All was well, Regina told herself. Despite her heavy, clumsy hands. Despite her nervousness.
“Tell me,” Ilkay said. “Tell me everything. What is your highrise working on?”
“You would not believe it, but it is a contract piece for the UN Commission on Historical Conflict Analysis, and what they are focusing on is conducting the most detailed possible analysis of the Peloponnesian War. All year we’ve been focused on the Battle of Pylos—refining equipment models, nutrition and weather patterns, existing in these simulations for twelve-hour shifts and feeding data to other teams of analysts. No idea what they are looking for—they’re concealing that to keep from biasing the simulation—but the level of detail is granular. I’ve been fighting and refighting a simulation of the Battle of Sphacteria. Half-starved, trying to keep the phalanx together. I’ve been taken hostage and shipped to Athens so many times as a Spartan hoplite, I should get danger pay. It was supposed to be a six-month research project, but it’s already run all year, and looks set to run another year.”
“You actually look like you could handle yourself pretty well in a battle, right now. That’s a heavy blank you’re sheathed in.”
Regina felt a flush of shame. “When they pulled me over to my new Istanbul distro, someone had walked off in the blank I ordered. It was this, or wait another week. I was furious.” She looked down at the hairy back of the hand. “It’s terrible, isn’t it? My highrise had to take a 10% pay cut across the board this year. I couldn’t afford my old distro. The new distro is dreadful. I woke up with pins and needles all over, felt like I had a club foot, and could barely move my fingers for two hours. I staggered here like a zombie, everybody who passed me on the street staring at me. And nobody at the distro even apologized about the mix-up.”
“It isn’t terrible.” Ilkay had been too impatient in drinking her Turkish coffee, and a thin line of grounds marred her perfect lip. She wiped them delicately away with a napkin. “Fortunes change, and we’re all reliant on our highrises. I’m just so thankful that you were here when I walked up. I had a fear, crossing the hippodrome, that you would be gone. That there was a recall, or a delay, or you had been wait-listed, or that you had… reconsidered.”
Ilkay was always so fragile, this first day. Always certain there had been some disaster between them. Ilkay could afford a better timeshare—something in the spring, when the tulips came, or something in San Francisco Protectorate, but she came at this cut-rate time each year to meet Regina, slumming it in the off-season. In the end, it was Ilkay who was the most uncertain of them, most sure she would one year lose Regina. Money, Regina had to remind herself, was not everything—although it seemed like it was, to those who did not have it. Ilkay worked in a classified highrise, cut off from the rest of the world, plugging away at security problems only the fine-tangled mesh of reason and intuition, “gut” feeling and logical leaps of a highly trained and experienced mind could untangle. For Ilkay, cut off from any contact for the rest of the year, and restricted to the Western Protectorates for her timeshare because of international security reasons, it was not about money at all. She was afraid of losing Regina, even more than Regina was of losing her.
Ilkay took her hand. “Don’t worry about the mix-up. It will be… interesting. Something new. Okay—not exactly new, but something I have not done for a long time. And I’m just so glad that you came, despite everything.”
“What do you mean?”
Ilkay’s eyes widened a bit, and Regina saw she had slipped, had revealed something not to be known outside the siloes of the classified highrises that crunched the world’s ugliest layers of data. No wonder they didn’t let her out much: she may have been one of the world’s greatest security analysts, but she was a clumsy liar.
Ilkay recovered and continued. “You know, this really is going to be fun. This guy even looks a little dangerous. God only knows what he’s been put up to while we weren’t around.” Ilkay grinned wickedly, and ran a nail along the inside of Regina’s ropy wrist. “I can pretend you’ve traveled through time all this way from Pylos to be with me…”
“I guess that, in a sense, I have.”
At that moment the muezzin’s voice called from atop one of the minarets. Cutting clearly through the rain, the muezzin’s trained voice, a rich contralto, carried so commandingly through the air that it almost seemed to come from speakers, despite the laws in Istanbul forbidding any amplification of the human voice. Both Ilkay and Regina paused until she had finished her call, staring at each other, cow-eyed as a couple of teenagers on a first date. Like it was every year, and just as exciting and good. When the muezzin had finished her song, Ilkay caught the eye of a young waiter and made a sign in the air for the check. The young man nodded, unsmiling. The bent, friendly old man who had been serving their table was nowhere to be seen.
When the check came, Regina saw she had been charged for two teas.
“Sorry,” she said to the young man. “The other waiter said that I would be only charged for one of these…”
The young man shook his head. “You spilled the first one. You’re responsible. You pay.”
Regina began her protest. “Look, I’m happy to pay, but…”
“No, you look.” The young man spat back at her. “I don’t care what he said. You blanks think you can do anything you want. Spill a tea with your clumsy hands and not pay, forget to tip us because we won’t even recognize you next time. You pay for what you took, like anyone else. Like the real people here.”
Ilkay interrupted. “It’s no problem. We’ll pay. You can save the speech.”
Stunned by the young waiter’s hostility, Regina felt the pure, chemical haze of rage rising in her body. This was new—a feedback of violence that seemed embedded directly in the muscle and bone, a sudden awareness of her physical power, and a desire to use it so strong that it distorted thought. She wanted to smash a fist into the young waiter’s face. Or a chair.
Grasping Regina’s knee under the table to restrain her, Ilkay waved her palm over the check. “It’s done, and a regulation tip for you, as well.”
The young man shrugged. “I deserve more, putting up with you people every day.” He muttered something else as they got up to leave. Regina did not catch it, but Ilkay’s cheeks flushed.
As they were walking away, Regina turned and looked back at the terrace of the little cafe where they had met for countless years. The young waiter stood, arms crossed, watching them. As Regina caught his eye he turned his head and, keeping his eyes locked on hers, spat on the sidewalk.
Ilkay squeezed her hand. “Come on. We’ve got…”
Regina interrupted her. “What did he say, that last thing?”
“It’s not important.”
“Tell me.”
Ilkay smiled gently. “You’re going to have to get used to that male blank. You’ve never been in one before, have you?”
Regina shook her head. “No.”
“You need to ride on top of it, the way you would a horse. Don’t let its adrenaline surges and hormones get the better of you, or the feedback will distort your decision-making. Cloud your thinking.”
Regina shook her head, as if to clear it. “Yeah, I can feel that. But what did he say?”
Ilkay tugged at her hand, and they walked in the direction of the Hagia Sophia. In this early hour, there was almost no-one on the sidewalks and the squares. The figures that they saw, all locals going about their own business, drifted in a clinging mist that did not quite turn to rain. “I’ll tell you,” Ilkay said, “but only if you promise, then, to concentrate on me. On us, and our time here.”