by Kelly Robson
Hamid had found a way to do his work and feed his horse obsession at the same time.
You’re sneaky.
Thanks, boss. The fake tipped its ridiculous hat and faded away.
Fabian had sent her bookmarks, too. Violent ones, showing the faces of brutality—cold, heartless, bloody. Screaming fights witnessed through windows. Men beating men, men beating women, both beating children, all of them beating animals.
Fabian’s message was clear. No point in sympathizing with past population members. They get what they deserve.
It was enough for Minh. She flushed the whole stack.
Only three bookmarks from Kiki. One showed a crowded open-air pottery workshop, the artisans chattering to each other as they sweated in the heat from a glowing kiln. Another showed a row of children in the shade of a plane tree, poking sticks into wads of clay under the watchful eye of a stooped oldster. The third bookmark showed a pair of people lazing in a blanket-strewn alcove, holding hands and chatting quietly. If Hamid’s passion was horses, and Fabian was fixated on violence, Minh supposed what Kiki really cared about was people.
A harmless obsession, she figured.
Minh reached back into her history and pulled up the falconer bookmark. The pink tunic’s color signature was distinctive; she grabbed the string and ran a search through the past few days of data.
Easy. Yesterday, a camera had trapped the falconer in the background of the vegetation survey, perched on a wall, eating bread smeared with something greasy. It dripped down her chin and blotched her tunic, then the camera moved on.
Minh cross-referenced the time and location on the previous day’s satellite feed and ran the feed backward, tracking the falconer to a mud brick shack in a village surrounded by vineyards and orchards. Then she grabbed that morning’s satellite feed and tagged the falconer as she left the house. The feed zipped ahead, tracing her route through the fields. The falconer’s long shadow shortened as the sun rose. The bird flew from her wrist and snapped back like a toy on a rubber band.
The satellite feed shuddered into real time. The falconer was striding through a riverside village. Minh grabbed the nearest camera and sent it spinning toward her.
By the time the camera arrived, a gang of farmers surrounded the falconer. They were clearly upset, throwing their arms around and yelling, but the falconer didn’t seem worried. She listened patiently, scuffing her foot in the red dirt and waggling her head from side to side in a gesture that appeared to be the local version of a nod.
A child spotted Minh’s camera and yelped. Heads turned, jaws dropped, but before the crowd could erupt into chaos, the falconer barked an order. The farmers formed a ragged line and clasped their hands in front of their bare bellies.
The falconer turned and stared into Minh’s eyes. She was about the same age as Kiki, and like Kiki, her skin glowed with that impossible sheen of youth, marred by a few tiny imperfections: a pale scar on her chin, and a constellation of shallow pockmarks on her cheeks.
She’d been through a plague of her own, this one.
Minh turned the camera toward the farmers. Thumb-to-thumb and finger-to-finger, their navels peeked out from between their hands like pupils in a line of shadowed eyes.
We see you, the gesture clearly said. Go away.
I see you, too. Minh tipped the camera from side to side, mimicking the waggling nod the falconer had made moments earlier. Then she let the camera go back to its survey.
-17-
THE SILVER STONE WHIPPED past Shulgi’s face. He barely restrained himself from flailing at it with his weapons. In the ditch, mud sloshed.
No - no - no - no - no - no - hamid - wake - up - wake - up - shit - shit - shit.
The monster was gone, but snakelike trails showed it had run across the ditch and squeezed itself into the other half of the egg. It had used the silver stone to distract him, like a dog harrying a lion to let a hunter close in. Clever.
* * *
Hamid woke as they dropped into the downskip. He leaned toward Minh across the skip’s narrow aisle. “You finally looked at my bookmarks,” he said.
Minh pinned him with a narrow squint. “You made equids your focal taxon.”
His eyes went wide; feigned innocence beamed across the cramped skip cabin.
“No, but horses do seem to be a keystone species in this ecosystem.”
“How surprising.”
“That means the client’s project won’t be complete unless horses are strongly represented among the restored species.”
“Even if they start the restoration tomorrow, you’d be long gone before it gets to that point.”
“I don’t need to see it, as long as it happens.” He grinned.
Behind Minh, Fabian was deep in his feeds. She tapped a toe on his knee.
“Are you joining us for this landing?”
Fabian reached under his sunglasses and scrubbed his knuckles over his eyes.
“The site looks good,” he said. “No surprises.”
Minh shot him the feed showing the farmers holding their thumbs and fingers in front of their bellies.
“What does this gesture mean?”
“Superstition. A ward against demons. It’s related to the evil eye.”
“They think we’re evil?”
“Aren’t we?” mumbled Kiki. She was still slumped in her seat, eyes closed.
“No,” Fabian said flatly. “We’re here to do a job and leave.”
“We know that, but they don’t.” Kiki stretched. Her hooves bumped the back of Hamid’s seat.
“Debate this with your time travel ethics tutor,” Fabian said. “Let me know how long it stays interesting. I’m betting ten minutes max.”
Minh’s toes curled into fists. She wrenched herself around in her seat.
“Fabian, are you poaching our research assistant?”
“They grow up so fast,” Hamid said under his breath.
Fabian was unconcerned. “Yell at me later. I’m running health and safety now.”
Minh turned to Kiki. Are you leaving Calgary?
Kiki glared at her. “Oh, are you talking to me again?”
Minh strengthened her grip on the string of test tubes, steadying it against the increasing pressure of their descent.
“Why wouldn’t I talk to you?”
“Your fake has been treating me like dirt ever since the first landing.”
Minh checked her dash. Her fake had been running its default workflow, intercepting and rejecting every attempt at private communication from Kiki.
“I forgot to turn off my fake. An oversight.”
“No, it’s business as usual. I’m just the admin who nags you to approve invoices and review RFPs before the business meeting. I’m no better than a fake, and that’ll never change, no matter how hard I work or how well I do my job. Will it?”
“Can we talk about this later? We’re landing in a minute.”
“Will it?” Kiki pounded her fist on the armrest.
“Now, kids,” Hamid said softly.
Fabian watched them intently, gaze flickering from Kiki to Minh and back again.
Are you enjoying this? she whispered to him. A little drama to make the days go faster?
Minh turned back to Kiki. “I can’t change hab economics. I wish ESSA could give you more work, but we barely stay afloat.”
“You don’t get it, do you? You have no idea why the fat babies are leaving the habs.”
“Things are hard. You’re giving up.”
“We’re giving up? Us?” Kiki leaned across the aisle, straining against her safety restraints as the skip settled into landing position. “No, the plague babies have given up. You used to believe in something, but now all you want to do is service the banks.”
Fabian cracked the hatch. “Cameras up.”
“We’d work for free,” Kiki said. “Every last one of us, to learn what you know.”
“You can’t do that. Calgary’s economy would plummet.”
/> “You sound like a banker, Minh.”
“I’m not—”
“The economy is an excuse. The truth is, you built the habs for yourselves and created us as pets. We were cute when we were little, but now you don’t know what to do with us. You feed us on scraps.”
“Boots down,” Fabian said.
Kiki shucked her restraints. She paused in the hatchway, backlit by the morning sun.
“You’ve given up on the future. So, when we leave, don’t blame us. Blame yourself.”
-18-
SHULGI GLIMPSED MOVEMENT IN a distant stand of lemon trees. His soldiers—yes—one of them waved. He would wait another minute or two and then confront the monster.
The octopus woman might be cowardly, but she was powerful, too. She had many clever allies. Silver stones had been spotted all over the kingdom—hundreds of them. At Asnear, she’d been protected by a burr-like creature that slayed soldiers on a whim, and she’d been accompanied by three other monsters he hadn’t yet spotted. Perhaps they were hiding, too.
And even if the octopus woman was alone—weren’t those legs useful? Was it born a chimera, or created from a person? If born, perhaps the children could be raised as proper humans. If created, Shulgi might pursue the transformation himself. What couldn’t he do with four extra limbs!
* * *
The second landing site was a narrow spit extending into the wide lower Tigris. This part of the river was a geological newborn, formed from sediment laid down when the Tigris split from its confluence with the Euphrates only a few centuries earlier. But Minh hadn’t chosen it for its geology. She’d picked it because the flat terrain gave long sight lines broken only by a few tamarisk and mulberry trees.
Minh took her samples automatically, paying no attention to the quality of the mud, the suck and pull of the sampling mechanism, the layers of sediment revealed within the cores, or the wiggling benthic organisms dredged up by the dragnets. For more than half a century, she’d focused her life on rocks, mud, dirt, and the things that lived and grew in and around flowing water. She’d never seen such richness, the riverbanks festooned with flowering forbs and buzzing with pollinating insects, the cool, sediment-laden water flowing through deep pools, the gravel shallows rippling with fry. She should have been fascinated by the landscape, eager to see if her core samples penetrated to the old substrate, but she couldn’t concentrate.
All she wanted to do was go back up to the skip and yell at Kiki until she promised not to leave Calgary.
You can dump your armor, Fabian whispered. Aren’t you hot?
Irritation washed over Minh. I’m fine.
Then why are you looking over your shoulder every twenty seconds?
If you’ve got free time, why don’t you assist Hamid with the biodiversity inventory?
I’m helping Kiki pack up the bugs.
Of course he was. Fabian would take every opportunity to get his hooks in deeper.
By the time Minh finished her sampling, her shadow had shrunk to a flat disk underfoot. A pair of lizards stretched on a flat rock at the edge of the riverbank, dozing in the heat. Her biom blinked a hydration warning. She should go back to the skip, eat, rehydrate. But she’d worked straight through the morning. Time to stop and enjoy the river.
Minh sent her floats back to the skip and waded into the channel, the thick sediment squelching underfoot. She floated over the thalweg, took a deep breath, and let the water close over her head like a helmet. Birdsong was replaced by the deep, persistent pulse of river flow.
No point in opening her eyes, not with all that sediment, but she could still see. She pulled data from all the local floaters, assigned glowing avatars to the datapoints, and threw it into a spatial mock-up.
The simulation had her surrounded. Three mature silver carp ranged upstream, followed by a small Ganges shark. Nine unidentified organisms browsed the riverbed, probably juvenile catfish. Nearly a hundred smolts sheltered under the bankside root system at the far edge of a deep pool. A softshell turtle dug in the mud with its front flippers, hunting worms and nymphs. All this within a five-meter radius. The river glimmered with life.
Minh swam up and down the reach, working on her riparian ecosystem classification and ignoring her biom until it slid a flashing nutritional demand into the middle of her eye. As she ran back to the skip, a raptor circled overhead. It was probably watching Hamid, waiting to swoop down and pick off one of his fleeing rodents.
Minh grabbed a lunch pack out of the skip and headed toward the tent.
Fabian’s pet priestess had erected a tiered pedestal of mud bricks that raised the tent’s floor a half meter off the ground. From each of the four corners, copper-banded, curved wooden struts braced wool walls shot through with gold and festooned with shiny metal discs, bright tassels of yarn, and painted clay flowers.
Inside, rugs lay on patterned tiles. Dappled light cast patterns over Kiki and Fabian, who sat on low stools among inlaid tables piled high with boxes and bowls, reed cages and covered pots, baskets and vases, and tippy little metal tripods hanging with cloth and leather bags.
“How are the samples?” Minh asked.
Kiki jumped. She fumbled a sample jar. It rolled under a table.
“We were just saying you need an entomologist to do this properly,” said Fabian.
“A herpetologist, too.” Kiki pointed at a dozen covered baskets stacked at the far end of the tent. “Those are snakes. I’m not going anywhere near them. Fabian says they’re venomous.”
“Nice,” said Minh. “Did we ask for snakes?”
Fabian palmed a box off one of the tables and cracked its lid.
“We asked for everything,” he said.
“Is Susa trying to kill us?”
Fabian tipped the box’s contents into a test tube. A beetle slid out, legs scrambling.
“She probably thought we could handle a few snakes,” he said. “She thinks we’re gods, remember?”
Kiki popped snails into a jar of saline.
“You could tell Susa the truth,” she said. “Explain why we’re here. People are smart. They can handle it.”
Fabian began to answer, but then his gaze flickered up to Minh and his mouth snapped shut.
“Don’t mind me.” Minh faked a smile.
Fabian looked wary. Minh glided over to the nearest table and scanned the jugs and bins. A wide-mouthed jar was sealed with a layer of clay. She broke it with the tip of her toe. Ants swarmed out, carrying white pupae in their jaws. Her seer sputtered, unable to identify the species.
Minh scooped up a sample jar. If she kept quiet, maybe Fabian would say something stupid.
“You can’t explain time travel to preindustrial past population members,” he said. “They have no sense of history and no vocabulary for talking about time outside the lifespan of a few generations.”
“They understand ancestors and descendants,” said Kiki. “I would say, ‘I’m your child’s child’s child many times over.’ They’d get it.”
“Assuming they don’t kill you while you’re waiting for the translation matrix to find the right syntax?”
“Assuming I haven’t frightened them, yes.”
“In every past population, children are expected to honor and obey their parents. Even adult children. What are you going to do when three or four generations start bossing you around while you’re trying to check boxes on your work breakdown? How will you get your project done?”
“Easy. I’d get them to help me.”
Fabian snorted. “You have no idea what families are like.”
Or what project management is like, Minh thought as she tried to scoop ants into a sample jar. They were crawling all over her. The vinegary sting of formic acid prickled her nostrils.
“We don’t come here to get adopted into an extended family,” Fabian continued. “We come here to work, so keep it simple. Use whatever strategy lets you get your project done.”
Those words could have come out of Minh’s own mo
uth. Fabian was putting on a show for her. She had to get out of the tent.
Minh capped the sample jar and brushed the ants out of her hair.
“Do you want me to take care of these snakes?” she asked.
“Yes, please.” Kiki shuddered. “Can you take them away—far away?”
“Sure. Across the river if you want.”
I’d like to keep listening in, though, Minh whispered. She shot Kiki a request to lurk on her feed.
The snake baskets were awkward. Minh piled them on the float as best she could, and then climbed aboard, holding them secure with all her legs as the float staggered under the weight. The snakes shifted beneath her, alarmed by the movement, throwing their heavy bodies against the sides of their baskets.
When Kiki accepted Minh’s lurk request, her visuals were focused on a leather bucket of earthworms. Minh threw the feed into the upper right corner of her eye.
“You think I’m naïve.” Kiki’s tone was low, confidential.
“You’re an amateur,” said Fabian. “TERN’s ethics specialists think about nothing else all day long. And you know what? They’re miserable. Time travel ethics is a dead-end field.”
“Doing the right thing is important.”
“No, doing the right thing is impossible.”
Kiki groaned. “You’re so cynical.”
“No, I’m not. A cynical person can think up a hundred good reasons not to get out of bed in the morning. But there’s one good reason to time travel, and it overrules every objection.” Fabian sounded like himself again—overbearing, know-it-all, priggish.
Minh guided the float over the river and set it down gently on the wide, sandy bank. When the snakes settled down, she tiptoed into the water, stretched out one leg, and tipped the first basket. A slender snake slipped out. Minh’s seer identified it as a horned viper, but Hamid already had a sample from the species, so she let it slither into the rocks unmolested.
“Can you guess what the reason is?” Fabian asked. Kiki didn’t answer. “Do you want a hint?”
“I’m thinking,” Kiki said.
The next snake’s glossy black body was thick as Minh’s wrist. She tagged it and a sample wasp chased it up the bank.