Year's Best SF 11 (Year's Best SF (Science Fiction)) by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

Author:David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer [Hartwell, David G.]
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction, General, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fiction, Fiction - Science Fiction, Science Fiction - General, Science fiction; American, Short Stories, Science Fiction - Short Stories, Science Fiction And Fantasy, Science Fiction - Anthologies
ISBN: 9780060873417
Publisher: Eos
Published: 2006-05-10T23:00:00+00:00

I gently laid Becky's lifeless body on the ground, trying not to feel. As before, I let Hunter take care of the final details, ensuring not a single brain cell remained in either head. There were two minutes left in our window when I heard a distant whine. It could only be the Shardies. I placed my finger on the detonator. Our comm packages were running and would catch our final moments.

"Civilians just don't understand, do they?" Hunter asked as he waited beside me for sweet oblivion, sweet release from these mechanical contrivances we'd become.

I thought of Truett, and the way he had bravely shielded Becky to the last, thought of all the ways the war hasn't changed human decency, thought of my prize sheep and the necessities life forces on us.

"Some do," I admitted.

Third Day Lights

ALAYA DAWN JOHNSON

From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)

Alaya Dawn Johnson lives in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2004

with a BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures. At Columbia, Alaya worked as the News Editor for the Columbia Spectator, and interned at the Village Voice and Smithsonian Magazine. She has been published in Internet Review of Science Fiction, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Chiaroscuro, and Arabella Magazine. Currently, she works as an editorial assistant at QPB (the Quality Paperback Book Club).

"Third Day Lights" was published in Interzone, which began to hit its stride again in 2005 under new editorship, and ended the year with a new, more commercial look as well. It starts as fantasy, and becomes SF, in the template of planetary romance, the Leigh Brackett and Michael Moorcock tradition. In the very far future, humanity is destroying universes to drain as power sources for a huge posthuman project.

The mist was thick as clotted cream, shot through with light from the luminous maggots in the sand. And through that mist, which I knew would entrap almost any creature unlucky enough to wander through it, came my first supplicant in over thirty cycles. He rode atop one of the butterfly men's great black deer, which greeted me with a sweep of its massive antlers. His skin was as pale as the sand was black; his eyes were the clear, hard color of chipped jade. A fine, pale fuzz covered his scalp, like the babies of humans. He had full, hard lips and high cheekbones. His nose had been broken several times, and was quite large regardless. His ears protruded slightly from his head.

He was too beautiful. I did not believe it. Oh, I had, in my travels, seen men far more attractive than he. Men who had eagerly accepted me in whatever form I chose, and had momentarily pleased me. But I had never seen this kind of beauty, that of the hard edges and chipped flakes of jade. That aura of bitterly mastered power, and unspeakable grief subdued but somehow not overcome. He gave the impression that he was a man to respect, a man who would understand my

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