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 grabbed her helmet off the table and put it over her head. She clicked it in place. Then she reached behind her back for the suit’s tether, a long spool of wire with a clasp at the end. She released the spool tension at her hip, then opened the clasp, looking for something to hook herself to.
There, on the floor. A safety ring. She bent to hook herself in.
Just as the clasp touched the ring, the hangar doors ruptured—bursting outward in explosive decompression. She was yanked off her feet and struck the scanner. She clutched at the machine and then at the wires, feet trailing upward as a great, sucking wind tore past her, dragging along everything in the room that wasn’t strapped down.
She looked at her son still strapped to the floor, and she watched him freeze. Watched him die, though perhaps he’d been dead already. Dead from the moment she’d scanned him, though his body hadn’t known it; and now his skin turned cold and blue, and his eyes froze, gazing sightless.
The wires pulled loose, and she was tumbling as the last of the air whipped past, sending her spinning outward toward the fissured doors—and then through them, and out into the black. Outside the ship.
Silence.
That was the thing that struck her. The utter silence of space—broken by the sound of her own panicked breathing as wreckage whipped past, and she tried to turn her body to keep the ship in view, looking for the thing that had ruptured the doors—and then she was screaming.
She screamed because she saw it.
All this time she’d wondered what it might look like, the Beast.
The reality was something no human mind could have conceived of. The color of a scalpel, it landed on the ship like a bladework wasp, but more complex—its form a kind of fractal recapitulation of itself—with blades for wings, and wings for legs, and eyes that repeated over and over so you didn’t know where to look. It picked its way slowly on magnetized legs toward the ruptured bay doors.
As she tumbled, she lost sight of it for a moment, turning her head to look again, but it was gone, and there was only the ship, getting further away—twenty meters now, twenty-five—as she drifted further into space, amid the great wheel of stars, and the tumbling wreckage, and trailing wires—
“No.”
She slammed to a stop with bone-jarring force.
An impact so great that she saw spots. Her vision grayed.
For a moment she hung there, too stunned to move, and when her vision cleared, she saw the tether. Slack now as she drifted, trailing behind her back to the ship, where it disappeared through the doors. She floated in space.
She had no time to think, because in the next instant, she saw the tether move.
She stared at it, all down its length. Just a soft twitch, as if something at the far end had touched it.
And then the tether pulled.
She was yanked back toward the ship—toward the hole, with incredible force, and then the line went slack, and she was flying, struggling to turn her body, struggling to do anything, but nothing she did mattered, because the ship was coming fast, and she careened off the jagged edge of the door as she spun back into the hangar, tumbling head over heels until she slammed into the inner wall. This time she did black out.
When she opened her eyes, seconds had passed. Or minutes. She was drifting.
She saw the Beast.
It stood between the boy and the robot on long razor tines.
More than a beast, she saw then. A thing beyond words.
It folded itself away from itself, mirrored plates sliding, until some different, inner part seemed to turn and look at her with its many eyes.
Not eyes, she realized. Not all of them.
Some of the glowing apertures that dotted its wide carapace were not eyes at all, but instead glass portals into something deeper. Jars of divinity. Inside were things that had once been human, or which might be human still, in some strange fashion, peering out, resolving reality in every direction. Bearing witness.
With strange limbs, it jerked her tether and she drifted toward it.
The Beast reached out a silver-bladed hand and grabbed her by the head—its long fingers enveloping her helmet. She twisted helpless before it, and it tightened its grip.
Her helmet creaked under the strain.
She stopped moving. She looked past the Beast, toward the robot on the floor.
She toggled her radio and heard only the whine of interference, the Beast’s proximity overwhelming all open channels.
Still, she had to try. She switched channels to the mining bot’s preset and spoke.
“Son,” she said. “Are you in there?”
The Beast cocked its head. Interference split her ears.
Behind the Beast, on the floor, Icebreaker opened its eyes.
The robot lifted its great head but did not speak, could not speak. Then it extended its arm and looked at its own hand, which it turned into a fist.
“The Beast is here,” she said into her radio. “Save us, if you can.”
The Icebreaker shifted its great bulk off the floor.
The Beast turned then, still gripping her by the helmet—an impossible, demonic thing with endless glittering eyes, each one a human consciousness gazing out.
It flung her away as the robot charged, and then the two machines fought.
The Beast had not expected resistance. In all its endless simulations, it had never gamed this contest.
The Icebreaker swung its arm, connecting with a steel fist.
The Beast rocked backward and then countered, slashing at the robot’s torso with bladelike limbs. The Icebreaker pivoted, broke free, then attacked again.
The two machines raged against each other. The woman kicked off from her place near the wall, narrowly avoiding being crushed as the machines tumbled by. A bladed limb grazed her leg, sending her spinning out of control, on fire with pain.
For a moment, she thought she was going to drift back through the gap and out into space, but she managed to grab the edge at the last moment.
She was sure her suit was torn, but when she looked, she could see only a scuff. Her leg might be broken, but her suit was intact, which was what mattered.
The Beast now wrapped itself around the Icebreaker’s back, twisting the robot’s head. The robot fought and lost part of its hand to the blades—the fingers spinning away in zero g, spraying hydraulic fluid. The Beast tore at the robot’s chest like it might tear at the bell of a ship—opening it up, ripping the steel, exposing the innards.
The robot was dying.
“The eyes!” she screamed into her radio. “Go for its eyes!”
The Icebreaker heard her.
It jerked its arm free and slammed its jagged fist down onto the Beast’s carapace, shattering a glass aperture that squirted biological material into the vacuum. It quickly froze into a red smear across the silver shell.
The Beast reacted as if wounded and tried to pull back. The Icebreaker swung again and crushed another aperture.
The squealing in her radio grew so loud that it seemed her ears would burst.
The Icebreaker struck again and again, denting the carapace, caving it in on itself while the glass popped in the vacuum and the Beast thrashed.
One after another, the inner jars shattered.
With a last great heave, the robot raised its arm high and then drove its jagged hand into the Beast’s carapace—deep, where its heart would be, if it had such a thing. There was an explosive release of gas from inside, and a piercing shriek over the comms. The Beast twitched and went slack.
It was over.
The robot pulled its arm free and stood over the dead AI.
For a while it just stood there; then, bending slowly, it reached down to pull a glass chamber from the broken shell. It held it up to look closely. Inside the glass was living meat. Sense organs, brain material, a single ovoid structure that must have been an eye—the iris blue. As the robot peered close, some mechanism in the glass chamber powered down and the fluid stopped circulating. The meat inside died. Cooled. Froze.