Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach

by Kelly Robson

  “My team will be small.” Minh grinned. “The smallest.”

  -5-

  WHEN SUSA SENT FOR Shulgi, he gathered his household and processed through the streets, accompanied by everyone who belonged to him, from his eldest wife to the child who swept the stairs. Susa and her people met them at the apex of the ziggurat. She looked agitated, tired, unwell, her skin sallow under the layer of cosmetic.

  She tried to rush through their greeting ritual, as if she didn’t have time to honor the gods, but Shulgi wouldn’t allow himself to be hurried. With new stars watching, he told her, they mustn’t scatter the grain of duty for others to glean.

  The delay made Susa furious. When the ritual was complete, she spoke plainly.

  The stars were the clearest augury she’d ever seen and could only be interpreted one way. The stars called for Shulgi’s death.

  * * *

  Hamid’s fake was dressed in cowboy gear. It looked like a refugee from a crèche costume party.

  “I’m busy, Minh,” it said. “Tell me what you want.”

  Minh ground her teeth in frustration. “I need to talk to Hamid.”

  Thousands of billable hours, Kiki whispered. Those are the magic words.

  Hamid doesn’t care. His lover is a private bank.

  “What’s it about? I’ll pass the message on,” the fake drawled.

  “It’s a new project. A unique opportunity. Can you boost me up his queue? Top priority.”

  The fake nodded and faded out.

  “Wait,” Minh said. The fake faded back in. She shot it the RFP package. “Tell him to look at this and think about the horses.”

  “The budget is due in ten minutes,” Kiki said. “We need to submit now. No room to wiggle.”

  Their draft budget had two big blanks. Minh was still the only team member.

  “Put Hamid in.”

  “Without his permission?”

  “He’s an old friend. And this is a just a draft.”

  “Okay. I’m putting myself in the other blank.”

  “Kiki—”

  “Do you have a better idea? The bank will like it. Call me a placeholder. You can kick me off the team anytime you like.”

  “Okay, it’s better than a blank.”

  “Better than a blank. That’s my new motto.”

  Kiki sealed the budget and shot it upstairs.

  When the Bank of Calgary called two hours later, they were both deep into editing—Kiki finessing a custom version of ESSA’s history and past projects into an inspiring three minutes, Minh pulling the guts out of the old Colorado work plan and trying to reshape it into a credible approach to a past-state assessment.

  Minh should have known the bank would jump fast. Calgary was deep into trade deficit. This RFP was a big ripe peach hanging on the branch. Of course the bank was itching to grab it.

  Even so, Minh knew exactly what the bankers would say. It was what they always said.

  The banker intercepted Minh and Kiki the moment they walked out of the elevator onto Calgary’s bustling apex floor.

  “These rates are too low,” he said, ushering them into a glass-walled conference room.

  He was young—a tall fat baby with bony wrists protruding from the sleeves of his banker suit. She’d seen him before, in the entourage of Calgary’s senior account manager. Now he had his own entourage—three more fat babies, big-eyed and downy-faced. Looked like they were right out of the crèche.

  “Where’s Rosa?” Minh looked around for the banker she usually dealt with, an elegant white-haired plague baby who wheeled around in an antique chair.

  “Palliative care. But she still has team oversight.”

  Minh winced. Rosa was only a few years older than her.

  “About these rates—”

  Minh cut the banker off. “I don’t want to lose this job on price.”

  “There’s no point in proposing a tiny team with cut rates. Your fees will be a minor line item compared to what TERN will be charging the Mesopotamian Development Bank.”

  “You think the client won’t care what we cost? In my experience, private banks are cheap. They only value their own expertise. Everyone else is just a warm body.”

  “Not this private bank. Their pockets are deep.”

  “Oh, good.” Minh plastered on a phony smile. “You’ve got intel. Tell me everything.”

  His eyes glazed over, descending into the data stream.

  Minh exchanged a glance with Kiki. He’s whispering with Rosa, I bet. He’s not as good as you are at running multiple streams.

  Why are you poking him?

  I want him scared of me. He needs to learn I can’t be pushed around.

  The banker looked up from his stream. “The Mesopotamian Development Bank is private.”

  “Obviously,” said Minh. “Tell me who they are. What do they want?”

  “Unknown.”

  Minh grimaced. All this would be so much easier with Rosa.

  “You don’t know anything about the client. You have no intel or insight, but you want to tell me how to budget this project.”

  The banker spread his hands in an awkward version of the conciliatory gesture bankers always made when they were out of their depth. He was trying to seem friendly and understanding, but his expression was wary.

  “Our models show ESSA should be contributing more to Calgary’s economy. Your firm has been treading water for years. You’re a top consultant in two fields, fluvial geomorphology and restoration ecology. Clients should expect to pay well for your time.”

  Minh gave the banker an icy smile.

  Watch this, Kiki. This is how I handle a bully banker.

  Minh drew several of her legs up onto the table, held tight, and leaned in. “Let me tell you something.” She smacked the glass with her toe and dropped her voice into its lowest register. “I’ve been running projects for forty years. Out there.” She pointed out the window at the mountains. “In the real world, not hiding up here in the top levels of a hab someone else built, juggling numbers and pretending to be important.”

  He sat back in his chair. A shade of alarm contorted his young face, but then he relaxed.

  Rosa’s telling him how to handle me.

  Minh lifted another leg and pointed at the underside of the glass spire overhead. “When I was your age, I helped build this hab. My team put the capstone into place. I know how to win a job and deliver results.”

  She gripped the edges of the table with two legs and thrust herself forward, right in the banker’s face. “All you do is push deficits around and procrastinate until the hab collapses.”

  The banker looked ruffled, but Rosa was keeping him under control. “We’ll take your budget recommendations into consideration. But one more thing—”

  Here it comes. He’s going to try to hobble me.

  “Calgary doesn’t want you to put yourself at risk on a dangerous project. Your maintenance contributions are valuable, especially snowpack management. Certainly, you should be on the team as project advisor, working from Calgary, but not project lead.”

  Minh pretended to consider it for a moment.

  “There’s a studio available,” the banker continued. “High level, over a hundred square meters.”

  I bet that’s Rosa’s space, Minh whispered. Banker level.

  “Which way does it face?” Minh asked.

  “I don’t—” The banker glazed over for a half-second. “East. It faces the old city.”

  Minh tapped a leg against the underside of the glass table, still pretending to consider the offer.

  I’ve never seen you in diva mode before, Minh. You’re pretty good at it.

  This is nothing. Wait until you meet Hamid.

  After letting the banker fidget for a minute, she said, “No, thanks. If you don’t want us to bid on this project, we can flush our proposal, right, Kiki?”

  “Sure. Iceland wants another adaptive management review. They requested a quote this morning.”

&n
bsp; The banker huffed and puffed for another ten minutes before winding up the meeting. As they walked to the elevator, he fell into step beside Kiki.

  “Glad to see ESSA’s finally doing succession planning,” he said.

  Kiki grinned at Minh, triumphant. See? I told you the bank would like having me on the team.

  -6-

  THE OTHER PRIESTS BACKED up Susa’s interpretation—the stars called for Shulgi’s death. Twelve priests, all agreed on an omen, all interpreting a sign the same way? Impossible. They couldn’t agree what direction the sun rose from. There was only one explanation: they’d decided upon it previously.

  Shulgi knew they’d been arguing, in a terrible hush, for months. He had expected a petition to expand the borders of the kingdom. But no—this must be it. Susa wanted him dead. When the new stars appeared, she forced the omen’s interpretation to suit her needs. Dazzled by the force of her will, the other priests fell into line.

  * * *

  Minh and Kiki hooked their bikes onto the guideway ramp and cruised west, ducking behind the bikes’ plexiform windbreaks and pedaling hard to keep warm in the chill. Ponds of meltwater dotted the shortgrass prairie below.

  Kiki lagged behind for a minute, then put on a burst of speed and zoomed past, laughing.

  I’m sorry, Minh. I don’t want to be mean, but you look really funny.

  What? Minh looked down at her prostheses, two legs on each pedal and the remaining two curled around the frame.

  An octopus riding a bike.

  Minh bore down on the pedals and raced past Kiki, waving two of her legs.

  Getting out of Calgary felt wonderful. Breathing the sharp, clean mountain air, letting Calgary’s stepped ziggurat shrink in the distance, leaving behind the dry eastern wasteland where the old city lay under dust, a reminder that similar devastation lay beyond every horizon. Below the guideway grazed a herd of pronghorn antelope. She pinged their stats. Optimal gravidity, health a few points suboptimal but within the healthy range, immune systems boosted to counter the late-winter nutrient variance. This particular herd’s population had been stable for a decade. They were the pride and joy of a wildlife biologist Minh knew from Tuk-U, a fat baby who’d taken over the breeding program from the biologist who’d initiated it forty years earlier. She trapped a minute of doc and shot it to him.

  To their left, the Bow River sliced through dun prairie, a silver ribbon curving into the foothills. Beyond, the mountain peaks glowed in the morning light.

  As they approached the front ranges of the Rockies, the snowpack turned patchy. Minh’s stomach flipped. She wiped the standard snowpack reports off her dashboard and dived into the guts of the live monitors. She threw fresh data across the horizon and drilled down into it, pedaling hard.

  Five minutes later, she’d convinced herself the snowpack was fine. The patchiness was a trick of the light. Still, she had to rest her elbows on the handlebars and hang her head to get her blood pressure under control.

  One season of low snowpack would put Calgary in a difficult position. They’d either have to evacuate half their population or install water printers. If they chose evacuation, only true surfacers like Minh would return, and the hab would be a ghost town. But installing water printers, like the Bank of Calgary wanted, would betray their ambitions and values. True surfacers would move to Iceland or Cusco, leaving Calgary to become a wart on a devastated landscape.

  They exited the main guideway onto a private drive a few kilometers into the Kananaskis Valley, where the prairie rucked up into the peaks and crags of the continent’s spine. The first blades of grass poked through the brown spruce and pine needles underfoot, and the chilly air brought a promise of fresh-flowing sap from the buds on the trembling aspen.

  “We have to walk from here?” said Kiki.

  “What’s the problem?” asked Minh. “There’s no predator alert. Ping the monitors if you’re nervous.”

  “There’s no people here. It’s spooky.”

  A camera disk flew out of the trees and hovered overhead. Minh waved at its red eye.

  “There’s your people,” she said.

  They followed the camera up a wide bush trail.

  “Can I ask what happened to your legs?” Kiki said. “Do you mind?”

  “Ringworm. I was born in Sudbury Hell. The pandemics hit us hard,” said Minh.

  “The plagues were eighty years ago. You were just a crechie?”

  “We didn’t have crèches back then. We were all live births. With parents. Families.”

  “Do you remember walking?”

  “I’m walking now.” Minh smiled.

  “You know what I mean.”

  She shook her head. “I remember the evacuation to Bangladesh Hell, the surgeries, and learning to use my first prostheses. They were dumb things, mechanical joints, completely inert. Huge advances in prosthesis tech since then. I’ve used these for ten years. I love them. Everyone should have six legs.”

  “Why not eight? If it’s an octopus, I mean.”

  Minh flapped her arms and wiggled her fingers. “These make eight.”

  A small skip rose silently toward the clouds, an elongated rose-colored egg riding a slim beam of power made visible by the angle of the morning sun—the iridescent condensation trail formed by the slight change in air pressure triggered by waste heat.

  When they crested the ridge, Kananaskis Ranch stretched across the wide valley. A small hab gleamed like a diamond, surrounded by a cluster of antique outbuildings—stables and barns rebuilt on ancient stone foundations. Horses grazed in paddocks and pastures. Cattle topped the distant ridge, grazing on the dry grass at the edge of the ranch’s boundary, where thick invasive scrub was forced back by a battery of specialized bots.

  Kiki boggled. “Is this a . . . a farm?”

  “It’s a biodiversity reserve.”

  “People live like this?”

  “Private banks can, if they want. Most stay underground.”

  As they approached the outbuildings, Hamid led a leggy young horse out of the stable, controlling it with a gentle, practiced hand. He walked the skittish animal around in a circle, paying out the lead line until the horse was orbiting him at a distance. By the time Minh and Kiki got close enough to hear hoofbeats and smell the grassy stench of horse manure, the animal looked relaxed, head down, ears up. Minh and Kiki leaned on the fence. Hamid ignored them, his focus on the tall beast at the end of the line.

  Hamid’s showing off, Minh whispered.

  Is this safe? He’s so tiny. The horse is a lot bigger than him.

  There’s nothing small about Hamid.

  Hamid worked the horse into a steady canter for a few minutes, then slowed it to a walk and led it to meet them at the fence. Kiki gingerly stroked the animal’s velvet nose.

  “Aren’t you a fat baby!” Hamid said, looking up at Kiki through the rails of the fence. “What was your birth weight?”

  “Nearly 3,300 grams,” said Kiki. “You?”

  “Oh, me? You won’t be impressed. I wasn’t very viable. Surprised I survived at all. I’m a plague baby, you know. A dying breed. We’re all getting old.”

  “You don’t look old,” Kiki said with all the loyalty of a best friend.

  It wasn’t a complete lie. Hamid still had his strong, flexible jockey physique, but his face showed as much wear and tear as Minh’s. More, maybe.

  “Is this ranch yours?” Kiki asked.

  “Nah. I only live here.” He gave Minh an icy glare and added, “For the moment. If Byron kicks me out, I’ll be sleeping on Minh’s floor.”

  “Did you read the RFP?” Minh asked.

  “Does it matter? You put me on the team anyway. Did you want to ruin my life? You know the banks blab to each other. Gossipy as a crèche gang in puberty.”

  Kiki laughed. Hamid gave her an approving glance.

  “Calgary told Iceland, Iceland told Cusco, Cusco told Zurich, and five minutes later, I’m in the middle of a domestic earthquake. Crockery flyi
ng everywhere, sturm and drang and betrayal and tears. And poor me standing in the middle, wondering what was going on.”

  “If you’d check your queue once in a while—”

  “My queue is full. You’re not the only one who wants a piece of me, Minh.”

  Now even Kiki was giving her a cold eye. She was on Hamid’s side already—instant best friends. Hamid was four times her age and they had nothing in common, but Hamid could charm the skin off a snake.

  Minh waited while Hamid stormed on. She’d known him since childhood. No point interrupting until he finished his grand performance.

  When he finally wound down, Minh said, “I can drop you from the team—”

  Kiki jumped into the fray. “I’ll explain it was my mistake. I could say you refused, but I forgot.”

  Hamid smiled. “Sweet little fat baby, you’re so kind. But I’ve already agreed to join the team.”

  She blinked. “You have?”

  “Maybe Minh should check her queue once in a while.”

  Kiki rounded on Minh, braids flying.

  Minh checked her queue. The message was there, marked low-priority and time-stamped to the exact moment she’d left Calgary. She shot it to Kiki.

  Kiki looked confused. “All it says is ‘Fine.’”

  “Did I forget to include the material I trapped for the proposal? Here it is.”

  Hamid fired a doc into the middle of the corral, and they all watched two minutes and twenty seconds of skillfully edited biography emphasizing Hamid’s multidisciplinary reach in wildlife biology, veterinary science, and biodiversity field research.

  “You only get a minute and a half,” said Minh.

  “I tried, my dear. But it just doesn’t fit.”

  * * *

  Hamid invited them into the hab. They sat in the middle of the atrium, on antique wooden benches. The overhead canopy of temperate greenery scented the air with spruce sap. The water feature’s cascade pattered tunefully, an undercurrent to the chirping birds.

  “Nobody’s here,” said Hamid. “Half the staff ran off to Calgary when the fight started, and the rest scattered to the edges of the ranch. Then Byron took the skip to Zurich.”

  “All this space.” Kiki gaped.