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

accommodate the new suits, ornate husks floating in nutrient soup in big glass tanks. Like soft-shelled crabs without the crab. The plating is striated with a thick fibrous grain that resembles muscle. The info brochure posted on the bulletin board promises ‘biological solutions for biological challenges.’ There is grumbling about what that means. But underneath all that is the buzz of excitement.

The operations brochure talks about how the suit will harden on binding, how the shell will protect us from anything a hostile environment can throw at us and process the air through the filtration system to be perfectly breathable without the risk and inconvenience of carrying compressed gas tanks around. We’ll be lighter, more flexible, more efficient – and it’s totally self-sufficient, provided we take up the new nutritionally fortified diet. ‘No more fucking oats!’ Mukuku rejoices. He’s not Ro, but he’s not an asshole and that’s about all we can ask around here.

Lab Four is still cranking. The reduced complement of labtechs are busier than ever, scurrying about like bugs. They wear hazmat suits these days. They’ve always been offish, always above us, but now they don’t talk to us at all.

Inatec management send in a state-of-the-art camera swarm to record the new suit trials – for a morale video, Catherine explains. Exactly the kind of camera swarm they supposedly can’t afford to send out into The Green to scout ahead of us to avoid some of the dangers. ‘You won’t have to worry about that anymore,’ she says. I believe her.

Harvest operations are called off while they do the final preparations, leaving us with too much leisure time, too much time to think. Or maybe it’s just me. But it allows me to make my decision. Not to blow it wide open. (As if they wouldn’t just hold us down and do it to us anyway.) Because I’m thinking that a cell doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It doesn’t have to be a prison. It could be more like a monk’s cell, a haven from the world, somewhere you can lock yourself away from everything and never have to think again.

*

On Tuesday, we’re summoned to Lab Three. ‘You ready?’ Catherine says.

‘Is my pension paid out?’ I snipe. There is nervous laughter.

‘Why can’t we use our old suits?’ Waverley whines. ‘Why we gotta change a good thing?’

‘Shut up, Waverley,’ Shapshak snaps, but only half-heartedly. And then because everyone is jittery – even us uneducated slum hicks can have suspicions – I volunteer.

I step forward and shrug out of my grays, letting them drop to the floor. Two of the labtechs haul a suit out of the tank and sort-of hunker forward with it, folding it around me like origami. It is clammy and brittle at the same time. As they fold one piece over another, it binds together and darkens to an opaque green. The color of slime-mold.

The labtechs assist others into their suits, carefully wrapping everyone up, like a present, leaving only the hoods and a dangling connector like a scorpion tail. The tip has a pad of microneedles that will fasten on to my nervous system. Nothing unusual here. The GMPs use the same technology to monitor vital signs. Nothing unusual at all.

‘Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. It injects anesthetic at the same time,’ Catherine says. ‘Like a mosquito.’

‘Not the ones on this planet, lady,’ Waverley snickers, looking around for approval, as they start folding him into his suit.

Back in Caxton, I tried converting to the Neo-Adventists for a time. They promised me the pure white warmth of God’s love that would transform me utterly. But I still felt the same after my baptism – still dirty, still broken, still poor.

‘Can we hurry this along?’ I ask, impatient.

‘Of course,’ Catherine says. And maybe that’s a glimmer of respect in her blue eyes, or maybe it’s just the reflection of the neon lighting, but I feel like we understand each other in these last moments.

The labtechs slip the hood over my face. She presses the bioconnector up against the hollow at the base of my skull, and clicks the switch that makes the needles leap forward. Suddenly the armor clamps down on me like a muscle. I fight down a jolt of claustrophobia so strong it raises the taste of bile in my mouth. I have to catch myself from falling to my knees and retching.

‘You okay, Yengko?’ Shapshak says, his voice suddenly sharp through the glaze of drugs he’s on. He must really care, I think. But I am beyond caring. Beyond anything.

I wondered what it would feel like. The soft furriness of the amoebites flooding through the bioconnector, the prickle as they flower through my skin. What’s better than a dead zombie? A live one. And maybe God’s touch is cool and green not pure white at all.

‘Yes,’ I say and close my eyes against the light, against the sight of the others being parceled up in the suits, at Waverley starting to scream, tugging at the hood as he realizes what’s going on, what’s in there with him. ‘I’m fine.’ And maybe for the first time, I actually am.

The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir

Karin Tidbeck

Sweden

Karin writes wonderfully creepy stories, of which I reprinted ‘Brita’s Holiday Cottage’ in The Apex Book of World SF 3. We’ve met a few times over the years, and were guests together at a Swedish convention a few years back. I’m a big fan of Karin’s writing, so I was really happy when I found ‘The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir’, which is definitely science fiction, though still properly weird!

Something had broken in a passenger room. Saga made her way through the narrow corridors and down the stairs as fast as she could, but Aavit the steward still looked annoyed when she arrived.

‘You’re here,’ it said, and clattered its beak. ‘Finally.’

‘I came as fast as I could,’ Saga said.

‘Too slow,’ Aavit replied and turned on its spurred heel.

Saga followed the steward through the lounge, where a handful