Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

Then the soldier shook his head, smiling slightly. “Almost weirder are the survivors who’ve stayed in there, trying to make it without metal, staying clear of the bugs. We were told to evacuate everybody , but it’s hard enough getting the people out who want to leave.” He scratched gently at one of his new scars. “Wonder if they’ll make it?”

Dad moved them to Maine, and he would’ve moved farther if there’d been any place in the Continental United States that was farther from the bugs. Jeremy couldn’t blame him. If Jeremy had a pacemaker, he’d do the same.

When kids asked him about the scars on his face, he told them the truth, but they usually looked at him like he was crazy, like he was making it up.

Fine. They weren’t there. They couldn’t really know.

Jeremy tried to be a good kid, working hard in school. He read everything he could find on the bugs and their dominion, the newly declared Southwest Emergency Zone. He made a special effort to get along with his sister. His parents had been through enough, he thought, and he did his best to ease their days.

It was going to be hard enough on them later, when he went back.

After the Fourth Great War, when most of the cities of the world were leveled, for decades the people lived without governance. Until our city was built, and those who would become the Court came together and decided that the element of the population that in the past had caused crime and unrest—the young, angry, and disadvantaged men who had been sent into a hundred pointless wars—needed a war that made sense to them, needed to compete for a real and fixed goal.

They also, for the good of the rest of the city, needed to be eliminated.

The reward of a hero in children’s stories is the hand of a princess, the fairest of them all, and half her kingdom. Power and beauty is what men fight for.

The people who would become the Court created the most beautiful woman who ever lived, and held the first Trials. They set the traditional tasks of the maze, the monster, and the mystery, built the maze beneath the city for men to get through, created the monster for the men to fight, and made up the riddle for men to think their way past. Every step of the way, the men had to battle with each other, because they knew that only one of them would be allowed out alive. Every unmarried man who did not receive the dispensation of the Court had to participate in the Trials.

All but one of the men died, and that one married the queen. With its most violent element eliminated, the city was at peace.

It was clear to all that the way to ensure civil peace was to repeat the Trials.

We created the most beautiful woman in the world again, and again.

• The Trials must take place every generation: that is, every twenty-five years, or when the old queen dies and the princess inherits. The Trials may be delayed or put forward according to the judgment of the Court, but it must not be delayed more than two years. Each queen is designed to last no more than forty years.

• Men of Court families, and other families the Court determines to be contributing to society, are exempt from entering the Trials.

• To be considered for exemption, families must pay the Court five hundred drachmae per head.

• Married men are exempt from entering the Trials, but as marriage must not be entered into lightly, every man must pay a brideprice. Each family may set their own bride-prices for their daughters, but it cannot be less than a hundred drachmae. A bride should be treasured, as the queen must be treasured.

• All volunteers for the Trials will be accepted. Wishing to enter shows either a commendable desire for the queen, or a volatile and violent spirit that needs eliminating.

• An order of men will be set up who are trained for the Trials from childhood. Any family who gives one son to the Order will be given exemption for another son. The Trials offer hope to all contestants, but a properly trained man has a better chance both during the Trials, and later with the Court and the queen.

• For her own safety, the queen is not permitted outside the palace grounds, kept both protected and pure by her guard.

• The only occasion on which the queen will appear and speak in public, in each of her lifetimes, is at the ceremony before the Trials. This speech will impress upon the Trial contestants her absolute authority over their lives and deaths, and the sight of her perfect beauty will inspire them.

Hers was the face that lit a thousand lamps. She had brought peace to a thousand homes across their land.

The mosaic of Queen Rosamond was the only bright thing permitted in the temple. Her image was on the farthest wall in the Great Hall, and they saw her during every meal and every prayer.

She stood tall as a mountain over land and sea, the whole earth a sweep of gold, which she had made bright and prosperous, all the waters calm because a glance of her tranquil eyes had stilled storms.

Her hair streamed over the land, black silk on gold, and her face was calm, kind, and impossibly beautiful.

No woman was born this beautiful. They had to make her.

Clustered around her feet were the skyscrapers of their city, shining silver blades rising higher than any buildings had ever risen before. Their city stretched farther, housed more souls, than any other city ever had, and all these souls were safe in her keeping. In the middle of the city were the sloping roofs that formed the buildings of the temple where Tor’s Order lived. On the mountains outside the city rose the golden dome of the palace, and all the buildings of the Court around it.

The mosaic was two centuries old, but the colors were still as vivid as the queen. Beneath the gorgeous blaze were words carved dark and deep into the old stone:

Tor had learned to read from those words. He’d been four years old when his parents sent him to the temple, thirteen summers ago, so he did not remember his father’s face or his mother’s.

The first face he remembered was the queen’s.

The second face he remembered was Master Roland’s, the oldest of the masters, withered as the last apple left rolling in a basket. He could not teach the trainees how to fight any longer, so his job was to run herd on the youngest, making sure they ate and went to bed, monitoring the machines as they trained to be ready for the Trials.

He found Tor curled on the floor by the mosaic of the queen, looking up into those wide bright eyes.

Tor expected a scolding, but he did not receive one. Master Roland knelt by him, though his old joints cracked like dry tree branches.

“She’s real, you know,” he said in a whisper.

Tor had placed his hand on the shimmering blue stones that formed the hem of Queen Rosamond’s garment, confused, not sure if he was proving she was real or trying to conjure her from the cold stone.

“She is alive this moment,” Master Roland said, and his voice thrilled. “Not so very far from here. She is always alive, ever alive. She never dies. She is the eternal rose. She is the soul of this country. And you are training so you may be chosen as fit to serve her.”

The Order, set up so the right man could be prepared to win the Trials.

Yes, Tor thought, and it all felt so right. He’d known there must be a reason for the Trials, a good reason. For the simulated programs and the real programs, having to hurt his friends, for the lack of any warmth or softness in his life. He’d known there had to be something, somebody, who was worth everything.