by Kelly Robson
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
For Alyx, always
The past is another country; we want to colonize it.
-1-
THE MONSTER LOOKED LIKE an old grandmother from the waist up, but it had six long octopus legs. It crawled out of its broken egg and cowered in the muddy drainage ditch. When it noticed Shulgi, its jaw fell open, exposing teeth too perfect to be human.
It recoiled and hissed: Oh - shit - shit - shit - shit - shit - shit.
Shulgi hefted his flail in one hand and his scythe in the other. He knew his duty better than anyone other than the gods. Kings were made for killing monsters.
* * *
On one of Calgary’s wide, south-facing orchard terraces, Minh pruned peach trees while paying vague attention to ESSA’s weekly business meeting. Minh and her partners were all plague babies. They’d worked together for nearly sixty years, so unless a problem cropped up—an over-budget project or a scope-creeping client—their fakes could handle the meeting nearly unmonitored.
No problems this week. Nobody playing diva, simply letting their fakes walk through the agenda. Everyone except for Kiki, the firm’s ridiculously frenetic young admin. She was playing with an antique paper clip simulation, stringing them into ropes. The clips clicked against the table.
Kiki, stop it, Minh whispered. The sound is driving me nuts.
I didn’t know you were lurking, Kiki replied. I thought I was all alone here.
The meetings are important. Sit still and listen.
Easy for you to say. You don’t spend every Monday morning with a bunch of fakes. I bet you’re halfway up a tree right now, aren’t you?
Minh didn’t reply. She was in a tree—four legs wrapped around the trunk of Calgary’s oldest peach. She’d just started the late-winter pruning. Below her, bots gathered the dropped limbs and piled them on a cargo float. A cold downwash funneled through the orchard, the wind caught and guided by the hab’s towering south wall. Minh pinged the microclimate sensors. A few more weeks of winter chill and the trees could start moving into bud break.
Since I’ve got your attention, Kiki continued, you might want to look over the RFP coming up next. It’s a big river remediation project funded by a private bank. You’ve never seen anything like it. You’re going to disintegrate.
Kiki shot her the request for proposal package with a flick of her fingernail.
Minh dropped out of the tree and spread the data over the orchard’s carefully manicured ground cover. She hadn’t seen a new project in ten years. The banks weren’t interested. Calgary and all the other surface habitats struggled to keep their ongoing projects alive. Some of the habs—Edmonton, notoriously—had managed the funding crisis so badly, they’d starved themselves out.
Before she’d even finished scanning the introductory material, Minh’s blood pressure was spiraling.
A time travel project. Aren’t you excited? Kiki whispered. I nearly blew apart when I saw it.
Half the RFP made sense. Past state assessment, flow modeling, ecological remediation—her life’s work, familiar as her own skin. The rest didn’t make sense at all. Mesopotamia, Tigris, Euphrates—words out of history. And time travel—those two words raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Her biom flashed with blood pressure alerts.
It’s intriguing, whispered Minh. Why didn’t you send it to me earlier?
Kiki jangled the paper clips. It’s been in your queue for two days. I’ve been bugging your fake about it. You never look at your RFPs before the meeting. None of you do.
Yeah, well, we’re busy people, Minh replied absently.
When the plague babies had moved to the surface six decades earlier, in 2205, they’d been determined to prove humanity could escape the hives and hells and live above ground again, in humanity’s ancestral habitat. First, they’d erected bare-bones habs high in the mountains, scraping together skeleton funding for proof-of-concept pilot projects. For the first few ecological remediation projects, the plague babies donated their billable hours, hoping to lure investment and spark population growth.
It worked. Not quite as quickly as they’d hoped, but over the decades, the habs proved viable. Iceland and Cusco were booming. Calgary wasn’t quite as successful but momentum was building. Then TERN developed time travel, and every aboveground initiative had stalled.
Why would TERN get involved in river remediation now? Hadn’t they ruined her life enough already?
Minh’s biom slid an alert into the middle of her eye. Blood pressure wildly fluctuating, as if Minh couldn’t tell. She’d been light-headed ever since opening the RFP package. Her field of vision was narrowing. Her fingers itched to dial a little relief into her biom, but no. Minh had promised her medtech she wouldn’t meddle with her hormonal balance, so instead of hitting herself with a jolt of adrenaline, she circled the peach tree’s central leader with two legs and hung upside down, rough bark against her back, and let the blood cascade to her brain.
Back in the meeting, the fakes finished walking through the project progress reports. Nothing over budget. No problems. The fakes approved them all.
“Okay,” Kiki told the fakes. “On to new opportunities.”
Watch this, she whispered to Minh. I can turn these fakes into scientists.
Kiki fired the time travel RFP onto the table.
“The first one is for Minh. River remediation, and it’s big. Thousands of billable hours.”
All round the table, the fakes dropped away as Minh’s partners engaged with the text.
Kiki grinned at Minh. See? It’s like magic.
Mesopotamian Development Bank Request for Proposal (RFP 2267-16)Past State Assessment of the Mesopotamian Trench
Due March 21, 2267 at 14:00 GMT
The Mesopotamian Development Bank is embarking on a multiphase initiative to remediate the Mesopotamian trench. This project will restore 100,000 square kilometers of habitat, including the natural channels of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, their tributaries, coastal wetlands, and terrestrial and aquatic species. The restoration project will support a network of arcologies across the habitat.
The Bank is seeking a multidisciplinary project team to execute a past state assessment supported by the Temporal Economic Research Node (TERN), a division of the Centers for Excellence in Economic Research and Development (CEERD). The successful proponent team will assess and quantify the environmental state of Mesopotamia in 2024 BCE. The project will include complete geomorphological and ecological baselines, responses to stressors, and processes of change and adaptation. The data gathered will guide and inform future restoration projects in an effort to impose a regular climatic regime across the Mesopotamian drainage basin.
“This project is too good to pass up,” said Minh. “I want it.”
“You can’t be serious, Minh,” David said. He was out of breath, puffing hard. “Nobody hates CEERD and TERN more than you.”
Minh pinged his location. David was cycling the Icefields Guideway, climbing Sunwapta Pass without boost assi
st.
“It’s a great job,” said Minh. “I’ve already started working on the proposal.”
Kiki rolled her eyes. Minh ignored her.
“This isn’t a job, it’s a joke,” said Sarah. “You can’t do an ecological assessment on a hundred thousand square kilometers in three weeks. Three years wouldn’t be enough.”
Zhang shook his head. “Maybe if we knew this bank, but we’ve never even heard of them.”
Kiki fired a documentary onto the table. “The Mesopotamian Development Bank specializes in West Asian projects. They’re designing a string of habs for the Zagros Mountains. Look at this design. You’re going to collapse.”
The table exploded into a full-blown architectural simulation, the angles and planes of a huge ziggurat echoing the peaks and crags of the surrounding ranges. In comparison, Calgary was a pimple on the prairie.
“Put the doc away, Kiki,” said Sarah. “It’s just pretty pictures to attract investment.”
Kiki slapped the doc down. Minh threw some numbers into an opportunity-assessment matrix and fired it onto the table.
“If we win, the follow-on work could be massive,” she said. “Make the client happy and they’ll keep us fed for decades.”
Minh’s partners reviewed the figures in the follow-on column.
“I like the numbers,” said Clint. “But the job’s got to be wired.”
Kiki leaned over the table, braids swinging. “If they already know who they want to hire, why bother with a public procurement process? Private banks don’t need procurement transparency.”
Easy, Minh whispered. I’m handling this.
“I want this job,” said Minh. “I’ve already started putting together my team.”
David said, “If you win, your team can’t pull out. The Bank of Calgary would peel the skin off us.”
“It won’t be a problem,” said Minh. “Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to time travel?”
-2-
WHEN THE NEW STARS appeared, Shulgi was in the arms of his new wife, a soft, fragrant widow who spoke with an endearing lisp. Still young, she’d already brought two healthy children into the world with ease. She was a proud and capable mother, and when she’d promised him more children than any of his other wives, Shulgi laughed.
It was his last moment of joy.
* * *
The next day, Kiki showed up at Minh’s door.
She was huge. More than half a meter taller than Minh, Kiki outweighed her by at least sixty kilos. Like all fat babies, she was flawless. Perfectly proportioned and so healthy, her flesh seemed to burst with the pent-up energy of youth.
She wore an all-weather coverall and lugged a backpack. Her brown face was pearled with sweat, and her pedal clips scraped over the catwalk grid as she shifted the heavy pack from one shoulder to the other.
“Hi,” Kiki said. “Sorry to surprise you. I told your fake I was coming, but I guess you haven’t checked your queue yet.”
Kiki belonged to one of the half-assed hybrid habs the fat babies were building up north. Minh couldn’t remember which one. She pinged Kiki’s ID. Jasper, right.
Minh blinked up at her. “Did you bike all the way here in one day?”
She’d never given Kiki much thought, aside from the occasional administrative tangle. But here she was, large as life. One of Minh’s neighbors, a sanitation engineer with cat’s-paw prostheses, tried to edge by on the atrium catwalk. Kiki’s backpack was in the way. She shrugged it off and hugged the wall to let them pass.
“I left at dawn,” said Kiki. “I wanted to take the scenic route, but Jasper doesn’t have rights to use the Icefields Guideway. I had to go through Edmonton. Haven’t been back there in five years—not since I got out of the crèche. It’s falling to pieces. A ghost town.”
It was rude to keep Kiki standing outside, but showing up at her studio uninvited was rude too. Minh crossed her arms and leaned against the doorjamb.
“What are you doing in Calgary?” she asked.
Kiki grinned. Even her teeth were big.
“David’s giving me full-time hours to help you with the time travel proposal. If we’re going to work together on a big job, I need to able to talk to you. Your fake hates me.”
Minh drew herself up a bit taller. No use. If she wanted to talk to Kiki eye-to-eye instead of staring at her sternum, she’d have to climb the doorframe.
“I don’t need help. You shouldn’t have come all this way.”
“Your fake said the same thing. You haven’t changed your mind, have you? You seemed excited in the meeting. Excited for you, I mean. You don’t exactly emote.”
Minh had been ignoring her project deadlines to do preliminary research on West Asia. A literature search on the Tigris and Euphrates left her with a shortlist of several thousand papers, all three hundred years old, but no problem. She knew how to decipher old academic English. The time travel aspect was another matter entirely. No information available at all. If anyone had ever done an ecological assessment using time travel, they weren’t talking about it. TERN’s nondisclosure agreement had fangs. Big ones.
Minh tried to keep her expression as bland as a fake.
“No, I haven’t changed my mind. I’m working on the proposal.”
“Then you need help. I checked your utilization projections. You have three report deadlines over the next two weeks. You’re in the middle of pruning the orchard on Crowchild Terrace. Plus, you must get pulled into lots of maintenance work. Calgary is an old hab. Falling apart.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Minh hooked a leg on the wall and drew herself taller. “Calgary is doing just fine.”
Kiki’s face fell. “Sorry.”
“I don’t have to work in the peach orchard. I do it because I like it. I planted the first trees myself.”
Kiki winced. “Come on, Minh. I dropped all my other jobs to work on this. If David throws me back to quarter time, Jasper will be in deep trouble. We traded my extra hours for an advanced civil engineering seminar from U-Bang. Half the hab has already started the course. Maybe you don’t need me, but it can’t hurt. Give me a chance.”
Minh bit back a retort. If the fat babies had stayed in Calgary instead of running off to start their own habs, they’d be fine. Or if they had to leave, at the very least, they could build aboveground using Calgary’s hab tech, which was time-tested and proven. Racking up a trade deficit with the Bank of Calgary was better than taking handouts from Bangladesh Hell.
But the young had to go their own way. Minh had to admit she’d been the same, back in the dim and distant past.
Remembering her youth didn’t make dealing with fat babies any easier. Minh found young people exhausting. Five years’ teaching at the University of Tuktoyaktuk hadn’t helped. When Tuk-U shut down, giving up face-to-face teaching was almost a relief.
Minh had been heartbroken, though. Tuktoyaktuk was a jewel box of a hab. The crowning glory of the Arctic, on the wide, fertile Mackenzie River delta, the hab represented the dreams she’d worked toward all her life. But Tuktoyaktuk had failed. Calgary couldn’t support it. The bankers hadn’t been clever enough. After the university shut down, Minh had tried to block the Bank of Calgary from leasing the hab to CEERD, but she’d lost that fight too.
Losing Tuktoyaktuk still hurt. For Minh, the time travel project was an opportunity to poke CEERD in the eye—not only for Tuktoyaktuk but also for creating TERN and inventing time travel in the first place. If they hadn’t, life on the surface of the planet would be different. The banks would still be interested in the investment opportunities the habs offered, and the populations of the hells would be looking to the future instead of the past.
If only she could figure out a way to win the project. Minh couldn’t deny her proposal would have to be unusually clever. Winning depended on finding the right strategy, which would take a lot of research. Minh couldn’t work twenty-hour days, not anymore. A lifetime of abuse had nearly ruined her health. She nee
ded to find a thin edge and wedge it hard. Kiki might be that edge.
“Fine. You can help. But you can’t stay here. I don’t have room.”
Kiki peered over Minh’s head into the studio. Her eyes went wide.
“Wow. Your space is tiny. I bet you can sit on your sofa and reach everything with your tentacles.”
“They’re called legs.”
“Sorry. Legs. You’re a firm partner, a senior consultant. You helped build Calgary. But your home is barely bigger than a sleep stack.” Kiki’s voice rose, incredulous.
“Ecologists don’t impress the bankers. You should know that by now.”
“So, are we working, or what?”
Minh stood aside and let Kiki into the studio. She loved her home, especially the ten square meters of window looking west at the front ranges of the Rockies, but with Kiki inside, it suddenly felt small.
I’m getting old, Minh thought. Set in my ways. Kiki was just an average young human, energetic and disgustingly healthy. A few weeks working together wouldn’t do Minh any harm. And a little youthful enthusiasm wouldn’t hurt the proposal at all.
-3-
LOUNGING IN THE COMFORT and luxury of the palace’s inner courtyards, enjoying the company of his wives and children, Shulgi might have been the last to notice the new stars if one of his falconers hadn’t sent word.
New stars were powerful portents, but their interpretation depended on the skill of the seer and the clarity of their conversations with the gods. Anyone could pretend to read an augury; anyone could say the gods talked to them. But gods rarely spoke plainly. For Shulgi, the gods’ voices were usually only echoes of his own desires.
Shulgi only truly trusted one priest: Susa, who spoke for the moon.
* * *
Minh put Kiki to work researching time travel, tasking her with prying up details about TERN and their technology. It wouldn’t be easy. CEERD moved mountains to keep their think tanks’ intellectual property classified as trade secrets. Even when the World Economic Commission ruled entire sectors of their work public domain, they shared as little as possible. Those lawsuits ate millions of billable hours.
