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

festive, catcalling youths in the center of her housing complex. And he had an interest in photography, which revealed a sensitive soul. It, in turn, prompted Amelia to forgive whatever mistakes he made, since she was a misguided romantic in search of a Prince Charming.

He still had that boyishness, in the eyes if not the face.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘I was on Friendrr for the same reason other people are. I wanted to talk to someone. I thought I’d talk to you. Maybe apologize. Amelia, let me buy you dinner.’

To be fair, she considered it and just as quickly, she decided, Fuck, no.

‘You booked me for two hours,’ she said, holding the phone tight, holding it up, so he could look at the timer she’d just switched on. ‘But I am not having dinner with you. In fact, I’m going to lock myself in your room and I’m going to take a nap. A long nap.’

She closed the sliding door behind her and walked down a wide hallway which led straight into said room. She promptly locked the door, as she’d promised. The bed was large, no narrow, lumpy mattress, springs digging into her back. She turned her head and stared at the curtains. She didn’t sleep, not a wink, and he didn’t attempt to coax her out of there. When the two hours had elapsed, Amelia walked back into the living room.

‘At Friendrr, your satisfaction is of the utmost importance to us. I hope you will consider us again for all your social needs,’ she said.

Elías was sitting on the sofa. When she spoke, he turned his head, staring at her. He had enjoyed taking pictures, but did not often have his own taken. Yet, she had snapped a rare shot of him with his own camera. He’d had the same expression in that shot: remote, somewhat flimsy, as if he were afraid the raw camera lens might reveal a hidden blemish.

Three months after he’d dumped her, Amelia had deleted that photo from her computer, erasing him from her hard drive and her life after finally clueing in to the fact that he was never coming back. Now she walked out and walked downstairs, not bothering to wait for the elevator.

I don’t know why you’re on Mars, Carl Sagan once said. Amelia had committed his speech to memory, but she couldn’t remember it now, although she’d played it back to Elías, for Elías. Elías, brushing the hair away from her face as she pressed a key on the laptop and the astronomer’s voice came out loud and clear. Which was maybe why she couldn’t, wouldn’t remember it.

4

Amelia had been tired, busy, upset, but the movie playing was too terrible to remember her worries. Too ridiculous. A man in an ape suit jumped around, chasing a young woman, and Lucía chuckled. Amelia, noticing this, chuckled too. They both glanced at each other. Then they erupted in synchronized laughter. The ape-man stumbled, pointed a raygun at the screen, and they both laughed even more.

Afterward, a servant refilled their glasses with mineral water. Lucía wore a yellow turban, embroidered with flowers.

‘Not my finest performance, I suppose,’ Lucía said, smiling. ‘In my defense, the ape costume was terrible. It smelled like rotten eggs for some reason. God knows where they got it from.’

‘That doesn’t sound very glamorous.’

Amelia did not ask questions, she simply listened, but for once, Lucía was offering conversation. Months of starchiness and, at last, the old woman had seemed to warm up to her. Perhaps this boded well. It would certainly be nice if she could book more hours. Especially considering that damned fiasco with Elías. Would he attempt to book her again? Amelia had asked herself that question a dozen times already. Each time, she thought she needed to phone Miguel, tell him this was her damned ex-boyfriend trying to book her, but she felt too embarrassed.

‘It wasn’t,’ the older woman said. ‘The glamor was in the forties and fifties. I was born too late. The movie industry in Mexico was eroding by the time the sixties rolled around. We made terrible movies, cheap flicks. Go-go dancers and wrestlers and monsters. I might have done a Viking movie if Nahum had gotten the funding for that, but he was flying low and Armand Elba wasn’t doing much better either. Can you imagine? Viking women in Mexico.’

‘Nahum?’

‘Nahum Landmann. The director. They billed him as Eduard Landmann. Armando Elba was the scriptwriter. They worked on three films before Nahum went to Chile. The first one did well enough, a Western. And then they shot the Mars movie: Conqueror Women of Mars. Then came that stupid ape movie and the Viking project floundered. Nahum couldn’t get any money and Elba flew back to Europe. Maybe it was for the best.’

‘Why?’

‘The movies were supposed to be completely different. Well, maybe not the Western. That one turned out close to the original concept. But Nahum saw the Mars movie as a surrealist project. The original title was Adelita of Mars. Can you picture that?’

Amelia could not, although that explained the strange costume choices and even certain shots, which had seemed oddly out of place.

‘Women wearing cartridge belts like during the Revolution, a guy dressed like a futuristic Pancho Villa. It was more Luis Buñuel and Simon of the Desert than a B movie. A long prologue, nearly half an hour of it. But then the producers asked for changes. Nahum also demanded changes; Elba kept rewriting and then Nahum rewrote the rewrites. I had new pages every morning. I didn’t know how to say my lines. I didn’t know the ending.’

‘Did they make any other movies?’

‘Elba wrote erotic science fiction. Paperbacks, I don’t remember in what language. Was it in French or German?’ the old woman wondered. ‘Nahum didn’t do any other movies. He didn’t do anything at all, although he sent me a few sketches from Chile. He had another idea: robot women!’

Lucía smiled broadly and then her painted eyebrows knitted