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.
“That’s good enough for me,” the lost lover said. In his pack, he carried a jar of ashes of the person he loved most in this world.
“It won’t bring you any happiness,” the stork said. “The water won’t save you.”
“I know,” the lost lover replied. “Let’s go anyway.”
I should have said goodbye to my bike, like heroes in adventure movies do when their animal companions are gravely wounded. When I hit that rock in the mud and went tumbling ass-over-head, that should have been a sign of what the path forward would look like. Except, I didn’t want to be that story either.
So I carried my steadfast steed over my shoulders, even as the mud swallowed my ankles with every footstep. Refusing to lose yet another thing. Now that I stopped fleeing, I grieved the loss of my helmet. I’d been so happy when I’d found it in a forgotten shipping warehouse when I was sixteen. It made me feel civilized and it made my parents feel like I had a talisman of safety in this dangerous world.
But I was alive and that was something. Around me there were prickly bushes and plenty of rocks and everywhere smelled like damp earth and sulfur, but thankfully, nothing rotten. The mud was murderous though. The trail was steep and the panniers with the jars of ashes rattled as I trudged forward. Miraculously, none of them were broken, but they clinked together threateningly with each step.
Of the many low points in this journey, this was one of the worst. Because it felt like I would drown going uphill to an ocean on top of a mountain that I didn’t want to see. I promised my parents that I would take their ashes to the summit. I promised Nat that I’d take her six jars up too. I promised I would drink the water and survive. And I wanted to survive. Even if the water was just a talisman.
I wish there was another way, I thought as I took another step and sank through the mud down to my calf. But this was the only path I knew.
Screw this, I thought.
I dragged myself over a cluster of rocks, rising out of the mud like the tip of an iceberg. Took stock of my scrapes and bruises from my fall and of the bent rim of the front tire. It was nothing that I couldn’t heal from, nothing I couldn’t fix. But still, it hurt.
The path ahead snaked upward forever.
I rubbed my muddy face with my muddy hands, struggling to swallow down the despair caught in my throat. I’d never felt so alone.
Quickly, before depression dragged me down, I pulled out my repair kit from one of the panniers and began to work on straightening the front wheel of my bike. Fixing something always made me feel better. I didn’t think so much when I was fixing.
That was how I heard it. The small, sad whine behind me. The sound of a motor fighting for life.
I put down my tools and scrambled over the rocks, trying to find where the noise was coming from, slipping once. Only by luck did I spot the aluminum leg peeking out from the bog, flexing helplessly.
The muddy water rose past my knees as I wrangled and pried the bot free from its mucky prison. It took me a few minutes, then a few minutes more to carry it back to my bike. The bot was small, but heavy, and the terrain wasn’t forgiving. Its gyroscopic head whirled laboriously in my arms.
I cleaned the grime from the solar panels on its back with an old shirt from my pack, but the sky was still cloudy and gray, so I hooked up my external power cell to give it a boost. And I waited.
“Damn it,” it said, when it finally had enough juice to power on.
I laughed and rubbed my face. I couldn’t have agreed more.
“Hi,” I said. “What’s your function?”
“I am. Was. Am. A park ranger,” it said. “This was. Is. A national park.” It went silent for a moment, the LED in its torso turning yellow for self-diagnosis. “Crap. Natural language processor. Is. Borked.”
I didn’t care if the bot was partly disabled, I was so relieved to have found someone. “Can you take me to the end of this trail?”
“Bad idea,” it said. It stretched out each of its six spidery legs one by one, testing the joints, giving a hum of frustration when one got stuck. Five of the six got stuck.
“I know,” I said.
“So. Why are. You here?”
“May I?” I pointed to one of its jammed legs and it beeped its consent. The joint was out of alignment. I fished out my screwdriver from my bag. “I promised my parents I would.”
“That’s a stupid. Reason. To follow,” it said.
“I know,” I said.
“Why then?”
Because this is the only path I know, I thought.
“Why were you on a muddy path out in the rain?” I tightened the screw and articulated the joint.
“My job,” it replied. “Is to guide. Visitors. Safely up the mountain. If asked.” In a slow, stuttering motion, it moved its head to look right at me. “They asked.”
Something about its inflection explained that the askers didn’t come back down. Something about its direct gaze begged me not to do the same.
I didn’t say anything, focusing on the next leg instead.
“You think. If you fix. Me,” it said after a few minutes. “I’ll take you. Where. You want. To go?”
“No,” I said, frowning at the third leg. It was bent, but no worse than the rim of my bike. “I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do. And because I like fixing things.” I carefully bent the leg back to mostly straight.
The ranger bot didn’t say much after that. It whirled its creaky head and searched for signals and updates, giving a frustrated beep when it didn’t find any.
“That’s it,” I said after I fixed its last leg and realigned the motor in its neck.
“Thank you,” it said, sounding genuinely grateful, LED turning green. “But I can’t. Take you. Up there.”
Disappointment slumped my shoulders. I hadn’t quite realized how badly I didn’t want to be alone on the path. But like the lost lover, I didn’t have much practice making friends, and I wasn’t going to force the ranger bot to come with me. “Okay. Any advice?” I asked.
“Yeah,” it said. “Don’t go.”
I slung my bike over my shoulders and tried to tamp down my fear. “Stay safe,” I said and began trudging forward. One muddy footstep at a time.
“Wait,” it said, after a moment, after an eternity. “There’s another. Path.”
One time, a survivor took the cursed path to the impossible ocean. She never made it there. She got lost.
Halfway up the mountain, the path began twisting and splintered into trails that all looked the same. There were no road signs or clues. So, she chose a fork at random.
She chose wrong.
It was only by sheer luck that she picked a path that spat her out at the edge of the forest, not far from her home.
When she realized where she was, she breathed a sigh of relief. Because she knew the stories of travelers that didn’t return from the cursed path. There were too many to count.
The survivor was wise enough to know when she should count herself lucky and tap out.
Except, when she returned home and put the jars of her friends’ ashes on the mantel, six in all, she felt a cut of guilt. She thought about trying the path again, but surviving had taken a toll on her body and she knew, if she tried again, she wouldn’t make it to the impossible ocean.
Still, every time she looked at those jars, she felt fresh cuts.
And no matter how many times she glanced at the mantel or counted herself lucky, their sting never dulled.
The ranger bot, or PARKER 17, as it preferred to be called, took me back down the mountain.
We retraced my tracks, slowly because riding downhill in the mud was treacherous even in the best of times. The farther we went, the more my chest constricted. There was something heartbreaking about going back down a path I had fought so hard to climb.