictured myself in a hospital gown in a white, white hospital, a doctor slicing my calves open and rearranging my tendons like a florist rearranging rose stems. I shook my head.
I tried to explain that we can’t be fixed—not in that way. We can’t relinquish what we have been built to carry. And it isn’t so bad, anyway, to be ourselves. But the sound of my voice only seemed to make things worse.
“Don’t you even want to try?” A drop of spit landed on Javier’s lip. “Don’t you realize how selfish you are? What if Celi grows up to be like you? We’ll need to know how to fix it.”
I wanted to hold him in my arms and comfort him, but he shoved me away.
“Do you know how hard it’s been for me? To grow up motherless? To lie to everyone about my mother? It would have been better if you’d just died.” And now he was crying, this adult man with my Javier’s eyes.
A venomous grief slithered up my calves and noosed my throat. I stopped trying to talk. By now, I understood my power. I looked in his eyes until his expression softened to a dull calm. I faced him as I walked away and he followed me, his lumbering footfalls heavy and thick. I imagined bringing him back to my sea cave, where I could rock him like a giant doll in eternal sleep.
Ciguapas have done worse.
But me? I had learned something new. I waited until the wave of anger receded back to some distant shore.
I kissed his hand. I watched from the window, just like before, as he packed his suitcase. I let him get in a taxi and find his way back to New York.
I grieved him again and I let him go. This letting-go is called living.
I know it will be hard, but when this message finds you—and it will find you—let your body hear it. You’re the one I’m waiting for.
I’ve read that it gets very cold in New York, but you won’t need much here. When you arrive in the old house in Higüey, wait until nightfall and then come straight through the back and out into the palm trees.
I will wait for you here. As long as it takes. Years and years and years—like sand to me. You will be sad at first, as I was, as we all were and are. But then you will see how the trees grow tall around us here, to keep us safe, and the grass is sweet-smelling and velvet-soft beneath our unloved feet. The breeze is a light kiss across our faces and the moon—full and white and glowing—is a generous mother. You will finally become who you have always been. You will remember what your body has forgotten.
I’ve waited so long for you, mi nieta, my granddaughter. Listen closely to me. I am teaching you our language.
GENE DOUCETTE
Schrödinger’s Catastrophe
Things began to go badly for the crew of the USFS Erwin around the time Dr. Marchere’s coffee mug spontaneously reassembled itself.
Dr. Louis Marchere was not, at that moment, conducting some manner of experiment. Well, he was, only not on entropy and the nature of time. He was running several other tests, of the kind that make perfect sense on a scientific vessel such as the Erwin. About half of them were biological in nature, concerning how small samples of cellular material react to certain deep-space factors. Other tests were more at home in the general field of astrophysics. But—again, as this is important—he was not conducting a test on entropy.
He just dropped his coffee mug. More exactly, he elbowed it from the corner of the table, while he was concentrating on things unrelated to the nature of falling objects. The mug fell onto the hard, ferrous metal of a lab floor, shattered, and sent his coffee—which was already disappointingly lukewarm—everywhere.
Louis Marchere was pretty upset about this. He’d been on dozens of deep-space scientific missions over the years, and this mug—a white mug with a black swan—had made it through all of them. It was a gift from his daughter.
But things break. No use dwelling.
Then, while Marchere was fetching a towel and a broom, the shattered pieces of the mug re-formed, rose up, and settled back on the corner of the table.
The spilled coffee remained where it was, either because it had decided that it wanted no part in whatever nonsense the mug had going on, or so as to verify—for Dr. Marchere’s sake—that what he witnessed had actually happened.
Which, of course, it had not. Shattered mugs don’t simply decide to reassemble themselves. They don’t decide to do anything, because they’re inanimate objects with no agency, subject to the whims of the same laws of physics as everyone and everything else in Louis Marchere’s laboratory, including Louis Marchere.