Slow River

by Nicola Griffith

  She nodded. “Less is better.”

  It was as though that single sentence had been echoing in the flat for nearly three years, as though I had somehow just stepped out for a while and stepped back in to hear it once again. Less is better. If only she had kept to that axiom. I wanted to grab the PIDA, leave the flat, and never come back, but I did not know anyone else who could do this for me. At least, not anyone as good as Spanner. As Spanner used to be. “I have the fingerprints ready to go.”

  “Let’s have those, too. You’ve used them to open an account?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good. You remember some things, then, despite your distaste.”

  I sighed and pulled a list from my pocket. “Here are the things I want. Her education and employment background are fine for now—unless someone wants to pay for an extensive backcheck.”

  Spanner just nodded for me to put the paper down on the tabletop by the screen. “You could make us some coffee.”

  I went into the kitchen, put on the coffee, and opened the cupboard under the sink. The watering can was still there.

  Most of the plants around the flat were beyond revival. I watered them anyway. I stopped by one pot for a long time. When I had bought the cheese plant for her it had been just over four feet tall. When I left it had been nearly six, the leaves as big and glossy as heavily glazed dinner plates. And now the cheese plant was dying, the edges of its leaves yellow and parchment thin, the trailing aerial roots hanging like the shriveled skins of snakes.

  “Put it on the table,” she said when I brought out the coffee. “I’m just about done here.”

  I sat, and after a minute she joined me. It felt very strange to be sharing the same couch.

  “So. Payment.”

  “Yes,” I said, and waited.

  “That scam you were so keen on a few months ago. The net ads for charity. Think it’s still possible?”

  “I can make the film, and it’ll bring in money. Can you do the rest?” I deliberately didn’t look at the dust on the bench.

  “No problem.” She made a dismissive gesture. “The hard part is going to be start-up costs.”

  “I’ve got nothing left. Not to speak of.” I wondered briefly what it would be like to get a paycheck. Another three weeks to wait for that.

  “I’ll provide start-up, then, on condition that it comes out of the pot before we divide it.”

  “Fifty-fifty?”

  She laughed. “You already owe me, remember? Seventy-thirty.”

  “Sixty-forty.” I didn’t care about the money. All I wanted was the PIDA. I was bargaining because Spanner would think me weak if I didn’t. I wondered how dangerous her creditors were, and how much she owed them.

  “Sixty-forty, then.” She didn’t bother to hold out her hand. I wasn’t sure what I would have done if she had.

  “How long?”

  “I’ll need to work out what equipment we need. And then I’ll have to find it. Hyn and Zimmer should be able to help.”

  I stood. There was no point talking further until we found out about equipment. “I know the way out.”

  I walked back to my flat, thinking about Spanner and her dying plants.

  Trees are not delicate. You can do all kinds of things to a fully grown tree—drench it in acid rain and infest it with parasites, carve initials in its bark and split branch from trunk—and it will survive. It is not presence but absence that will kill a tree. Take away its sunshine and it will stretch vainly upward, groping, growing etiolated, spindly beyond belief, and die. Take away its water and its leaves wrinkle, become transparent, and fall.

  I tilted the watering can into the pot of my ficus tree, watching the brown, granular soil darken and smooth out as it absorbed the water. I sprayed the leaves, wondering when the light green of the leaves grown in the summer, summer when I had left Spanner, had blended with the seasoned, deeper green of all the others. And then I cried.

  I was still crying when I went into the bathroom. It was small, painted peach and cream, and everything in it was clean, but somehow it still reminded me of the bathroom Spanner and I had shared. Even the mirror, which was new and square.

  I turned the cold tap, splashed my face. Enough, I told myself sternly. But how could it be enough when even the clear, cold water streaming into the sink reminded me of the first time I went into Spanner’s bathroom? How could it be enough when I looked into the mirror and even the hair framing my face was the fox red Spanner had chosen?

  I looked at my hair more closely and sighed. The gray roots were beginning to show again. That would have to be fixed before I went to my new job.

  I had never liked red. I would buy some brown dye, and I would let my eyebrows grow back. Symmetrically.

  * * *

  Lore’s back was healed and her hair was a different color. She was as disguised as she was going to get. She was getting restless. She had been inside the flat for several weeks and, before that, the kidnappers’ tent. Now she was afraid to go outside. She sat by the livingroom window and watched the sky as it turned to November gray, and shuddered. It was so big, so open. She tried to imagine being out under the whipping clouds, among the people who all seemed to be hurrying toward destinations she could only guess at. But she had nowhere to head for. And she would be without a slate, without a real identity, with no one to call if she found herself in trouble. And people might recognize her, might stare and point…

  She went into the kitchen to make coffee, try and distract herself. The weeds down in the back garden were turning yellow. She stared at them while the coffee bubbled. Weeds, interlopers, were always the last to die. They started small, but after a year or two they made themselves belong, put down strong roots.

  Trying not to think about what she was doing—or she would panic—Lore went into the tiny hallway and pulled on one of Spanner’s jackets. She did not pause to zip it up. She had to think for a moment before she could remember the door code Spanner had given her three weeks ago; then she opened it and went out.

  The stairwell was damp, and funneled the cold November wind right through her thin jacket. But it was still enclosed.

  The hard part was reaching the street. People passed her, not looking, but she still felt horribly exposed. She was breathing hard.

  The cut-through was five yards to her left. She ran. It was a brick-lined tunnel under the overhanging flat, about eight feet high and less than a yard wide. Her footsteps echoed.

  At the other end was a gate. It was shut. She rattled the door. The knob came off in her hand, the wood was so rotten. She kicked it. The door split open. The wood smelled fruity and spoiled. She went through and lifted it back into place as well as she could. She was probably the first person to set foot back here in years.

  It was hard to tell what had once grown here a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago when the row of large houses had originally been built. It looked as though no one had cultivated the place for a long, long time. Judging by the assortment of ancient appliances and precode concrete rubble, the place had been used as a tip for the last two or three decades. But everywhere—by the rusting washing machine, between the old tires, in between the broken paving stones—sprung weeds and small saplings. There were brambles and the remnants of what might once have been a rose garden. She squatted down by the tangle of thorns. They might be the variety that bloomed at midwinter.

  This close to the ground she could smell the dark, cold, loamy dirt, a clean smell, one that reminded her of being small, watching while one of the van de Oest gardeners planted tulip bulbs. She dug her fingers into the leaf mold. It felt just the same.

  There was a rotted-out lean-to by one wall. She poked at it, looked at the hole in the roof. It wouldn’t be too hard to waterproof it enough for gardening tools.

  She stood in the middle of the barren garden, surrounded by walls and broken glass, and smiled. She felt safe here. Many of the windows of the surrounding commercial buildings had been bricked up. Unless
someone looked down from Spanner’s bathroom or kitchen, no one could see her. She looked up at the windows. They were blank, reflecting only the scudding sky.

  She waited until Spanner had taken off her shoes, then told her she wanted to do something with the garden.

  “Like what?”

  “Clear it first. Then see.”

  “You’ll need all kinds of equipment.”

  “Not as much as you think. And besides, you said you’d get me anything I needed.” It was a challenge. Lore remembered the weeds.

  Spanner smiled and pulled a slate to her. “Give me your shopping list, then.”

  “A shovel, spade, rake, trowel.” Lore pictured the gardeners at Ratnapida. “A wheelbarrow. Heavy gloves. Some shears. Grass seed, Other things when I’m ready to plant.”

  * * *

  The Hedon Road night shift ended at two in the morning. I was exhausted, so tired I could barely manage to unstrap my back support and the wrist and forearm splints. My arms felt leaden as I stripped off my skinny and showered. I was too tired to bother drying my hair. I regretted it as soon as I stepped out of the ugly pseudo-Victorian plant gates.

  It was cold, and mist made the streetlights smeary; the kind of night that reminded me that in this northern city, autumn was just an eyeblink between summer and winter. At this time in the morning, all the passenger slides would be garaged at the far end of town. I would probably freeze if I had to wait for one to answer a request tapped in at a roadside pole. Besides, until I got paid—until I was sure my records would hold long enough to get paid—I would have to be careful with my money.

  A special call-out would mean a large debit from my PIDA. Six months ago I would just have jumped a ride on a freight slide. I knew all the times and delivery routes—Hedon Road, then Springbank, then Princes Avenue—but with my new PIDA it was no longer worth the risk. If I got caught, there would be a blemish on my record that could cost me my job. That would mean a new PIDA… and where would it ever end?

  I was tired, but there was something about walking at night, when the streets were empty: my strides felt longer, stronger, and the cold made even my breath tangible. I was real. I was here. Nothing was complicated anymore. I no longer had to be ashamed. I was Sal Bird, aged twenty-five, and I worked for a living.

  But when I got back to the flat I had to climb five flights of stairs, and when I opened the three locks on my door and turned on the lights, one of the first things I saw was my Hammex 20 camera and the edit box, and I remembered it wasn’t over yet, that Spanner still wanted payment.

  In the kitchen I snipped the corner off a plastic bag and poured half a pound of soybeans into a pan. They smelled of dust, and rattled on the metal as I filled the pan with water. As the water heated, the bean skins suddenly wrinkled, as though the outside absorbed water faster than the rest. The water boiled, and the beans began to rock, and some swelled before others, so it looked as though they were crawling over each other. In the space of minutes what had been hard, shiny ivory ball bearing plumped out into sleek alien ovoids curled up like so many fetuses. Like frog eggs in the desert hatching in a sudden downpour. And I laughed.

  I ate well, and slept better, and didn’t remember any dreams.

  The mobile rake was churning up gravel and detritus. and trying to dig its way through the trough’s concrete bottom; even in the din of rushing water and pumps, I could hear its electric hum turn to an overstressed whine. I swore, pulled on my waders and went after it.

  The troughs were directly under the high, dirty glass of the roof. It was getting dark outside, and the light that made it through turned the choppy surface the color of zinc and pewter, like the North Sea before a storm. The water stank of shit and pollution and rot, and as the trough deepened toward the center, so did the smell of volatile organic compounds. Fourteen feet out, foul, warmish water spilled over the top of my thigh-high waders. It made no difference that nothing would get through my skinny; I felt soiled. And I could almost feel the hydrocarbons easing down my throat, smearing my lungs with filth. I was angry. Magyar had no right to deny basic safety precautions and procedures to her shift.

  But Magyar had not written the rules, she merely had to follow them to meet the almost impossible productivity standards Hepple had set. And I doubted she knew any other way. She was smart, yes, and seemed to have good instincts, but she was untrained and unsupported. Hepple had no business appointing her to a supervisory position without even going through the motions of teaching her what she needed to know. No doubt he thought she would make him look good by comparison.

  Even the orientation procedures were disorganized and sloppy. Magyar had surprised me on my second day by digging up a copy of the orientation disk. “Watch it in the breakroom,” she said. “It runs forty minutes. I want you back on station in forty-five.”

  The carpets and walls of the breakroom were done in white and teal, and there were about twenty uncomfortable chairs and two screens, one tuned to the net—usually the news—the other to a video loop of swimming fish. There was a PIDA reader under each screen, but I didn’t have to V-hand it to run the disk.

  The video was terrible. It wasn’t just the production values that were bad; there were several major errors in the procedures described, errors that would continue to echo down the line like Magyar’s insistence that the bugs could not tolerate even the slightest deviation in temperature. The information was simplistic at best: “In the primary section, specially tailored bacteria break down some of the more toxic compounds. Think of them eating ammonia and excreting other, less toxic chemicals, like nitrite…”

  Worse, there were half a dozen blatant edits where worker safety information had been taken out, probably by Hepple. No details about warning signs of the deadly chlorine gases that could build up, or methane explosions like the one that had killed four hundred workers in Raleigh, North Carolina, six or seven years ago, even though I had seen the red methane-release handles at the emergency station. The simple evacuation drill was clear—use this exit, not that; turn this off, not that—but unexplained. More worryingly, there was no mention of the stakes, the regional impact of polluted water if someone really screwed up their job: nothing about spontaneous abortion and convulsions, or violent dehydrating dysentery, spinal meningitis or central nervous system collapse.

  “I hope you got something out of it,” Magyar had said when I gave it back. “You need to look out for yourself in a place like this. Pay attention to the machines. They can be dangerous.”

  I had not known what to say. The machines in and of themselves were not dangerous—if you followed safety procedures. But you could not follow safety procedures that you were not told about. I wondered how much Magyar herself knew, how much she pretended not to know in order to keep her job. I had contented myself with a nod and a thank-you.

  I circled the rake, which was still madly trying to dig its way to Australia. The month before I started this job, another worker had his left leg torn up by a mobile rake that had got stuck. Statutory regulations stated that a machine should never be approached while in operation, that it should be deactivated by remote, then towed out of the water and examined by a qualified technician.

  At Hedon Road, there was never time: turning the machine off and then on again in less than thirty minutes damaged it. The rakes were temperamental enough without adding to their unreliability, and we were so shorthanded that the unwritten rule was: Shove it out of the hole and keep it going. Once in the clear, whatever was clogging its lines usually got whirled off. If you couldn’t find and retrieve what it was that fouled the blades in the first place, you just hoped that the next time the machine encountered it, it wasn’t your shift.

  It looked as though the right front lines were jammed. I stepped carefully in front of the stilled metal, hoping it wouldn’t restart on its own, and leaned in and pushed. The rake chugged, sputtered, then moved sluggishly on its way. A two-foot length of bulrush floated to the surface.

  Until I ha
d started work at Hedon Road, I had not cared one way or another about bulrushes. After ten days on the job, I hated them. They were good at what they were intended for—facilitating the anaerobic and aerobic cycles of denitrification and nitrification, and buffering the rest of the system against toxic shock—but they were incredibly difficult to manage. Their tough, fibrous stalks fouled all the maintenance equipment and their fluffy cotton seed heads clogged air intakes. The rakes, of course, were designed to cut the rushes before the heads ripened, but because they had about thirty percent downtime—most of it, of course, during the night shift—we were always behind schedule.

  When Magyar had walked by three days ago and seen me pruning the rush heads by hand, she had said nothing, but the next night the other workers had been issued with shears, and instructions to work out their own system for keeping the rushes trimmed. She may have been poorly trained but she was not stupid. She had nodded at me afterward, but said nothing. I found myself liking her.

  I pulled down the record slate and started to check the readouts. Smart or not, good instincts or not, Magyar wouldn’t take kindly to being shown too many times how to improve things by a new worker. I could not blame her for that. I wondered how my father would have handled the situation in my place…

  And then I was standing staring at the slate without seeing it, tears rolling down my face. What was I doing here? I didn’t belong. I could run this place in my sleep. I shouldn’t be waist-deep in other people’s shit. I could be back on Ratnapida, lying on my back in the sun-warmed grass watching the clouds, making up stories with Tok about industrial counterespionage… And we would eat dinner with Oster and Katerine, and Greta and Stella; Willem and Marley would be staying for the week…

  But Stella was dead, Oster was not who he had pretended to be for all those years, and my family had refused to pay my ransom. There was no going back because what I wanted to return to had never existed, except in my Oster-woven version of reality.