The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

ago, broke VecTech’s copy protection watermarks. I can’t do the same, no matter how much the Small Animal taught me. So I have to cheat, recover the marked parts from somewhere else.

The wrong master’s brain.

The part of me that was born on the Small Animal’s island takes over and fits the two patterns together, like pieces of a puzzle. They fit, and for a brief moment, the master’s voice is in my mind, for real this time.

The cat is waiting, already in its clawed battlesuit, and I don my own. The Marquis of Carabas is dying around us. To send the master on his way, we have to disengage the armor.

The cat meows faintly and hands me something red. An old plastic ball with toothmarks, smelling of the sun and the sea, with a few grains of sand rattling inside.

‘Thanks,’ I say. The cat says nothing, just opens a door into the Zeppelin’s skin. I whisper a command, and the master is underway in a neutrino stream, shooting up towards an island in a blue sea. Where the gods and big dogs live forever.

We dive through the door together, down into the light and flame.

Benjamin Schneider’s Little Greys

Nir Yaniv

Israel

I first met Nir almost twenty years ago in Tel Aviv. We hit it off immediately – before long we were already plotting a novel together, a murder mystery set in a thinly-veiled Israeli SF convention. Since then we’ve written two novels together and most of a third, and are currently making a web-animated series for the sheer fun of it. Nir’s restless mind has led him to writing fiction, movie making and music, so it’s hard to pin him down! I translated several of his stories, of which this is my favourite, a strange, liminal tale of a child with unusual ailments…

When Benjamin Schneider came to my clinic and complained of mysterious coils on his left wrist I wasn’t overly surprised. The term ‘hypochondriac’ may have become overused years ago, but Benjamin nevertheless lived and acted as its perfect archetype. He had been that way ever since he was a child. I remember the first time he came to me, when I was still a minor family GP at the National Health clinic in town. He was about fourteen, short for his age, thin, curly and bespectacled, and a thorn was stuck, mortifyingly, in his behind. His mother, Mrs. Romina Schneider, did not spare him her wrath – ‘Every time, something strange has to happen to you!’ she said – and the embarrassed child gritted his teeth and gave me a pleading look. His mother, too, gave me a look – the kind an older woman gives a younger woman she doesn’t trust, doesn’t want to trust, but is forced to, if only by the vagaries of the National Health Service. I don’t remember how I got her away from the room – one of the nurses helped me, perhaps – but five minutes later the thorn was removed to the relief of everyone concerned. Benjamin’s grateful gaze was something I could never forget – if only because, for years afterwards, I received it from him, on average, about once a week.

The week after the thorn incident, for instance, he grazed the back of his neck on barbed wire – I had no idea how – and came to me to clean up the wound. I asked him if they didn’t have iodine at home, and he shrugged and didn’t reply. In fact, he never talked about himself, beyond – more or less – the medical reasons for his current visit. Every week he visited me, with one reason or another, as he grew up from a boy to a teen and then a man, still thin, still curly and bespectacled. When I opened my own clinic, twelve years later, Benjamin was my first client.

His medical problems were always a little odd. He was bruised in unlikely places – his right ear, for instance – suffered diseases like an arthritis that had the same symptoms as gum disease, didn’t respond to medicine and disappeared after a week – and indeed always healed miraculously and returned to me to verify the fact, and perhaps discover some new ailments in the process. It is possible other doctors would have ridiculed him and his various ills, and certainly my cooperation with it and with him, but I couldn’t bring myself to be so cruel to him.

The coils, however, despite our long history together, were something new. I had sent him for an X-ray several days before, at his insistence. He brought the prints back to the clinic, in the brown paper folder of the National Health Service, searched through them for a minute or two and then found what he was looking for. I spread the print over the white fluorescent board designed for that purpose and examined it, not expecting to find anything out of the ordinary, or at least of the ordinary as considered in the case of Benjamin Schneider. But, to my surprise, something was there. Two greyish coils, half-transparent, testifying that whatever they were made of was not solid enough to completely block the X-rays. And there was something else that was odd in the picture, but to begin with I couldn’t figure out what it was.

‘Does it hurt?’ I asked. He shook his head. His arthritis had already disappeared. I examined the wrist myself, but externally it was not possible to discern anything out of the ordinary. I told him I had to think about it and to come back to me in a few days. I looked at him, worried he might be upset by that, but he just nodded and left, satisfied, to all appearances, that his fate was in good hands. How little did you know, Benjamin. How little did we know.

I had quite a lot of work to do in the office that day, so I took the print home with me afterwards.