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

eerie greyness. When my grandmother was still alive I used to ask her, ‘Nkuku, does the sky hurt and bleed like humans?’

She looked up from her knitted blanket. Wrinkles laced the contours of her face like rippled water. ‘The sky is the predator. All animals are humans but some humans are inanimate,’ she said. She was the only one in our family who loved me.

(VI)

I wake to noise blaring in my mind. How many megabytes of memory space will be depleted just to contact those bloody, poor-serviced customer lines?

Very well, psychomail it is:

#file report 22

Thought number #53897

Subject complaint: Skin malfunction; does not detect sun. Pre-requisite water levels contained in lungs reaching 53%.

Sent! Please hold for the next available customer advisor. All networks are busy. In case of emergency, please hold on to the nearest human for self-powering, explaining clearly your predicament to avoid violence and he/she shall be compensated within 7 days. Solar Power Corporations appreciates your patience. Goodbye.

A second is not long enough to send a message to Mama, to tell her, despite what’s happened, I still love them all – my family. That is the only regret I have: no one to say ‘I love you’ to. No one to breathe my soul into. I cling to desperation halfway out the door as if a miracle will split the skies and save me. My neighbour half-waves from her stoep until she realizes what’s happening. Her tear is the last grace I feel.

It is too late to remain alive.

In three seconds I am dead.

What the Dead Man Said

Chinelo Onwualu

Nigeria

Chinelo is the co-founder of Omenana, the ground-breaking magazine of African speculative fiction. She is the former spokesperson for the African Speculative Fiction Society. She edits, publishes, writes and is practically a force of nature. ‘What The Dead Man Said’ is one of my favourite stories of hers, a painful, honest, clear-eyed portrayal of family scars.

I suppose you could say that it started with the storm.

I hadn’t seen one like it in thirty years. Not since I moved to Tkaronto, in the Northern Indigenous Zone of Turtle Island – what settler-colonialists still insisted on calling North America. I’d forgotten its raw power: angry thunderclouds that blot out the sun, taking you from noon to evening in an instant, then the water that comes down like fury – like the sky itself wants to hurt you.

As I sat in the empty passenger terminal of the Niger River Harbourfront waiting for the bus, I watched as rain streaked the cobbled walkways in silver, sluicing through the narrow depressions between the solar roadway and the gutter. The ferry was long gone, moving up the river into the heart of Igboland, leaving me stranded in an alien world.

A holographic advertisement for some sort of fertility treatment played out on a viewscreen across the street. It was distorted by the haze of rain, but I made out a plump, impossibly happy woman in a crisp red gele – her skin glowing in the golden light of a computer-generated sun – clutching a newborn baby and dancing toward a household shrine. She was surrounded by celebrating family members, but she stopped before a regal older couple to whom she presented the child. The old man took the child with a benevolent smile, while the woman stretched her hand toward the young mother, who was now kneeling before them, in a benediction. The ad ended with a close-up of the beaming mother and the logo of the fertility treatment company in the corner. I turned away before my ocular implants could sync with the ad’s soundtrack, but I’d already caught the tagline: ‘Keep New Biafra Alive.’

My A.I. announced that the bus had arrived. Its interface had switched to Igbo as soon as I passed from Nigeria™ into New Biafra, as neither English nor Anishinaabe were recognized languages here. I hadn’t spoken Igbo in decades, but its musicality returned to me with smooth familiarity – as if it had simply been waiting for its turn in the spotlight. I ignored the ping; I wanted to watch the rain a little longer. Perhaps it would somehow wash this reality away and I could return to the quiet life I’d built for myself on the other side of the Atlantic.

You can’t put it off forever.

I frowned, then sighed. The dead man was right. This was like getting a body mod. You’d be a brand-new person when it was over, but in the meantime it was going to hurt like hell. I put up the hood of my hi-dri, shouldered my backpack, and stepped out into the storm.

*

It really started with the notification two days ago. My father had passed on – as they used to say – but that wasn’t real. At least not yet.

What was real was me here in Onitsha, my hometown. Even though I’d spent my childhood wandering this city’s narrow red streets, as I slumped in the passenger well of the automated minibus, it struck me how foreign the place now seemed. How had I forgotten how compact everything was, as if it had been built to accommodate a mass of people long gone? My grandparents told me that over a century ago, more than half a million people had packed into these pristine streets. Now, it wasn’t even half that.

The minibus glided along Niger Avenue, stopping occasionally to let passengers off or allow pedestrians to cross the road. As we passed Fegge, I caught sight of the neighborhood’s ancient cement family quarters, squat-shouldered and tin-roofed, hulking next to each other like sullen children. Crossing from Main Market, with its workshops and retail outlets, into the quiet residential lanes of American Quarters, I spied children in neat uniforms walking hand-in-hand to their various apprenticeships. Children were rare enough in Tkaronto, and those few who could afford to give birth preferred to cluster in tower communities that would protect their precious progeny from the vicissitudes of life. Apart from major celebrations like Emancipation Day,