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.
All the ships in the USF communicated locally by sending concentrated radioelectric bursts in tight, targeted beams. A similar approach was used for long-range communications, only the local transmission was sent to a relay, which repeated the information through an FTL tunnel.
The Rosen was just at the edge of Quadrant Brenda. In a rational universe, the Erwin would already know the Rosen was there, either because the Rosen pinged it when it was in range—which it did, as part of the ongoing effort to establish communication—or because the midrange sensors have only one job, which is to detect nearby objects and keep track of them.
Possibly, the Erwin was no longer a participant in a rational universe.
She asked the ship to perform a full sensor sweep, and while there was some good news—it did pick up the Rosen, and her shuttle—according to the survey, there was nothing on the starboard side.
Not just nothing, as in, space is pretty much a lot of nothing anyway nothing. This was a nothingness that far exceeded any previously recorded nothing, on a scale that made it quite a remarkable something. There were no quantum fluctuations popping in virtual particles, or the evidence of gravitational force acting at a distance to warp the fabric of space-time, or microscopic space debris. There were no solar winds. There was just nothing.
Alice was reminded of the ancient Earth maps: those two-dimensional rectangles meant to approximate a portion of a spherical object. The early ones weren’t large enough to encompass the entire planet, so when one drew a line to the edge of the map, it wasn’t an expectation that the line would pick up again on the opposite side. There was nothing else there because the mapmaker had stopped drawing what came next.
This is the end of the map, she thought. Here be dragons.
“No, that can’t be right,” she said. “It must be a sensor malfunction.”
“Sensors operating at full capacity,” the computer said, helpfully.
Alice stood up and leaned, to get a look at that side of the ship. If she didn’t know better, she’d have said someone was out there hanging a gigantic piece of nonreflective fabric over that part of space. Maybe they were.
“Oh no, don’t do that,” Hadder said.
“Do what?”
“Stare at the Void. Never a good idea.”
“You know about this?”
“Of course I do. It’s why the ship isn’t moving.”
“Great, now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me what it is, and then maybe we can work up a strategy to get away from it.”
“It’s nothing. You read the sensors. I don’t know why you’re acting so surprised, I told you what the problem was already.”
“You didn’t mention the giant Void in space,” she said. “I would have remembered that.”
“I said nothing was the matter with the ship. That’s very clear.”
She sighed, and resisted the urge to draw her blaster again.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I can still see the Rosen. I’ll hail them, set up a tow.”
“Best of luck!”
She opened a channel.
“USFSF Rosen, this is Corporal Aste, on the USFS Erwin. Please respond.”
The transmission came from the radar array at the highest point on the top of the Erwin, with secondary and tertiary arrays on the underbelly in the event of damage from space debris or an act of violence. When Alice sent the transmission, the signal was transmitted by all three.
Alice already knew this was how local communication worked, but this time she got a dramatic demonstration of it, because for some reason the radio signal she sent out became visible for five full seconds, before falling apart.
It was hard to get a total count on the number of things that were wrong with this. Radio waves weren’t supposed to be a part of the visible spectrum, so that was a big problem right there. Also, before the signals dissolved (or whatever that was), those beams of impossible-but-true visible light slowed down.
Alice checked the communications array to confirm that the frequency she chose to send the signal on was a normal, nonvisible-spectrum frequency. It was.
“Don’t try the laser,” Hadder said. He meant the high-burst pulse communicator, which was meant for long-range emergency signaling. “Unless you dislike the Rosen.”
“You tried it already?”
“It was like birthing a sun. Very beautiful! Given its speed and direction, I’m afraid that beam may be well on its way to annihilating everyone who lives in the Podolsky System. First Officer Hart worked that out.”
This was the first time Hadder mentioned a member of the bridge crew other than the departed Ensign Anson. She thought that was a significant thing.
“First Officer Regina Hart?” she said. “Where is she now? In her quarters?”
“I’m afraid not. She’s left.”
“L . . . left. Left the bridge? Left the ship?”
“She’s in the Anthropene Principality now. I’ll see her soon, I’m sure.”
“Where is that?” Alice asked. It wasn’t a place she’d ever heard of before. Not that it mattered if she had; it was impossible to walk off a ship in deep space and visit much of anywhere, and there was a full complement of shuttles in the hangar. Wherever it was, First Officer Hart wasn’t actually there.
Hadder laughed, and gestured vaguely at the expanse of space. Oh, you know, the gesture said. Let’s not be silly.
Exasperated, Alice sat back down in the helm chair and rubbed her head. She could feel a headache coming on.
“I wonder,” she said, “if one of you—captain or computer—can tell me what actually happened, or why, or even when?”
Hadder laughed again.
“Why, I’m not sure!” he said. “What an excellent question. I know what we can do. Computer?”
“Yes, Captain,” the computer said.
“Switch to narrative mode.”
“Narrative mode?” Alice asked. “That’s not even . . .”
The computer began speaking again, only this time in a deeper voice that wasn’t precisely the same as the singsongy soothing one all the USF ships were stuck with.
“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.”
“Computer, stop,” Hadder said. “There, that was helpful, wasn’t it?”
“What the hell was that?” Alice asked. “And why is the computer doing that?”
“Doing what?”
“It said Alice asked, when I was talking, and the same thing when you were talking.”
“It’s narrative mode. Useful! Now we know it all began with Dr. Marchere.”
Alice was deeply confused. She’d never heard of narrative mode before, and was nearly positive Hadder was playing some sort of elaborate joke.