Nebula Awards Showcase 54

by Nibedita Sen

  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 assist.

  “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 needed 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.

  Minh thought Kiki wouldn’t last long working out of her little studio, but it was fine. Kiki left whenever she got restless, and Minh was in and out too. But on the second evening, Minh came home late from a friend’s centenary to find Kiki on her sofa. She hadn’t bothered to slide it into sleep config. When Minh nudged her elbow with a toe, Kiki didn’t even move.

  Minh borrowed a hammock from her neighbor and slung it in front of her window. Kiki slept through the whole noisy operation.

  The next morning, Minh woke with her nose grazing the glass, drinking in a two-hundred-degree panorama of bright late-winter morning, brown hills in the distance and blue sky above framing the high front ranges of the Rockies, the half-frozen Bow River snaking toward Calgary. A familiar view, but its beauty could still put a crack in her heart.

  Minh stayed in the hammock all morning, throwing the West Asian climate data into a key-value database, then painting the mountains with data, using the view for a playground as she ingested enough data to fake an expertise in the ecology and geology of West Asia.

  Kiki’s feet bumped the wall as she stretched out on the sofa.

  “Sorry.” Kiki gathered up her clothes and began stuffing them into her backpack. “I couldn’t get a sleep stack. Tonight, I’ll find a lolly and double up.”

  Kiki kept her head down, braids veiling her expression.

  Why would Kiki insist on staying in Calgary? Jasper must be full of friends, lovers, crèche-mates. Once the proposal was submitted, Kiki would drop back to quarter time. It could take months to replace the billable hours she’d dropped to work with Minh.

  But if she wanted to be in Calgary, it must be important. The reasons were none of Minh’s business.

  “It’s okay,” Minh said. “You can have the sofa.”

  “Really?” Kiki’s grin shone brighter than the sun coming through the windows. She trotted into the bathroom. Her voice echoed off the tiles. “Thanks, Minh. I don’t like to fuck strangers, actually. Or anyone, really. I don’t get much out of it.”

  Minh’s eyebrows rose. Maybe that was why Kiki was in Calgary. Taking a break from the hormonal atmosphere at home.

  “That must be hard in Jasper. You’d be odd person out.”

  “Yeah, Jasper’s pretty sticky.”

  “So, what do you do? Dial up the oxytocin and join the crowd, or hibernate and avoid it?”

  Kiki stuck her head out of the bathroom. The beads on her braids clicked against the doorjamb.

  “Don’t you know? Jasper doesn’t offer full biom control. We can’t float the license fees.”

  Minh gritted her teeth. “Oh, right. I forgot.”

  Personal autonomy was a central tenet of the aboveground movement. When the plague babies ascended from the hells, they’d spent years in clinics and hospitals, poked and prodded by surgeons and physical therapists. Escaping that life was one of the reasons they’d moved to the surface in the first place. The habs offered their people complete power over their own bodies. Minh had managed her own health since she was twenty.

  Trust the fat babies to throw that freedom away.

  “I tried joining in the sex games a couple of times, but I don’t see the point. I’d rather spend my time doing useful work, you know?”

  Minh nodded. “Doing important work is all that matters.”

  Kiki grinned. “No wonder you and I get along so well.” She disappeared into the bathroom again.

  “Do we?” Minh muttered, scowling.

  Maybe they did. Kiki approached time travel research with energy and determination, quickly accumulating a pile of annotated bookmarks for a solid and substantial literature search report. Minh was making progress too, soaking up old West Asian ecological research papers.

  She was itching to dive into a work plan draft, but her project deadlines loomed. Mesopotamia would have to wait. Minh put the research aside and tried to drum up enthusiasm for yet another Icelandic adaptive management review. But that evening, Calgary’s water recirculation system blew. All available residents were pulled into the refit. Minh spent an eighteen-hour shift crawling up and down pipe shafts, troubleshooting the repair bots.

  When Minh dragged herself home from her first shi
ft, Kiki was waiting.

  “I’m still researching time travel,” Kiki said. “If you want, I can pull work plans from old proposals so you don’t have to face a blank page when the refit is done. Just point me in the right direction.”

  Minh peeled off her wet coverall. “Dig out the proposal for the Colorado River current-state assessment. The target area is about the same size.”

  “Which bank is remediating the Colorado River?”

  Minh shut herself in the bathroom and threw her clothes in the sink.

  None of them, she whispered. They yanked the funding ten years ago. Make a list of all the data-gathering tech we used in Colorado. Satellites, cameras, sampling, and so on. We’ll have to take all the infrastructure back in time with us.

  You’ll be launching satellites?

  Of course. I’m not going to measure river flow with a handheld doppler.

  No water in the shower, not until the refit was done. Minh slathered herself with cleanser and toweled herself dry. Then she gripped the shower walls with her three right legs and hung upside down. She loosened her left legs and slid open the shield protecting the teratoma on her lower hip. After cleaning it thoroughly, she slathered the prosthesis socket with lubricant gel. Then she repeated the process on her right side. When she was done, she hung from the wall and let her arms hang, stretching the kinks out of her back and shoulders.

  Careful curation of her glucose and blood oxygen levels had kept her alert through the whole long shift, but now she needed rest. Her body thrummed with exhaustion.

  If she couldn’t fall asleep naturally, she’d ping her medtech. In the past, she would have tweaked herself asleep. No more, though. She’d done enough damage. Standard hormonal protocols only from now on.

  Which gave Minh the glimmer of an idea.

  She wrapped herself in a soft jumper and opened the bathroom door.

  “TERN must have a standard project protocol. They take tourists to the past. No way they do it without power and tech.”

  Kiki nodded. “The only official information is from the marketing for TERN’s package tours. They claim ambient power is fully available in the past. I’ve tried to get more specifics, but I get canned replies saying TERN’s intellectual property rights are ratified by the World Economic Commission.”