Slow River

by Nicola Griffith

  Spanner brought back red dye and some peroxide. “And here.” Spanner gave her a tube of depilatory cream. “Get rid of the rest of your body hair, unless you want to dye it strand by strand.”

  In the shower, her hair and the cream washed away in gelatinous clumps, leaving Lore as smooth and bare as a baby. Naked in a new way.

  Spanner wiped the mirror free of condensation and Lore, still dripping, looked at her new self. The red hair made her face pale, pinched and hungry as a fox. Spanner stood behind her and stroked her hair. “Red was the right choice,” she whispered, and kissed Lore’s left shoulder blade. Her hand ran down Lore’s ribs, over her hip, up her belly. “So smooth.”

  She kissed the back of her neck. “Lift your arms.”

  Spanner ran her palms over the hairless armpits, down over the hairless breasts. Lore could feel Spanner’s nipples pebbling through her shirt up against her shoulder blades. Condensation ran in streaks down the mirror. Lore watched Spanner’s hand reach down and cup her naked vulva. She closed her eyes, listened to Spanner’s hoarse breath in her ear.

  I am hairless and newly born.

  It did not matter that Spanner might have seen her helpless and naked on the newstanks, because this was not the real Lore. This was someone different, someone’s creation. A construct. One she could hide behind. One that would make her safe. Just as she thought she had been with her father, Oster. Only this time, she was aware.

  She opened her eyes again and watched.

  * * *

  Cherry Magyar turned out to be young, about twenty-three, with hair as thick and wiry as a wolfhound’s, and hard brown eyes with a hint of epicanthic fold. Her skinny was deep green. Her thigh-high waders, fastened with webbing straps and Velcro cuffs over her hips and waist, were black. The six-inch-wide stomach and back support was bright red.

  “We’re three shorthanded, so I hope you learn fast.”

  Her voice was coarse and vivid.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  I had to work at not wrinkling my face at the smell down here: raw sewage, volatile hydrocarbons, and something acrid that I couldn’t place. If there were any air strippers installed, they were not working. I was not surprised. The space was at least as big as a city block, and sixty feet high or more. I couldn’t even see the far wall. But the wall nearest to me was brilliant with safety equipment: the bright yellow of emergency showers, drench hoses, and eye baths every thirty yards; fire-engine-red metal poles that were in reality fire-blanket dispensers; the green-and-white-checkered first-aid stations; hard aquamarine for breathing gear…

  “I’m going to put you on a combination TOC/nitro analysis and basic maintenance. They’re both full-time positions, but we don’t have enough people. I’ve been doing the TOC myself the last two weeks. Hepple says you’re experienced. I need someone who knows what they’re doing. You’ve done TOC analysis before?”

  Sal Bird had not, but I doubted Magyar would have the time or inclination to backcheck her records. “Yes.”

  We walked for a few minutes along the cement apron that ran in front of the huge troughs that lay parallel with each other, numbered from left to right, one to eighty. If I was expected to work here and oversee the maintenance of one or more troughs, I’d wear myself out just walking to and fro. She opened the heavy, soundproofed door of a concrete bunker and motioned me ahead of her.

  Inside was a vast, white space threaded through with silvery pipes. Four and a half million gallons a day thundered through those pipes, and the noise was a full-throated roar. Magyar leaned toward my ear and shouted, “Think this is loud?”

  I nodded. She grinned and gestured for me to follow her. We went through a narrow doorway into what looked like an empty room. She hit a button on a plastic panel and a ten-by-ten section of the floor slid back.

  The roar became a bellow, a deep chasm of noise, old and ugly, big enough to grind its way through the crust of the world. I clapped my hands over my ears, but the noise was a living thing, battering at my ribs, vibrating my skull. We stood at the edge of a pit where water rushed past, twisting and boiling. It was like standing on the edge of creation. Magyar was laughing. I was, too. That kind of noise puts a fizz in your bones.

  Magyar hit the button again and the floor slid back into place. My ears rang with the relative quiet. “The only reason I like getting trainees is the excuse to open that thing up.”

  We went through another doorway, but this time the door slid shut behind us, cutting off the noise entirely.

  It was a small room, faced with banks of digital readouts, and the same spigot and pressure-reduction setup I had seen for testing the effluent. Magyar became all brisk efficiency.

  “The equipment is two years old. These readouts here are for your TCEs and PCEs. This one’s nitrogens. Keep an eye on that. We get a fair amount of HNO3—that’s nitric acid—but the bugs break it down to nitrate and nitrite. Got to watch those levels, and the difference is important. Nitrate’s what the bugs use as an oxidizing agent, turning it to nitrite, then nitrogen gas. But watch the nitrite. If levels get too high, the bugs die off and all we get is nitrate and nitrite instead of nitrogen gas. But if we get rid of it all, then the duckweed downstream’s got nothing to feed on.”

  “What bugs are you using?”

  “The OT-1000 series.”

  I nodded. The van de Oest OT-1000 series was tried and true. A strain, mainly Pseudomonas paudimobilis, for the BTEX and high-molecular-weight alkanes; B strain for chlorinated hydrocarbons; and probably by now the C strain that had been new when… before… I stopped thinking about it and looked instead at the readout for vinyl chloride, a vicious carcinogen. That was the red flag as far as I was concerned. VC levels told an observer a lot about the health and ratios between aerobic and anaerobic, methanotrophic and heterotrophic bacteria.

  Magyar was still talking. “Here’s your methane. Other volatiles like toluene and xylene. Biological oxygen demand, but don’t worry about that, BOD’s not our problem. Though if it goes much above the indicated range”—she pointed to a metal plate inset above the station, inscribed with chemicals and their safe ranges—“pass it along to me. My call code’s written up there, too. Beginning and end of each shift I’ll want a thumbprinted report. The slates are here.”

  She pulled one down from a shelf and handed it to me. “Everything clear enough?”

  She seemed a bit muddled, conflating more than one process, but I just nodded. “I think so.”

  “Good. These readouts over here are remotes from the dedicated vapor points, but they’re often swamped during a big influx. And these two figures, in green, are the combined remotes from the online turbidimeter. The top one is NTU. Last but not least-” We walked three paces to a readout in red. “-the water temperature.” Magyar stopped. “What does it say?”

  “Twenty-seven point three degrees. Celsius.”

  “That’s what it should always say. Always. Not twenty-seven point six or twenty-seven point one. Twenty-seven-point three. That’s what the bacteria need.”

  For a denitrification-nitrification process, heterotrophic facultative bacteria were usually comfortable anywhere between twenty-five and thirty degrees, but I just nodded. “What about emergency procedures?”

  “That should have been on the orientation disk.”

  “I haven’t seen an orientation disk.”

  Magyar swore. “Hepple said… Never mind. I’ll see what I can do. Meanwhile, anything comes up that looks out of place, call me. Immediately. If your GC goes pink, find one of these red studs-”

  She pointed to what looked like red plastic mushrooms that bloomed every five meters from walls and floors and ceilings. “-twist it through three-sixty, push it all the way down, and get out ASAP. But make good and sure that your GC really is pink. The buttons shut down the whole system. That costs enough to mean that you’ll be out of a job instantly if you make a mistake. You got that?”

  I nodded.


  “Good. Then we’ll move on.”

  We went back to the troughs. “One worker for every two troughs according to the original design, but we operate on three per, and some are having to handle four.” She pulled the slate off her belt, scrolled through a list, replaced it. “I’ll assign you two, numbers forty-one and forty-two, while you’re working TOC analysis.”

  I opened my mouth, changed my mind, and shut it again. She lifted an eyebrow. “Something to say about that, Bird?”

  “TOC and nitrogen analysis is pretty important at this stage?” I knew damn well it was. Magyar nodded. “I’m just not sure that it’s possible to keep a close eye on the readouts as well as maintaining two troughs.”

  “Then you’ll just have to try extra hard. Any other questions?”

  Does anyone here know what they’re doing? “What about masks?”

  “Do you see anyone else wearing a mask?”

  “No…”

  “Masks are available on request. But they’ll slow you down, and if you can’t keep up you’ll be fired.” Magyar’s voice seemed almost kindly, but her eyes were flat and hard. “You’ll soon get used to the smell. Besides, management doesn’t take kindly to agitating for more so-called safety rules.”

  “I understand.” Health and Safety regulations mandated the wearing of respiratory protective devices in the presence of short-chain aliphatics like 1,1,2-trichloroethane and aromatics such as 1,4-dichlorobenzene, but I wasn’t going to argue the point here and lose my job on the first day for being a suspected union organizer. If I lost this job, my Sal Bird identity would be useless. Ruth would not help me again, and I did not want to have to ask Spanner. I said nothing.

  Magyar nodded and left me to it.

  The first thing I did was find the schematic handbook. It was tucked behind the slates at the readout station. At the first break, I looked it over.

  The plant was well designed: good automatic monitoring and lock systems. In the event of a massive spill, all pipes would shut down, the plantwide alarm sound, and the alert sent out to county emergency-response teams. An expert system then decided how far the pollution had spread and the pipes and tanks would be pumped out into massive holding tanks. I checked the capacity. Six hundred thousand gallons. Adequate. Even better, the whole system could be overridden on the side of caution and shut down by hand. There was a first-response team structure outlined. I examined it with interest. Apparently, we should all know about it, and how to access self-contained breathing apparatus and other protective gear.

  It was hard looking for the gear without appearing to be poking into others’ areas of work, but eventually I found it. There were only four sets of SCBA where there should be more than two dozen, and just two moon suits. A pile of EEBA—emergency escape breathing apparatus—all tangled together. I wasn’t surprised. No one ever expected to have to use the lifeboats.

  The schematics for the sensors and chemical controls looked good, but the maintenance schedule told another story: there was plenty of water, of course, for the sprinkler system, and plenty of regular foam, but someone had decided not to bother replacing the alcohol-resistant foam canisters. That smelt of Hepple: ARF had a short shelf life, and was expensive. Ketone spills were very rare. It probably seemed like a reasonable risk.

  Air scrubbers; multilevel valves for sampling vapors and liquids heavier than air and water; incident control procedures… They were all there. I wondered how familiar Magyar was with all this. I hoped I would never have to find out.

  Chapter 4

  Lore is seven. Her father, Oster, is brushing her hair. It is high summer. Outside, the buildings are washed gold by the sinking sun, but inside Lore’s bedroom the ancient wooden paneling sucks in what light manages to get through the tiny window set deep in the thick fifteenth-century walls. Oster has almost finished with her hair, but Lore wants him to stay longer with her instead of running off and talking to Tok about his stupid pictures, or playing with Stella’s hair, which she has just started dyeing yellow. Lore thinks about Stella’s yellow hair. Lore’s hair—and Oster’s and Katerine’s, and Tok’s and Willem’s and Greta’s—is gray, like Lore’s eyes. Gray all over.

  “Why is our hair gray?”

  Oster puts the hairbrush down, pulls back the bedcovers, and motions for her to climb in. “You won’t let me go until I explain everything, will you?”

  “No,” she says seriously.

  “A long time ago, in a fit of ostentation-” Lore frowns at ostentation but does not interrupt. “-your grandmother had the color-producing allele turned off, She was rich-”

  “As rich as we are?”

  “No, but rich enough to be stupid. Anyway, she was so rich she did not know what to spend her money on. Doctors had just discovered that those people with pigmentless hair—gray with age, or white-haired albinos—got a lot of cancer in the scalp. That’s because without pigment, the hair acts like a fiber-optic cable, conducting ultraviolet from sunlight straight to our follicles, bombarding them with mutagenic radiation.” She frowns and he sighs, tries again. “Like the telephone wire brings your mother’s voice and picture to you when she’s out in the field.” Katerine never calls her when she goes away to strange places to work, but Lore says nothing. It would only upset Oster.

  “So when people get old and their hair turns gray, they get cancer?”

  “No. They just dye their hair black or brown or dark red or whatever, or wear a hat.”

  “Is that why Stella dyes her hair? To stop the cancer?”

  “No. Stel changes her colors because she wants to. Like your mother changes the color of her contact lenses.” He smiles and ruffles her hair, the hair he has just brushed. Lore pats it back down. “She doesn’t have to, none of our family do, because Grandmama van de Oest was so rich she could have genetic treatment—do you understand what genetic treatment is?” Lore nods, even though she doesn’t. He is crossing and uncrossing his legs, which means he is getting restless. “She had genetic treatment against cancer. It’s very, very expensive, and it takes a long time, and it hurts.”

  “Then why did she do it?”

  “Because she was stupid and too rich. She-”

  “Does that mean we’re too rich?”

  He looks at her for a long moment, his blue eyes still. “I suppose it does.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a minute, and Lore has to prompt him. “So Grandmama pays a lot of money for the cancer stuff…”

  “Yes. And then she paid a lot more money to have her genes fixed so that all her children would have gray hair and the anticancer protection. Her way of saying to the world, look, I’m so rich I can afford to have this expensive anticancer treatment so I don’t need to care about having gray hair. And, like a lot of stupid and wasteful things, it became fashionable. Which is why your mother has gray hair, too.”

  Lore sits up in bed so she can see herself in the mirror on the dresser. She turns her head this way and that, touches her gray hair. “Can we turn the gene back on?”

  “Yes, but it won’t make any difference to you, Only your children.” He holds the covers, waiting for her to slide back down.

  “Why didn’t you turn it back on?”

  “I did, but your mother didn’t. She wanted you to have all the visible trappings of the rich and powerful. As she said to me at the time, you can always dye it. Now lie down.”

  Lore does. “What color am I supposed to dye it?”

  “Any color you like.” He goes to the window and pulls the curtains closed.

  Lore frowns at his back. “But how will I know which color is the right one?”

  Right, wrong; on, off, yes, no. She is used to black-and-whites, but at seven Lore is suddenly realizing she can make of herself what she wills. When she is old enough she can have red hair or golden eyebrows or hot, dark lashes like spiders’ legs. And no one will tell her she is wrong, because no one will know. She could become anyone she wishes. But how will she know she is still herself?

 
She stays awake a long time, thinking about it. How does Stel know who she is if every time she stands in front of a mirror, she looks different? Before she falls asleep, Lore resolves that she will never, ever dye her hair.

  Chapter 5

  I knocked, the two short, three long taps we used to use. Spanner opened the door. Her eyes were gummy and vague.

  “We agreed I’d come here. Yesterday. In the bar.”

  “Right.” She let me in.

  I noticed the changes immediately. It was not just that someone else had been living there for a time—the different smells of soap and shampoo left behind in the bathroom, the exotic spices half-used on the shelf over the microwave—it was other things. We had never kept the place scrupulously tidy but it had felt alive and cared for. Now the worn places in the rug were dark with ground-in dirt and several plants were brown and curling. The plastic eyes of the power points were dull and cold and the equipment on the bench was covered in dust. I tried not to think about how she must have been supporting herself the last few months.

  I couldn’t help glancing at the bench again. She noticed, of course, and laughed the laugh I had first heard a few months before I left, the ugly one. “Don’t worry. I haven’t lost my touch.” She ran her fingers through her hair, and the familiarity of the gesture here, in this flat, almost gave me vertigo.

  “Let me see the PIDA.”

  I handed over the baggie. “It’s sterile.”

  Spanner carried it over to the bench. She took off covers, Ripped a couple of switches, then pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves, took the PIDA out of the bag, and slid it into the reader. She scanned the information that came on-screen. “How much detail do you want?”

  “Not much for now. Change the fingerprint ID and physical description to start with. And add my middle name, of course.”