Nebula Awards Showcase 54

by Nibedita Sen

  Farmer agents never lie unless it’s absolutely necessary. She’s learned how to make the truth do what she wants it to do.

  If Project Shipwreck works, though, there will be a lot less demand for her unique set of skills.

  Helmut and Rati emerge at the top of the basement stairs.

  “Anything I should know about?” she asks.

  Helmut shakes his head. “We’re still running reliability checks. Getting better. Point-two percent.”

  Prudence sighs. Not nearly good enough. But she won’t wait any longer.

  “You look exhausted,” Rati says. “Is 1889 not going well?”

  They are both looking at her with concern. They’re too goddamn young, too new, to know that it’s perfectly normal to be exhausted.

  “Not going at all, anymore. General Almo’s closed it down.”

  “Closed it down?” Rati asks. She’s the sharper of the two. “You mean he . . . gave up?”

  Prudence walks the room, checks their work. They’ve been busy. They’re dedicated, these two. They’re ready. “He wanted to reassign me to goddamn 2016, which if you ask me is too late to do any good for the timeline, and too early to do any good for the History War. I convinced him to send me here to do Berlin Convention sabotage instead.”

  If he suspects anything, he’ll suspect that Prudence wants to spend time with her sister. It’s one more reason she chose to make this time and place the headquarters for Project Shipwreck. She has a plausible reason to want to come here.

  “The leaders won’t lead,” she sloganeers. “So we have to.”

  Rati frowns. “Now? But you said . . .”

  When they began, three years ago in Prudence’s lifeline, it was an experiment to see how much EEG-scanner coverage they could achieve, worldwide. They were going to turn the network over to Teleosophic Core Command, or said they were.

  Prudence, Rati and Helmut have mainly kept up that fiction even among themselves, but the network has been basically complete for months and they haven’t discussed handing it over to the TCC. Even if they could convince the TCC to send a generation of Misguideds downstream, they could never convince the TCC to end time travel altogether. Project Shipwreck won’t be nearly as effective if they allow the enemy to develop counterstrike ability. Mutually assured destruction is exactly what Prudence and her protégés are trying to avert.

  So the three of them have drifted, from rogues to traitors.

  “Almo doesn’t have the stomach to win,” says Helmut. “He just gave up on preventing the First World War.”

  “Exactly,” says Prudence. “The Command has just shown it is not interested in putting an end to this war. Too many generals behind desks and not enough of them out in the field to see what the enemy is doing. I’ve seen, over the last ten years, just how fanatical the Misguideds can be. There is no winning against a cult in a war of attrition. The only way is to burn it all down. Almo can’t see that. So it’s up to us.”

  They’re quiet.

  “And what about the 1788 component?” Rati asks.

  “I’ve chosen the naïf and I’ll go today. Jane Hodgson. You two know that name?”

  Helmut shakes his head, but Rati says, “The inventor of the helidrone?”

  Prudence smiles. “Just the kind of person we want, don’t you think? She dies in poverty, so I think the reward, and the lure of a scientific machine she’s never seen, will do the trick.”

  Helmut shakes his head. “It’s a weak spot, but I don’t know what to do about it. I’d go myself, happily, but we just can’t be sure that the causality won’t glitch. I was hoping to figure it out, but—”

  Prudence raises her hand. “Hodgson will work out. And if she doesn’t, there are plenty of other people in 1788 who will take the job.”

  Helmut nods. “All right. Once that’s in place, we’re ready.”

  “Ready? You just said point-two percent!”

  He blushes. “Point-two percent may be as low as I’ll ever be able to get it. EEG scanning has inherent limits, and there will always be some false positives.”

  “OK. Let’s think about the consequences of that. The global population of Misguideds, as of July 1, 2070, will be roughly two-point-two-six billion. Right? Which gives us a false-positive of . . . let’s see . . . oh, four and a half million people. Four and a half million people who are actually neutrals, or maybe even Farmers. People like us.”

  Helmut frowns, and his face goes pink.

  “Yes,” says Rati, glancing at him, and back at Prudence. “But it’s not as if we’re killing them.”

  “No, we’re not killing them,” she says. Her voice still sounds like a rusty hinge. “Probably. But it’s the goddamn nuclear option, isn’t it?”

  Their eyes go wide. Shit. She has to tread more carefully here. She’s taking them for granted.

  These two kids are working with second-rate equipment, putting all of Rati’s ill-gotten funds toward the power cells. They’ve disguised their workshop to fit the period, as much as possible, and to fit their cover story, should any of their fellow Farmers find them. These two young people have chosen not only to blow up their own chances at making a better world, but to blow up everyone else’s chances too. She’s already asking too much of them, but goddammit, she’s going to ask for a little fucking humanity too.

  “Look,” she says. “Our energy supply is going to be extremely touch-and-go as it is. Nobody has ever done anything like this before. Ever. We’re moving two billion people five centuries downstream. I would like to have a little wiggle room in my calculations. OK?”

  Helmut nods, although he’s still a faint salmon colour. White people: always showing their emotions in their skin. Date the Walking Biogenuine Mood Avatar. Never Be in Doubt of How He Feels Again.

  They both nod, dutifully, devotedly. They are exhausted, poor tadpoles. And she needs to do a better job of morale.

  “Let’s get a drink,” she says. “I think Orbital Decays are still popular in Toronto in 2070. You like cocktails, Helmut? Of course you do. Everybody likes cocktails.”

  They close down the displays, power down the cooling fans and the Faraday decoy rig.

  She hangs back, trudging behind them like a chaperone while Helmut and Rati chatter their way down the sidewalk, into the streets of Toronto. It takes twenty minutes to get to the gentrified part of the neighbourhood. They order their cocktails and sit in a dark booth in the back, watching the life of an ordinary bar. Rati has her scanner on the table. It blinks orange, green, blue, as people pass by their table.

  “You’re worried,” Prudence says, grimacing a bit at the sourness of her Orbital Decay. The mix of shrub syrup and gin always takes a few sips to taste anything but awful.

  “Not worried,” Rati says, stirring her own Decay so the tapioca pearls dance and swirl in the martini glass. “Just . . . wondering. Thinking about the timing. You keep a diary, right? You’ve been at this longer than I have. Can you really know that this is the best of all plausible worlds?”

  “I’m sure it isn’t,” Prudence says. “But I know it isn’t the worst.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In Which Mr. Grigson Gives His Account

  1788

  “But do you mean to say,” says Father, “that you and His Lordship did not travel together, or that you did? Elucidate.”

  Father is florid already, well past the heady certainty that no one can tell he’s had two mugs of cider if he pronounces his diphthongs with austerity, and venturing into gleeful indifference.

  Grigson glances at her again. “I do not wish to frighten Miss Payne, but—”

  “Miss Payne does not frighten easily,” says Father, loudly, regretfully.

  It is irritating, the way Father becomes all the more imperious after each of his absent episodes. Mr. Brown the groom found him wandering on the hills again, just last week, and Alice held Father’s hand while he stared into the posset of cream and strong sack that Cook made for him, while all the servants tried not
to show their concern. And then the next morning, he was back to being this other new version of himself, disagreeable and unkind, as if in compensation for his vulnerability the night before.

  Grigson looks back at her. She smiles sweetly.

  “We were expecting trouble,” Grigson says. “There have been so many tales of the Holy Ghost in this county lately. So my lord asked me to ride a little behind, so that if he were robbed, I could give chase. It all happened just as he thought it would. Just as the stories say: the man appeared, and then the apparition. A creature of wood and gears, if you ask me, although I could only see the shape of it from where I was. As soon as the coachman had driven my lord up Gibbet Hill, I spurred my horse and my companions did the same. He veered back across the road, around the carriage and out of view over the hill. The carriage horses spooked and ran up onto the road bank, but we three followed the highwayman. I lost him in a creek bed. I had half a mind then to return and find the automaton and smash it to bits—”

  Alice’s intake of breath is loud; the man pauses; she covers it up by fluttering her hand to her mouth, hoping she looks overwhelmed at his manly energy. He is handsome. Good arms, nice legs.

  She has always dismantled Laverna during the night, after her prey has passed. If they find it, there is no clue that could betray her, and she does not think anyone would trace it back to Jane—people tend to leave her to putter about in her study, the harmless companion, bookish, fancies herself a scholar . . . Still. Laverna is theirs, their private secret, and she does not want their secrets smashed or studied.

  “Go on, man,” says Father, “and never mind what you had half a mind to do. Where was his lordship then?”

  “Upon the road, or so I thought. A fear struck me that perhaps we had driven the highwayman to take some desperate action. Perhaps he thought we’d recognized him. So we returned to the road, back to the spot where we left it, and then rode as hard as our horses would go, straight to Fleance Hall.”

  He pauses, and takes a deep, shuddering breath.

  “I did not pass the carriage. And it was not here when I arrived.”

  “What do you mean?” Alice asks sharply. “It could not have vanished. There are no side roads, no paths big enough to take a carriage, not between here and Gibbet Hill.”

  That’s the very reason she chose that spot to waylay Lord Ludderworth, once she heard that Father had invited him to Fleance Hall. He was a fish in a pond. So where is he now?

  “You mean to say the whole carriage has vanished?” Father asks.

  “And the three men in it.”

  “Three? What three? Who was with the earl? Your tale is all tangled.”

  “I mean, Colonel, that the earl was driven by his coachman, and that there was a footman too, riding on the seat.”

  “It must be just on the hill somewhere,” says Alice. “Perhaps the coachman couldn’t get the horses back onto the road, and decided to wait for help.”

  “Begging your pardon,” says Grigson, “but there are few trees on the hill. Not much to hide a carriage behind.”

  “You could have passed very near to it without seeing, in the dark,” she says. “Or they turned around to drive back to London, although why they would, when they were three miles from Fleance Hall, I can’t imagine.”

  It must have been fancy, that shimmer in the air beside the road near the last place she saw the carriage. But perhaps her fancy had some cause. Perhaps her eye caught sight of something her mind did not have time to understand.

  “Satterthwaite,” says Father, his brows knit. “Have the groom ride to the New House and fetch Captain Auden.”

  Is he getting up a search party? They’ll find the automaton. She has to get out before them and dismantle it. Damn that earl! Where can he have gone?

  “What do you want with Wray Auden, father?” Alice asks. “Do you think the carriage passed our lane in the night and went on to New House? It’s possible, I suppose, although we have the lantern lit.”

  “That is possible, yes,” says Father, adopting a pompous set to his jowls to camouflage his suppressing of a belch, “but I want Captain Auden because he’s the parish constable. There’s been at least one crime done tonight, and maybe more than one. It’s time this highwayman was caught.”

  Excerpt from Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach

  by Kelly Robson

  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 22
05, 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.”