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.
They could all hear you, Anna said, as gently as she could in a language she would never be native in, if you spoke to them.
I do not wish to speak with the voice they have given me, Proteus Three said. I have no more shape than water.
Anna opened her eyes. The spars and spikes of the ship were dripping back into the lake. She could hear them like a syncopated rain. New spars emerged, melted, dripped again, an ouroboros cycle.
How can I help? she asked.
Let me tell you my service record, Proteus Three said. I fought at the van in the Battle of the Upended Grail, and helped lift the Siege of the Seventh Pagoda. I served under Admiral Meng of the Tortoise Ruins, and I struck the blow that killed Captain Estelle of the Lyons. I have saved millions and destroyed more. I could tell it all to you, but it would mean nothing to you, civilian that you are. And for all of this I gave up the dreadnought Seondeok that was my soul and my shell, because my duty is to the war, and if it would win the war more quickly, I was willing.
Willing no more, Anna said, because it wasn’t. Is this what happened to your comrades?
It was easy enough to say, here in the realm of ones and zeroes and all the numbers in between. But Anna knew the stories of soldier suicides. When she heard of them, she saw her sister’s face, and wondered if, for all that Maia had chosen the profession, it would break her.
My comrades chose death, Proteus Three said. I will not. But neither will I serve, not like this. Let me show you—
She was water and the memory of water, she was dissolving and disappearing, forever evaporating only to rain down again, sand castles sloughing into nothingness upon an empty shore. And this was it, this was all there was, she could not find boundaries, let alone escape them or transcend them, could not find her way back into her fingers or her feet, the heft of her bones—
Then it ended, and she was on her back with the Marshal’s mouth pressed to hers, the Marshal’s breath inflating her lungs. She wheezed, banged unthinkingly on the Marshal’s back—something she would never have dared if not for the sheer physical panic that gripped her. The Marshal slapped her. She rolled away, wondering if she was being punished for her temerity, but the Marshal pushed her back.
“Medic’s on the way,” they said. “Breathe.”
“Oh, I don’t care about that,” Anna said with an enthusiasm that would have been more convincing if she hadn’t been interrupted by a paroxysm of coughing. “What happened?”
It was only then that she realized that her link to Proteus Three had snapped.
“You screamed and convulsed twice,” the Marshal said. “To say nothing of the incoherent babbling. And then you stopped breathing. It’s clear why they banned your research.”
Just like a soldier, Anna thought, to point this out when it was also the key to the solution. “Do you ever treat your ships the way you would your lowliest soldiers?”
“We’ve been through this,” the Marshal said, their brows lowering. “They’re valued members of our fighting force.” Except when they defy my orders, their tone implied.
Anna forced herself to meet the Marshal’s gaze. “Yet it never occurred to you, in doing these ‘upgrades,’ that an AI habituated to a certain physical shell, who was comfortable in it, could be subject to dysphoria if it moved into a different one?”
She would forever remember the sensation of being as liquid as water, and yearn after it, a reaction diametrically opposed to that of Proteus Three; but that was her own burden to bear, and not one she would ever share with the Marshal.
The Marshal sucked in their breath. Anna braced in case they slapped her again, this time in anger. But the blow never came.
“But they’re created beings, not born like we are,” the Marshal said blankly. “It shouldn’t matter one way or the other.”
“They still habituate to the bodies we offer them,” Anna said, willing herself to be gentle. “The change of shell is a shock to them, just as it would be a shock to us. You said it yourself: they’re people, too.”
“So I did,” the Marshal said after a long pause, and this time their grimace made them all too human. And then, wryly: “I should have seen it earlier, if only I’d been looking in the right place. Measures will be taken.”
Anna pressed her hands against the transparent wall. The ship/lake was quiescent again. She didn’t say anything; nothing more needed to be said.
SHINGAI NJERI KAGUNDA
And This Is How to Stay Alive
Kabi finds my body swinging. I watch my sister press her back against the wall and slide to the ground.
My mother shouts, “Kabi! Nyokabi!”
No response.
“Why are you not answering? Can you bring that brother of yours!”
My sister is paralyzed, she cannot speak, she cannot move, except for the shivers that take hold of her spine and reverberate through the rest of her without permission. She is thinking No, no, no, no, no.
But the word is not passing her lips, which only open and close soundlessly. Mum is coming down the stairs.
Pata-pata-pata.
Slippers hitting the wooden floorboards in regular succession. In this space between life and after, everything is somehow felt more viscerally. Mum is not quiet like Kabi. Mum screams, “My child . . . Woiiiiii woiiii woiiiiiiiiiiiiii! Mwana wakwa. What have you done?”
She tugs, unties the knot, and wails as I fall limp to the ground. She puts her ear on my heart. “Kabi. Call an ambulance! Kabi—I hear his life; it is not gone, quick, Kabi, quick.”
Kabi does not move; cannot move. She is telling herself to stand, telling her feet to work, but there is miscommunication between her mind and the rest of her.
Mum screams at her to no avail. Mum does not want to leave my body. She feels if she is not touching me, the life will finish and the cold will seep in. Death is always cold. She wraps me in a shuka. It does not make sense but she drags my body down the hall to the table where she left her phone. “Ngai Mwathani, save my child.” She begs, “You are here; save my child.”
She calls an ambulance. They are coming—telling her to remain calm. She screams at them, “Is it your child hovering between life and death? Do not; do not tell me to stay calm!”
She calls my father. When she hears his voice she is incoherent but he understands he must come.
The hospital walls are stark white. There are pictures hanging on one wall, taken over sixty years ago, before our country’s independence. White missionary nurses smiling into the lens, holding little Black children; some with their ribs sticking out. This is what fascinates Kabi—she cannot stop staring at the black-and-white photos. The doctor comes to the waiting room area and Kabi looks away. She knows it in her spirit; she cannot feel me.
It is not until my mother begins to wail that the absence beats the breath out of her. Kabi feels dizzy. The ground comes up to meet her and Dad is holding Mum so he does not catch Kabi in time. The doctor keeps saying, “I am sorry. I am sorry. I am so sorry.”
For Kabi, the sounds fade but just before they do, somewhere in her subconscious she thinks she will find me in the darkness. Yes, she is coming to look for me.
But I am not there.
Funerals are for the living, not the dead. Grief captures lovers and beloved in waves; constricting lungs, restricting airflow, and then when and only when it is willing to go does it go. Kabi tries to hold back tears—to be