Slow River

by Nicola Griffith

Springbank, the road that had once groaned under a thousand rubber tires a minute, was now bobbled with gray vehicle ID sensors and laced with silvery slider rails that glistened like snail tracks in the late September sunshine. It was the first day in two weeks I had not had to wear a coat. Foot traffic was heavy, and sliders hissed to a stop at almost every pole to pick up or drop off passengers. The occasional smaller, private car hummed and dodged impatiently around the tubelike sliders.

  The building, old and massive, was built of sandstone. The sign over the entrance was a picture of a polar bear. Inside, it was the same as all bars.

  Spanner was there. I threaded my way through the smell of stale beer and newly washed floors toward the fall of dark gold hair, and slid onto the stool next to her.

  Spanner lifted her head. We looked at each other a moment. It was strange to not touch. “It’s been a while.”

  “Yes,” It felt like a year, or an hour. It had been just over four months. I beckoned the bartender and nodded at the glass Spanner nursed between her hands. “A beer and…”

  “Tonic for me.”

  There had to be a reason she wasn’t drinking. People changed, but not that much. I tried to keep the tone light. “Waiting for anyone in particular?”

  “Just sitting.”

  She knew I knew she was lying, but I had gone past the stage of being angry, of facing her with it. It was Spanner’s life, Spanner’s body.

  In here, the bright sunshine was filtered by old beveled glass and well-polished mahogany to a rich, dim glow, but it was enough to see the glitter in Spanner’s eyes, the way she kept glancing up at the mirror behind the bar to see who came in the door. Her skin looked bad and she had lost weight. I paid for the drinks.

  She sipped at hers. “How have you been?” She sounded as though she did not really care about the answer.

  “Well enough.” I hesitated. “Spanner, I’ve found some work, a job I might take. I need your help.”

  She finally dragged her attention away from the mirror and looked at me. “What happened to all your noble ideas about an honest living?” There was no mistaking the edge of contempt in her voice.

  I had not expected this to be easy. “This is the last time. I want a new ID, a permanent one. I want to work, get an honest job.”

  “Ah. You need my dishonest help so you can make an honest living.”

  I looked at Spanner’s face, at the hard, grooved lines by mouth and eyes that belonged to all those who had lived on their wits too long, and wanted to take her face between my hands, wanted to make her face her own reflection and shout, Look, look at yourself! Do you blame me for wanting to earn my living in a way that’s not dangerous? In a way that no one will ever be able to use to make me feel ashamed? But it had never done any good before.

  “I’ve found a PIDA that might make a match. I need help with it.”

  “Well, as you always said, I’ll do anything for money.”

  “Spanner…” Even though I had tried to prepare for this, the pain of reopening old wounds was sharp and bright. I took a deep breath. “What’s your price?”

  “Let me think about it awhile.”

  We both knew what she would ask, eventually. “Fine, you do that, but I need the preliminary work completed now, within the next couple of days.”

  Spanner glanced in the mirror again, then at her wrist. She was getting nervous.

  “I have an interview today,” I pressed. “I should be starting work tomorrow, or the day after.”

  “Fine, fine. Come by the flat tomorrow.” Her attention was beginning to drift.

  I sighed and stood. “Your flat, then, tomorrow.” But she wasn’t listening anymore.

  When I reached the street door, a couple were just coming in. They were laughing, wore expensive clothes, good jewelry. I glanced back. Spanner was rising to meet them.

  Outside, adjusting to the bright afternoon after the dim warmth of the bar, I hesitated. Those two were trouble. Maybe Spanner was too desperate for what they were offering to notice the casual hardness of their faces, the way their eyes had flickered automatically over the room looking for exits, checking for weapons.

  I waited outside for nearly ten minutes before I realized I could do nothing to help. I left reluctantly, wondering why—after all she had done—I still cared.

  Chapter 2

  Lore is five. Tok and Stella, the twins, are nine. They have been playing in the fountain in an Amsterdam neighbor’s gardens. Lore has tried to catch the upspouting water in her mouth.

  Tok is shouting at her. “Don’t you want to know what it is that you’re drinking?”

  “It’s water,” she says, puzzled.

  “How do you know it’s clean?”

  “But it’s always clean.”

  “This is clean,” he says, “but it isn’t everywhere.” Lore hardly listens at first. His eyes are bright and fierce, an almost turquoise blue, like the sky first thing in the morning when the day will be burning hot. Like the eyes of their father, Oster, when he is excited. But then Tok pulls up facts and figures on water contamination incidents over the last thirty years and Lore listens in horror. “All it takes is one sip of some of this stuff, Lore, and then when you’re grown up, or as old as me, it’s leukemia, which means your blood goes yucky, or renal failure, that’s when your kidneys rot and don’t work anymore…”

  She is frightened, but refuses to cry. Stella would mock her for weeks. “Does it hurt?”

  “Of course it hurts!”

  Lore does not go back to play in the fountain and that night she has nightmares of drinking swamp water full of dead rats, and she never forgets to test the water again. Even in the water– and air-filtered surrounds of the family holdings. Even on trips to luxury resorts in Belize and Australia. Even bottled water, because all it takes is one chemical spill in the groundwater table and the eau de source can be full of benzene—there and gone again in the blink of an eye, missed by the random testing. Never take anything for granted, her mother often says, and Lore never does. None of the family ever do. It is the company motto when Lore’s great-uncle patents the hundreds of genetically engineered micro-organisms that now are indispensable in the world’s attempt to clean up its own mess. It is what prompts the ever-careful van de Oests to guarantee future monopoly and profit by making sure their patented, proprietary bugs need their patented, proprietary bug nutrients. And Never take anything for granted prompts them to use the first gouts of cash to corner a piece of the nanomechanical remediation technology market, a corner that grows steadily for the next fifteen years.

  Chapter 3

  The Hedon Road wastewater-treatment plant was on the east side of the river, the part of the city that grew during the Victorian era. The buildings were big and ugly: limestone, and sandstone partially eaten away by the corrosives in industrial soot.

  I turned up at seven in the evening, and after a few perfunctory questions about name, age, and experience, the flunky showed me into a tiled locker room. He handed me a skinnysuit. “Get changed while I pull your record for Hepple.”

  “But I’ve only come here for an interview.”

  “You want the job, you talk to Hepple. You want to talk to Hepple, you wear this.”

  He left with a shrug that indicated he did not care, one way or the other. At least I didn’t have to worry about the records. Sal Bird’s employment history was good enough for this job.

  It was an hour after the change of shift and the room was empty, though from somewhere down a corridor I heard the beating slush of a shower. I wondered if they used water from the mains, or siphoned off their own effluent I smelled chlorine. The mains, then.

  I stripped to my underwear, then sat on the wooden bench and pulled the skinny from its package. I was expecting cheap government issue and was pleasantly surprised by the slick gray plasthene. It was about a millimeter and a half thick—well within the necessary tolerances—and the seams were well made. I stepped into it, spent a couple of minutes wriggling
my toes to get them in the right place, then hauled it over my hips and up to my shoulders. The smell of new plasthene on my skin reminded me of the sheet in the van, of dreams of blood and suffocation.

  There was no easy way to skinny into these suits. You just had to squirm until everything was in the right place. I flexed my plasthene-covered hands, checked to make sure the roughed patches were at the tips of my fingers and thumbs. There were seals above the wrist for those jobs that needed the extra protection of gauntlets. I did a couple of deep knee bends to see if the neck seal would choke me.

  It had been a while since I’d worn one of these, and then it had been specially made. I was surprised at how well this one fit.

  No one had said anything about a locker so I settled for folding my street clothes into a neat pile on the bench. They were probably not worth stealing, and I had not brought a slate or a phone extension. They couldn’t trace you from what you didn’t carry. Old habits learned from Spanner.

  A man wearing a tailored gray cliptogether over his skinny entered through the door marked Executive Personnel Only. His face was young and bland. A pair of dark goggles hung loose around his neck and his name tag read Johne Hepple. He checked his hand slate. “Ms. Bird? Sal Bird?”

  I stood. “Yes.”

  He looked me over. “Well, you know how to put on a suit, at least. I’m the acting shift supervisor.” He handed me a magnetized name tag. “You must wear this at all times. It’s also a miniature GC.”

  I slapped it onto the magnet over my left breast. Sal Bird, age twenty-five, with two years’ experience at the waste-water depot of Immingham Petroleum Refinery would know that a GC was a gas chromatograph, and what it was for. Johne Hepple, though, was taking no chances.

  “It’ll let you know if the atmosphere is contaminated to dangerous levels by changing color.”

  “Industry standard?”

  Hepple looked confused for a moment, then adjusted his expression to one of superior amusement. “Superior to standard, as is all the equipment used here.”

  I nodded politely but mentally rolled my eyes. For now I’d just have to assume it used the standard color system, but if I got the job I’d make sure I asked another worker. If there was any kind of leak, I wanted to know exactly what I would be dealing with.

  Hepple talked as we toured the plant. “The six city stations process more than twenty million gallons of household wastewater per day. The Hedon Road plant is the biggest, at between four and four and a half mgd.”

  “Just household?”

  He gave me a long look. “Of course.”

  I nodded, trying to look satisfied. I just hoped that his reticence came from a feeling of superiority and not from ignorance. Household wastewater was anything but. It also included the runoff from storm drains. Which were prime sites for both deliberate dumping by waste-generating companies—large and small—and accidental spillage. Even if there was a spill in Dane Forest, forty miles from here, the contaminated water would find its way through underground aquifers to the city system. And those spills could be anything. Literally anything. I was glad that plants like these always had a large, specifically designed overcapacity. With people like Hepple in charge, we’d need it.

  We climbed onto a catwalk over a hangarlike area where huge plastic troughs lined with gravel stretched into the distance. Bulrushes rocked and swayed in the water below. The air was snaky with aromatics and aliphatics. The workers below were not wearing masks but I said nothing. Sal Bird would not.

  “This is the initial treatment phase where influent goes through simulated tidal marshes. The influent point itself is at the far end, housed in the concrete bunker.” He pointed, but then we got off the catwalk in the opposite direction and went through an access corridor. It was noticeably warmer. “We have eighty parallel treatment trains here, and an impressive record. The Water Authority mandates less than thirty parts per million total suspended solids; we average eight. The biological oxygen demand needs only be reduced to twelve ppm, but even with extremely polluted influent, our effluent rarely tests out at over seven.”

  I had learned at age twelve, from my uncle Willem, that in a properly run plant the average BOD should never be higher than two ppm, but I didn’t say anything. Hepple hadn’t mentioned heavy metals or any of the volatile organic compounds, either, and I wondered what the plant’s record was like on those.

  We walked among enormous translucent vats filled with swimming fish and floating duckweed. Pipes ran everywhere: transparent and opaque, plastic and metallic, finger-thin and bigger around than a human torso. I could feel the vibration of larger pipes running under our feet.

  “The fish graze on this weed,” he said, “and if we have overgrowth we can harvest for animal feed. Further on we grow the lilies that are the real commercial backbone. But nothing, nothing at all, is wasted.” He came to an abrupt halt.

  “According to your employment file you’ve worked at the Immingham Petroleum Refinery. What was your speciality?”

  “Continuous emission monitoring,” I said, knowing full well that in this solar aquatics and bioremediation waste-water plant there was no such job.

  “You’ll be assigned something suitable, of course, but whatever your role, the one thing to bear in mind is that this plant—the four and a half million gallons coming in, the thirty-five million gallons on the premises, and the four and a half million going out—is one giant homeostatic system.” He waited for me to nod. Probably wondered if I knew what homeostatic meant. “The more polluted the influent the more plants we grow and the more fish we harvest, but the effluent is always the same: clean, clean, clean. The only way this can be achieved is through attention to detail. As you’re used to a monitoring post, we might start you off in TOC analysis.”

  I asked, because Sal Bird would have. “What’s TOC?”

  “Total organic carbon analysis. Of the influent.”

  At the initial stage, where none of the workers wore masks. One of the dirty jobs.

  We stepped through what looked like an airlock into another closed corridor. Hepple fussed with the seals and we started walking again.

  “It’s not for you to worry about what a given reading may mean, but you’d better know what the parameters of any substrate are, and know what to do if they rise above or fall below that level. When you’re assigned, your section supervisor will give you more precise details.”

  We stopped at another air-sealed door. Hepple opened a panel in the corridor wall and took out a pair of dark goggles for me. He pulled up his own pair. “Goggles must be worn in the tertiary sector at all times.”

  With his eyes covered, his mouth seemed plump and soft.

  “Even though you will not be assigned to the tertiary sector immediately, the possession of eye protection is mandatory.”

  He ticked something off his chart. “The cost of those will come out of your first wage credit.”

  It seemed I had the job. I pulled on the goggles.

  Hepple opened the door. The light was blinding: huge are lights hung from a metal latticework near the glass roof; bank after bank of full-spectrum spots shone from upright partitions between vats. It was incredibly hot and the air was full of the hiss of aerators and mixers and the rich aroma of green growing things. I had forgotten how much a person sweated in a skinny.

  “This is where the heavy metals are taken out by the moss.”

  I watched as a man and a woman lifted a sieved tray out of a vat and scraped off the greenery. “It’s recycled, of course.”

  A woman carrying a heavy-looking tray of tiny snails walked toward us. I started to move aside to let her pass, but Hepple pretended not to notice and the woman had to detour. A little tin god, lording it over his tiny domain. He wouldn’t have lasted more than a day on one of my projects.

  “Zoo-plankton and snails do a lot of cleaning up at this stage, along with the algae, of course.” women and men moved back and forth, harvesting zoo-plankton; checking nitrogen level
s; monitoring fecal coliforms. Hard and busy work in the tertiary sector, but not dangerous.

  We climbed up to a moving walkway that ran twenty feet above the floor. As we moved farther downstream and the water became progressively more clean, the heat lessened, as did the light, and the smell got better.

  “Our main sources of income at this stage are the bass and trout, and the lilies.” As we glided past the hydroponic growth, the smell of flowers was almost overpowering. “We’re planning to convert to thirty percent bald cypress next month.”

  That was ambitious, but I said nothing.

  “Ah, here we are.” We stepped down from the walkway. It was a plain white room, full of thick pipes. One had a spigot. I recognized a pressure reduction setup. Hepple pulled a paper cup from a stack and held it under the spigot, turned the tap. The cup filled with clear water. He drank some. “Here, taste it. Cleaner than what comes out of your tap at home. Pure. And that’s our effluent.”

  I sipped, to show I was willing.

  He slapped a pipe. “This is it. From here the water is no longer our responsibility.”

  He seemed to expect some admiring questions. “Where does it go from here? Out to sea?”

  “Not so long ago, it did. And then we realized we had a practically foolproof system and started simply piping it back to the watertable.” I nodded. Standard practice.

  “Now, though, even that’s not necessary.”

  I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. “The water goes straight back into the mains?”

  He looked amused. “Certainly. We avoid all that unnecessary transport of water, cut out the waste of time and energy and worker hours. Productivity has gone up twenty-three percent.”

  I tried not to look as horrified as I felt. My half sister, Greta—a lot older than me—had told me, “Lore, there’s no system on earth that’s foolproof. One mistake with a waste-water plant and without that vital break in the cycle, you could have PCBs and lead and DDT running free in our water system. No matter how many redundancies there are, no matter how many backups, things go wrong.”