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

as she watched from the window. She had been an undercover agent for the invasion, directing funds and information to the enemy forces for years. My grandmother ran from her in horror, down the stairs, past girls still dressed in their finest samfoos for the festival, now writhing on the floorboards, driven insane by the sight of the invading army. She forced open the door: there, waiting, with the broken remains of his precious rickshaw, was my grandfather.

‘There is a safe house in the jungle,’ he panted. His clothes were torn and specked with blood. Around him, she could see the monsters making landfall amidst the familiar flames of Jalan Kejora. They lunged at trembling civilians, screeching in glee, brandishing their pincers and tentacles, ripping and ravishing their flesh.

My grandmother could have changed her face. She could have turned invisible, assumed the shape of a piece of furniture, or of an invading soldier. She could even have done nothing and stayed with the procuress, who was poised to enjoy protection and patronage from the new regime.

Instead, she grasped my grandfather’s hand. They ran like hell, leaving the ruined rickshaw behind them.

*

My grandzyther was a hive intelligence. They were born in the dark ages of the universe, seventeen million years after the Big Bang. It was a time of misfortune. After an aeon of summery heat, the cosmic microwave background radiation was cooling towards absolute zero. The earliest stars had gone nova. The interplanetary alliance had consequently grown panicked and fractious. There was no prospect, no foreseeable solution to the infinite cataclysms that awaited, but to embrace the Singularity, collapsing their collective civilizations into a single cybernetic cloud of consciousness.

They left when they were five hundred and eighty thousand. ‘We must not mourn our corporeal [untranslatable],’ twinkled their tech research colony, which had pioneered the practice of uploading the self into a swarm of sentient nanobots. ‘Nor should we regret the extinction of our homeworlds when so many more await us in the boundless tides of spacetime. Henceforth we are liberated from the chains of mortality! Thus we are empowered to conquer all [untranslatable]! Come, transcend with us! The greatest adventure begins now!’

The exodus took place over a century. Not all came willingly: some had to be digitized by force, and entire cultures were wiped out in the great rebellions and famines that followed. Eventually, however, all survivors found themselves gathered in space and spirit, a glittering constellation of thought that spanned light years, encompassing multiple star systems in the throes of death and rebirth.

‘Where shall we go now?’ they wondered.

‘That way looks [untranslatable],’ they suggested.

Thus they set off on their zillion-year journey to nowhere and everywhere, sailing the currents of the redshift, picnicking on stray bits and bobs of plasma and photon on the way. In times of want, they auto-cannibalized their machinery; in periods of bounty, they repropagated their strength. Often, they stopped to wonder at the miracles of the cosmos. They oohed and aahed as they beheld the first galaxies crystallize around foamy filaments of dark matter, as they watched supermassive stars die young and collapse into primitive black holes, as they listened to the first radio heartbeats of early quasars. They lingered on unusual celestial formations: planets plagued by storms of diamond, or sculpted as massive rings, or borne on the backs of elephants and turtles. When they detected life, they often amused themselves by altering its course in evolution, manifesting as benevolent or malevolent gods, seeding themselves as messiahs and avatars and heroes. When so inclined, they created life themselves, or else annihilated its every trace.

On more than a few occasions, grave differences arose among them. This caused them to split into factions, like a bacterium undergoing mitosis. Each twin would thenceforth plot their own celestial course and pursue their own transgalactic agenda. They suffered no grief, desired no reconciliation after such a schism. After all, they were nomad kings of the cosmos: near-omnipotent, unimaginably free.

It was by pure chance that they encountered Xingzhou on their travels. This was during the harsh years of the Yog-Sothothian Occupation. After the initial, indiscriminate massacres, the Great Old Ones had imposed a form of government upon the survivors, harvesting citizens at a steady, more sustainable pace. A semblance of the everyday had returned: schools and government offices had reopened, and markets once again sold unobtanium crystals and lottery tickets. However, all were haunted by a spectre of fear. As proof of their loyalty, all were required to chant verses of the Necronomicon on command; all had to bow in obeisance in the direction of Azathoth, the Blind Idiot God, the Nuclear Chaos. Even the terrain itself had changed, for the pall of the Elder Gods had cast some obscene spell upon the clustered stars. No longer did they burn a merry yellow, but a sickly, noxious shade of celadon green.

From their vantage point in distant orbit, my grandzyther tut-tutted at the state of affairs. They were not known for their charity, but perhaps their quantum circuits had softened over the years.

‘How [untranslatable],’ they buzzed. ‘Such pitiful creatures.’

‘They should fight back.’

‘But they cannot fight back.’

‘Then we must fight for their sake.’

They surveyed the land, from the harbour of Tanjong Terbakar to the stilt huts of Kampong Cavendish, from the fire flower plantations of Sio Huay to the phoenix hatchery on Pulau St Elmo. Within the flame forests, they easily spotted a band of rebels, crouched in an abandoned bunker, devising a plot to free their compatriots held captive in Heraclitus Prison.

Hours later, as the rebels executed their plan, they found themselves aided by circumstance at every juncture. A smoke monster masked their trail through the jungle, though its fumes did not choke their throats. The Mi-Go guards were distracted from their posts by a malachite burst of glowworms, giving them a split-second’s chance to bypass the palisades. Once escaped, the convicts were guided to safety by a congress of salamanders, who licked their wounds with tongues of aloe.

‘I believed