Slow River

by Nicola Griffith

  Cel agreed eventually, arid the three of us:trooped out behind the medic’s assistant.

  Outside, it was as bright as day: emergency-response trucks sat in a circle with are lights burning into the black sandstone building. Camera teams, with anchors talking into their own spotlights. Dozens of groups in flash suits and air hoses, protective helmets, radios… I could almost smell their adrenaline, and wondered how they would work it off now that they wouldn’t be needed. While I watched, two ambulances turned off their flashing lights and drove away. There were probably about two hundred people watching and waiting for survivors. While most of them would be the next shift waiting to go in, many were media.

  “Cel.” She turned. “Wait.”

  “What’s going on?” Kinnis asked.

  They had trusted me earlier, with their lives. “I can’t afford to have my face seen on the net, or my name mentioned. I need to avoid them.”

  Cel shrugged, “I don’t see how we can help you.”

  “I thought that if everyone was swarming to talk to one of you—or both of you—I could get away unnoticed.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. She didn’t relish the idea of a media feeding frenzy, and I didn’t blame her.

  I had a sudden inspiration. “Kinnis, won’t your wife be worried?”

  “Christ, yes. I hadn’t thought about that.”

  “One quick way to let her know you’re safe would be to get on the net. You, too, Cel.”

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly.

  But Kinnis was looking at the cameras happily. “Being on the net would make me a hero to my kids, Cel: the guy who saved the city. And like she said, it would let my wife know I’m safe.”

  “I don’t know,” Cel said again, then sighed. “I don’t know why I keep doing what you say.” Because I ask it. Katerine was right. “Come on, Kinnis. You head for those teams over there, I’ll take this side.” She walked out, waving. “Hey!” Lights swung her way.

  Kinnis stepped out after her, to one side. “Me, too!”

  I slipped into the shadow left behind by the piercing light and hurried away.

  * * *

  It was almost dawn by the time they were dressed and outside. The woman and Spanner stood in the doorway, murmuring. Something changed hands. Lore looked around, ignoring them. The apartment building was a converted warehouse, made of the long, thin bricks manufactured before the eighteenth century: they were in the center of the city, surrounded by trees and a high wall.

  They found a cafe. Lore stirred her coffee aimlessly. Her body felt hopelessly confused: whenever she thought about what had happened she felt a flush of arousal followed quickly by shame.

  “I don’t want to do that again,” she said quietly, not looking at Spanner.

  “You enjoyed it.”

  “Yes. That makes it worse.”

  “It would have been better if you hadn’t liked it?”

  “Yes. At least then I would have felt more like me. More in control.” She stirred the coffee some more. It slopped over into the saucer. “I just feel so… used.” No, she wanted to feel used, but she did not. She felt as though it did not matter, and that frightened her. She stared blindly across the river, broad here, and slow moving.

  “Anyway, it’s done now. And you did enjoy it. You can’t tell me it wasn’t good.”

  And it had been; it had been very good. What did that say about her?

  “When did you drug me?” Her voice sounded surprisingly calm.

  “Who says I drugged you?”

  “Just tell me when.”

  “After you had already taken off your dress.”

  After you had already taken off your dress. So she did not even have that much of an excuse; she had already unbuttoned her dress. Some part of her had been willing, even without the drug.

  Spanner squinted at the rising sun, sipped from her coffee. “So,” she said casually, “do you want me to tell you when I’m doing it, next time?”

  Next time.

  Lore watched the sparkle of morning sunlight on the river. It looked so bright, so optimistic, on the surface. But underneath there were river reeds, and pikes to eat smaller fish, and the rich river mud was made of dead things, including the bones of thousands of people.

  Next time. “There’s no sign of business improving?”

  “No.” Spanner waited for a waiter to refill her coffee. “This is more profitable, anyway.”

  How many times had the river accepted victims? The river did not care whether those who slid under its surface were women or men, victims of murder or heroes trying to save a drowning child. It was all the same to the river. Death was all the same. Just as it did not matter what kind of person Lore felt she was inside: if there were many more times like last night, she would become someone else, someone who did those things.

  But Spanner and the temporary fake PIDAs were all that held the implacable, uncaring river of her past from pouring in on her head. With Spanner she might drown; without her, she certainly would.

  * * *

  The message tone woke me minutes after I had gone to bed.

  “Lore? Ruth. I heard about the plant. Are you all right.” I staggered out of bed. “I’m here.” I found the ACCEPT button. “I’m fine.”

  “Oh. I woke you. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. What time is it?”

  “Half past four. Listen, about Spanner.” I sat up straighter. “Ellen’s been with her. She called and left a message saying the medic’s been back and there’s no infection. Ellen seems to think the pain’s still pretty bad, though. Do you know what happened?”

  “No.” If Spanner hadn’t told them, it wasn’t my place. Maybe one day. I was too tired to care if my lies were convincing.

  “Well,” Ruth said uncertainly, “I’ll let you get back to sleep. You look exhausted.”

  “Thanks. And thanks for calling.” I meant it. It was good to have someone who cared.

  I was dreaming about a fire when the screen woke me again. This time it was Magyar. She must have got my number from the records.

  “Hey, Bird, you there?”

  “I’m here.” I scrubbed my eyes. “Time is it?”

  “After five. They’ve just let me out. Kept asking me over and over what had gone wrong. And how I’d known how to fix it.”

  “You didn’t tell them?”

  “I told them part of the truth: that I’d been reading the manual a lot lately because I was worried that Hepple’s idiotic games were going to hurt the plant somehow.”

  “What did they say?”

  She laughed. “Not much. Then they sent Hepple from the room.”

  “He was there?”

  “Not for long.” When she smiled her eyes wrinkled upward, like a cat’s. She stretched. “I feel good, Bird. I don’t think he’s going to work in this city again.”

  “You told them about the bugs, the nutrients?”

  “Everything.” She yawned. “Thought you’d like to know: Someone from the command-post staff, the documentation people, said they’ve traced the spill upline to some off road drainage in the north of the county. Well away from any manufacturing complex and off the usual transport routes. The official opinion is fly dumping.”

  “Right.”

  She nodded. “As far as I’m concerned, this was planned.” She yawned again. “Before I forget, tomorrow’s shift is twelve hours: four till four. With overlap.”

  “That’ll be fun.” I tried to imagine the chaos of overlapping shifts, with both shifts overtired and irritable.

  “Yeah. But the pay’s good: time and a half for the whole twelve hours.” Another yawn. “Gotta go. Those leeches sucked me dry. You’d think it was my fault things went wrong. ‘So tell us again why you think the glucose line malfunctioned, Cherry.’ Over and over. Jesus. And I hate it when they call me Cherry.” She reached to the side to cut the transmission, then stopped. “I didn’t tell you earlier, Bird, but I think between us we did a good job. It was har
d to not tell them what you did. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “I do.”

  “Good, because it’s too late to change your mind without making me look like an idiot. I’ll see you at the beginning of the shift.”

  No one had ever said to me before, See you later, at work.

  Chapter 20

  When Lore gets back to her suite after swimming with Sarah, she is exhausted and has the faint beginnings of a hangover. The light on her screen is red: she has a message. She ignores it. All she wants is a shower and several hours’ sleep.

  She is climbing into bed when the phone chimes. It takes her a moment to recognize the family-emergency override tone. She drags the sheet from. her bed to wrap up in.

  “Yes?”

  “Lore… Lore…” The screen remains blank and whoever has called her is sobbing. “Lore…”

  “Tok? Tok, is that you?” The screen suddenly flashes into color: Tok’s face is swollen and ravaged with grief.

  “She’s dead. Those bastards. Oh, Lore, she’s dead…” He says more, but his tears thicken the words beyond sense.

  “Tok, please.” Who was dead? “Take some deep breaths. Tell me-”

  “She was trying. God, she was… She killed herself, Lore. Can you imagine that? Feeling so bad you don’t want to wake up ever again and eat breakfast, you don’t want to look up ever again and see tiny white clouds in the sky. Just wanting to forget. That bastard. She…” More weeping.

  Lore’s heart feels so big she can hardly breathe. “Tok, who’s dead?”

  Tok looks up, astonished. “Stella. She killed herself. She…”

  Lore does not hear the rest. She is flooded with relief that it is not Katerine. Tok is looking at her. “Why? Why did she kill herself?”

  “Because of what that monster did to her. Almost every night. She only started therapy six months ago, Lore. She was finally facing it. But then I think it just got too much, I think she looked ahead and saw this thing, this black swamp inside her, this cloud that looked like it would stain her life forever, and couldn’t face it. Well, I can face it. I’m going to make that monster pay. Come back home, Lore, wherever you are. I need you. We’ll do this together.”

  Lore just looks at him, horrified. What is he talking about?

  “I’ll contact you in a day or two, tell you where I am. I’m going to put a stop to it. This has gone on too long.” He reaches to the side and his picture blips out.

  Lore stares at the blank screen, unable to move. What is he talking about? Stella is dead. What does he mean? Who is the monsters. A quick image of Greta and a locksmith glide through her memory. She shakes her head. Stella is dead. She has a sudden image of Stella and her friends standing around the net screen, drinks in hand, vying to send money to some amateur charity. Stella is dead.

  She does not know how long she sits there, but when someone knocks at the door and she gets up, she finds she is stiff. She expects Sarah, and opens the door without checking the peephole.

  Two masked figures burst in. One takes her arms and the other points something at her face. There is a funny smell, and the floor comes up to hit her.

  Chapter 21

  I opened my eyes again at eleven in the morning and thought it was the message tone that had awakened me. I was halfway out of bed before I realized it was the door.

  Someone was knocking on my door.

  This was the first time since I had lived alone that anyone had knocked. It made me think of Uruguay.

  “Hold on.” I found a shirt, padded to the door. “Who is it?”

  “Why, who’re you expecting’.”

  Tom. Even so, I made sure both chains were fastened before I opened the door a crack. “I’m not dressed.”

  “We don’t mind.” He held up his hand. I saw it was attached to some kind of string. “Brought you a present.” A leash. And a dog. A black, stocky-looking thing with a startlingly pink tongue.

  “No. I can’t –”

  “Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” he said cheerfully.

  “He’s not to keep. Just to borrow for an hour or two every day, Can we come in?”

  I opened the door and the dog dragged Tom in. “Sit down while I dress.”

  “I’ll put the kettle on.”

  “Fine.”

  I went into the bathroom and showered quickly. I could hear the dog’s claws clicking on the floor as it padded about, sniffing things. When I came out of the bathroom, rubbing my hair, it sat down and panted at me. Its entire hindquarters shuffled back and forth as it wagged its tail.

  I patted it cautiously on the head. It wagged harder. “It looks young.”

  “He. He’s eight months old. His name’s Gibbon.”

  “As in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?”

  Tom smiled. “Knew you had an education. Now, hurry up and comb that hair, tea’s ready.” I did, then checked to see if I had any messages. Just one, a notice from the plant, reiterating what Magyar had already told me: tonight’s shift had been extended. For the next three days, the notice said. No please or thank you, just an assumption that we would all cooperate.

  We sat at the table by the window. The dog sat on the carpet, watching me carefully.

  “I got him yesterday. From the pound. I thought to myself, ‘Tom, you’re getting old. More to the point, you’re thinking you should feel old and lonely. You need something to look after.’ I decided a dog would be just the thing.”

  “But…”

  “How am I going to walk a young, healthy dog like this every day? That’s where you come in. I saw you dragging yourself in the other night, and I said to myself, ‘That lass needs a bit of fresh air, something to take her mind off things.’ And then I heard about the bit of bother at the plant last night and thought a walk by the river would do nicely.”

  I thought Tom thought entirely too much. And then I wondered how he knew I worked at the plant, and realized too late he’d been guessing. I smiled wryly. “By the time I get him to the river we’ll both be exhausted and it’ll be time for me to head back.”

  But Tom had evidently been thinking about that, too. He actually folded his arms in satisfaction. “Bet you didn’t know you could reach the river not two minutes’ walk from here.”

  I acknowledged defeat. “You’d better tell me how.”

  I got to work early. Twelve hours was a long time to spend in a skinny, especially when there was cleanup and overlapping shifts arguing about jurisdiction, and I wanted to be prepared.

  Tom had been right about the walk. The fresh air and exercise had stretched the tension kinks out of my shoulders and put vigor back in my veins. Although I knew it was all in my mind, I felt cleaner, as though the breeze had blown away the stain of aliphatics and aromatics from the spongy tissue of my lungs.

  I sighed as I took my time sliding on wrist supports and strapping on my waders. Now I was going to clog everything up again.

  “It’s going to get worse,” Kinnis said cheerfully. He hadn’t even sealed his skinny yet. “Lot of work to do.”

  “I hear these daytime jerk-offs have only got a few more troughs up,” Meisener agreed.

  “Less than forty is what I heard,” Cel said as she started stripping off her street clothes. “Hey, Kinnis, you were dumb as a rock on the net last night.”

  “Yeah? At least I looked good, not like you, you ugly cow.”

  I stepped out of the line of fire. The next stage would be thrown gauntlets, goggles, raucous laughter. It always made me feel out of place, the way the rest of the shift familiarly insulted each other, threw things, played jokes. They knew it, I think, but I never got the sense that they might gang up on me and herd me out. They could have done, in the beginning, but they hadn’t. Maybe I had been as strange to them as they to me. They wouldn’t do it now; I might be weird, but I had worked with them, helped them. I had been adopted and my difference was now taken for granted—like the slowness of a younger sister who is defended fiercely on the
school playground. All of a sudden I liked these people, liked them a great deal.

  The shift was hard, but we were used to that, and the two shifts meshed together more smoothly than I had anticipated. There was no sign of Magyar, but without any discussion, our shift took on the heavier, dirtier work. The day shift seemed content to let us. I wondered how many more centuries it would take to break the physically-stronger-equals morally-superior equation, then shrugged and concentrated on the job.

  Once the day shift had left, the work was faster and smoother. An hour before the break, we had almost fifty troughs up.

  “Maybe we should slow down,” Cel said from behind me. She was leaning on her rake, surveying the progress. “Time and a half is a hard thing to lose.”

  “I wonder how Magyar got that for us.”

  “The way I read it, she can get what she wants right now. Did you know she’s been in executive land all night? Rumor has it they gave Hepple’s job to the day-shift supervisor—Ho? Hu? something like that—and offered Magyar his job.”

  “On the day shift?”

  “Yeah,” she said, misinterpreting my expression. “What would she do with those soft wankers?”

  “Do you think she’ll take it?”

  “Maybe.”

  We broke as usual after four hours. For the first time in a while, I sat by myself in the breakroom. I didn’t like the thought of a new shift supervisor. Magyar and I understood each other. It would be annoying to have to go back to being careful all the time about what I was and was not supposed to know. And Magyar was smart. What if the new one was mean, or petty like Hepple?

  The second third of the shift seemed harder than the first, despite the fact that we were on our own. By the second break, Cel’s rumor had gone round and there was intense speculation. No one seemed to doubt that Magyar would take the job—the interest was all about who would take Magyar’s place. I watched the fish and spoke to no one, then went back to the troughs and worked like an automaton.