Farland L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 34

The Best New Sci Fi and Fantasy Short Stories of the Year
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61986-572-3
Verlag: Galaxy Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 34, 400 Seiten

Reihe: L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future

24 Award-Winning Authors and Illustrators

Accompanied by Orson Scott Card, Brandon Sanderson, Jody Lynn Nye, Jerry Pournelle, Ciruelo and Echo Chernik and Edited by David Farland

Your search for something new and different in sci-fi and fantasy ends here.

Presenting this year's collection of fresh voices, fabulous worlds, and fantastic new characters.

Each year, the Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contests' blue-ribbon judges search the world to discover and introduce to you the very best new talent in sci-fi and fantasy.

Created by L. Ron Hubbard, whose commitment to help new writers and artists gave rise to the annual Writers of the Future anthologies-a launching pad for writers and artists who are sure to command our attention for decades to come.

'Writers of the Future, as a contest and as a book, remains the flagship of short fiction.' -Orson Scott Card

'The best new stories by new writers, anywhere.' -Larry Niven

'These are the people who are going to be creating trends.' -Brandon Sanderson

'Science fiction as a genre has always looked to the future and the Writers of the Future looks to the future of science fiction.' -Kevin J. Anderson

'See the best of the best culled for you, curated and selected in a single volume every year.' -Robert J. Sawyer

Wondrous and powerful tales from some of the world's best new writers

Autoren/Hrsg.

Farland, David

Leseproben

Turnabout
After Stephanie left me, I vagabonded alone through the arid Rif Mountains of Morocco—humped under a backpack with dirhams and dollars in one dusty hiking boot and a credit card chafing a callus in the other. Her leaving wasn’t going to ruin my rambling. Near an adobe village famous for being alabaster white in summer and lapis lazuli blue in winter, a sparkle of reflected sunlight snagged my curiosity. It came from under a skeletal bush with a few leathery leaves rattling in the wind. I sidled closer and saw a brass urn the size of my knobby fist. Maybe it had pearls or blood diamonds in it … something to lure Steph back to me. The sun-hot brass stung my fingers, and I dropped it. The urn clinked on the rocky ground, and its little domed lid spilled off. A snake’s head, tongue flickering, eased out of the urn’s mouth. I stood there like a doofus, too paralyzed to run, as a sinister blue-black cobra longer than my arm slithered impossibly out of the tiny vessel. The tip of the cobra’s tail was a shocking lipstick red. Strung out beside the urn, it raised its head, hood flared, tongue flittering at me, and kept levitating upward until the cobra balanced on its red-tail point. Then it shimmered into a young Arab woman. Amazed, I was too fascinated to be scared. She wore red embroidered slippers, leather pants, a vampire’s cape, and a dark scarf over her dark hair. Her slitted eyes gleamed like black ice, glassy and deadly. I whipped a Hand of Fatima charm out of my pocket and shoved it at her face. Her human tongue darted out between her thin lips. “Do not insult me, Westerner. What is your wish?” “You’re a genie?” I’d thought genies were ponderous eunuchs who wore brocade vests and turbans … jinns who vapored out of brass lamps, not urns. “Don’t I get three wishes?” “One wish frees me from my obligation to you, man of clay.” Yeah, and be careful what you wish for. All jinns had a slithery side. What if I asked for fame and got arrested as a serial killer? Or if I asked for riches and my loved ones, or loved one if Steph came back to me, were kidnapped for ransom. If I wanted a long life, would I spend most of it comatose in a hospital bed? “Is there a downside to my making this wish?” She stared across the desolate khaki-colored hills and scrub brush with a martyr’s expression. Her tongue tasted the dry air. “I must give you a wish, Westerner, but its consequences come to you. I am not your protector. No one is free from fate.” Was it just coincidence that two days after Steph stomped out of my life, a jinni popped into it? As for my wish, well, Steph had abandoned me in noisy Tangier, so I said, “Okay, I wish for you to make a woman I know love me enough to stay with me. For the rest of my life.” The jinni’s face drooped into a please-deliver-me expression. “I cannot change your human nature.” “So you’re saying you’re limited in what you can do for me? First off, I don’t get the usual three wishes, then you refuse even to honor my one wish?” “I can give you gold ingots, a marble palace, things you may touch. I cannot make this woman fall in love with you, man of clay. I cannot make you more agreeable to her.” Inwardly, I flinched. Steph’s last words to me, not exactly whispered, more like shouted in the souk, called me a suffocating, selfish prick. I considered myself loyal and helpful, the opposite of selfish. And yeah, sometimes when people pushed me I did come across as a bit contrary. Now this jinni was pushing me. A free wish without any obligation on my part seemed way too good to be harmless. Everything comes with a price tag tied to it. “It’s odd that I’m the one who found your urn.” I waved at the leached-out country around us. “I mean, I’m not following a caravan route or a shepherd’s path or anything.” She looked ready to turn me into a donkey turd. I quickly asked, “What would you wish for?” Her eyes flickered toward the brass urn then away. “What does it matter, Westerner? You cannot grant it.” Her glance had given me my answer: she wanted freedom. Who wouldn’t? “My name’s Layton, by the way.” Her lip curled. I was just a talking cockroach to her. Well, this cockroach didn’t take orders from genies, especially limited ones. “Okay, how about if I call you Jenny? Listen, Jenny, since this is a one-time deal, I need to think. I want to get this wish absolutely right.” Her womanly form crumpled into a muscular blue-black cobra with a red tail. I stood there, my jaw almost hanging down to my belt buckle, and watched the snake slither away without even a backward hiss. The jinni had left her brass urn behind, so I stuffed it into my backpack. A genie’s prison probably wasn’t disposable. I had the promise of a wish and meant to keep that option alive. Tomorrow was probably going to be an interesting day. In Morocco, breakfast meant hot sweet tea and two or three crusty pastries filled with almond pudding. Afterward jittering with a sugar rush, I wandered the claustrophobic passages of the clamorous medina, the old quarter. As usual, boys pestered me to buy key chains with Moroccan flags on them, cheap Citizen watches, or bootleg beaded necklaces. Most of them gave up whining and begging alongside of me after ten yards, but one lanky kid leeched onto me. I kept shooing him away, but he harassed me like a blood-starved mosquito. He had the usual short dark hair and peanut-butter skin and wore a faded black T-shirt and jeans. For some reason, his glaring red trainers disturbed me. He stubbornly pulled junk souvenirs out of a goat-leather bag. He also offered me kif, hashish. As a young guy humping a backpack, I was used to this. Then he held up a silver teardrop pendant dangling on a delicate chain. It was set with blue lapis lazuli. I shrugged it away, but his huckster eyes saw through my fake disinterest. He was holding the perfect peace offering for Steph. She adored lapis lazuli. The boy chuckled. “You wish this?” My brain clicked into revelation. I glanced down at his red trainers, then into his black-hole eyes. The jinni shouldn’t have used the word “wish.” I consciously relaxed to hide my anger. I had been one word away from losing my wish. “So what happens if I die, Jenny? Would that wipe away your obligation to me?” A spasm of hatred squirmed across the boy’s face. “Yes.” “But you can’t be the one who does me in, can you?” A grimace of regret was her answer. “Nice to know,” I told her. “Tell me, why is my making this wish so important to you?” A laborer yelled for us to move aside in the narrow passageway and led a donkey loaded with scrap wood between us. When we came together again, Jenny said, “It is the ritual I must follow.” “Yeah, well, I don’t like being tricked. And I shun rituals I don’t understand. Tell you what, though. I’ll buy that necklace from you.” I pulled out a wad of dirhams. “How much do you want for it?” Jenny threw the pendant and silver chain at me and stalked away with reptilian grace. To a shape-shifting fire demon, money was just paper with the grainy portrait of a king on it. But maybe I could give this jinni something it did value. Of course, I too was limited in what I could offer. Still, partial freedom, something resembling house arrest, had to be preferable to a cramped brass prison. I knew better than to expect gratitude. The jinni was a yin and yang creature, sometimes a snake which represented earth, and sometimes earth’s elemental opposite, fire. My reward would be in having a travel companion. I decided to ramble down to the sea and send Steph the peace-offering pendant from feisty Tangier, the seaport where we had parted. So I started to zigzag my way through the crowded medina to the bus station. A very traditional woman fell into step three paces behind me. She plodded along in an ankle-length, black abaya smelling of myrrh. Her incongruous red slippers let me know trouble stalked my footsteps. My brown skin, brown eyes, and dark hair tended to blend me in with the locals. So having a pretty, young wife in tow didn’t raise any eyebrows. She followed me into the well-worn bus station as if I had her on a leash. At the ticket counter, I asked a young clerk who smelled of rose perfume and wore a flowery silk scarf if I could speak English. She wiggled her shoulders shyly and told me she spoke a little English. She sounded as if she had been born in London and read The Economist. “Did you study English in school?” I asked. “I was educated in England,” she said with bashful pride. She glanced behind me and lost her smile. I turned to my “wife,” who had a bruised cheek and black eye. Jenny cringed when I faced her. After a moment of open-mouth surprise followed by shame then anger, I pulled out a limp ten-dirham bill and asked the British-educated clerk, “Is this the right amount to give to a beggar woman?” Jenny bumped past me to the counter and clutched the sympathetic clerk’s slim brown hand. She exploded into explanation. My spotty Arabic picked up “marriage” and “not leave me here.” I said, “I’m a Christian. She couldn’t marry me.” Jenny said something, and the young woman snarled in my face. “Can you prove this? That you are a...