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.
She paced back and forth across the apartment, picturing the ghostly outlines of everything that had been taken away by the cleaner, to be returned in another week: A Fresh Start.
But did she want a fresh start? Did she want everything around her to be like the phones she cleaned at the warehouse, smelling faintly of the promise of emptiness, possibilities achieved at the price of erasure?
She had invested so much of herself into this life with Lucas. Just because he had left didn’t mean that it had been wasted. She had lived through it; it was not a dream.
“We all need to be reminded, from time to time, that we’re better than we remember.”
She looked at the pen in her hand again, squeezing it tight, feeling that burst of enduring trust, a faith that had survived growing up, growing apart, growing into strangers who had fresh starts.
The woman strode deliberately around the corner of the workshop in which her goods were piled and then hesitated.
Gui watched her, saying nothing. Clients sometimes changed their minds about cleaning. That was why he took his time on large jobs.
She stopped in front of the gleaming wicker chair. After scrubbing, he had oiled and polished it with a soft cloth. She ran her hands over the woven strands, holding her breath. Then she let out a long exhalation. “You’re very good. This feels new.”
He said nothing.
Her hand lingered on the chair a moment longer before she took another couple of steps, stopping before a desk lamp. The base, a crystal vase encased in spiraling brass vines, was meant to serve as a souvenir display jar or perhaps a small terrarium. It was filled with pebbles and shells, bits of sea glass, a plastic aquarium boat, a few key chains, folded-up bits of paper, ticket stubs.
“He bought this for me,” the woman said, as though speaking to herself. “But we both filled it. We tried to fill it with happy memories, to keep us going when things weren’t so good.
“At first, we filled it quickly. Then the filling slowed and stopped. We began to reach in for jolts of comfort, of strength. But we did so only when things were really bad, and so they got coated with arguments, betrayals, deposits we’d rather forget.”
Gui waited. He knew what she meant, but also didn’t.
He thought about the recordings his parents had made for him over the years, first very few, and then many more, in higher and higher resolution, documenting every aspect of the cleaning process as well as their life together. It was meant to compensate for his condition, to help him remember. But the very act of conscious documentation cast a pall over everything. Watching himself and them felt like watching actors.
She reached into the crystal and wrapped her fingers around a bit of green sea glass. Her whole body stiffened. She held that pose for a moment, eyes closed. Then she let out her breath slowly, her body relaxing.
“It’s messy, but we filled it together. I put myself in it.” She turned to him. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want the rest of it cleaned. I’ll pay you the full amount.”
“When would you like to schedule the drop-off?”
They worked out the details.
Before she turned to leave, he stopped her. “Do you want the dregs?” He pointed to the bucket sitting unobtrusively in the corner.
“No,” she said. “You can’t control everything. Some forgetting is healthy.”
After she left, he took the bucket to the incinerator. Carefully, he placed the lumps inside, one after another, as though laying out offerings on an altar. He shut the door, turned it on, and watched through the glass viewport as the flames inside leaped to life. The sponges charred, deformed, collapsed, and then burst into brilliant flowers of color and smoke.
He looked over at the scrubbing brush hanging on the wall. In the flickering light of the incinerator, he could see that the handle gleamed with a grayish shimmer, like a moth’s wings. It was the hue of his own deposits, mysteries he was himself powerless to decipher.
He realized that he could not recall the color it held when his father had wielded it, for the hue of memory was impossible to capture with the camera. He wept then, knowing that he would not remember this moment in the future, feeling both the weight of freedom and the lift of oblivion.
YOON HA LEE
Beyond the Dragon’s Gate
Anna Kim couldn’t decide whether the scenery outside was more or less beautiful for the coruscating cloud of debris. From here, she couldn’t even tell there was a war on. Of all the ways her past could have reared up, being trapped in the star fortress Undying Pyre was one of the more unpleasant. Aside from letters from her sister Maia, who was a soldier, Anna had done her best to stay away from the military. Too bad she hadn’t counted on being kidnapped.
It went without saying that Anna didn’t want to be here. She was a citizen of the Harmonious Stars. She had rights. But the Marshal had sent their thugs to drag her away from her attempt at a new start. Anna already missed her aquarium with its two cantankerous dragon-fish, one of them in the throes of metamorphosis. She’d barely had time to ask her colleagues to keep an eye on it, and was half-afraid that she’d return—if she returned—to a sad carcass floating upside down in the tank.
There was no one else in the room, which made her nervous. Along with the extravagant viewport, it featured a table too long for ten people and a commensurate number of uncomfortable chairs. (She’d tested one, which was why she remained standing.) Anna wondered why you would spend this much money building an orbital fortress and skimp on chairs.
They’d dragged her to the Undying Pyre with her senses partly deadened, an unpleasant journey for everyone involved. She’d had her senses slowly reactivated here, like a butterfly easing out of its chrysalis. If the room had a number or a name, she didn’t know it. Anna couldn’t have found her way out of it unassisted, any more than she could have sloughed off her skin and slipped away. The room had no visible doors.
She heard footsteps but couldn’t, to her discomfort, discern which direction they came from. A door materialized in one of the walls. Anna yelped and backed away from it.
A spindle-tall personage walked through the door. Anna recognized the newcomer. Even the most isolated citizen, let alone one with an older sister in the military, would have known that dark-skinned figure, with its sharp eyes and a nose that made them look like an ambitious hawk. Their uniform was velvety blue with a gradient of gold dusting along the upper arms, and a staggering array of medals glittered on their chest. They went by many names and just as many titles, but only one mattered: the Marshal of the Harmonious Stars, the supreme commander of its military forces.
“Should I salute?” Anna asked them, because she couldn’t think of anything but bravado.
The Marshal laughed, and Anna flinched. “You wouldn’t know how,” they said. “It would be a waste of your time, and mine, for me to show you how to do it without pissing off all the soldiers in this place. In any case, I apologize for the nature of this meeting, Academician Kim, but it was necessary.”
Anna swallowed, wishing the Marshal hadn’t used her old title. It dredged up unpleasant memories. “Yes, about that. I would have appreciated being asked.”
“I would not have taken no for an answer.”
So much for that. Anna gestured at the vista. “I’m assuming this is about the remnants of those three ships.”
The Marshal’s eyebrows flicked up alarmingly. “Someone’s been talking.”