The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

  What Oscar used to eat: Cocoa Puffs with milk, orange juice from concentrate, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, leftover pizza, Oreos, beer.

  Although I have no statistical evidence, I believe Beautiful Boys need more carbohydrates than human males. Once, at night, I walked into the kitchen and saw him standing in front of the open refrigerator, in his boxer briefs, drinking maple syrup from the jug.

  He showed up at my house.

  “Hey, Dr. Leslie, it’s me, Oscar,” he said when I opened the door. “I was wondering if there’s anything else I can do for the study. My landlord just kicked me out and I don’t have money for another place.”

  “Why did he kick you out?” I asked. It was 2 a.m. I stood at the door in my pajamas and a robe, trying not to yawn.

  “I got in a fight.”

  “A fight? You mean in the apartment?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “With the wall.”

  He showed me his bloody fists. I told him to come in and cleaned his knuckles, then bandaged them.

  “How much have you been drinking?” I asked.

  “A lot,” he said. He looked sober, although he smelled like beer. Beautiful Boys have a higher than average tolerance for alcohol. That metabolism again.

  “You can spend the rest of the night on the sofa,” I said. “Tomorrow, you’ll have to find a new apartment.”

  The next morning, I woke up to the smell of pancakes. He was in the kitchen, fixing the screen door that had always stuck. “Hey, Dr. Leslie,” he said. “I made you pancakes. How come you don’t have a man around to fix this door, a beautiful lady like you?”

  “My husband decided that he preferred graduate students,” I said.

  “Seriously? What an idiot. This door should work a lot better now. Anything else you want me to fix around here?”

  The pancakes were stacked on a plate, on the kitchen table. I sat down, poured syrup over them, and started to eat.

  I have devised a test that identifies Beautiful Boys with 98% accuracy. I believe Beautiful Boys emit a particular set of pheromones to attract human women. I do not know whether this is a conscious or unconscious process.

  We put the test subject in an empty room. My research assistant, a blonde Tri Delt, enters the room and asks the test subject a series of questions. The questions themselves are irrelevant: What is your favorite color? If you could be any animal, what would you be? (A statistically significant number of Beautiful Boys identify themselves as predators, wolves or mountain lions.) After he has answered the questions, we inform the test subject that he has been enrolled in the study and give him the study t-shirt, in exchange for the shirt he is currently wearing. We take that shirt and put it in a sterile plastic bag.

  Later, three testers smell the t-shirt and rate their sexual arousal on a scale of 1-10. Human males typically elicit no more than a 5. Beautiful Boys average in the 7-9 range. Our testers are all female. I have found that the best testers are brunette, a little chubby, nearsighted. They are most responsive to the chemicals that Beautiful Boys emit.

  Why have they come to Earth?

  For the same reason aliens always come to Earth in old science fiction movies: Mars needs women.

  Where is their home planet? I’m not sure even they know.

  Sometimes Oscar would stare off into space, and I would say, “What are you thinking about?”

  He would say, “Just a place I used to play when I was a kid.” Then he would roll over and say, “Hey, how about it? Are you up for a quickie?”

  He was a superior lover. I do not, of course, know if that is a characteristic of all Beautiful Boys, or unique to Oscar. I think of him sometimes, when I’m alone at night: his smooth brown skin, mostly hairless, with the muscles articulated underneath. The black eyes looking down into mine. He would grin, kiss the tip of my nose. He was always affectionate, like a puppy. One day he brought me flowers he’d stolen from the college’s botanical gardens.

  “You really shouldn’t have,” I said. “I mean, seriously.”

  “I know,” he said. “But that’s what makes it fun.”

  One day, he came to me and said, “Dr. Leslie, I’ve got to go. My dad down in Tampa is sick, and I need to take care of him for a while.”

  I didn’t tell him, you don’t have a father in Tampa. You landed here on an alien spaceship with others of your kind. Where, I don’t know.

  “Give me your father’s address,” I said. “I’ll send you some books.”

  He scribbled an address down on a slip of paper.

  We made love one last time. It was like all the other times: intimate, affectionate, effective. Like being made love to by a combination of teenage boy, eighteenth-century libertine, and robot. Then I gave him $500 and he drove off in his pickup.

  A week later, I missed my period. I was angry with myself, told myself I should have been more careful. Although I suppose my therapist would tell me that I unconsciously wanted this to happen.

  I found a phone number for the address in Tampa. It was a bicycle repair shop, where they had never heard of Oscar Guest.

  The study has three stages. The first one, nearly complete, involves devising a test to identify Beautiful Boys. That test has been devised, with 98% accuracy. We are in the process of writing up our results.

  The second stage, for which we are currently seeking funding, focuses on understanding their reproductive cycle. We believe Beautiful Boys belong to a species that only produces males. To reproduce, they depend on the females of other species. In order to spread their genes and avoid inbreeding, they leave the planet on which they were born and travel to another planet, where they transform themselves into particularly appealing males of the target species. They travel around that planet, implanting their offspring.

  The third stage focuses on the offspring they produce with human women. What are these children like? We do not know when Beautiful Boys first began coming to earth, although we suspect their presence as far back as the early twentieth century. There were probably Beautiful Boys seducing women in both World Wars, in Korea, in Vietnam. There are certainly alien children among us. We should find out as much about them as we can.

  I’m going to call him Oscar Jr.

  I didn’t need the ultrasound to tell me that he was a boy. Of course he would be.

  What will my Oscar be like? Will he play with Match Box cars? Will he watch Scooby Doo? Someday, will he ask about his father?

  We don’t know what happens to the children of Beautiful Boys, which is why completing the third phase of the study is so important. We don’t know if some of them have the lifespan of human males, or if they all repeat the reproductive cycle of their fathers. Will Oscar go to college, settle down with a nice brunette, have my grandchildren?

  Or, after high school, after we have argued because he’s been smoking pot again and he’s told me that he needs to find himself, waving a battered copy of On the Road, will he drive to the mountains, find the ship with others of his kind, fly to another planet and become whatever the women want there: green, with six arms and gills, like something out of an old science fiction movie?

  I don’t know. I think I would love him, even with six arms and gills.

  I think of them sometimes, all the Beautiful Boys, driven to reproduce as salmon are driven to spawn. Driving across the country like an enormous net whose knots are bars, cheap apartments, college dorm rooms. And because I’m a scientist, I’m comforted by what science teaches us: that life is infinitely stranger than we can understand, that its patterns are beyond our comprehension. But that they tie us to the stars and to each other, inextricably. Like a net.

  The Education of a Witch

  Ellen Klages

  Ellen Klages [www.ellenklages.com] is the author of two acclaimed YA novels: The Green Glass Sea, which won the Scott O’Dell Award, the New Mexico Book Award, and the Lopez Award; and White Sands, Red Menace, which won the California and New Mexico Book Awards. Her short stories, which have been collected in
World Fantasy Award nominated collection Portable Childhoods, have been have been translated into Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, and Swedish and have been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, and Campbell awards. Her story, “Basement Magic,” won a Nebula in 2005. She lives in San Francisco, in a small house full of strange and wondrous things.

  Lizzy is an untidy, intelligent child. Her dark hair resists combs, framing her face like thistles. Her clothes do not stay clean or tucked in or pressed. Some days, they do not stay on. Her arms and face are nut-brown, her bare legs sturdy and grimy.

  She intends to be a good girl, but shrubs and sheds and unlocked cupboards beckon. In photographs, her eyes sparkle with unspent mischief; the corner of her mouth quirks in a grin. She is energy that cannot abide fences. When she sleeps, her mother smooths a hand over her cheek, in affection and relief.

  Before she met the witch, Lizzy was an only child.

  The world outside her bedroom is an ordinary suburb. But the stories in the books her mother reads to her, and the ones she is learning to read herself, are full of fairies and witches and magic.

  She knows they are only stories, but after the lights are out, she lies awake, wondering about the parts that are real. She was named after a princess, Elizabeth, who became the queen of England. Her father has been there, on a plane. He says that a man’s house is his castle, and when he brings her mother flowers, she smiles and proclaims, “You’re a prince, Jack Breyer.” Under the sink—where she is not supposed to look—many of the cans say M-A-G-I-C in big letters. She watches very carefully when her mother sprinkles the powders onto the counter, but has not seen sparkles or a wand. Not yet.

  2.

  Lizzy sits on the grass in the backyard, in the shade of the very big tree. Her arms are all over sweaty and have made damp, soft places on the newsprint page of her coloring book. The burnt umber crayon lies on the asphalt driveway, its point melted to a puddle. It was not her favorite. That is purple, worn down to a little stub, almost too small to hold.

  On the patio, a few feet away, her parents sit having drinks. The ice cubes clink like marbles against the glass. Her father has loosened his tie, rolled up the sleeves of his white go-to-the-office shirt. He opens the evening paper with a crackle.

  Her mother sighs. “I wish this baby would hurry up. I don’t think I can take another month in this heat. It’s only the end of June.”

  “Can’t rush Mother Nature.” More crackle, more clinks. “But I can open the windows upstairs. There’s a Rock Hudson movie at the drive-in. Should be cool enough to sleep when we get back.”

  “Oh, that would be lovely! But, what about—” She drops her voice to a whisper. “—Iz-ee-lay? It’s too late to call the sitter.”

  Lizzy pays more attention. She does not know what language that is, but she knows her name in most of the secret ways her parents talk.

  “Put her in her jammies, throw the quilt in the back of the station wagon, and we’ll take her along.”

  “I don’t know. Dr. Spock says movies can be very frightening at her age. We know it’s make-believe, but— ”

  “The first show is just a cartoon, one of those Disney things.” He looks back at the paper. “Sleeping Beauty.”

  “Really? Well, in that case. She loves fairy tales.”

  Jammies are for after dark, and always in the house. It is confusing, but exciting. Lizzy sits on the front seat, between her parents, her legs straight out in front of her. She can feel the warm vinyl through thin cotton. They drive down Main Street, past the Shell station—S-H-E-L-L—past the dry cleaners that give free cardboard with her father’s shirts, past the Methodist church where she goes to nursery school.

  After that, she does not know where they are. Farther than she has ever been on this street. Behind the car, the sun is setting, and even the light looks strange, glowing on the glass and bricks of buildings that have not been in her world before. They drive so far that it is country, flat fields and woods so thick they are all shadow. On either side of her, the windows are rolled down, and the air that moves across her face is soft and smells like grass and barbecue. When they stop at a light, she hears crickets and sees a rising glimmer in the weeds beside the pavement. Lightning bugs.

  At the Sky View Drive-In they turn and join a line of cars that creep toward a lighted hut. The wheels bump and clatter over the gravel with each slow rotation. The sky is a pale blue wash now, streaks of red above the dark broccoli of the trees. Beyond the hut where her father pays is a parking lot full of cars and honking and people talking louder than they do indoors.

  Her father pulls into a space and turns the engine off. Lizzy wiggles over, ready to get out. Her mother puts a hand on her arm. “We’re going to sit right here in the car and watch the movie.” She points out the windshield to an enormous white wall. “It’ll be dark in just a few minutes, and that’s where they’ll show the pictures.”

  “The sound comes out of this.” Her father rolls the window halfway up and hangs a big silver box on the edge of the glass. The box squawks with a sharp, loud sound that makes Lizzy put her hands over her ears. Her father turns a knob, and the squawk turns into a man’s voice that says, “…concession stand right now!” Then there is cartoon music.

  “Look, Lizzy.” Her mother points again, and where there had been a white wall a minute before is now the biggest Mickey Mouse she has ever seen. A mouse as big as a house. She giggles.

  “Can you see okay?” her father asks.

  Lizzy nods, then looks again and shakes her head. “Just his head, not his legs.” She smiles. “I could sit on Mommy’s lap.”

  “’Fraid not, honey. No room for you until the baby comes.”

  It’s true. Under her sleeveless plaid smock, her mother’s stomach is very big and round and the innie part of her lap is outie. Lizzy doesn’t know how the baby got in there, or how it’s going to come out, but she hopes that will be soon.

  “I thought that might be a problem.” He gets out and opens the back door. “Scoot behind the wheel for a second.”

  Lizzy scoots, and her father puts the little chair from her bedroom right on the seat of the car. Its white painted legs and wicker seat look very wrong there. But he holds it steady, and when she climbs up and sits down, it feels right. Her feet touch flat on the vinyl, and she can see all of Mickey Mouse.

  “Better?” He gets back in and shuts his door.

  “Uh-huh.” She settles in, then remembers. “Thank you, Daddy.”

  “What a good girl.” Her mother kisses her cheek. That’s almost as good as a lap.

  Sleeping Beauty is Lizzy’s first movie. She is not sure what to expect, but it is a lot like TV, only much bigger, and in color. There is a king and queen and a princess who is going to marry the prince, even though she is just a baby. That happens in fairy tales.

  Three fairies come to bring presents for the baby. Not very good ones—just beauty and songs. Lizzy is sure the baby would rather have toys. The fairies are short and fat and wear Easter colors. They have round, smiling faces and look like Mrs. Carmichael, her Sunday School teacher, except with pointy hats.

  Suddenly the speaker on the window booms with thunder and roaring winds. Bright lightning makes the color pictures go black-and-white for a minute, and a magnificent figure appears in a whoosh of green flames. She is taller than everyone else, and wears shiny black robes lined with purple.

  Lizzy leans forward. “Oooh!”

  “Don’t be scared.” Her mother puts a hand on Lizzy’s arm. “It’s only a cartoon.”

  “I’m not.” She stares at the screen, her mouth open. “She’s beautiful.”

  “No, honey. She’s the witch,” her father says.

  Lizzy pays no attention. She is enchanted. Witches in books are old and bent over, with ugly warts. The woman on the screen has a smooth, soothing voice, red, red lips, and sparkling eyes, just like Mommy’s, with a curving slender figure, no baby inside.

  She watches the story
unfold, and clenches her hands in outrage for the witch, Maleficent. If the whole kingdom was invited to the party, how could they leave her out? That is not fair!

  Some of this she says a little too out loud, and gets Shhh! from both her parents. Lizzy does not like being shh’d, and her lower lip juts forward in defense. When Maleficent disappears, with more wind and green flames, she sits back in her chair and watches to see what will happen next.

  Not much. It is just the fairies, and if they want the baby princess, they have to give up magic. Lizzy does not think this is a good trade. All they do is have tea, and call each other “dear,” and talk about flowers and cooking and cleaning. Lizzy’s chin drops, her hands lie limp in her lap, her breathing slows.

  “She’s out,” her father whispers. “I’ll tuck her into the back.”

  “No,” Lizzy says. It is a soft, sleepy no, but very clear. A few minutes later, she hears the music change from sugar-sweet to pay-attention-now, and she opens her eyes all the way. Maleficent is back. Her long slender fingers are a pale green, like cream of grass, tipped with bright red nails.

  “Her hands are pretty, like yours, Mommy,” Lizzy says. It is a nice thing to say, a compliment. She waits for her mother to pat her arm, or kiss her cheek, but hears only a soft pfft of surprise.

  For the rest of the movie, Lizzy is wide, wide awake, bouncing in her chair. Maleficent has her own castle, her own mountain! She can turn into a dragon, purple and black, breathing green fire! She fights off the prince, who wants to hurt her. She forces him to the edge of a cliff and then she—

  A tear rolls down Lizzy’s cheek, then another, and a loud sniffle that lets all the tears loose.

  “Oh, Lizzy-Lou. That was a little too scary, huh?” Her mother wipes her face with a tissue. “But there’s a happy ending.”