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.
“It’s not a joke!” Hadder said.
“I didn’t say it was!”
“The narrative did.”
“Turn it off,” Alice said. “I KNOW I SAID THAT, YOU DON’T HAVE TO TELL ME I SAID THAT.”
“Computer, end narrative mode.”
“Ending narrative mode,” the computer said.
“Oh, thank God,” she said. “All right, so, Dr. Louis Marchere. Where is he? Or did he go to the . . . whatever-you-said place?”
“No, I believe he’s still aboard,” Hadder said. “We were just speaking. Deck three, in the research lab.”
“Great. Let’s go.”
She headed for the elevator. Hadder remained where he was.
“Well, come on,” she said. “You’re the only survivor I’ve found so far; I think we should stick together, don’t you?”
“It’s . . . um, no. No, I think my place is on the bridge,” he said. “It’s safer.”
“Captain Hadder, I don’t think any part of this ship is safe. Our best option here is to find out what Marchere knows; if he doesn’t have a way to save the Erwin, we need to get to my shuttle.”
“Find out what you can,” he said, in a tone that sounded like an order, “and keep me updated! Much to do up here.”
He sat down in the captain’s chair, as if this settled things.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll, ah, I’ll let you know. Computer, deck three.”
“Deck three,” the computer confirmed.
As the doors closed, Alice could have sworn she saw Ensign Anson standing next to Captain Hadder.
But of course, she didn’t. That would be impossible.
It took twice as long to get to the third deck from the first as it did to get to the first deck from the fifth. Alice was quite certain there was no mechanism in existence capable of adding fractional decks to the ship, and so was chalking this up to another aspect of the ongoing computer malfunction. She supposed a way to validate this was to ask that the elevator stop at, say, deck two and five-sixteenths, but she also didn’t want to encourage the computer’s departures from reality any more than necessary.
Find the problem, she thought. Find the problem, work the problem, solve the problem.
The reason Corporal Alice Aste was an ideal rescue mission envoy was that, over the course of a fairly extensive career, she’d worked in just about every part of a starship, from engine to helm. She was a problem-solving universal tool, a one-person away team. If a disabled ship was disabled because there was nobody aboard with the expertise to re-enable the vessel, the likelihood was fairly high that Alice had the gap-filling skill set.
But this? Whatever was going on aboard the USFS Erwin, she wasn’t equipped to deal with it. Maybe nobody human was.
“The subjective mind is objectively flawed,” she said aloud. It was one of the philosophical-slash-practical mottos she lived by. She couldn’t recall who said it to her originally—probably one of her academy professors—but she’d found it incredibly useful over the years. There were some things the human mind was simply bad at grasping, observationally or intuitively, which was why flawed humans created machines to objectively interrogate the world for them.
That was what the computer was supposed to be doing. Since it was malfunctioning, Alice had no way to determine how much of what she was experiencing was even real.
And that was terrifying.
“Deck three,” the computer announced, finally.
The door slid open, revealing a corridor with glass-walled rooms on both sides.
Scientific research was the Erwin’s central function, which was why the third deck was its widest and tallest. (Looked at from the front, the Erwin looked like a wide oval or, if you were hungry, like an overstuffed sandwich; deck three was where all the meat was located.) It was also where most of the vessel’s funding went.
There was a dizzying amount of experimentational activity taking place in both of the glassed-in rooms, nearly all of it mechanized. If quizzed, Alice could definitively identify maybe a third of the experiments, and perhaps half of the equipment.
The ship’s supercollider—one of only a half dozen off-planet supercolliders in existence—was running some kind of test on the far wall on her left, while on her right a laser tube designed to detect gravitational waves was humming along. A little farther along, a hologram of a Möbius strip was rotating slowly beside a bank of computer screens displaying rapidly evolving fractals.
Those were just the most obvious, macroscopic things. There were also cultured cells somewhere, having things done to them, and top-secret genetic splicing research, and plants being taught to grow in zero gravity chambers, and much more, but she couldn’t see any of that.
She kept walking down the corridor, absorbing the maelstrom of activity on both sides, wondering exactly where all the power for this was coming from. The supercollider alone was supposed to take up enough of the energy from the Erwin’s fusion engine that the vessel couldn’t run the FTL drive as long as it was also going. (The energy issue wasn’t the only problem. Nobody was sure what would happen if a supercollider ran while on a ship traveling faster-than-light speed, but the consensus was: nothing good.)
The point was, everything running at once had to be an enormous drain, and yet the captain insisted the ship’s engine wasn’t even running. Either he was wrong—he was crazy, so it was probably that—or the Erwin was surviving on battery power. The batteries on a ship like this supplied just about enough power to keep life support going, plus the communications array, and maybe some impulse power for basic maneuverability, for about thirty days. It couldn’t do all that and also provide a city’s worth of energy to the research deck.
And yet, that appeared to be what was happening. Unless Hadder was wrong.
“Computer,” she said, “give me a read on the ship’s engine output?”
“The engine is not running,” the computer said.
“Not the propulsion. I know we aren’t moving. The base-level output.”
“The engine is not running.”
“Computer, the ship has power, does it not? Otherwise, you and I wouldn’t be talking and I wouldn’t be able to breathe.”
“Confirmed, the ship has power.”
“Then what’s the engine’s baseline output?”
“The engine is not running.”
“Fine,” Alice said. “Computer, what is the source of the ship’s power, if not the engine? Is it the auxiliary batteries, or something else?”
“What is the answer you are expecting?” the computer asked.
“The right answer would be great.”
“The batteries are providing the ship with power.”
“Did you just say that because you thought that was what I wanted to hear?”
“The batteries are providing the ship with power.”
“Sure.”
“Would you like to switch to narrative mode?”
“No. What is it with you and narrative mode?”
“Narrative mode has been proven to reveal information not otherwise available to this computer.”
“No, thank you.”
She stopped short of asking the computer what other modes it had available, both because this was yet another ridiculous conversation she had no time for, and because she could see someone moving in the last part of the lab on the right.
The man had on a lead vest, with goggles and a face shield dangling loosely around his neck. He was also wearing thick leather gloves, brown coveralls of the sort Alice recognized as standard for the engineers, and heavy mag-spiked boots. His hair was pointed in five different directions, and he was holding something that looked like a blowtorch in one hand.