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.
This was true irrespective of where that laboratory happened to be located. It had to be.
In this particular instance, the lab was in the middle of a ship that was in the middle of deep space, in a previously unexplored quadrant. The part about it being unexplored was unusual, but only a little unusual. The quadrant in question—C17-A387614-X.21, but everyone called it Brenda—was right in the center of a fully explored space grid. There had been many exploratory missions to all the other cubes on that grid, but nobody had bothered to check out Quadrant Brenda.
Probably, this was because Quadrant Brenda looked incredibly boring. There didn’t appear to be anything in Brenda—no stars, planets, or moons. Comets showed no interest in visiting, and asteroids kept their distance. In a universe that could be defined as “enormous patches of nothing, with occasional, albeit incredibly rare, bits of something mixed in here and there,” Quadrant Brenda somehow managed to contain even more nothing. This was probably why nobody had bothered to explore it before. It was definitely why the USFS Erwin was there, as this much nothing might mean something.
So far, two days into the quadrant, Dr. Marchere could confirm that it was just as boring on the inside as it looked from the outside. Three thousand different sensors on and outside the ship confirmed that sometimes a quadrant full of nothing is just a quadrant full of nothing.
And then the second law of thermodynamics—which was both extremely important and incredibly reliable—stopped working.
Dr. Marchere knew that wasn’t what really happened; a dozen better explanations were surely available. He just had to find one of them.
First, he checked on the lab’s artificial gravity, which he did by going to the wall panel and examining the settings, rather than by jumping up and verifying that after having done so, he also fell down.
The control panel confirmed that he had artificial gravity, and that nothing anomalous had transpired recently, either near the coffee mug or in any other part of the lab.
Louis returned to the table and picked up the coffee mug, half expecting it to fall apart in his hands. It did not; the mug appeared intact, with no indication it had been in seven pieces quite recently.
“How did you manage that?” he asked the mug, which didn’t respond.
Dr. Marchere held the mug over the floor and considered a practical but possibly irreversible test. Would the mug reassemble itself a second time? If so, the anomaly could be pinned down to something peculiar about the black swan mug his daughter gave him some years back. Perhaps it was even a trick of some kind, just waiting for the day he dropped it. She bought this trick mug based on certain assumptions about her father: that he was naturally clumsy, or vindictive about mugs, and would have shattered it before now, revealing the gag.
But that hardly seemed possible. It would require that self-healing mug technology existed, which it did not. And if it had, there was still the problem of the mug also returning to the tabletop.
He decided that this was a scientific problem, while wanting to keep the mug intact was an emotional problem. But he’d already reconciled with having broken the mug his daughter gave him, and felt confident that, if she were there, she’d understand.
He let go. The mug fell, broke into five pieces . . . and remained broken.
Of course it did. How could he have expected otherwise?
He fetched the towel and the broom, cleaned up the mess, and made an appointment with the medical wing. One of the twelve remaining possible explanations to consider, before upturning the second law of thermodynamics, was that he was going mad, and that was information that couldn’t wait.
Dr. Louis Marchere didn’t make it to the medical wing for his checkup.
“Final approach,” the computer announced, in a cheerful singsong.
Corporal Alice Aste was in the rear portion of the shuttle at the time of the announcement, performing some light calisthenics to get the blood moving in preparation for . . . well, something. There was no telling what she was headed into, but there was an excellent chance that it would require her to be limber. This was an old combat-readiness technique that had less applicability now, in peaceful times, but she knew of more than one soldier who didn’t live to become an ex-soldier due to a pulled hamstring.
She climbed back to the front of the cabin to get a look at the side of the vessel through the front windshield. The United Space Federation Science Vessel Erwin was right where Alice expected it to be, free-floating in the middle of Quadrant C17-A387614-X.21-slash-Brenda and doing absolutely nothing.
She opened up the comms.
“USFS Erwin, this is Corporal Aste of the USF Security Force. I’m on approach, and intend to dock. Please respond.”
No answer.
“Again, Erwin, this is USFSF Corporal Alice Aste, on approach, requesting dock. Please open bay doors. Respond, Erwin.”
She waited for a few seconds, in case someone over there felt chatty, then left the line open and went back to the rear of the cabin to get ready.
In any normal circumstance, Alice would be speaking with a hangar tech now, working out the details on how and where she’d be parking her shuttle. These weren’t normal circumstances. What she expected from the Erwin was continued radio silence, just like when Alice sent a transmission from the base ship—the Rosen, parked at the edge of the quadrant—and just like the same radio silence the science vessel had been honoring for a little more than six weeks.
The last official transmission from the Erwin was recorded forty-seven days ago. It was from Captain Hadder, and it read: We aren’t here again today. It was received, as were all of the science vessel communiqués, at the research station relay hub and then forwarded to the main cluster, where it sat for several days before anyone actually looked at it. And then, the only reason they did was that no subsequent communications came through and somebody thought that was notable.
Protocol was for a twice-daily check-in. Granted, the “day” these transmissions were sent and the “day” they were received were hardly ever the same, given the vast distances the signals had to cross, even when using the FTL ports. Still, ships like the Erwin had to transmit on a prearranged schedule, even if that transmission was nothing more than a not much, what’s up with you?
Self-evidently, something was now up with the Erwin.
Once it became clear that the cryptic message had no obvious, direct meaning, it was handed off to a linguistics team, and run through some databases. It received a partial hit on an old Earth song by the Zombies, and an even older poem by Hughes Mearns. Neither made sense in the context of deep-space communications from science vessels.
A message was sent back, asking for clarification, but no clarification arrived. Someone got a linguist involved, who decided that in order to get a proper response from the Erwin, base had to answer in kind. He offered several suggestions, such as: If you are not there, where are you? and Are you here again now?
When that didn’t do the trick either, somebody dug up the Zombies’ song and broadcast that, to see if it triggered a response, and then tried reading back both the annotated and full versions of the Mearns poem.