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.