Brave New Worlds

Everyone turns away from us, holding their little kids close. My father walks in front of me, with his head down, his hands in his pockets. By the time we get to the car in the parking lot we can hear the polite applause from the football field as another woman enters the circle. He opens his door. I open mine. We drive home in silence. I crane my neck to try to look up at the sky as if I expect to find something there, God maybe, or the living incarnation of the blood pterodactyl but of course I see neither. There is nothing. I close my eyes and think of my mother. Oh, how I miss her.

The Funeral
    by Kate Wilhelm

    Kate Wilhelm is the winner of three Nebulas, two Hugos, and two Locus awards, and is an inductee to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Her short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , Omni , Asimov's Science Fiction , Amazing Stories , Orbit , and has been collected in several volumes, notably in The Mile - Long Spaceship ; Listen , Listen ; and The Infinity Box . Her SF novels include Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang , Juniper Time , Welcome Chaos , and the Constance and Charlie series ( The Hamlet Trap et seq. ). She has also written several legal thrillers, beginning in 1991 with Death Qualified . The latest of these "Barbara Holloway" mysteries, Cold Case , was released in 2008.

    The story of two boys' quest for freedom, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the greatest American novels. Jim wants to escape slavery. Huck wants to get away from his horrible father. Their adventures rafting down the Mississippi River have become a part of the American identity, stirring up hopes and dreams inside the hearts of generations of dissatisfied children.

    Our next story is set in a regimented society that, like the antebellum South, maintains some people are property, without voice and fully disposable. For girls like Clara, their lives are spent in frightened obedience, waiting for their futures to be set for them. Only the dying words of one mad woman offer Clara hope: the hint of a secret cave, a mysterious hideout that no one has ever found.

    The Widow Douglas was always trying to "sivilize" Huck Finn—but she could never bend his indomitable spirit. If she could escape from her world, perhaps Clara could teach him a thing or two.

    N o one could say exactly how old Madam Westfall was when she finally died. At least one hundred twenty, it was estimated. At the very least. For twenty years Madam Westfall had been a shell containing the very latest products of advances made in gerontology, and now she was dead. What lay on the viewing dais was merely a painted, funereally garbed husk. "She isn't real," Carla said to herself. "It's a doll, or something. It isn't really Madam Westfall. " She kept her head bowed, and didn't move her lips, but she said the words over and over. She was afraid to look at a dead person. The second time they slaughtered all those who bore arms, unguided, mindless now, but lethal with the arms caches that they used indiscriminately. Carla felt goose bumps along her arms and legs. She wondered if anyone else had been hearing the old Teacher's words.
    The line moved slowly, all the girls in their long grey skirts had their heads bowed, their hands clasped. The only sound down the corridor was the sushsush of slippers on plastic flooring, the occasional rustle of a skirt.
    The viewing room had a pale green plastic floor, frosted-green plastic walls, and floor-to-ceiling windows that were now slits of brilliant light from a westering sun. All the furniture had been taken from the room, all the ornamentation. There were no flowers, nothing but the dais, and the bedlike box covered by a transparent shield. And the Teachers. Two at the dais, others between the light strips, at the doors. Their white hands clasped against black garb, heads bowed, hair slicked against each head, straight parts emphasizing bilateral symmetry. The Teachers didn't move, didn't look at the dais, at the girls parading past it.
    Carla kept her head bowed, her chin tucked almost inside the V of her collarbone. The serpentine line moved steadily, very slowly. "She isn't real," Carla said to herself, desperately now.
    She crossed the line that was the cue to raise her head; it felt too heavy to lift, her neck seemed paralyzed. When she did move, she heard a joint crack, and although her jaws suddenly ached, she couldn't relax.
    The second green line. She turned her eyes to the right