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

her, needles that are connected to tubes coiled around each other on the floor, just like the ones we’ve come across thousands of times in the refuse heaps. When Naima manages to focus her eyes on the masked face of one of the people in white, she sees worried eyes. I see greed, and an ‘s’ tattooed beside the eyebrows. Then we slide into a state of induced tranquillity, totally artificial, like that time we sniffed glue. Only it wasn’t really glue, but something else, that plunged us into a dancelike drowsiness, because we were relaxed but in the mood for fun: we wanted to just collapse anywhere to enjoy the hallucinations, but we also felt an impulse to run a race against the person nearest to us. Everything was simultaneously one thing and its opposite, sublime bliss and profound dissatisfaction, sexual passion and apathy, a desire to laugh and sneer at the bloody mara and cry for it.

I know what we felt: she only intuited it. She was in that space between mirage and delirium, roaming through alien landscapes where there’s no rubbish to triage – as if that were possible! I leave her to entertain herself with the images generated by the muck we’ve been injected with, and concentrate on her bodily responses. And for the first time I am afraid. I note that something strange and potent is beginning to circulate through her blood vessels, something that carries with it the force of a thousand cannon broadsides, something inexplicable, which frightens me when it reaches me. It’s a pushing, added vectors of force that twist, frenzied traction, a fever for destruction, and I fear the worst. The discharges tear into every part of the skeleton. It’s as if they’re paring the bones from inside, and I thank God that Naima is immersed in the quicksands of her imagination.

And now I can’t find my own space and I choke because they’ve invaded my home and torn down its very foundations. What was a beautiful adolescent body is now something else. I don’t quite know what, even though it looks the same and has the same features and measurements, even if it once again sips soup just as stubbornly as it would weak coffee, or triages plastics as easily as others collect cadavers. It was pleasant, my house, because it was mine; it was my temple, it was where I lived, and in exchange I looked after it without her noticing. She never suspected my presence, nor bothered to wonder why she sometimes had strange impulses that altered her usual conduct. And, in my own way, I adored her from my watchtower even when Sibilo was fucking her, because the interior of her muscles was my garden, because her brain was my dwelling place. I enabled her to survive the most devastating winters, the hungriest wild beasts, the most perverted homies.

The Santeros have desecrated her: I don’t recognize these nerves, this cartilage growing like the toxic fumes of stagnant waters. A one-armed girl for them to test their potions on, practise on, play at being doctors… Fucking devil’s priests! How easy to trade with other people’s bodies so that those living in the colonies can have nice fresh organs to repair their rotting carcasses, or in order to recycle them as a source of protein! I’m willing to bet we took so long to arrive because the paths of this mara pass through open-air cemeteries, and there were limbs and fragments of what were once people everywhere. She was unconscious, but the stench of dead flesh floated in the air like the fear in the mara and the lechery in the sewers, and it was impossible not to sense it. This odour is unforgettable because it infiltrates the cracks separating sanity and madness, which are as tenuous as chains of proteins, but elastic. It enters and takes over this space, and I no longer fit in this place nor do I recognize it. It’s all too much for me, I don’t want to navigate in this ship. There are always others that can take me in, even if the moving is laborious, even if it takes me my whole life to collect my belongings and find another cavern with external views. How can I possibly share my sphere with who knows what it is? I’m off.

END

They brought her a sugary liquid to help her recover. It was very sweet, almost colourless, and dripped from the corners of her mouth the first time she tried to take a sip. Her arms felt numb.

Both of them.

As soon as she noticed the left one, she stared at it with disgust, as if it were a gangrenous appendage. She raised her left hand and examined the palm and the back, following the lines marked in the skin by the veins, swollen bluish ribbons. She left the container she had been drinking from on her lap, and touched her left hand with her right one, palpating the fingers, stroking the transparent nails, tracing the tendons with her fingertips, going up past the wrist as far as the elbow, dwelling on the internal fold, and ascending until she reached the point where the stump should have been.

She waited, but only received the crackle of static. She gazed at the whole left arm, and for a moment thought she had only dreamed that it didn’t exist, that her mind had been playing tricks on her. But she noted the subtle faint line just above the elbow.

Naima was whole.

And burst into tears.

Translated by Steve Redwood

Rue Chair

Gerardo Horacio Porcayo

Mexico

Gerardo is another name new to me, though he’s considered the forerunner of cyberpunk in Mexico and is one of the most renowned writers of science fiction there. He is the author of multiple novels. Cristina Jurado sent me his story and I was delighted to grab it! The story was translated by the author, and is original to this anthology.

The subway sound, down there, filling and