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

They waited for a long time. Novik didn’t say much; he sat with his legs crossed in front of him, gazing up at the spires.

*

At dusk, Skidbladnir’s walls cracked open. Saga understood why Novik had positioned them so far away from the building; great lumps of concrete and steel fell down and shook the ground as the building shrugged and shuddered. The tendrils that waved from the building’s cracked roof stiffened and trembled. They seemed to lengthen. Walls fell down, steel windows sloughed off, as Skidbladnir slowly extricated herself from her shell. She crawled out from the top, taking great lumps of concrete with her. Saga had expected her to land on the ground with an almighty thud. But she made no noise at all.

Free of her house, Skidbladnir was a terror and wonder to behold. Her body was long and curled; her multitude of eyes gleamed in the starlight. Her tendrils waved in the warm air as if testing it. Some of the tendrils looked shrunken and unusable. Saga also saw that patches of Skidbladnir’s body weren’t as smooth as the rest of her; they were dried and crusted. Here and there, fluid oozed from long scratches in her skin.

Next to Saga, Novik made a muffled noise. He was crying.

‘Go, my love,’ he whispered. ‘Find yourself a new home.’

Skidbladnir’s tendrils felt the buildings around the plaza. Finally, they wrapped themselves around the tallest building, a gleaming thing with a spiraled roof, and Skidbladnir pulled herself up the wall. Glass tumbled to the ground as Skidbladnir’s tendrils shot through windows to pull herself up. She tore through the roof with a thunderous noise. There was a moment when she supported her whole body on her tendrils, suspended in the air; she almost toppled over the side. Then, with what sounded like a sigh, she lowered herself into the building. Saga heard the noise of collapsing concrete as Skidbladnir’s body worked to make room for itself. Eventually, the noise subsided. Skidbladnir’s arms hung down the building’s side like a crawling plant.

‘What now?’ Saga said.

She looked sideways at Novik. He smiled at her.

‘Now she’s free,’ he said. ‘Free to go wherever she pleases.’

‘And what about us?’ Saga asked. ‘Where do we go?’

‘With her, of course,’ Novik replied.

‘There’s no map,’ Saga said. ‘Nothing to navigate by. And the machinery? Your engine room?’

‘That was only ever needed to make her go where we wanted her to,’ Novik said. ‘She doesn’t need that now.’

‘Wait,’ Saga said. ‘What about me? What if I want to go home?’

Novik raised an eyebrow. ‘Home?’

A chill ran down Saga’s back. ‘Yes, home.’

Novik shrugged. ‘Perhaps she’ll stop by there. There’s no telling what she’ll do. Come on.’

He got up and started walking towards Skidbladnir and her new shell. Saga remained on the ground. Her body felt numb. Novik went up to the building’s front door, which slid open, and he disappeared inside.

*

Season 1, episode 5: Adrift.

The captain’s wife dies. She goes into space on a private shuttle to consign the body to space. While in space, the shuttle malfunctions. The captain finds herself adrift between the stars. The oxygen starts to run out. As the captain draws what she thinks are her last breaths, she records one final message to her colleagues. Forgive me for what I did and didn’t do, she says. I did what I thought was best.

*

Life on the new Skidbladnir was erratic. Novik spent most of his time interfaced, gazing into one of Skidbladnir’s great eyes in a hall at the heart of the building. Saga spent much of her time exploring. This had been someone’s home once, an apartment building of sorts. There were no doors or windows, only maze-like curved hallways that with regular intervals expanded into rooms. Some of them were empty, others furnished with oddly shaped tables, chairs and beds. Some wall-to-wall cabinets held knick-knacks and scrolls written in a flowing, spiraled script. There were no means to cook food in any way Saga could recognize. She made a nest in one of the smaller rooms close to where Novik worked with Skidbladnir. The walls gave off a soft glow that dimmed from time to time; Saga fell into the habit of sleeping whenever that happened. Drifting off into sleep, she sometimes thought she could hear voices speaking in some vowel-rich tongue, but they faded as she listened for them.

Skidbladnir did seem concerned for Saga and Novik. She stopped at the edge of towns every now and then, where Saga could breathe and was able to trade oddities she found in the building that was now her new home for some food and tools. But mostly they were adrift between worlds. It seemed that Skidbladnir found her greatest joy in coasting the invisible eddies and waves of the void. Every time they stopped somewhere, Saga considered getting off to try her luck. There might be another ship that could take her home. But these places were too strange, too far-flung. It was as if Skidbladnir was avoiding civilization. Perhaps she sensed that Aavit and the old captain might be after them. That thought gnawed at Saga every time they stopped somewhere. But there was such a multitude of worlds out there, and no one ever seemed to recognize them.

She tore the Andromeda Station tapes apart and hung them like garlands over the walls, traced her finger along them, mumbled the episodes to herself, until Skidbladnir shuddered and she took cover for the next passage.

Each time Skidbladnir pushed through to another world, it was more and more violent.

‘Is she going to hold?’ Saga asked Novik on one of the rare occasions he came out from his engine room to eat.

Novik was quiet for a long moment. ‘For a time,’ he said.

‘What are you going to do when she dies?’ Saga asked.

‘We’ll go together, me and her,’ he replied.

*

One day, improbably, Skidbladnir arrived outside a place Saga recognized. A town, not her hometown, but not so far