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

cages. Aquariums with all kind of species… I look at a woman descending to the giant squid’s cube. That kind of hug has reached pale simulation on screens all over the world. Not even computer reconstructions achieve a minimum of this reality.

Adi grabs my arm again. Her smile gets bigger when she tries to avoid a threshold. I refuse to walk.

‘All right,’ she says, and we go over our steps.

The doors are made of wood. Everything’s decorated Tholhurst style. Men with overfeminine gestures manipulate the silverware. The fountains with food are vast. Exotic. Platypus, penguin, blowfish.

‘You’re not one of them,’ Adi assures. A waiter opens a lateral door with urgent gestures. In this alley, I look at the boys with needles in their veins, flooding their nostrils. One of them smiles at me, placing the last dermo in his eyebrow. The dealer growls. Makes a sign to my companion.

We walk through the last housing block. The smell speaks for itself. The rigid, cerulean bodies are bitten while mounted by men and women. Nobody notices us.

Rue Chair opens again into my sight. There are a few things to see and we’re almost done. At the center, a tower that stands until it reaches a hundred meters, starts to pull up a fourteen-year-old girl. The elastic rope tied to her ankle.

I’m surprised at this. There are things in which the boys will always surpass us. So easily attracted. A magnet so crafty for Rue Chair.

I’ve heard some things about the trick about to start, something about throwing her into the void. I keep walking.

An Arab-styled tent shows bits and pieces of dances, the glitter of the curving knives. Not the unguarded exit to the streets, to the city. It is also a shield for censoring what’s in front of me.

The man is still tied to the pole. His look, his grin, seem to speak of revelations and epiphanies. Four oriental women, without any clothing, kiss his flesh with the soft caress of their knives. They know where and when to do it.

‘Chinese doesn’t become you,’ says Adi, playing with her hair.

‘I think I’ll wait a little more.’

Adi smiles again, drives me to the door.

The policeman looks at me without looking. Two Prowler Plymouth, over there, slowly roll, trying to drive away those who were brought by random.

I sense the sweaty hand pulling away from my arm.

‘Maybe you’ll never find it again…’ she tells me.

I stop before crossing the final threshold. The guarded frontier.

‘You think too many artificial things. Too phony. That’s not what you want,’ she insists.

Her words are not what make me go back. It’s what I see in her eyes. I put back the personal invitation in my pocket. Even that slightest glimmer I would’ve lost.

She grabs my arm again. We now look behind the stands on the other sidewalk. The building is humid and smells rotten. The shack looks rickety. She begins to take her clothes off, complaining, and sits at the edge of the bed.

‘You know what you are…?’ and her hand finds some difficulty caressing the metal in my legs, not to make me feel that edge of meat that I still have. She throws herself on the mattress, lying down. Her buttocks are meager, almost open. I can see her anus, the texture of her sex.

I drop my clothes, get inside her. And I know I was right. In her immobility, in her old sweat, in her lacking attempts to fake what she feels, I perceive peace. The true conclusion of my story.

The orgasm is clean. Without astonishments.

But I know there’s no merchandise, no events on Rue Chair that can hide her final awe. That’s the word on the streets, in the right bars. It can be about mortal poisons, pandemic contagion, mechanic or electronic traps.

It can be anything.

Adi smiles. She hugs me and I kinda hear a sound behind me…

Then I feel it…

The cold metal against my skull. Its bite is circular and awakens a dark calmness. A relief. I know the caliber. Its effects. The looks.

‘And what are you looking for?’ I ask, without taking my eyes from hers.

The slow outcome guests transform into species. They don’t leave Rue Chair. They become merchandise. Those who get out without trying something rarely come back, they settle for cheap imitations, not always effective…

They are the Chorus. The Voice. The ones who talk about what happens here.

Rue Chair stays for just a day in the same place. It’s always on the move; they say not only in space, but in time itself.

Rue Chair is the farewell for those who feel what I feel. It’s the last taste of pleasure before walking the other street. The one situated out of life. Beyond life.

‘I look for chance, for the Russian roulette…’ Adi answers, without trying to kiss me. She doesn’t smile. ‘I just pick people like you. Without color in their lives. Maybe we’ll leave together… maybe this time I’ll share your same lead… maybe…’

I notice a fragment of the gun in Adi’s eyeball, the rest dilutes in her gray metal pupils. After that, I listen to the slow squeak of the trigger as it’s squeezed…

His Master’s Voice

Hannu Rajaniemi

Finland

Hannu’s one of those incredibly smart people (he has a PhD in mathematics) who are usually too busy inventing A.I. or nano-technology (just look up his career!). Luckily he’s also a fantastic SF writer. I published his ‘Shibuya no Love’ in The Apex Book of World SF 2 and of course I had to have him in this one. It was just a question of which story! ‘His Master’s Voice’ is prime Rajaniemi, strange and wondrous and post-human in the best way, and I’m delighted to include it here.

Before the concert, we steal the master’s head.

The necropolis is a dark forest of concrete mushrooms in the blue Antarctic night. We huddle inside the utility fog bubble attached to the steep southern wall of the nunatak, the ice valley.

The cat washes itself with a pink tongue. It reeks of infinite