by Kelly Robson
He gave a gentle laugh, and his eyes disappeared behind a web of wrinkles in his weathered face.
“Ah, Minh. You know me.”
“Yeah,” she said. “You only care about animals.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, but as far as I’m concerned, human deaths are nothing compared to the mass extinctions. Bringing back animal populations is worth a few human lives. More than a few.”
“Would you have been okay if I’d died?”
“No, I’d be devastated.”
“What’s the difference between the soldiers killing me, and Fabian killing the soldiers? Why would I be more dead than them?”
“If you died, we couldn’t go back in time and find you alive again.”
“Can’t we? Can’t TERN travel forty years into the past? Or two weeks? They could grab me out of the past and put me right back into the present.”
Hamid looked thoughtful. “I suppose. But we would all know you’d died.”
“Exactly. Like those soldiers died. They’re not less dead because we don’t know their names.” Minh swirled her legs, stirring the sand under her. “I’m sure TERN has a tangle of metaphysics justifying their health and safety protocol. I bet their physicists split time travel hairs down to the nanometer, in that awful hell of theirs. But right here, right now, the plain fact is—”
We’re on an island with a killer.
She bit the words back. Hamid would lock down her biom and dial her full of sedatives. And he’d be right to do it. She was overwrought.
And it wasn’t Fabian’s fault the soldiers were dead. It was her fault.
She dialed herself down, and calm closed over her like a warm blanket. Her gut unclenched. She scrubbed her hands through her hair. She should have cut it before leaving Calgary. She watched Hamid through the shaggy locks hanging in her eyes. He looked tense, like he was expecting her to say something irredeemable.
“The plain fact is we’re here to do a job,” she said. “We’ll finish what we came here to do, go home, file the final report, invoice the client, and move on to the next job.”
Saying it made it true.
* * *
Minh immersed herself in her work. She time-shifted the work plan and then dived into the live remote feeds. The vegetation survey was engrossing, the cultivated areas of the landscape as biodiverse as the wild. Plants and landscape, rocks and lichen, water and algae, pure and simple.
Eight camera feeds filled her eye. When humans strayed into the survey areas, the cameras avoided them, either zipping to a new location or rising high overhead. The cameras were usually spotted—pointed at, exclaimed over, chased, but it didn’t matter. Cameras couldn’t hurt anyone.
In a vineyard survey, a woman in a pink tunic padded barefoot down a dusty track. When she spotted the camera, she raised her arm and part of her costume flew off.
Minh maximized the feed and scanned backward in slow motion. A dark winged mass flew back and latched onto the woman’s arm. Minh zoomed in. A small falcon perched on the woman’s leather wrist cuff. When Minh jumped back to the live camera feed, outstretched talons raked at the lens, reaching for Minh’s eye. The camera dropped low and looped behind the bird, trapping a close-up of the bird’s fanned tailfeathers quivering in the wind.
The falconer recalled the bird to her wrist with a sharp whistle. She stared up at Minh’s camera, eyes narrow, jaw tight, lips drawn into a thin line.
The falconer snatched a stone from the track and pitched it. The camera dodged easily. Minh sent it up to two hundred meters and paused the survey. It could wait until the falconer moved on.
Minh bookmarked the incident and shot the feed to Hamid and Kiki. Hamid got back to her right away with more information about the bird’s species than she wanted to know, but Kiki didn’t reply. When Minh climbed up to the cubbies—late, too late, she’d worked too long into the night—Kiki’s cubby was sealed. So was Hamid’s. Fabian’s was empty.
Kiki hadn’t whispered to her all day. She’d been working hard—the work breakdown was thick with her timestamps. A day ago, Minh would have said Kiki couldn’t go an hour without chattering at her.
Now, it appeared, Kiki had pulled away. The trust was gone. It left a hole, right under her ribs. Minh curled up in her cubby and wondered when she’d begun caring what Kiki thought of her.
-15-
A SILVER STONE CIRCLED overhead, moving lightly as a bubble in the breeze. Its red eye glinted, watching him. Shulgi tried to keep it in sight, but it settled directly overhead. If he kept looking up like a pheasant gaping at the clouds, he’d leave himself open to attack. He ignored it for now and returned his attention to the ditch where the monster waited for him.
The monster’s egg was broken cleanly in half, the open sides cupping the earth. A material like sea-foam oozed from under the broken sides.
Demons, monsters, spirits, and ghouls had once been common, but that age had passed. In Shulgi’s lifetime, they were only vague rumors and well-worn stories. Everyone claimed to know someone who’d seen them, but when his falconers tracked those rumors to the source, they lost all substance. Until now.
Shulgi’s duty was to protect the land from all threats. In dreams, he’d battled monsters, sometimes losing, rarely winning, but often the dream-monsters disappeared or transformed before the battle resolved. Few of the battles felt real, though the priests claimed he was fighting in a spirit realm where force and motion were unpredictable.
Shulgi was dubious. Everyone dreamed. Most of the time it meant nothing.
Killing the octopus-woman might not be difficult. It was clumsy. Easily frightened, too. This might be Shulgi’s only opportunity to exercise his duty. He’d be sure to kill it with proper ceremony.
* * *
Kiki changed. She did her work and kept the fab humming, but the cheerful, companionable chatter was gone. No jokes, no whispering, no teasing. Minh should have been too busy to notice, too focused on work to care, but she tracked Kiki’s movements, as surely as if she were tagged with a monitoring camera.
Just good project management, she told herself. Keeping an eye on the junior team member.
Kiki was getting cozy with Fabian. He’d set up a hammock on the far side of the island, and Kiki wandered over there often, disappearing for hours at a time.
After lunch, Minh watched Kiki gather up the dishes and toss them to the hygiene bot, then trot under the palms to the beach.
“I didn’t think we’d have to worry about our research assistant defecting to the other side,” Minh said, nudging the whirring bot with her toe.
Hamid was abstracted, running multiple streams, attention only half in the present moment.
“It’s a good move for her,” he answered. “More options with TERN than in Calgary, if she can catch Fabian’s eye.”
A cold stone dropped into Minh’s stomach. “You don’t think they . . .”
“A romance?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I have no time for primate behavior right now. But it’s clear there’s something going on.”
“Kiki’s asexual.”
“She cut off her legs to get this one chance at time travel. What do you think she’d do to make a career out of it?”
The next morning, when Fabian finally rolled out of his cubby, Minh followed him to the other side of the island. His hammock hung between two palm trees, overlooking a slender sickle of white beach bordering water that shaded from turquoise to cobalt a few meters from shore. The sand was pocked with Kiki’s hoofprints, half washed away by the rain.
“I hope you’re not tasking Kiki with any of your historian workflow,” she said as Fabian shook the water out of his hammock.
“Not a chance. The three of you are the most boring time travelers in the world, so I have plenty of time for research.”
He pried open his breakfast container and scooped a spoonful into his mouth.
“But I shouldn’t complain,” he added. “Can you imagine the drama a doc crew gets into? It’s a pain in the ass,
but it makes the time go by fast.”
Minh drew herself up to her full height. “I didn’t realize we were here to entertain you.”
“Humans can’t help but be entertaining.” His lips parted in a faint sneer. “Most of them, anyway.”
“Luckily, you’ve got a whole world full of people at your fingertips.”
“Yes. Lucky me.”
He sat on his hammock, legs dangling, and fired a live feed onto the horizon. The sour-faced priestess perched on the edge of a golden chair in a dim courtyard, eyes closed, hands folded in her lap. Lamplight flickered over her face. Her eyelids and lips quivered as she muttered to herself.
“What can I do for you, Minh?” asked Fabian.
Minh pointed at the feed. “I suppose this is what you’ve been sharing with Kiki.”
“She lurks when she has time. I bookmark the interesting bits for her.”
The audio feed picked up the quick whisper of the woman’s breath, the tinkle of water in the fountain at her feet. Minh zoomed in on her face. Lamplight glinted on the golden jewelry around the woman’s collarbones.
“Who is she?”
“Susa, priestess of the moon. She’s praying. Lots to worry about right now in her world. Monsters in a barley field. Disks floating around the landscape. New stars appearing in the night sky.”
Six dead soldiers, Minh thought.
“I suppose there’s no way to explain,” she said softly.
“No point.” He pulled his legs into the hammock. “We’ll be gone soon.”
“Listen, I want to find the safest possible location for the next landing.”
“It won’t be a problem. Choose whatever location you want. Nobody will bother us.”
Minh took a sharp breath. The conversation had been going so well. Now Fabian was talking nonsense.
“Come on, Minh.” He laughed. “What do you think I’ve been doing out here, working on my tan? I’ve been brushing up on my Akkadian. Lots of lexical shifts in the past two hundred years, but she’s been helping me.” He gestured at the priestess.
Minh stared at him. “You’re kidding.”
“When we time travel, we don’t sit around and record stuff. We gather data and analyze it, same as you. I’m making friends with her. She’ll help make our next landing much easier.”
“You’ll tell her to make sure everyone stays away from us?”
“I’ll hand down the law. Don’t look so worried.”
“Then why didn’t you do that on the first landing?” She could throttle him. Grab his skinny neck and squeeze until his teeth popped out.
“We needed to get the cameras and bugs into place. And I’m still working on the language.”
Her vision dimmed as her blood pressure dropped. She dialed herself up and her pressor response surged. Her face turned hot with rage. If she flipped the hammock, he’d be on the ground and helpless.
“Want to meet her?” Fabian didn’t wait for an answer. He adjusted the feed so the priestess appeared to be sitting in front of them. “Say hi, Susa.”
The priestess stood. She raised her left arm and opened her hand, waving awkwardly. Her eyes scanned the rooftops, searching for a point to fix on.
“Shu-lu-mu,” the priestess said in a gravelly voice.
“You’re not talking to her,” Minh said. “Not directly.”
“No, I’m using a morphological parser and a syntax database. But I didn’t have to start from square one. We have a pretty good handle on Akkadian.”
“You told her to stand up and wave. And she did it because she thinks you’re—what? A god?”
Fabian looked a little shamefaced. “Yes.”
Minh nodded. “Okay. Okay, you’re a god. I guess we’re all gods, compared to these people. Where’s the bug?”
Susa raised her hand to her hair and withdrew a tiny black sphere pinched between her thumb and forefinger. She held it out for a moment before replacing it.
“She can make her people do whatever you want?” Minh asked.
“Susa’s powerful,” he said. “Second only to the king.”
“She’ll tell them to keep away from us. Good. What else? Can you make them bring us arthropod samples?”
“I guess so, sure. Can you be more specific?”
“Ask her for worms. Insects. Spiders. Snails and slugs. Eggs and larvae, too—especially aquatic specimens. Mollusks—everything they can find. We want a few of each individual type, not thousands of one kind. Can you do that?”
Fabian grinned. “Now you’re starting to think like a time traveler.”
-16-
A THUMPING SOUNDED FROM inside the egg. The monster spoke: Shit - shit - shit - shit - shit - shit - where - are - your - health - and - safety - protocols - now.
Shulgi strained to understand the words.
I’m - the - child - of - your - child’s - child’s - child.
It laughed. A human sound, but demented. Perhaps it would attack now. He readied his weapons.
* * *
Minh added a manual arthropod biodiversity survey to the workflow—no analysis, only collection and cataloguing. The samples would have no provenance, no metadata, but it wouldn’t be the first time she’d had to work with incomplete information. It was better than nothing. Arthropods had been an unsolvable problem, but now they were a research management hassle.
She filled Kiki’s work breakdown with fab tasks. They needed hundreds of sample jars, in all sizes, stackable, airtight, sterile. And it would keep Kiki away from Fabian.
Minh paced around the fab. “We need cellular fixative to preserve the samples. Formalin isn’t much more than formaldehyde in solution. Easy.”
Kiki looked up from the humming fab. “This kind of fab can’t print liquids.”
“But you can make the equipment to make liquids.”
“Technically, yes. Let me see.” The skin under Kiki’s left eye twitched. “To make formaldehyde, we need alcohol. I could make a still. Where do you want to get the carbohydrates?”
Minh looked around. “Palm trees?”
“Do you really want me to fab a chain saw and start cutting down trees?”
“No, that’s ridiculous. Can’t you print carbohydrates?”
“Not while I’m making sample jars.”
“Why didn’t we bring any alcohol with us?”
Kiki shrugged and turned back to monitor the fab as it chugged out sample jars.
Minh scrubbed her fingers through her hair. This was getting out of hand.
“Most samples can be stored dry,” Minh said to Kiki’s back. “Soft-bodied specimens can go into a saline solution.”
“Salt water.” Kiki didn’t turn around.
“Not perfect, but we’re improvising.”
“A lot of improvising going on,” Kiki said under her breath.
Kiki stacked a row of tiny jars onto the rack she’d fabbed earlier. Two dozen jars took nearly twenty minutes to create. They didn’t even have lids.
“How do you want to sterilize these?” Kiki asked. Her back was still turned.
“You’ll have to fab a dry-heat sterilizer. Easy. Why is this taking so long?”
Kiki plopped a jar into Minh’s hand. “This fab isn’t optimized for small, fine work. It chokes on the jar threads.”
“Then make a different kind of container.”
Kiki rounded on her, eyes narrowed. “You said make jars.”
“Make whatever fabs fastest. It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s airtight.”
By the time they were ready for the second landing, Kiki had filled every corner of the skip with jars, tubs, cartons, and containers. When Minh strapped into her seat, Kiki dumped a bandolier of test tubes in her lap. They were still hot from the sterilizer.
Two minutes into the upskip, Hamid was snoring as usual. Behind him, Kiki was asleep, too, long arms softly drifting. Fabian was head-down in the feeds, unfocused eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. He’d promised to keep close tabs on their landing s
ite, and Minh dropped into his feed whenever she could, to make sure health and safety was top priority in his workflow. Their second landing was scheduled to last thirty-six hours, and Minh didn’t want lose one moment on the ground.
She glanced at her workflows. Her analyses were running well, with climate data funneling in from the microclimate sites, and biodiversity survey cameras running their programs efficiently. The microscopic floating gauges she’d released into the Euphrates were beginning to illuminate the rivers with hydrometric and water temperature data. The gauges were flowing into the Tigris through the narrow canals joining the two rivers, and were making their way up into the tributaries, through the canals, the ponds, irrigation ditches, and reservoirs, and down to the coastal wetlands. The data was still patchy, but the numbers looked solid.
The instream biodiversity survey was another matter. High levels of suspended sediment kept the underwater cameras from trapping visual data, so the seers extrapolated species from infrared and sonar. A lot of gaps in those data sets.
Minh checked her queue. It was packed with bookmarks, mostly from Hamid. She flipped through them and got an eyeful of horse docs, full data trapped from multiple angles. A dizzying parade of animals grazing, laboring under harness and saddle, or lazing in the shade. She dove into the biota survey feeds. More horses.
She flicked a sharp toe across Hamid’s shoulder.
Have you looked at anything other than horses since we got here?
Hamid snorted, then nestled back against his headrest, hand over his eyes. His fake hove into view. It smirked.
I knew you were going to say that. Take a closer look.
It tossed her a metadata catalog. Hamid’s portion of the biota survey was ahead of target, with hundreds of species recorded and prioritized for the sampling wasps. But when she rifled through the bookmarks, all she saw were horses. She shook her head and looked closer. No, the catalogued species were there with the horses. A fox slipping behind the hocks of a dozing mare to nab a field mouse. A crested lark hopping across a pair of brown haunches. A tall heron fishing in the shallows with a mare and foal in the pasture beyond. Sheep in a dawn-lit corral, nosing a few flakes of grain from the dirt beside a horse hoof.