The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  On the other side of the terrace, one of the breakfasters, a young woman with dark hair in a braid, seated alone, was having a conversation with a local teenage boy on a bicycle. The boy had drawn out a map and was pointing to something on it. He handed the map to the blank, who began examining it, her easy smile displaying a row of white teeth. And then, the boy reached into his pocket, and drew out a small, red canister with a nozzle at the top. He aimed it at the young woman’s face and depressed the button, firing a spray into her eyes, nose and mouth.

  Without thinking, Regina was on her feet, across the terrace, then on top of the boy, slamming his hand again and again into the pavement until the canister fell from it and rolled bumpily away across the cobblestones, wrestling with him as he tried to twist away from her. The boy struck her in the face, hard, his hand impacting with a strangely sharp pain. But then others joined her, from the street and from the terrace. Whistles blew. The boy disappeared behind a mass of struggling backs and legs. Ilkay was on the terrace, pouring water from a bottle over the young woman’s face. The woman’s eyes were red and swollen closed, she was coughing and gagging. Near her, others were wiping at their eyes, trying to clear them of the irritant spray. Another man offered Regina a cloth, a napkin from the terrace, and now she noticed that her face was bleeding. She pressed the napkin to her cheek, feeling the warm pulse of blood from the deep cut there. Only then did she notice the policeman, carefully placing a small, bloody folding knife into an isolation bag. The café’s proprietor stood in the center of his terrace, all tipped-over tables and shattered tea cups, wringing his hands.

  * * *

  At the medical clinic, the nurse who applied the seal was a young man, ex-military, his silver-sheathed prosthesis of a right arm, twelve-fingered and nimble, deftly working the seal into place as he cheerfully bantered with Regina.

  “Luckily, your insurance covers this damage. They can be picky about what you put the blanks through, you know. There are all sorts of clauses and sub-clauses. That knife just touched the zygomatic bone, but there are no fractures, no bruising. A lot of people don’t read the fine print, and go paragliding or something, break a leg and find themselves footing a huge bill for repairs later, or a scrap and replace that they can’t afford. But you made the right choice, bought comprehensive. You must have gotten into the program early—those rates are astronomical these days. Nobody can afford them but the highest-ranking Minister Councilors and, of course, the postmortems. There we go. This guy’s face will be good as new in a few days.” He patted Regina’s cheek affectionately, flexed the smoothly clacking twelve-figured hand. “Just try not to smile too much.” He admired his hand. “God, I love this thing. If anything good can be said to have come out of the Fall of Beirut, it’s this hand. A masterpiece.”

  Ilkay was giving a deposition in another room. Looking up, Regina saw the Inspector from the IPSHC standing in the doorway in a casual polo shirt and slacks, abglanz glittering weirdly under the medical-grade lights. She recognized him by the pomegranate-colored birthmark on his hand.

  “I hope you are well,” he said. “After your adventure.”

  Regina nodded slightly.

  “Hold still one second,” the young nurse said. “I have to fix the seal along the edge here.”

  “We are going to have to take a bit more of your time, I am afraid. Of Ilkay’s time, to be more precise. Will you be able to get back to your residence all right? If not, I can send someone to accompany you. We will return her at the soonest moment we can, but I am afraid…” His digital smear of a face turned to the nurse. “If you are finished, can you leave her for a moment?”

  The nurse shrugged and left the room.

  “I am afraid,” continued the Inspector, “that we will need her particular skill set over the next few days. We have encountered … a rather fluid situation. It needs further analysis. Normally we would not … well, to be honest, the austerities have left us a bit short staffed. Ilkay’s presence here, with her particular skill set, is an opportunity we literally can’t afford to pass up.”

  Ilkay was in the doorway. “Inspector, can I have a moment alone with her?”

  Once the Inspector had departed, Ilkay crossed the room to Regina. She ran a finger lightly along the seal. “They’ve done a good job. It’s the best work I’ve ever seen.” She blinked back tears. “God, you are an idiot. You’ve spent too long in that simulation, or maybe that body is getting to you.”

  “I don’t know what came over me,” Regina said seriously. “It’s something in the air, I suppose. I just reacted.”

  “Well,” Ilkay said, “stop reacting. I’ll be back with you in a day. Two at the most. In the meantime, try not to play the hero too much. And I expect a full report of your adventures. But…” And now she seemed uncertain, lowered her voice. “Play it safe a little, will you? For me? It might be better…” she leaned in and whispered in Regina’s ear. “It might be better to stay away from the touristy areas for a while. Can you do that for me?”

  She pulled away. Regina nodded.

  “Oh,” Ilkay said, running her finger along Regina’s razor-stubbled chin. “And by the way—you really need to shave more often. You’re a beast, and it’s not that I don’t like it, but it’s giving me a bit of a rash.”

  * * *

  They had met here, so many years ago. It had been a different Istanbul, then—a city dominated by a feeling of optimism, Regina thought. No, not dominated—optimism could never dominate the city’s underlying feeling of melancholy, of nostalgia for what was always lost. But the city had been brightened, somehow, by optimism. For years, there had been a feeling, ephemeral, like a bright coat of whitewash over stone. The relays were in place on a hundred possible new worlds, the massive array on Istanbul’s distant hills were firing the consciousnesses of the first explorers into interstellar space. It was in that time that they had met. They had met on a Sunday, at the Church of St. George. Regina, who was not religious, had gone to a service. She had been trying things out then—meditation, chanting, prayer—all of it a failure. Where does one go when one has lost everything, risen back from nothing? But she found the drone of the priest’s voice and the smell of incense—a thousand years and more of incense soaked into the gold leaf and granite—comforting. The flat and meaningfully staring icons, the quietude. In those first years of adjustment, it had been all she had.

  Ilkay had found her outside in the courtyard. She had been doing the same—wandering from temple to mosque to church, searching. They fell in together, naturally, talking of the most private feelings immediately, walking up the hill through neighborhoods that had been crumbling for as long as they had been standing, where the burned shells of houses mixed with those restored, and all of them leaned on one another, the whole leaning on the broken for support, the broken leaning on the whole. They ate a meal together in a little family restaurant whose courtyard was the ivy-covered walls of a shattered house, long ago consumed by fire, open to the sky. The meal felt, for Regina, like a communion. Someone had found her and had made her whole. And there had been no struggle, no doubt, no sacrifice. They had spent every moment together afterwards, never parted, and agreed to meet the next year. That was all. They had never questioned it.

  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.”

  My English Name

  R. S. BENEDICT

  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.

  If the black domes in the ceiling of the fourth-floor corridor had actually contained working cameras the way they were supposed to, a security guard might have noticed Tingting, a dowdy maid from a coal village in Hunan, enter room 414 without her cleaning cart. The guard would have seen Thomas Majors emerge a few days later dressed in a blue suit and a yellow scarf.

  A search of the room would have returned no remnant of Tingting.

  * * *

  Hunan Province has no springtime, just alternating winter and summer days. When Tingting enters room 414 it’s winter, gray and rainy. The guest room has a heater, at least, unlike the sleeping quarters Tingting shares with three other maids.

  Tingting puts a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door and locks it. She shuts the curtains. She covers the mirrors. She takes off her maid uniform. Her skin is still new. She was supposed to be invisible: she has small eyes and the sort of dumpy figure you find in a peasant who had too little to eat as a child and too much to eat as an adult. But prying hands found their way to her anyway, simply because she was there. Still, I know it won’t be hard for a girl like her to disappear. No one will look for her.

  I pull Tingting off, wriggling out of her like a snake. I co
nsider keeping her in case of emergency, but once she’s empty I feel myself shift and stretch. She won’t fit anymore. She has to go.

  I will spare you the details of how that task is accomplished.

  * * *

  It takes a while to make my limbs the right length. I’ve narrowed considerably. I check the proportions with a measuring tape; all the ratios are appropriate.

  But Thomas Majors is not ready. The room’s illumination, fluorescent from the lamps, haze-strangled from the sky, isn’t strong enough to tan this new flesh the way it is meant to be.

  You thought I was handsome when you met me. I wish you could have seen what I was supposed to be. In my plans, Thomas was perfect. He had golden hair and a complexion like toast. But the light is too weak, and instead I end up with flesh that’s not quite finished.

  I can’t wait anymore. I only have room 414 for one week. It’s all Tingting can afford.

  So I put on Thomas as carefully as I can, and only when I’m certain that not a single centimeter of what lies beneath him can be seen, I uncover the mirrors.