The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (best romance novels of all time TXT) 📗

the sea. The tide was in; an errant wave washed through my hair. I remember that clearly.

And then they were all over me. Rough hands grabbed me, lifted me to my feet, pinned my hands behind my back. ‘No!’ I screamed. ‘Let me go!’ I screamed. ‘I won’t go with you! Let me go!’ The men ignored me.

The sea went about its business and the moon watched impassively, like they’d both seen more interesting things. One of the men took out a syringe and uncapped it; the needle glinted, a singular fang filled with poison.

I summoned a final, desperate burst of strength and broke free of my captor. I tried to run again. He stuck his foot out and tripped me. There was a rock, hidden under the wet sand. It met my head as I fell.

After that I just lay there and looked up at the stars while my vision blurred and faded. The two men stood over me. The one with the needle knelt and reached for my hand. As he did so, all their attention was on me.

So it was that I was the only one who saw the shadow rising from the sea, almost impossibly large, blotting out a third of the stars I could see, dripping water from its silvery scales. Rising silently from the water. Eyes like stars themselves. Reaching down with claws like ancient stone pillars, its tail like a mighty serpent twisting through the air.

I felt the needle in my arm and felt ice flowing inside me, coursing through my veins, making my eyelids too heavy to hold open.

The shadow’s great hand reached down toward us.

And then, right before my vision went dark, I saw that what I had taken for a tail was not a tail at all, for it was growing out of the shadow’s back.

The world went black.

Then I heard the screams.

And then I was gone.

*

When I woke up, it was morning and I was alone on the beach, except for the birds on the rocks and the ones swooping over the waves. I sat up slowly, looked around me. I saw no one.

But there, on the sand in front of me: an empty syringe, its needle caked with fine grains of sand. I picked it up and examined it closely. I turned and looked out at the sea. It was so calm today. So peaceful.

I got to my feet and started walking.

The old man with the third hand was sitting right where I’d left him the day before. He was rocking gently in his chair, head turned toward me, watching as I approached. My blanket, as I’d already come to think of the beach towel, was spread out on the sand beside him.

I sat down by the old man. His third arm rested casually over the back of his rocking chair. The breeze ran through his clothes, making them flutter on his frame. I leaned back and felt the sun on my face, my neck, my arms. I pushed my toes into the sand and wriggled them. A beach, I realized, is an in-between place. Neither sea nor land, it belongs to both and it belongs to neither. It belongs to no one, but it belongs to everyone.

‘I can’t go back home,’ I said.

The old man with the third hand looked down at me, and then he smiled, and then he said, ‘You can stay here with me.’

After that, we just sat on the beach and looked out toward the sea.

The Green

Lauren Beukes

South Africa

I pretty much knew Lauren was going to be a star when I first met her. We were both starting out, but Lauren had a presence about her, a steely determination with the talent to match. I was there when she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and could only watch in awe as her career went from strength to strength. I nabbed one of her stories early on for The Apex Book of World SF 2, and of course I had to have her in this one. I love ‘The Green’, so I hope you do too!

The Pinocchios are starting to rot. Really, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. They’re just doing what corpses do best. Even artificially preserved and florally animated ones. Even the ones you know.

They shuffle around the corridors of our homelab in their hermetically sealed hazmat suits, using whatever’s left of their fine motor functioning. Mainly they get in the way. We’ve learned to walk around them when they get stuck. You can get used to anything. But I avoid looking at their faces behind the glass. I don’t want to recognize Rousseau.

They’re supposed to be confined to one of the specimen storage units. But a month ago, a Pinocchio pulled down a cabinet of freeze-dried specimens. So now Inatec management lets them wander around. They seem happier free-range. If you can say that about a corpse jerked around by alien slime-mold like a zombie puppet.

They’ve become part of the scenery. Less than ghosts. They’re as banal a part of life on this god-forsaken planet as the nutritionally fortified lab-grown oats they serve up in the cafeteria three times a day.

We’re supposed to keep out of their way. ‘No harvester should touch, obstruct or otherwise interfere with the OPPs,’ the notice from Inatec management read, finished off with a smiley face and posted on the bulletin board in the cafeteria. On paper, because we’re not allowed personal communications technology in homelab. Too much of a security risk.

Organically Preserved Personnel. It’s an experimental technique to use the indigenous flora to maintain soldiers’ bodies in wartime to get them back to their loved ones intact. The irony is that we’re so busy doing experiments on the corpses of our deceased crew that we don’t send them back at all. And if we did, it would have to be in a flask. Because after they rot – average ‘life-span’ is twenty-nine days – they liquefy. And the slime-mold has