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.
dbauerbadgas is available to chat, her screen prompted her.
She typed a greeting to her colleague, Dagmar Bauer.
No audio? Dagmar’s response came back instantly.
Brother and niece having tea party. May get noisy, Audra explained.
Niece still in lockup?
Audra bit her lip. They’d had that argument by audio months ago, when Maisie was first confined to one of their examination rooms.
“Why do you keep her in a sealed room?” Dagmar had demanded. “It’s contact transmission in the first phase. Droplet transmission occurs only later in the second phase. That’s been confirmed over and over. You’re making the trauma and stigma worse.”
Audra had pushed back immediately. “She’s six. She can’t defend herself if some paranoid ex-mainlander decides she’s the island’s patient zero. It’s not necessary for the plague bacterium; it’s necessary for us. It’s a visibly reassuring abundance of caution.”
Today, she had another answer for Dagmar.
Help me get her out, then, she typed back. Impulsive, unplanned, the words on the screen looked as strange to her as if someone else had written them.
Dagmar must have thought the same. After a slight delay, a line of question marks popped up.
Audra continued, feeling bolder, pulling the words out from some deep place of rebellion and discontent. Fourteen bodies washed up today. Dr. Pereira says we’re due to miss one. The ocean currents could change and the beach might stay clear. But the bodies might just wash up somewhere else, and we’d have another case like Maisie’s. Or several cases.
Again, Dagmar’s reply was delayed. She was busy—multitasking in her clinic or thinking seriously about what Audra was saying. You have quarantine stations, of course?
Yes, on Salt Rock Island, just 2 km west of the main port. Navy directs mainland boats there. But some refugee boats don’t survive the trip.
Another pause. Things are changing here too. We see more restrictions on movement in and out of town. Media control. I haven’t seen a journalist in months. Can’t rely on email, and even letters go missing.
Audra started to type a reply. Sounds like what’s happening on our mainland . . . but then her fingers froze at the next line she saw.
Death toll is increasing in Bad Gastein and the rest of the country. Secondary disease phase is now established in population, I think. Authorities must be afraid to tell us the truth. So—censorship.
“Oh no,” Audra said softly. Dagmar, with characteristic bluntness, was setting out all their unspoken fears in permanent text for the world to witness. She glanced furtively at Colin and Maisie to make sure they hadn’t heard her, and then returned to her conversation.
We have to get a cure to human trials. Need your help, she insisted.
Dagmar sent a laughing face. We’re going to find a cure, after all the big labs and hospitals failed?
They failed because they focused on the first phase of the disease. We know better now. And maybe we’re all that’s left. Audra’s fingers shook as she typed the last sentence.
She had discussed the lack of response from the mainland with Dr. Pereira, and what that suggested about the progress of the plague there. And yet she felt such talk should remain a bleak mutter behind the shelter of a face shield, witnessed only by decaying corpses.
You are saying that help may never come.
Dagmar meant it as a statement, not a question, and Audra doubted it was a mistake. The question mark was nowhere near the full stop on a German keyboard. Audra was less brave, so she chose the question mark and batted the problem back to Dagmar.
What do you think?
I think you are right. I think that I am gaining far too much experience with autopsies in far too short a time. I often have to stop myself from thinking because it never looks good when the doctor has a panic attack in front of the patients.
Audra’s spine straightened as Dagmar spoke, and she almost laughed at the last words. Almost. Let’s make a start, then. Let’s reach out to the others. We need a team.
They needed more than a team—they needed data, resources, and a plan. Gilles had access to a vast library of medical statistics, clinical summaries, and experimental results from hospitals, labs, and institutions worldwide. Jennifer was involved in a project that collated similar information from community clinics, herbalists, and healers in the Rural and Emergency Medicine Network. Audra knew that the lab reports and autopsy summaries she submitted to Dr. Pereira ended up with the REM Network along with all the work of the community clinic team, but visualizing their drop of data as part of an ocean of knowledge was both humbling and heartening.
Best of all, Dagmar had secured funding, the result of a personal connection to a ridiculously rich philanthropist with the ridiculously aristocratic name of Alexander Esterházy-Schwarzenberg. “He will take care of our communications and logistics, including security,” she told them on their group call.
“Why security?” Jennifer wanted to know.
“Just in case,” Dagmar said. “We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves, but right now, if someone wanted to shut down our communications, or take over our data banks, it wouldn’t take much.”
Jennifer scoffed. “That’s a waste of money. Why would anyone want to shut us down?”
“You have to ask?” Gilles said. “Don’t your patients—hell, your colleagues—tell you the conspiracy theory of the day? The plague is a weapon of biological warfare. Sent by aliens. No, created by the rich to cull the poor. No, it’s Gaia; she’s trying to wipe out our species. It’s the Rapture, you think they’re dead, but they’re in another dimension. There’s no information from the authorities, nothing from the media, so people imagine the worst.”
“You sound a little tired, Gilles,” Audra noted gently.
“Exhausted!” Gilles confirmed with a massive grin. “Our electrical grid finally collapsed last week, did you know that? They say it’s due to a lack of personnel to carry out maintenance. We have too many dead, too many sick, and those who still live are stretched to the limits of mind and body. I would love to have security here. People break in—they think we’re hoarding medicine. They try to tap our solar generators. They hack into our Wi-Fi to get news from outside. Information is precious now. We have to protect ourselves.”
“Yes. Exactly. Just in case,” Dagmar said again, but softly, sympathetically, as Gilles trailed off into an incoherent and weary grumbling. “But we can’t protect everyone everywhere, so we’ll have to rely on redundancy. Duplicate our effort with three, four clinics working on the same thing. If one is lost, the others continue. No one is indispensable. And we must hold nothing back. We share all our work straight to our network, and Alexander will protect the network. The work is all that matters.”
With Dagmar’s friend throwing money at the project, everything became startlingly real. Audra told Colin, in the spirit of cautious encouragement, that she was researching every possible treatment that could help Maisie leave quarantine, but she said nothing about the Network and their project to find a cure. Her colleagues were a different matter. Dr. Pereira, at the very least, would demand details, and Audra was afraid of being quietly mocked or silently pitied.
The day after their group call and Dagmar’s revelation, Audra finally met with Dr. Pereira. The team leader’s reaction was completely unexpected.