Элинор Арнасон - The Very Best of the Best - 35 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction

Regina did not question it now. If Ilkay was gone tomorrow, she would not think it was because she had abandoned her. This was not possible. It would be because she was gone completely.

Regina lasted three days, waiting in the icy house and keeping to the city’s Asian side. She found some comfort in a book she dug up in a bookstore there, a long-forgotten treatise on insect architecture. The book came complete with color plate illustrations of the complex constructions of bugs. It was a labor of love written by some Englishman, obscurely obsessed in the best possible way. She pored over the book’s slightly mildewed pages, rich with the vanilla scent of their paper’s chemical decay, for hours. Ilkay sent her reassuring messages, full of her bright sarcasm, hoping every day for their reunion. And the time slipped away. Would Istanbul Protectorate pay for their separation? Reimburse them for what they were taking? Unlikely.

On the fourth day, Regina decided to return to the European side. She would avoid the most popular places, as she had promised Ilkay. But most people went to the hippodrome and Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque and, at the most, strolled up to the Grand Bazaar. She would avoid those places.

The Church of St. George itself was surprisingly small, suited now to the dwindling number of pilgrims and tourists it received, though once it must have swelled full of the faithful on holy days. Pilgrims must have filled the small courtyard which, now, was nearly empty. The gray stone of the simple façade was more like a house than a church, though inside it was filled with gold leaf and light.

But Regina stayed in the courtyard. A group of blanks was there, in a cluster around a local guide who Regina could not see, but whose voice carried in the air. Pigeons walked around the feet of the tourists.

“The church’s most precious objects, saved from each successive fire that consumed parts of it, are the patriarchal throne, which is believed to date from the fifth century, rare icons made of mosaic and the relics of two saints: Saints Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom.”

Regina walked toward the group to hear more clearly. A message was coming in from Ilkay.

“Regina, where are you?”

“Some of the bones of these two saints, which were looted from Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, were returned by Pope John Paul II in 2004. Today the Church of St. George serves mostly as a museum…”

Regina could see the guide now, standing in the semicircle of faces. The faces of the blanks were pale, lips and noses red with cold. Most of them bored. Some carried on quiet conversations with one another as the guide spoke. Why did they come to this place if they did not care?

“I am at the place we met,” Regina sent. “Still laying low, waiting for you.”

The guide wore a heavier coat, and a warm hat. As Regina approached, he saw her and looked up, continuing his speech. “Though there are still pilgrims.”

It was the young waiter from the café on her first day. Recognizing her, he smiled sarcastically. “They return here every year….”

Another message came in from Ilkay. “GET OUT!!!”

The guide raised his hands. “And they will keep coming until we stop them.”

There was a flash of blinding light.

The trireme lurched free of its anchorage and began a slow rotation to starboard, oars churning in the gray-blue water. Regina was crouched on the deck, the sun white-hot on her exposed neck. Her hands were bound behind her. Blood was spattered on the wood, small droplets from a wound she had received across her cheek in the final moments of the battle.

There had been chaos, and many had thrown down their shields, but for some reason she had kept fighting until finally one of the Athenian hoplites had struck her on the side of the head with the flat of a sword and she had fallen, dazed, struggling to get to her feet. Then they had moved in, knocking her sword from her hand, wrestling her to the ground, finally subduing her and binding her wrists with a leather thong.

Her head still throbbed from the blow from the sword, and a hundred other bruises and scrapes ached. Behind them, Sphacteria’s flat, narrow expanse, fought for so hard and at such cost, began to fade as the simulation’s boundaries drifted into opalescent tatters. Finally there was only the trireme, and the lingering sound of its oars in water that was no longer there.

An Athenian hoplite approached, and handed her water, but she did not bother to take it. Sensation was already fading, the materiality ending. The water would be nothing in a mouth that had ceased to feel it. The wound had stopped throbbing, was gone. Blood remained on the deck, and the sun’s warm color, but not the warmth of the sun.

“Do you really think they would have kept fighting like that? After it was impossible to win?” The Athenian cut her hands free with a small bronze knife.

Regina lay down on the deck. Moments ago there had been the physical feeling of exhaustion, heat. Now there was none of that, though there was a faint sensation of the deck beneath her. She laced her fingers behind her head and looked up into the glaucous simulation edge that was the sky.

“I do,” Regina said. “Some would have given up. But others were beyond reason, beyond caring about consequence. They would have carried on when it was impossible. Hatred, fear, and anger would have ruled them. I was missing it in my reports last year. The stubbornness, the things beyond strategy.”

Astrid, who had played the Athenian but was now becoming Astrid again, was silent for a moment, then tossed her helmet to the deck, where it landed without a sound and was gone. She sat down with a sigh. “You’re probably right. Anyway, it seems to come closer to the truth. But I’m so tired of doing this every day. I wish I knew what they were looking for. What’s the key to all of this? Anyway… another year almost gone, and no end in sight. Is your timeshare still in Istanbul? Will you really go back there, after everything that happened there last year? After almost getting killed, and totaling your blank? You barely made it out of that place alive.”

That morning, before the start of the day’s simulation, Regina had received a message from Ilkay: “Here a day early, already waiting for your arrival. Tell me you are coming, though I won’t stop worrying until I see your face.”

Regina grinned into the blank swirl of false sky, seeing black tea there, and cobblestones, incense aged into stone, the hiss of snow along a seagull’s wing, and Ilkay’s face—the many faces Ilkay’s being had illuminated, her smile each year both different, and the same.

“Of course I’m going back. Now, and every year. It is my home.”

R. S. Benedict spent three years teaching English to rich kids in China before returning to her native New York to become a bureaucrat. Her work can be found in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Upper Rubber Boot’s upcoming anthology Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up to No Good.

Here’s a creepy yet ultimately quite moving story about a man with a secret so deeply buried that even he no longer knows what it is….

I want you to know that you are not crazy.

What you saw in the back of the ambulance was real.

What wasn’t real was Thomas Majors.

You have probably figured out by now that I wasn’t born in London like I told you I was, and that I did not graduate from Oxford, and that I wasn’t baptized in the Church of England, as far as I know.

Here is the truth: Thomas Majors was born in room 414 of the Huayuan Binguan, a cheap hotel which in defiance of its name contained neither flowers nor any sort of garden.