Slow River

by Nicola Griffith

  “Is it always as bad as this?” becomes Lore’s standard question.

  “Usually worse,” comes Marley’s smiling reply. He is always ready with advice, both theoretical and practical, and Lore sighs and goes back to negotiating, or drawing, or simply shouting, whichever is most expedient. Half a year later, the pipeline is done, stretching south across the Kirghizi desert mile after mile to the Aral Sea. Lore is fascinated by it. She watches the first water hiss through the special glass tubes along the center of the troughs and begin to bubble as the absorbed UV changes the toxic dioxins to aldehydes, then carboxylic acids, and finally carbon dioxide. It will take forty years, but she has begun it.

  “Did you know,” she tells Marley that night, “that all this, this mess, the ruin of a whole ecosystem, a whole generation of people, was practically for nothing? About eighty percent of the water carried by the original canals away from the Syr and Amu Darya never even reached the cotton fields! They were criminally inefficient. The canals were made of unlined sand. Can you believe that? Sand!”

  The grandiose insanity of the initial scheme to turn a desert into cotton fields outrages Lore. She forces herself to read every study that has been made of the suffering population. The water minerals are running at 1.5 grams per liter, thirty-four percent of adults and sixty-seven percent of children suffer respiratory illness, and seven out of ten inhabitants have hepatitis. All because some maniac thought that climate, geography, and ecology were amenable to ideology.

  The sheer scale of that idiocy prods her into a fever. She has to find some way to make a statement, create some monument to remediation as powerful, as awe-inspiring as that lunacy. So she squeezes the budget and builds tower after tower—artificial waterfalls. Water falls hundreds of feet, brilliant with the reflected light of bank after bank of alien-looking heliostats that focus on the cascades the power of sixty suns, enough UV energy to initiate the reaction of organic pollutants to CO, in less than forty-five seconds, the time it takes for the water to fall from the top to the bottom.

  Mile after mile of these artificial waterfalls glitter in the desert, carbon dioxide fuming from their bases like smoke. Lore dreams of them at night, and wakes in the morning filled with their imagery, satisfied in a way she has never found before—not from sex or food, not from exercise or books or making films. From her mind, her planning, has come this scheme to change a tiny portion of the world. In forty years these rusted hulks will be gone, the birth pathology rate will fall from its current horrendous forty-one to something more normal, and people will fish again in the Aral Sea.

  Chapter 17

  Ruth and Ellen owned a tiny house in a row of sixteen, all painted bright, primary colors. They faced what had once been a brickyard. The yard had closed down unexpectedly four weeks after they had signed the mortgage, making their home instantly worth thousands more. The yard, Ellen told me as she took my coat, was being converted into a seed nursery by one of the big garden-center chains.

  Ruth showed me the living room—small, but with ingenious shelving—then led me into the big kitchen. Ellen followed but said nothing.

  There was a bathroom extension, compact and rather chilly, and a back door that led out onto several square feet of concrete.

  “We’re going to turn it into a patio or something, but we need to get the inside of the house fixed up first.”

  “It looks fine to me.” And it did: clean, bright, open.

  “You should have seen it before. Upstairs is still a bit of a mess.”

  Ellen handed me a big glass of cold white wine. I drank it as I followed Ruth to look around upstairs. Ellen filled it again for me when we came down.

  We sat in the bay window of the living room, at an old table with scarred legs covered with a cheerful cloth. Handmade stained-glass shades colored the lamplight, dimming it enough, so that I could barely see the thin patches in the chenille curtains. The room felt warm and vibrant and jewel-like, and I wondered if they knew how much I envied them.

  Ellen brought in soup. We started to eat. I did not know what to say. I had hurt these two a while ago, yet here I was, eating their food.

  I cleared my throat, waved my spoon at the walls. “Do you think these colors would suit my flat?”

  “Tell us what it’s like.” There were rich shadows under Ruth’s cheekbones, along her jaw.

  “Empty. I mean, bare. Long and narrow, low ceiling. Strange angles at the roof and corners.” My soup was gone. I refilled my wineglass, just to have something to do with my hands. “A high window, but wide. From my bed it looks like the horizon a long, long way off.” That surprised me, but they weren’t giving me funny looks. I was encouraged. “In the late afternoon and early morning, the light slants in and sort of washes the walls. Sometimes it’s like stumbling out of a dark tent to desert sunshine, to sand stretching away in the distance.” I held my wineglass up until the light turned it gold. “I want the air to feel as though it’s this color. Sunshine on sand.” I felt very pleased with myself. “Yes. A sort of sandy peachy color.”

  Ruth got up and went to the bookshelf that ran along the long wall over the couch. She brought back an old book of photographs. We pushed aside glasses and bowls.

  “How about this?” Dunes, blue sky. Camel prints into the horizon. “Or this?” Sunset, sand the color of orange and caramel. “If you find the right color, they’ll match it for you.”

  Ellen brought back a tray with two covered dishes and we had to set the book aside. We spent a moment spooning things onto our plates: some kind of spicy vegetable casserole, with roasted potatoes and baked parsnip and carrots.

  I tasted the parsnips cautiously. They were light, sweet like fresh pastry. “These are good.” We ate quietly, looked at some more pictures. Ellen said nothing much. I drank steadily.

  “Thank you,” I said, and gestured to my empty plate, the book of photographs. “I’m grateful.”

  Ellen leaned back in her chair. “You should be.” Ruth shot her a look but she ignored it. “I’ll be honest. I didn’t want you to come. What you did was unforgivable, except that I did a few things I’m not very proud of while I was with Spanner. She has that effect on people.”

  “She didn’t exactly hold a gun to my head.” I wondered why I was defending Spanner. Or maybe I was defending myself; I wasn’t a child to be told what to do. At least not anymore.

  “True.”

  Ruth was utterly still. Ellen seemed to be waiting for something. Something from me. I emptied the wine bottle into my glass, took a hefty swallow. “How did you meet Spanner?”

  “In a bar,” Ellen said. “She was playing pool. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. You know how she is.” Oh yes. “She was losing. Not very gracefully.” I could imagine: the glint in her eyes, hair thrown back, anger flushing her cheeks, her strides around the table getting more and more like the stalk of some hunting animal. “One thing led to another.” She picked up a fresh wine bottle and gestured at Ruth’s glass.

  “That’s the third bottle.”

  “I know.”

  Ruth sighed and pushed her glass across the table. I was getting drunk, but I nodded when it was my turn. Ellen filled her own last.

  “So, how about you, Lore? How did you meet Spanner?”

  I thought about how to answer, because the question wasn’t only How did you meet her? but Who are you, where are you from? They didn’t need to tell me their backgrounds, because they were Ruth-and-Ellen and Ellen-and-Ruth. Their coupledom said We’re nice people, otherwise we wouldn’t have lived together so long, wouldn’t be capable of love. But I had lived for over two years with a woman they both stepped around very carefully, which made me suspect in itself; and now I was alone. They wanted a pedigree, a provenance, a way of knowing what to expect in the future. I understood it and resented it at the same time.

  “I was naked and bleeding, left for dead in the city center. She found me.” I didn’t look at them. “She took me-” I swallowed; I had nearly said home. “S
he took me back to her flat on Springbank. I had to stay with her because I couldn’t use my real name, For fear my parents… for fear…” Even though I knew what they must be assuming, this felt too close to the truth for comfort. “Anyway, I was a babe in the woods. I had no idea how to support myself. Spanner showed me how.” Now I met their eyes. “And, yes, I did some things I’m not proud of. You don’t know the half of it.”

  “But you didn’t know any better,” Ruth said, trying to excuse me, trying to make everything all right.

  “Yes, I did. I think I always did. Just as I’m sure Ellen there knew at the time. We can tell ourselves that we had to, we had no choice, until we’re blue in the face, but how many days did I starve while I tried to find other ways to make money? None. I had food, shelter, access to the net. I didn’t need to do those things.” I wanted her to understand. Poor Ruth, or lucky Ruth, who had never had to look inside herself and face what stared back.

  “But you mustn’t feel guilty.”

  “Why mustn’t I? I am guilty. But you know what bothers me? I don’t feel guilty. Not really. Sometimes I feel this heavy weight in the pit of my stomach, but it’s more like an acknowledgment of stupidity than guilt. I was so stupid.”

  “And young,” Ellen said.

  I hadn’t looked at it quite that way, maybe because I hadn’t felt young since I was about seven years old. “You might be right. But I knew, all those nights when I lay awake, trying not to think about what I had just done that evening, or afternoon, or morning, I knew that what I was doing was wrong. Oh, most of the time I didn’t care that I hurt others-”

  “Not even us?”

  It would be easy to lie. I sighed. “Not even you. I was more concerned with how low I must have sunk to do that, what it meant for me, not how you felt. I’m sorry.”

  Ruth touched my hand briefly.

  “I wonder if Spanner would have corrupted me if I’d spent more than five weeks with her,” Ellen said thoughtfully.

  “She didn’t corrupt me;” She had just showed me what was there, pointed me inward to all the seams and twisted paths. “That’s something you can only do to yourself.” It was hot. I was thirsty, but I didn’t want to get up in the middle of this to get a glass of water, not until they understood. I drank more wine. “We all have wounds. We all get hurt. But self-pity, lack of courage, leads to a sort of… mortification of the soul. Corruption. And then it takes more courage, costs more pain, to clean it up afterward.”

  I drank more cold wine, thought about the heat in Belize, how I had been cool in my hotel room, cool and unconcerned about the fate of those people in Caracas.

  “I was in the jungle once. I lay on my back in the middle of a clearing while insects crawled over my hands and under the small of my back, and looked up. Up through the endless greenery.” I spoke slowly, remembering. “The jungle isn’t just one place, you know—it’s a dozen, all in layers. And the animals and insects of each layer are utterly oblivious to what’s above them, or below. They don’t even know anything outside their world exists. So I lay there, covered in bugs, and tried to imagine what the world looks like to the white hawks and harpy eagles soaring over the canopy hunting for their food—troops of howler and spider monkeys. A green carpet, maybe. Something flat, anyway. They float about up there and have no idea that lower down ant-eaters ramble about, clinging with their prehensile tails to thin tree trunks, leaning down and licking out termites from the high-up nests. Sloths live there, too.”

  I had seen them, fur slimed with algae, hanging upside down, creeping from bough to bough. “Did you know that the sloth’s claws are so well adapted to hanging upside down that if it fell off, to the forest floor, it would die because it couldn’t crawl away from predators?” I had been born to soar above the canopy, oblivious. But humans were adaptable, weren’t they? “The eagles don’t know the sloths and anteaters are there. The sloths and anteaters don’t know that underneath them are other layers. Little, quick things that flit from bloom to bloom, like bees and hummingbirds. And kinkajous and geckos and insects. All scampering about, oblivious.” The layers I had seen that day were endless. “The bottom layer is the forest floor. Big things, slow-moving. Heavy. Jaguars, herds of peccaries, tapirs. Where things squeal and run.” Bright crunch of blood. Shrill screams. “Layer after layer, each separate, each teeming with life…”

  They were looking at me oddly.

  “Don’t you see? Everything works in layers: jungles, cities, people. Each layer has its predator and prey, its network of ally and foe, safe place and trap. Its own ecosystem. You have to get to know the land.” I wondered if I was making sense. “We don’t always know what we’re getting into. And we don’t always know how to get out. We can’t understand everything. We each have a niche.” I remembered Paolo, saying, I’m nothing, a nobody. I thought of Spanner, her amusement when I had suggested a job: Now, why would I want a job? “If we fall out of it, like the sloth, we’re not equipped. We can die. Others can see it happening, but they can’t help. They can’t climb down the tree and help us back up. We have to do it ourselves.” I was crying. I couldn’t seem to stop.

  * * *

  Interest in the porn films lasted until early summer, but then their money began to dry up again. They swapped their PIDAs often—though her middle name always remained Lore—but their stock began to dwindle, and there were no more PIDAs from Ruth, and no more money to get them elsewhere. Hyn and Zimmer stayed out of sight, and Spanner went out more and more often on her own. She came back restless and irritable. One evening after they ate, she stood behind Lore’s chair and rubbed her shoulders.

  “We’re going out tonight to meet some new friends. Wear that black thing I bought you before Christmas. The dress.” She went into the bathroom, and Lore heard the click as she opened up the cabinet, the chink as she dropped the tiny glass vial into her pocket with her razor.

  It was a warm night, and Lore’s dress clung to her body. Her shoulders and neck felt exposed as they rode the slide to the bar. It was a new place, built only a year or two ago on a patch of land that had been a park until the city ran out of money. Inside, it was all rounded angles and glass just a little too thick to see through. The floor was some kind of clay tile. There was no bar, just table service, and the clientele had the tight, jerky look of people who were on display, or desperately wanted to be. Their nervousness was catching. For the first time since Lore had known her, Spanner—her hair up in a twist, wearing a formal tunic—did not order beer. Lore followed her lead and got a cold vodka cocktail. It felt peculiar to be wearing a black dress and sipping a cocktail.

  The ceiling was mobile and made of glass, thick chunks tinted aquamarine and azure, indigo and electric green that moved slowly, occasionally showing Lore sliding reflections of another table, her own hand, the floor.

  “They’re here.” Spanner stood up and waved.

  Afterward, when Lore thought about that evening, she was sure Spanner had introduced them all, but she could never remember their names. The man was in his early forties, in cotton trousers and soft shirt. He was tall, and stooped all the time, though Lore was not sure if that was from habit or because he was uncomfortable. The woman was a little younger, late thirties, and plainly excited. She smiled a lot. Her hair was thick, black and glossy, about shoulder length. They bought another round of drinks. Lore noticed that, like herself and Spanner, they paid with anonymous debit cards.

  Spanner, as she could so easily when she made the effort, was charming them, telling tales of riding the freighters at night for no charge, of the more colorful regulars at the Polar Bear, of the night she and Lore had tried to burn their own front door in the fireplace, only to find out it was definitely noncombustible. They ordered another round, then another. The waitress seemed to be always at their table with a tray of frosting, clear drinks. Each time, the couple paid.

  The woman talked about her job. She did not say what she did, exactly, but hinted that she worked for the executive branch
of the city council. “Very dull,” she said, but her coy smile suggested it might be anything but.

  There were rings on every finger of her right hand. They flashed and sparkled as she talked, tapping neatly manicured nails on the tabletop. She leaned forward. Lore could feel the heat of the woman’s skin on her own bare arm. The man hardly spoke.

  Lore’s glass was empty. So were the others. “Shall we have another?”

  “Well, no,” the woman said, suddenly diffident. Lore was watching her hand again. It had been a while since she had seen such expensively manicured nails. “I could do with something to eat. Perhaps you would both like to join us?”

  “We’d love to,” Spanner said. Lore nodded. She had no choice, not really. She knew what was happening.

  “And then perhaps a film afterward.”

  Outside, the night was very immediate. The man mis-stepped in the doorway and swayed. The woman laughed and slid one arm through his, another through Lore’s. “We probably all need support.”

  Instead of heading for the slide pole, the woman stopped by a small black car. Lore realized she was not surprised. “Yours?”

  The woman nodded. “We’re here,” she told the car. Lore heard the locks click back. There was one driver’s seat on the right-hand side, and three other seats arranged in a triangle. “Take us home,” the woman said once they were all inside, “and let’s have some privacy.” The windows polarized to black. The man sat in the driver’s seat but appeared to go to sleep.

  The drive took twenty minutes. Lore had no idea in which direction they were going. In the close quarters of the vehicle, Lore could smell the woman’s perfume, a surprisingly light fragrance, one she found familiar. She wondered if this woman had ever attended one of the low-voiced dinners with family representatives, where crystal flashed and deals were made between one course and the next. Crystal, Lore thought fuzzily, like silverware, reflected a distorted version of reality. Look in a spoon or into the bottom of a glass and what looked back at you was swollen and grotesque.