Bereft, I Come to a Nameless World by Benjamin Rosenbaum (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) starts with Siob, a member of the far-future Dispersion of Humanity, remembering a faraway conflict before he arrives on a world where Thave (another member of the Dispersion) lives.
The planet is disguised to appear uninhabitable, and Thave lives through several host bodies in a futuristic underground city. Siob remonstrates with her about her choice (a dull section that seems essentially to be about cultural aesthetics).
Later, Siob asks Thave about other members of the Dispersion before he goes down to “Bedlam”—the final long stream of consciousness section of the book:
Outside the door, the city seethed, roiled, cacophonous. Brimming with people. Were they people? Brimming with dolls, brimming with shadows, brimming with monsters. I forced a smile, a monstrous gritted-teeth affair. “I can’t, Thavé. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I have to go down.”
Thavé nodded (whatever that meant).
It was time for Bedlam.
There was a claw-hand of a moon, violent violet, digging down past my eyes, beneath the portal, the partial, the penetrating perorating peach perfection, capsized
capsized in an ocean of night.
That’s not right. Focus on the hands, on the hands—leather? of leather? Running through the heather.
(“I can see where I am, I can always see where I am. Dreaming with part of my brain. But how to interpret what I see? How to know if that—that—is a bed, a wall, a hand, a moon, a vault, a vertilex, a transix, a typhoon?”)
Cultural detox. Hallucenophenomenic aspects of.
I’m not entirely sure what goes on subsequently, but I vaguely recall a lot of memories and angst. And, of course, the two pages of blank verse, which were an especial treat.
There is a lot of surface glitter in this story but not, I think, much else.
* (Mediocre). 5,750 words.