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

‘Father, you cannot take it away, it can only give out its voice here. It will die if you take it to a different place!’

Her father just sneered, and gazed at the lamas, waiting for a reply. The lamas seemed to have no clear idea about her father’s request, and they were all at a loss. Her father thought that they would not agree with him, but he said, ‘Let’s make a deal. How much is it?’

The lamas gathered and murmured for a while. Then an old lama, possibly the living Buddha of the lamasery, stepped forward and said to her father, ‘My benefactor, if you really want it, just take it away. Is there anything in the world that we cannot give up? And it is the wheel’s fate.’

The reply went beyond her father’s expectations.

Watching the lama’s peaceful face, the daughter and the student were also stunned.

Father picked the wheel up. The wheel was so heavy that he could hardly hold it up.

At that moment, all the lamas walked out of the temple. They lowered their heads and began reciting sutras.

Her father removed the wheel to the ground in front of the temple, placing it well, and stared at it with a thoughtful expression.

The daughter and student did not know what he was going to do next.

Suddenly, father burst into bewildering laughter, just like an owl, and he pulled out his laser cutter, waving it toward the wheel.

‘Let’s see the real face of the so-called hidden universe!’ he cried.

The daughter and student were frightened. They stepped forward to stop her father but it was too late. The wheel was cut into two pieces down the middle, falling apart to the solid ground.

It was empty. Nothing was inside.

The lamas suddenly fell silent. So did the mountains and the sky. The daughter felt extremely uncomfortable.

After a while, the sky became dark, and stars were just inches away from people’s heads.

Everybody looked upward in astonishment.

At that moment, a silent, bright white light flashed across the sky, splitting the sky into two pieces, just like the laser cutter had cleaved the wheel.

Millions of wheels appeared in the sky, just like flocks of birds. They were spaceships she had never seen before. They were escaping something, in haste.

The lamas kneeled down and began to pray.

Then the split sky began to fold along the white light in the middle of the universe.

And so did the vast land. The shadows of mountains rushed to an unnamed centre, just like fighting beasts, and their bodies huddled together.

She lowered her head and saw the shadow of her body begin to bend, just like a tree eaten away by insects, and it finally broke from her waist.

Then all the shadows folded together from opposite directions, swallowing all the people, all the mountains and rivers, and all the oceans and stars.

The lama’s smile flashed as an arc on the last second.

Nobody could see how the Big Bang started – it was quite different from all of humanity’s previous hypotheses.

Xingzhou

Ng Yi-Sheng

Singapore

Yi-Sheng and I met serendipitously at a writing retreat in the mountains of South Korea a few years ago. I got to hang out with him for a couple of weeks without, somehow, realizing this talented poet and activist from Singapore was also a major genre fan. I urge you to pick up his 2018 collection, Lion City, which blew me away when I first read it. I caught up with Yi-Sheng in Singapore back in 2017 and then – again serendipitously! – in New York a while later. I knew I had to have him in this anthology and, luckily for me, Yi-Sheng wrote the marvellous ‘Xingzhou’, which somehow manages to cast the history of Singapore in riotous science fictional terms – indeed, he seems to encompass the whole of science fiction in this one short tale!

My grandfather was a rickshaw coolie. He was born in China in the late nineteenth century, in a tiny village upriver from the coast of Fujian province. It was a time of misfortune. The rice harvests had failed. The landlords were heartless. His mother had hanged herself to escape her gambling debts. There was no food, no work, no means for him to survive but to voyage across the seas in search of a new life.

He left for Xingzhou when he was sixteen. ‘Young men like you can earn good money there,’ the recruiting agent told him as he pressed his thumbprint to the labour contract. ‘But you must work hard, harder than the tin miners of Perak, harder than the railroad workers of Jinshan. Live frugally, avoid the Four Great Evils, and remember your duty as a son. Only then may your family prosper.’

The steamer was waiting at the docks. It was ancient and filthy, packed with desperate youths like himself. Many turned pale and vomited over the railings as they blasted off into orbit. My grandfather slowed his breathing and screwed his eyelids shut. It was easier this way to bear the bone-crushing weight of gravity, to endure the pain of watching his homeland grow smaller and smaller beneath him.

The journey, he told me, was no less of a nightmare. True, it was a revelation to see the glittering expanse of the stars, unoccluded by the mists of home. But the interminable darkness and cold of the beyond struck terror into his heart. There were not enough hypersleep pods, so the men lay awake in shifts, playing chap ji kee and scratching at their pigtails. The captain sometimes came to laugh at their suffering. He was one of the foreign devils: a bearded, barrel-chested beast with tattoos on all seven of his tentacles. My grandfather gave him wide berth, for there was a rumour that he ate the weakest on board, later blaming their deaths on dysentery.

Eventually, they came within sight of their destination. Even the tallest tales of the village liars had not prepared him for this. For they had spoken only of a