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 walls were partly transparent and partly solid, because deck four’s walls were opaque, while deck three’s floors had glass walls. Deck three and eleven-sixteenths was trying to have both at once.
Since the gravity was out, Alice activated the mag-spikes on her boots and attached herself to the floor, then stepped off the elevator onto a blurry level that somehow managed to be solid.
“Computer, where is the nearest maintenance shaft on this deck?” she asked.
If the ship behaved for long enough, she’d be able to access the fifth deck by way of a maintenance shaft.
“Twenty-five meters.”
“In which direction?”
“All directions.”
The computer was not going to help.
Relying on the deck layout of one of the levels that was actually supposed to exist, Alice headed straight down the blurry corridor between the blurry rooms on both sides. In a slightly more ideal circumstance, she’d run, but because the artificial gravity generator had decided it was done (or ceased to exist, or whatever), she had to keep one boot on the ground.
About fifteen steps in, the boots stopped working. Actually, what it felt like was that the magnets holding her in place switched poles spontaneously, and repelled her from the floor. She began drifting to the ceiling.
Then came an explosion, somewhere aboard the ship. Alice felt it tremble through the belly of the vessel, rocking the walls and putting her into a gentle spin.
“Computer, what was that?”
“That was an explosion,” the computer said, not at all helpfully.
“Right, thanks.”
There was another tremble, and a shudder, and then a loud screech that didn’t sound like much of anything Alice had ever heard before: not the noise a machine makes when it’s broken, or a sound approximating that of an extinct elephant getting squeezed, or the cacophony a ship makes when its hull is torn open. It was not, in other words, on the short list of bad noises in her mental catalog of things to be alarmed about. She was nevertheless extremely alarmed, because what it did sound like was a creature that her lizard brain told her to run from. This was even though that portion of her brain also didn’t know what she was hearing.
Then, directly beneath her and along the corridor floor, a thing ran past.
There were a tremendous number of wrong things that were wrong with this thing, the most arresting being that it was somehow in a higher definition than the rest of the deck, including Alice herself. It was a bright shade of blue, and green, almond, and a color of purple she was pretty sure was ultraviolet, which she was also pretty sure she shouldn’t have been able to see. There were other colors she didn’t even have a name for, because they didn’t exist in the universe she was familiar with.
It was perhaps a giant bat, perhaps a snake, and perhaps a horse. It galloped and hissed, shrieked and chortled, and swung its long, clawed fingers through the walls on either side as if they weren’t there. The walls, in turn, acted as if the creature wasn’t there, showing no damage.
Here be dragons, she thought.
With a great flap of its enormous wings, it soared ahead, and vanished at the far end of the corridor.
“All right, I’ve had enough,” Alice said. “Computer, what’s the fastest way off this ship? I don’t care how, just as long as it puts me on the other side of the hull.”
“Unable to calculate,” the computer said.
“Why is that?”
“The concept of other side of the hull is too variable to allow for a precise calculation. There are several places where the hull has ceased to exist, but sensors indicate nothing exists on the other side of where the hull no longer is.”
“That’s great.”
The vessel shuddered again. Alice waited for a new nightmare creature to show up, but none did. It was probably just another part of the Erwin getting unwritten from the universe.
“Computer, how close am I to the maintenance shaft now?”
“Twenty-five meters.”
“That’s how far I was when I got off the broken elevator. I must have gotten closer since.”
“Understood. However, the distance remains twenty-five meters.”
She sighed.
“I really need to understand what’s happening to the entire ship right now, computer,” Alice said, “or I’m never getting off of it. I don’t even know what questions to ask you. Can you provide me with an integrity assessment?”
“Not in this mode.”
A hole opened up in the floor, which should have been good news, because that was the direction she wanted to go. But there was nothing on the other side of the hole. Either decks four and five were missing now, or the hole just went to someplace different.
“What the hell,” Alice said. “Computer, switch to narrative mode.”
Something quite extraordinary was happening to the USFS Erwin.
It was difficult to tell, from more or less any angle, whether the ship had been drawing closer to the Void on its starboard, or if the Void was moving closer to the ship, but what was definitely the case was that their positions relative to one another had been changing since the Erwin first encountered the strange section of space. Now—after either two days or six weeks—the two things were colliding.
The Void was having a devastating effect on the Erwin. (The same could not be said of the Erwin’s impact on the Void, which appeared to be weathering things just fine.) There were certain expectations regarding how most space-based threats could damage a man-made starship. Incredibly dense objects, like neutron stars or black holes, could tear apart such a ship if it ventured too close, by literally ripping parts of the vessel off of other parts of the vessel, and/or drawing it into an inescapable gravitational well. Highly radioactive objects could bombard the ship with levels of gamma radiation so severe as to overwhelm the shielding and cook whoever was unfortunate enough to be inside. Rogue objects like asteroids could blow through a hull with a direct hit.
And so on.
None of those things were happening to the Erwin. Instead, it looked as if someone had produced a very realistic three-dimensional artistic rendering of the ship and then, deciding they disliked it, began erasing the artwork. Starting on the starboard side, large chunks of solid material were being turned into tiny bits of particulate matter—eraser crumbs, perhaps—after which the tiny bits of particulate matter glistened with internal light and then vanished.
It’s fair to say that however beautiful this might have looked to a neutral (and presumably distant) observer, its impact on the contents of the vessel was very bad indeed. Under optimal circumstances, a hull breach was dealt with by the ship’s integrity shields: short-term force fields that plugged up holes before all of the atmosphere in the breached cell leaked into space. But the integrity shields only worked in circumstances where there was more hull than breach, and anyway they needed power in order to function. Unfortunately, the entirely impossible perpetual motion machine Dr. Marchere assembled had begun to break down.
All of this would be very bad news for anyone still alive aboard the USFS Erwin. It was good news, then—if such a thing deserved to be called good news—that there was nobody left alive on the Erwin. All except for Corporal Alice Aste, desperately shuffling along deck three and eleven-sixteenths in a quixotic attempt to get back to her shuttle before she too was unmade.