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

each other. He had cannily figured that out. He had probably imagined the tears of a girl, the pleas, and cut it all off brutally to do himself, and her, a favor.

Or he did not figure out anything. He merely fled and she was giving too much thought to his actions.

A mess, a mess. She could not even remember the names of Mars’ moons as she stood with her arms crossed, her breath hot in her mouth.

‘You could buy a ticket too,’ she suggested, even though she knew he never, ever would. If he’d wanted it, it would have already happened, years before. But he had not.

Elías sighed. ‘It will be the same there. Nothing will change. I know you hope it will, but Mars won’t fix anything,’ he told her.

‘Maybe not. But I have to go,’ she said. ‘I just have to.’

He didn’t understand. He looked at her, still disbelieving, still startled, still thinking she somehow didn’t mean it. He still tried to kiss her, mouth straining against hers, and she squeezed his hand for a second before heading out without another word.

MARS, FINAL SCENE, ALTERNATE

INT. CELL – NIGHT

SPACE EXPLORER awaits THE HERO in her cell. The stars have gone dim. The building where she is held is quiet, all the guards asleep, and she waits. She waits, but nobody comes. From her cell, she sees a rectangle of sky, tinted vermilion, and faded paper-cut moons, which dangle from bits of string (there is no budget to this production, none at all).

THE HERO is coming, he is nearing, sure footsteps and the swell of music. But the swell of music hasn’t begun yet and the foley artist is on a break, so there’s no crescendo, no strings or drums or piano, or whatever should punctuate this moment.

There is the cell and there is the vermilion sky, but the script says she is to wait. The SPACE EXPLORER waits.

But she presses her hands against the walls, which are not plaster. They are cardboard like the moons. They are not even cardboard, but paper. And the paper parts and rips so that the rectangle of vermilion becomes a vermilion expanse, and she is standing there in front of the ever-shifting sands of Mars.

She holds her breath, wary, thinking she’s mucked it up. She turns to look at the other walls around her, the door to her jail cell, the hallway beyond the door. Then she turns her head again and there are the moons, the sands, the sky, the winds of Mars.

She wears no spacesuit, which means that it is impossible to make it out of the cell. But we are not on Mars. We are on Mars. The moons are paper and the stars are tinfoil. So, it is possible to step forward, which is what she does, tentative.

One foot in front of another, the white dress they’ve outfitted her in clinging to her legs and her hair askew as the wind blows. A storm rises somewhere in the distance.

She sees the storm, at the edge of the horizon, dust devils tracing serpentine paths, and she walks there.

She does not look back.

There are only two plots. You know them well: A person goes on a journey and a stranger comes into town.

FADE TO BLACK

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My heartfelt thanks to Lavie Tidhar, who wrote the introduction to this novella. Thank you to Paula R. Stiles for her copy-editing and proofreading. I am grateful for all the people who backed my campaign to fund ‘Prime Meridian’. Most of all, thank you for reading.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2017

If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again

Zen Cho

Malaysia

Zen Cho made history winning the Hugo Award for this story, which is as funny and delightful as anything she writes. I had the good fortune to blurb her first novel, Sorcerer To The Crown, before it came out – I kept reading it until well past 2 a.m.! I keep asking her to write more, quicker. I’ve wanted to publish her for years – we finally did it in The Apex Book of World SF 4 – and I could think of no better closer for this anthology than this story. Just don’t ask her when the next novel’s due!

THE FIRST THOUSAND YEARS

It was time. Byam was as ready as it would ever be.

As a matter of fact, it had been ready to ascend some three hundred years ago. But the laws of heaven cannot be defied. If you drop a stone, it will fall to the ground – it will not fly up to the sky. If you try to become a dragon before your one thousandth birthday, you will fall flat on your face and all the other spirits of the five elements will laugh at you.

These are the laws of heaven.

But Byam had been patient. Now it would be rewarded.

It slithered out of the lake it had occupied for the past one hundred years. The western side of the lake had recently been settled by humans and the banks had become cluttered with the humans’ usual mess – houses, cultivated fields, bits of pottery that poked Byam in the side.

But the eastern side was still reserved for beasts and spirits. There was plenty of space for an imugi to take off.

The mountains around the lake said hello to Byam. It was always safer to be polite to an imugi, since you never knew when it might turn into a dragon. The sky above them was a pure light blue, dotted with clouds like white jade.

Byam’s heart rose. It launched itself into the air, the sun warm on its back.

I deserve this. All those years studying in dank caves, chanting sutras, striving to understand the Way…

For the first five hundred years or so, Byam could be confident of getting the solitude necessary for study. But there seemed to be more and more humans everywhere.

Humans weren’t all bad. You couldn’t meditate your way through every doctrinal puzzle. That was where monks came in useful. Of course, even