The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

  His mother was sitting in her robe in the kitchen. She got up when Rafe came in.

  "Where are you going? You are like a possessed man." She touched his hand and her skin felt so hot that he pulled back in surprise.

  "You're freezing! You have been at his grave."

  It was easier for Rafe to nod than explain.

  "There is a story about a woman who mourned too long and the specter of her lover rose up and dragged her down into death with him."

  He nodded again, thinking of the faery woman, of being dragged into the dance, of Lyle sleeping like death.

  She sighed exaggeratedly and made him a coffee. Rafe had already set up the sewing machine by the time she put the mug beside him.

  That day he made a coat of silver silk, pleated at the hips and embroidered with a tangle of thorny branches and lapels of downy white fur. He knew it was one of the most beautiful things he had ever made.

  "Who are you sewing that for?" Mary asked when she came in. "It's gorgeous."

  He rubbed his eyes and gave her a tired smile. "It's supposed to be the payment a mortal tailor used to win back a lover from Faeryland."

  "I haven't heard of that story," his sister said. "Will it be a musical?"

  "I don't know yet," said Rafe. "I don't think the cast can sing."

  His mother frowned and called Mary over to chop up a summer squash.

  "I want you and Victor to come live with me," Rafe said as his sister turned away from him.

  "Your place is too small," Rafe's mother told him.

  She had never seen his apartment. "We could move, then. Go to Queens. Brooklyn."

  "You won't want a little boy running around. And Mary has the cousins here. She should stay with us. Besides, the city is dangerous."

  "Marco is dangerous," Rafe said, his voice rising. "Why don't you let Mary make up her own mind?"

  Rafe's mother muttered under her breath as she chopped, Rafe sighed and bit his tongue and Mary gave him a sisterly roll of the eyes. It occurred to him that that had been the most normal conversation he had had with his mother in years.

  All day he worked on the coat and that night Rafe, wearing the silvery coat, went back to the woods and the river.

  The dancers were there as before and when Rafe got close, the faery woman left the circle of dancers.

  "Your coat is as lovely as the moon. Will you agree to the same terms?"

  Rafe thought of objecting, but he also thought of the faery woman's kiss and that he might be able to change the course of events. It would be better if he caught her off-guard. He shouldered off his coat. "I agree."

  As before, the faery woman pulled Lyle from the dance.

  "Lyle!" Rafe said, starting toward him before the faery could touch his brow with her lips.

  Lyle turned to him and his lips parted as though he were searching for a name to go with a distant memory, as if Lyle didn't recall him after all.

  The faery woman kissed him then, and Lyle staggered drowsily to the mattress. His drooping eyelashes nearly hid the gaze he gave Rafe. His mouth moved, but no sound escaped him and then he subsided into sleep.

  That night Rafe tried a different way of rousing Lyle. He pressed his mouth to Lyle's slack lips, to his forehead as the faery woman had done. He kissed the hollow of Lyle's throat, where the beat of his heart thrummed against his skin. He ran his hands over Lyle's chest. He touched his lips to the smooth, unscarred expanse of Lyle's wrists. Again and again, he kissed Lyle, but it was as terrible as kissing a corpse.

  Before he slept, Rafe took the onyx and silver ring off his own pinkie, pulled out a strand of black hair from his own head and coiled it inside the hollow of the poison ring. Then he pushed the ring onto Lyle's pinkie.

  "Remember me. Please remember me," Rafe said. "I can't remember myself unless you remember me."

  But Lyle did not stir and Rafe woke alone on the mattress. He made his way home in the thin light of dawn.

  That day he sewed a coat from velvet as black as the night sky. He stitched tiny black crystals onto it and embroidered it with black roses, thicker at the hem and then thinning as they climbed. At the cuffs and neck, ripped ruffles of thin smoky purples and deep reds reminded him of sunsets. Across the back, he sewed on silver beads for stars. Stars like the faery woman's eyes. It was the most beautiful thing Rafael had ever created. He knew he would never make its equal.

  "Where do you get your ideas from?" his father asked as he shuffled out to the kitchen for an evening cup of decaf. "I've never been much of a creative person."

  Rafe opened his mouth to say that he got his ideas from everywhere, from things he'd seen and dreamed and felt, but then he thought of the other thing his father said. "You made that bumper for the old car out of wood," Rafe said. "That was pretty creative."

  Rafe's father grinned and added milk to his cup.

  That night Rafe donned the shimmering coat and walked to the woods. The faery woman waited for him. She sucked in her breath at the sight of the magnificent coat.

  "I must have it," she said. "You shall have him as before."

  Rafael nodded. Tonight if he could not rouse Lyle, he would have to say good-bye. Perhaps this was the life Lyle had chosen—a life of dancing and youth and painless memory—and he was wrong to try and take him away from it. But he wanted to spend one more night beside Lyle.

  She brought Lyle to him and he knelt on the mattress. The faery woman bent to kiss his forehead, but at the last moment, Lyle turned his head and the kiss fell on his hair.

  Scowling, she rose.

  Lyle blinked as though awakening from a long sleep, then touched the onyx ring on his finger. He turned toward Rafe and smiled tentatively.

  "Lyle?" Rafe asked. "Do you remember me?"

  "Rafael?" Lyle asked. He reached a hand toward Rafe's face, fingers skimming just above the skin. Rafe leaned into the heat, butting his head against Lyle's hand and sighing. Time seemed to flow backward and he felt like he was fourteen again and in love.

  "Come, Lyle," said the faery woman sharply.

  Lyle rose stiffly, his fingers ruffling Rafe's hair.

  "Wait," Rafe said. "He knows who I am. You said he would be free."

  "He's as free to come with me as he is to go with you," she said.

  Lyle looked down at Rafe. "I dreamed that we went to New York and that we performed in a circus. I danced with the bears and you trained fleas to jump through the eyes of needles."

  "I trained fleas?"

  "In my dream. You were famous for it." His smile was tentative, uncertain. Maybe he realized that it didn't sound like a great career.

  Rafe thought of the story he had told Victor about the princess in her louse-skin coat, about locks of hair and all the things he had managed through the eyes of needles.

  The faery woman turned away from them with a scowl, walking back to the fading circle of dancers, becoming insubstantial as smoke.

  "It didn't go quite like that." Rafe stood and held out his hand. "I'll tell you what really happened."

  Lyle clasped Rafe's fingers tightly, desperately, but his smile was wide and his eyes were bright as stars. "Don't leave anything out."

  The Prophet of Flores

  Ted Kosmatka

  Ted Kosmatka (www.tedkosmatka.com) is a twenty-first century writer. His first stories appeared in 2005, and he has published a small handful of thoughtful, challenging science fiction tales like "The God Engine" and "Bitterseed" in venues like Asimov's Science Fiction. According to his website, he lives not far from the dunes of Lake Michigan in a house shaped, vaguely, like a ship.

  The challenging alternate history that follows takes a piece of recent history—the discovery of the manlike "hobbit" on the island of Flores—and turns it on its head, setting it in a world where Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection was disproven decades ago.

  If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?

  —Voltaire

  When Paul was a
boy, he played God in the attic above his parents' garage. That's what his father called it, playing God, the day he found out. That's what he called it the day he smashed it all down.

  Paul built the cages out of discarded two-by-fours he'd found behind the garage, and quarter-inch mesh he bought from the local hardware store. While his father was away speaking at a scientific conference on divine cladistics, Paul began constructing his laboratory from plans he'd drawn during the last day of school.

  Because he wasn't old enough to use his father's power tools, he had to use a handsaw to cut the wood for the cages. He used his mother's sturdy black scissors to snip the wire mesh. He borrowed hinges from old cabinet doors, and he borrowed nails from the rusty coffee can that hung over his father's unused workbench.

  One evening his mother heard the hammering and came out to the garage. "What are you doing up there?" she asked, speaking in careful English, peering up at the rectangle of light that spilled down from the attic.

  Paul stuck his head through the opening, all spiky black hair and sawdust. "I'm just playing around with some tools," he said. Which was, in some sense, the truth. Because he couldn't lie to his mother. Not directly.

  "Which tools?"

  "Just a hammer and some nails."

  She stared up at him, her delicate face a broken Chinese doll—pieces of porcelain re-glued subtly out of alignment. "Be careful," she said, and he understood she was talking both about the tools, and about his father.

  "I will."

  The days turned into weeks as Paul worked on the cages. Because the materials were big, he built the cages big—less cutting that way. In reality, the cages were enormous, over-engineered structures, ridiculously outsized for the animals they'd be holding. They weren't mouse cages so much as mouse cities—huge tabletop-sized enclosures that could have housed German shepherds. He spent most of his paper-route money on the project, buying odds and ends that he needed: sheets of plexi, plastic water bottles, and small dowels of wood he used for door latches. While the other children in the neighborhood played basketball or wittedandu, Paul worked.

  He bought exercise wheels and built walkways; he hung loops of yarn the mice could climb to various platforms. The mice themselves he bought from a pet store near his paper route. Most were white feeder mice used for snakes, but a couple were of the more colorful, fancy variety. And there were even a few English mice—sleek, long-bodied show mice with big tulip ears and glossy coats. He wanted a diverse population, so he was careful to buy different kinds.

  While he worked on their permanent homes, he kept the mice in little aquariums stacked on a table in the middle of the room. On the day he finished the last of the big cages, he released the mice into their new habitats one by one—the first explorers on a new continent. To mark the occasion, he brought his friend John Long over, whose eyes grew wide when he saw what Paul had made.

  "You built all this?" John asked.

  "Yeah."

  "It must have taken you a long time."

  "Months."

  "My parents don't let me have pets."

  "Neither do mine," Paul answered. "But anyway, these aren't pets."

  "Then what are they?"

  "An experiment."

  "What kind of experiment?"

  "I haven't figured that out yet."

  Mr. Finley stood at the projector, marking a red ellipse on the clear plastic sheet. Projected on the wall, it looked like a crooked half-smile between the X and Y axis.

  "This represents the number of daughter atoms. And this . . ." He drew the mirror image of the first ellipse. "This is the number of parent atoms." He placed the marker on the projector and considered the rows of students. "Can anyone tell me what the point of intersection represents?"

  Darren Michaels in the front row raised his hand. "It's the element's half-life."

  "Exactly. Johnson, in what year was radiometric dating invented?"

  "1906."

  "By whom?"

  "Rutherford."

  "What method did he use?"

  "Uranium lead—"

  "No. Wallace, can you tell us?"

  "He measured helium as an intermediate decay product of uranium."

  "Good, so then who used the uranium-lead method?"

  "That was Boltwood, in 1907."

  "And how were these initial results viewed?"

  "With skepticism."

  "By whom?"

  "By the evolutionists."

  "Good." Mr. Finley turned to Paul. "Carlson, can you tell us what year Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species?"

  "1867," Paul said.

  "Yes, and in what year did Darwin's theory finally lose the confidence of the larger scientific community?"

  "That was 1932." Anticipating his next question, Paul continued. "When Kohlhorster invented potassium-argon dating. The new dating method proved the Earth wasn't as old as the evolutionists thought."

  "And in what year was the theory of evolution finally debunked completely?"

  "1954, when Willard F. Libby invented carbon-14 dating at the University of Chicago. He won the Nobel prize in 1960 when he used carbon dating to prove, once and for all, that the Earth was 5,800 years old."

  Paul wore a white lab coat when he entered the attic. It was one of his father's old coats, so he had to cut the sleeves to fit his arms. Paul's father was a doctor, the PhD kind. He was blond and big and successful. He'd met Paul's mother after grad school while consulting for a Chinese research firm. They had worked on the same projects for a while, but there was never any doubt that Paul's father was the bright light of the family. The genius, the famous man. He was also crazy.

  Paul's father liked breaking things. He broke telephones, and he broke walls, and he broke tables. He broke promises not to hit again. One time, he broke bones; and the police were called by the ER physicians who did not believe the story about Paul's mother falling down the stairs. They did not believe the weeping woman of porcelain who swore her husband had not touched her.

  Paul's father was a force of nature, a cataclysm; as unpredictable as a comet strike or a volcanic eruption. The attic was a good place to hide, and Paul threw himself into his hobby.

  Paul studied his mice as though they were Goodall's chimps. He documented their social interactions in a green spiral notebook. He found that, within the large habitats, they formed packs like wolves, with a dominant male and a dominant female—a structured social hierarchy involving mating privileges, territory, and almost-ritualized displays of submission by males of lower rank. The dominant male bred most of the females, and mice, Paul learned, could kill each other.

  Nature abhors a vacuum, and the mouse populations expanded to fill the new worlds he'd created for them. The babies were born pink and blind, but as their fur came in, Paul began documenting colors in his notebook. There were fawns, blacks, and grays. Occasional agoutis. There were Irish spotted, and banded, and broken marked. In later generations, colors appeared that he hadn't purchased, and he knew enough about genetics to realize these were recessive genes cropping up.

  Paul was fascinated by the concept of genes, the stable elements through which God provided for the transfer of heritable characteristics from one generation to the next. In school they called it divine transmission.

  Paul did research and found that the pigmentation loci of mice were well-mapped and well-understood. He categorized his population by phenotype and found one mouse, a pale, dark-eyed cream that must have been a triple recessive: bb, dd, ee. But it wasn't enough to just have them, to observe them, to run the Punnett squares. He wanted to do real science. And because real scientists used microscopes and electronic scales, Paul asked for these things for Christmas.

  Mice, he quickly discovered, did not readily yield themselves to microscopy. They tended to climb down from the stand. The electronic scale, however, proved useful. He weighed every mouse and kept meticulous records. He considered developing his own inbred strain—a line with some combination of distinctive chara
cteristics, but he wasn't sure what characteristics to look for.

  He was going over his notebook when he saw it. January-17. Not a date, but a mouse—the 17th mouse born in January. He went to the cage and opened the door. A flash of sandy fur, and he snatched it up by its tail—a brindle specimen with large ears. There was nothing really special about the mouse. It was made different from the other mice only by the mark in his notebook. Paul looked at the mark, looked at the number he'd written there. Of the more than ninety mice in his notebook, January-17 was, by two full grams, the largest mouse he'd ever weighed.

  In school they taught him that through science you could decipher the truest meaning of God's words. God wrote the language of life in four letters—A, T, C, and G. That's not why Paul did it though, to get closer to God. He did it for the simplest reason, because he was curious.

  It was early spring before his father asked him what he spent his time doing in the attic.

  "Just messing around."

  They were in his father's car on the way home from piano lessons. "Your mother said you built something up there."

  Paul fought back a surge of panic. "I built a fort a while ago."

  "You're almost twelve now. Aren't you getting a little old for forts?'

  "Yeah, I guess I am."

  "I don't want you spending all your time up there."

  "All right."

  "I don't want your grades slipping."

  Paul, who hadn't gotten a B in two years, said, "All right."

  They rode the rest of the way in silence, and Paul explored the walls of his newly shaped reality. Because he knew foreshocks when he felt them.

  He watched his father's hands on the steering wheel. Though large for his age, like his father, Paul's features still favored his Asian mother; and he sometimes wondered if that was part of it, this thing between his father and him, this gulf he could not cross. Would his father have treated a freckled, blond son any differently? No, he decided. His father would have been the same. The same force of nature; the same cataclysm. He couldn't help being what he was.