Nebula Awards Showcase 54

by Nibedita Sen

  Minh snorted. “CEERD and all its rotten think tanks believe if they game the system enough, the World Economic Commission will turn them all into private banks and then they can roll around in their credit.”

  Kiki laughed. “You really hate them.”

  “They’re greedy. But maybe we can make it work for us.” Minh hooked a leg on the hammock and hauled herself up. “What have you found out about the client?”

  Kiki sat cross-legged on the sofa, in a nest of quilts.

  “The Mesopotamian Development Bank was created last year. Their identity isn’t public yet, so all I have are rumors. They might be a mechanical engineer from one of the Siberian hives who developed a way to tunnel through burning peat, or a neurosurgical engineer from Bangladesh who found a new way to splice neurons.”

  “The World Economic Commission loves engineers.”

  Minh dimmed the lights and closed her eyes. Maintenance bots danced in patterns behind her eyelids. She’d never get to sleep.

  “The client only just became a private bank, but they’re already investigating a massive project. That’s quick,” Minh said.

  “I guess they like Mesopotamia a lot.”

  “So it’s a passion project.”

  Minh squirmed, trying to get comfortable. She slipped one leg out of the hammock and pushed against the window, rocking herself back and forth. Maybe it would help her get to sleep. She hated bothering her tech.

  “A passion project,” Minh repeated. “Which means . . .” Her biom nagged her, flashing unusually strident cortisol alerts and demanding rest. “I’m too tired to figure it out. Remind me about it tomorrow.”

  “Okay. And what about the project team?”

  Minh hadn’t even thought about team members yet.

  “I’m working on it,” she said.

  -4-

  Shulgi trusted Susa because she never told him what he wanted to hear. She didn’t care for his good opinion and never made any effort to gain his favor. In fact, she hated him. The moment she got within ten steps of him, her nose would wrinkle up as though he smelled foul. It made no difference whether he were stewing in training-pit sweat or fresh and oiled from a bath. Shulgi never smelled sweet to her.

  When Shulgi had become king, Susa ascended the dais of the moon. Her duty was to oppose him. As woman opposes man, as humans strain against the gods, as children defy their parents, Susa’s right and duty was to say yes when he said no and argue against his every decision.

  But she didn’t have to take such pleasure in it.

  • • •

  By the time Calgary’s refit was done, the Bank of Calgary was nagging Minh for a draft budget. The submission deadline was only a few days away, and Minh still hadn’t done anything about her project team.

  Ten years back, when news of the first time travel project hit, she’d been wrapping up the Colorado River current-state assessment. Her entire thirty-person multidisciplinary team camped on the edge of the Grand Canyon, accompanied by a professional media crew and a dozen cameras, exploiting the canyon’s spectacular visuals as they trapped the documentary data for the final report. It was a waste of billable hours, but banks liked grand gestures and mediagenic visuals. The funding had been available back then.

  The Colorado River was envisioned as the largest riverine restoration project ever undertaken, extending from La Poudre Pass to the gulf, supporting a string of habs—eight glistening green pearls along the great river from mountains to sea, providing habitat for a hundred million people within four centuries.

  Minh had been skeptical. But there was no reason they couldn’t remediate the first few reaches, support a few new habs. Even one would benefit the funding consortium eventually. She had planned to plant the first glacier seed herself. Maybe she would have even seen a little streamflow before she died.

  Then the time travel news hit and all work stopped.

  At first, the whole Colorado team was transfixed by the news docs. When they began arguing over the implications of time travel, some predicted disaster—temporal disturbances and out-of-control paradoxes. Most were enchanted by the possibility of restoring extinct species—rewilding on a scale they’d never dreamed of. Personally, Minh was excited by the idea of time-traveling adaptive management projects. She could initiate a restoration initiative, visit the future to see the results, then come back to the present day and fine-tune the approach. But her excitement was short-lived; time travel could only be used to visit the past.

  Not even Minh foresaw what actually happened: the banks lost interest in everything aboveground, and especially in long-term ecological restoration projects.

  People—especially bankers—had trouble thinking long-term, and nothing was more long-term than ecological restoration. Results took decades, even with soil printers, glacier seeds, climatic baffles, wind chutes—all the tech they’d developed. Even when harnessing the wind-sculpting and rain-generating power of the great mountain ranges of the globe, restoring natural habitats took vision, determination, and, most importantly, glacial patience.

  Banks were not patient. When they saw a shortcut, they lunged for it. No matter if the shortcut was an illusion. No matter that time travel couldn’t be used to change anything.

  The funding pool dried up. Ambitious new restoration projects died in the planning phase, never to be resurrected. The habs formed desperate consortiums to keep their projects afloat, fees plunged in all related disciplines, and the few surviving projects operated on shallow budgets with skeleton teams.

  After a long, dry decade, interest in ecological restoration was starting to trickle back, but the damage was done. The Colorado River would stay dry. Probably forever.

  Kiki passed a mug of tea up to Minh as she lay in her hammock. She’d slept ten hours straight. Probably snoring openmouthed the whole time, judging by her throbbing headache.

  “I’m looking through TERN’s earliest docs,” said Kiki. “Why were they so concerned with proving time travel can’t affect anything? Wasn’t it obvious? Time travel happened. Nothing changed.”

  Minh swished the tea around her parched mouth and swallowed.

  “No, it wasn’t obvious at all. You were still in the crèche, right? How old?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Easy to take things on faith at that age. I was seventy-three. TERN wouldn’t share their research. No open peer review process, no repeatable results. Plus, their public relations department was releasing disinformation to keep critics confused. Everyone I knew was suspicious. How could we trust them not to mess with history?”

  “TERN says that when they time travel, a separate timeline is spun off from ours, and when the time travelers leave, the timeline collapses.”

  Minh shrugged. “TERN can say anything they want. They have a monopoly. Nobody can prove them wrong, because nobody outside TERN knows how it works.”

  “Have you seen this?”

  Kiki shot a doc into the middle of the room. The Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan bloomed across the floor and stretched up to the ceiling.

  Minh winced. Her headache pounded. She shot the doc out the window. The pyramid grew to full size over the river valley.

  Sunlight bounced off the back of Minh’s skull. She lifted a leg to her forehead and squeezed her temples. Her biom blinked a low-priority dehydration alert.

  A hundred puffs of dust pocked the surface of the pyramid. The stones shuddered and slipped, then the whole huge structure disappeared behind a cloud of dust. When it cleared, the pyramid lay like a corpse, a pile of cold rubble across the Avenue of the Dead.

  The doc overlaid the rubble with a dozen time-stamped satellite images of the pyramid in real time, here and now, whole and undamaged. Kiki killed the doc.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen it.” Minh clambered out of the hammock and grabbed a bottle of water. “When TERN finally proved time travel was effectively useless, I figured everything would go back to normal and the banks would get interested in us again. I was wrong.�
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  “That’s why you hate CEERD and TERN.”

  “One of the reasons.” Minh drained the water bottle and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “What have you found out about the project’s restrictive parameters?”

  “Payload,” Kiki said. “That’s the big one.”

  Kiki took her through a stack of bookmarks. She’d analyzed hundreds of time travel docs, estimating the mass and volume of the cast, crew, and equipment. Her analysis was confirmed by a stack of other calculations, including the capacity of time travel tourist groups, and details of all known artifacts retrieved from the past.

  Kiki sat cross-legged on the sofa, pulled her braids back, and knotted them at the nape of her neck.

  “TERN’s maximum payload seems to be restricted by volume, not mass. The single heaviest item brought from the past is the Golden Buddha from ancient Thailand. It weighs over five thousand kilograms.”

  Minh flipped through the bookmarks and scanned the attached notes. Kiki’s analysis was solid, her conclusions well supported. Impressive.

  “You should publish these results,” she said.

  Kiki grinned. “I can’t. It’s TERN’s intellectual property.”

  Then she whispered, I bet I’m not the first person to figure this out. Every time someone tries to publish results like this, using open and available information, TERN shuts them down. I’ve been whispering with a plague baby in Sudbury Hell who hates TERN even more than you do.

  Okay, I get it. No more bad-mouthing TERN if we want to win this work.

  Minh plucked at her temples with her suckers. The headache was easing off. Time to get to work.

  Minh used Kiki’s numbers to mock up the payload dimensions. The volume amounted to a little more than half her studio.

  “This can’t be right. There’s no room for equipment.”

  “There is, actually. Almost everything can be fabbed.” Kiki shot an array of color-coded rectangles into the mock-up, stacking them like crèche blocks. A large yellow cube flashed. “That’s the fab, and the layer on the bottom is super-dense feedstock. You can even bring a skip along for transportation. All you need are the skip drives, sensory array, and safety-foam canisters.” A dozen shoe-sized pink boxes stacked on top of the yellow cube. “If you want to bring lots of satellites, it’s easy. They’re small. You can take plenty.”

  Minh paced the edges of the mock-up, thinking.

  “People take up a lot of space. They can’t be compressed.”

  Minh added blocks to represent monitoring and sampling equipment. She threw in a few placeholders for the team’s personal effects, water treatment system, and a nutritional extruder. A third of the payload was still empty.

  Minh’s aches and pains faded into the background, overwhelmed by the electric thrill jolting from fingers to the tips of her legs.

  “I got it,” Minh shouted. Kiki jumped, startled.

  Minh lowered her voice to a reasonable level. “This is how I’ll win the project.”

  “You’re sure?” Kiki asked. “You sound pretty sure.”

  Minh laughed. “No, but it’s not impossible.”

  Kiki beamed. “How?”

  “The client is asking for a multidisciplinary team. That’s old lingo, from the big-budget days. Our competitors will stack their proposals with consultants—everything from fisheries biologists to fluvial engineers to statisticians. Big teams, lots of billable hours, like the old days.”

  “And our team—your team, I mean?”

  “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 whisp
ering 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.”