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

touching-not-touching his crop circle. Many things were suddenly clear. Many things. Little clues, grazed necks, strange illnesses, illogical pains. Aliens. ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘Am I going to be all right?’

I looked at him, straight into his eyes. They were grey. There were strange geometries behind his eyes, and I thought I understood them. I didn’t say anything. His eyes grew large. Only after a moment I realized he was afraid. And only a little after that I realized he was afraid of me.

‘You too, Dr. Katz,’ he said. ‘You too!’ – and he passed out.

I climbed onto the chair and from there onto the table, and stood there, high, looking at the thin silent man who had spent the majority of his life with imaginary diseases that were, in the end, quite real. Maybe he was in love with his diseases. Maybe he was in love with me. It didn’t matter. Not now, with the aliens controlling him, and me. I gritted my teeth, and jumped, head first, into the crop circle, into his navel.

*

He still comes to visit me every week. Right after they released him from the hospital he came to see me. How nice of him. Maybe he’s still in love with me, even after I jumped into him. They told me the doctors managed to recover his digestive system. My head, though…

He comes to visit me every week, and the little greys are in his eyes, on his hands, forming and growing, growing and spreading all over his body. I have no mirror here, and I can’t look at my body, but I think it’s the same with me. I think I hope it is so. It’s hard to be sure, with a head like mine.

I think I see the world in black and white, or grey. Apart from Benjamin no one would understand, of course. I know exactly what the medical thinking is. I know exactly what the people who surround me would think of anything I would say. I know what I would have thought. I’m well-behaved, but that doesn’t help. Only Benjamin, only Benjamin could help me. He and the little greys, the growing greys, the great big greys. Now, when I see the look in his grey eyes, when I imagine the touch of his hands, the coils on his wrists, beyond the reinforced glass window separating us, beyond the jacket enfolding me, I know that he loves me.

I love him too.

But most of all I love the greys.

Translated by Lavie Tidhar

The Cryptid

Emil Hjörvar Petersen

Iceland

I met Emil a few years ago at a convention in Sweden and became a fan of this rare Icelandic fantasy writer. I am hoping we see a novel in English from him soon, and this fun story of a monster hunt should prove a fitting introduction to his work. The story was translated by the author and is original to this anthology.

How can they claim something has ceased to exist when its existence has never been proven? They say that the serpent has vanished, but how can something vanish that has never been Seen?

*

‘Aldis, are you sure you’re safe to dive? What did the ranger say exactly?’ Nyradur Njalsson sits comfortably by one of the abandoned boatsheds, smacking his lips on dried fish under his leather bowler hat, a frayed rag that gleams in the afternoon sun nonetheless.

This peculiar dwarf can cast his doubts as he pleases for he is the only person who still believes in my project – or at least the only mechanic who wanted to be hired as my assistant.

He rips the fish apart and offers me some of it. Despite a growling stomach after a busy and stressful day, I have no appetite and wave it away.

‘Well,’ I drawl. ‘He asserted that if I dive in a copper-bottomed drysuit I should be able to do my thing in the water for half an hour without risking any sickness. I actually thought it would be two hours like last time. This will be even closer than I thought.’

‘But wouldn’t it be enough to look around and take pictures from inside the sub?’

I narrow one eye. ‘Nah, the water is too turbid. We’ll take pictures inside but if I’m to find real traces, if I’m to find any specimens, I have to be able to examine the bottom closely. I have to dive.’

When I give him my unwavering look, the one my colleagues in cryptozoology have described as stubbornness giving birth to defiance, Nyradur shrugs and continues to eat.

*

Early Bird, my itty bitty copper-red submarine, floats calmly by the wharf, and my truck is parked close by. Nyradur and I have checked and crosschecked the controls, and made sure that all latches, hatches, valves, seams and bolts are in place. The clockwork in my new paracamera has been greased and the obscura stone inside it is attuned. This costly piece of equipment emptied my budget but with it I should be able to get quality pictures of the supernatural.

Everything should be in order. Everything must be in order.

This will most likely be my last expedition in Lagar River as an independent researcher. The growing pollution from the aluminium plant in Reydar Fjord, and the colossus dam at Kara Peak that fuels it, has slowly, over three decades, distorted the food chain in the area. What eradicated nearly all life in the water was a so-called accident five years ago, when dug-down barrels of waste from the plant cracked in a powerful earthquake, resulting in the goo leaking into the soil, spreading steadily into the flora’s and fauna’s cycles, all the way to the river. Over time the water began to change and now it’s thick with unwanted particles, poisonous to humans and animals. Questions have been raised if there’s something other than aluminium being produced at the plant. For the past year, schools of dead fish have washed up on land and birds in the surrounding