John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

They said their planet was beautiful, but it didn’t sound beautiful. It sounded cold and dark and wet. (The blues themselves smelled like damp wool and spoiled citrus.) They were only one of many tribes on their planet, and none of the tribes were particularly kind to each other. Apparently there were seasons, because at certain times of year heavy fruits hung from the trees, and herds of grunting animals wandered around, offering themselves up for meat. But other times the blues were hungry. Before leaving, they had sold off everything they’d owned, which is why they’d brought nothing with them. “What did you have? What did you sell?” we asked, wanting specifics. They mentioned animals, mainly livestock, and some kind of cloth in which they had wrapped themselves.

Many of the words the blues used to describe where they’d come from we couldn’t understand. We shook our heads, and they sketched the object in the dirt: a square box, perhaps, with lines radiating from it. We still had no idea. This is how conversations went with them. We asked if they had been to planets other than ours. The blues said yes, there had been other planets. Honestly they didn’t like to talk about it much. If we asked for a story about their home, the blues waved their hands in the air, as if the gesture itself were a story.

Such a change in what was possible: Aliens! Spaceships! New worlds! It didn’t seem healthy for a child’s development.

“What color are their penises?” little Jess Mueller asked her mother.

“I’m not sure they have penises,” her mother said, blushing. How was she supposed to know? Children should not be thinking about such things. They asked what the blues’ poop looked like, how they made their babies, whether they went to hell or heaven when they died, why blue boys were so skinny, and what were those marks on the blue women’s faces? We steered the conversation to more suitable topics.

Once a blue female wandered from their group, shrieking and tearing at her eyes with her nails. Eventually she collapsed, and a blue male strode toward her. We assumed he intended to help her up, but instead he hit her with the back of his hand, then with his fist. We heard the male’s fist hitting the female, and her whimpering. The sounds made us sick. “Those fucking barbarians,” Ms. Mueller said. We expected the beating to stop, but it went on for a long time. We’d been told not to intervene, out of respect for their culture. If a blue male brought out a leather strap that left welts, we were told not to stare, but also not to avoid looking. We were to act like what they were doing was normal and accept them as they were.

The blues did not hit their children, as far as we knew, but they behaved as if their boys were worthless. At meals, for instance, a blue mother gave each girl an enormous bowl of gruel—seconds if the girl asked for it—along with a chunk of dark bread, while the boys received no bread and were given only a few spoonfuls of the gruel. “They do not get hungry!” a blue female insisted when we asked, though the blue boys looked at us with starving eyes.

To be fair, the blues weren’t brutal all the time. They had a playful side to them. Even the adults appeared to enjoy a childish prank. They were known to hide in alleyways and jump out as we walked by. If we feigned surprise—“Oh, my!” or “Look at that!”—they made clicking sounds in their throats, which meant they were satisfied. When they laughed, they sounded like donkeys.

Through the cameras in their apartments, we could watch the blues on our screens whenever we wanted. We watched how they ate (with their hands), whether they used the toilets, how they prepared their meals and nuzzled and mated and fought. It was fun studying them like this. It made us feel like amateur naturalists. There was none of the usual awkwardness we felt in their presence; we didn’t need to worry about what to say or how to act. Their violence toward each other continued to strike us as bestial—the males biting the females’ arms; the females’ apparent pleasure—but we eventually came to expect it. In private, by ourselves in our unmonitored homes, some of us discovered that such peculiar and brutal scenes held an erotic charge.

Most of all we liked to watch them sleep. They looked the most like us when they slept, and we felt compassion for them as their chests rose and fell under the thin blankets.

Despite many such hours of observation, we still had unanswered questions. We wished we could understand what kindness looked like to them, and how they described cruelty, and what they thought love meant.

Winter came, a very mild winter. By February’s end the trees were budding, and there were yellow daffodils in Mrs. Durand’s yard. We were glad for the pretty flowers, no matter when they decided to come. All around us the trees bloomed spectacularly, fragrant and white.

In March we put on our spring festival to celebrate the longer days and shorter nights. As happened every year, we got sick on Ms. Mueller’s fried dough, and we dressed Jeff Campbell up as the spring maiden and made him dance. Not one blue came. They could have come—no one was stopping them—but they didn’t, and in a sense it was better that way. Things were as they should be.

Part of the festival is an art contest, and the theme that year (Mrs. Gorski picked it) was the blues’ home planet. A dozen fine entries came in: paintings of an arctic landscape, an underwater city, even a terrifying vision of spindly-legged machines that set trees on fire with their eyes. Only one painting sold, a watercolor of a monochromic desert purchased by Mrs. Lucas. She hung it in her family room, then sat on the sofa and stared at that painting for a long time, entranced by the blowing blue sands and the multiple suns. Perhaps she was trying to imagine herself on the blues’ planet.

“What the hell is this?” Mr. Lucas asked when he saw the painting hanging there.

First they misted up a few of the cameras. The other cameras they covered with their dirty sheets. So Johnny Reynolds marched right into their apartments—he was caretaker of the building, the master keys jangling at his belt—and he wiped the cameras clean and took down the bedsheets. “Don’t you touch these again,” he scolded.

Within a week the blues had broken every camera. Now that we could no longer watch them, they grew stranger and more savage to us.

They began leaving their apartments more often—swarming out of their apartments, is how it felt. We saw them at the bus stops in the morning, and in the afternoons they crowded us out of our parks. We ended their food donations—we had to, because of the shortages—so they dug through restaurant dumpsters and went begging beside the on-ramps. It was unpleasant for us to see all this and also unpleasant for our children, who began asking uncomfortable questions, like why the blues were stuffing rancid food scraps into their mouths. “Run them over,” Jeff Campbell said whenever he was in the car and saw a blue beside the road scrounging through a garbage bin. It’s not as if Jeff actually ran a blue over; it was just something he said. The point is they weren’t trying to act like us, or even to be likable. Though this shouldn’t have mattered, privately it did matter: their unpleasant smell, how close they stood to us, those guttural noises they sometimes made in their throats instead of using English. Best to leave them be, we instructed our children. We believed the blues must be going through an adolescent phase from which they’d soon emerge more fully formed and useful to us. Until then, we told our kids, stay away.