Regeneration

by Stephanie Saulter

  Are you in the estuary? What’s going on?

  There was a delay of more than a minute, and the slight sense of distortion in the band response that told him she was underwater.

  Can’t talk. Below with repair team. Explain when I see you.

  He stared at the message, baffled, and unable to leave it at that. The picture of Pilan in his utility vest was suddenly sharp in his mind.

  What repair team? What’s happened?

  And then, suddenly fearful of the answer,

  Is everybody all right?

  The response came back more quickly this time.

  Everyone OK. Turbines damaged, not sure how. Array shifted, blades warped.

  A pause.

  We’ll head back soon.

  A longer pause.

  I don’t think it was an accident.

  *

  “It definitely wasn’t an accident,” Gaela said to Sharon Varsi as they kept an eye on their children playing on the quayside downriver from Sinkat. “I’m sure of it. I saw the trace.”

  Sharon chewed her lip thoughtfully. “Walk me through it again. Could there have been a malfunction? Some program gremlin they haven’t caught yet?”

  “That’s what they thought at first, because of the way the turbines shut down. The vids showed a whole row just turning aside to the current, one after the other after the other. There’s a protective subroutine that can shut an array down and collapse the blades if the flow gets really turbulent, in a bad storm or something.”

  “So either the shutdown was triggered accidentally, or there really was turbulence.”

  “There was. They’re running diagnostics on the system, just to be thorough, but we already know what happened; I could see it on the security vids. It shows up in ultraviolet.”

  She paused and glanced around, checking on Eve, blinked into infrared for a moment and found her heat signature as she crouched behind a recycling bin. Sharon’s elder son, Misha, two years younger than Eve but already more than a head taller, was creeping up from behind. “It was a focused jet of water, very sudden and quite large.” Gaela spread her arms wide to demonstrate. “It was strong enough for some of the blades to be damaged before the shutdown could be completed. There’s no natural current that powerful, certainly not one that shoots across the estuary at ninety degrees to the direction of the tide, so something created it. It moved down the line of turbines whacking them out of position and then stopped.”

  “Could you see anything else? Besides the water itself?”

  “Not much. The cams are all focused on the turbines. We zoomed in and there are streaks of silt and algae on the blades. Pilan’s getting Agwé to take some close-ups, record the scene ahead of repairs—”

  “He should’ve waited if they suspect foul play. Let police forensics get in there.”

  “He’d already mobilized everyone before I arrived. And anyway, you know what he’s like. They’re so close to joining the grid, they’ve fought off so many attempts to delay and obstruct. I think he’s decided he’ll be damned if he lets anything get in the way now.”

  “I understand how he feels, but they still should’ve waited. Charging ahead might just give the other side ammunition.” She winced as Misha pounced on Eve and opened her mouth to shout a rebuke, then closed it as Eve reached up, grabbed the boy’s ear and twisted. Misha fell off with a good-natured yell. Little Sural, who liked to pretend to be above the fray but never really was, piled in too.

  The mothers looked at each other. “Oh well,” Sharon concluded, “what’s done is done. So your guess is—what? Some kind of submersible?”

  “I’d say so. It happened at high tide last night, just on the turn. Maximum depth in the water column, black as pitch, no one around.”

  “A good time for sabotage.”

  “Exactly. They would’ve been able to slip away without a trace—or so they thought—and without evidence of an external cause, the presumption would have been that it had to be a system error, which Thames Tidal Power would then have been unable to find.”

  “Was that the point? To cast doubt on TTP’s system integrity?” Sharon waved at the children leapfrogging each other halfway up the quay, beckoning them back: Misha was getting five feet further away with every jump. “Because it doesn’t sound like the damage is that bad, and the turbines are not intrinsically dangerous, not like the battery banks.”

  “No, but the battery banks have many more layers of security. And it would be insane to try anything that might breach quantum-energy storage. You’d never get away in time.” She shivered.

  Sharon felt the chill too, and was not entirely certain it was down to the breeze off the water, sharp though that was.

  “If they thought that no one would ever find out it was sabotage, an inexplicable fault that shut down a tidemill array would lend weight to fears that the entire project is risky and that implementation should be delayed.” Sharon was thinking aloud now, and vaguely aware that she sounded like she was reading a case file aloud. “I’ve heard an emergency petition claiming exactly that is about to be filed with the city, which is an interesting coincidence. It suggests that we should take a very hard look at the group behind the petition. But here’s what’s bothering me, Gaela”—she could feel herself frowning as she worked through the implications—“connection to the grid hasn’t happened yet. Even if it had, this stunt last night wouldn’t have affected supply. The turbines are meant to constantly recharge the battery banks, but the whole TTP venture is predicated on the capacity of quantum storage. Even if every turbine in the estuary was shut down for days, there’d still be enough stored energy for the company to meet its targets.” She signaled to the children again, more vigorously this time. “To put it bluntly, if Pilan and company had decided to just stay quiet about this, would anyone even have known?”

  “It would never happen. Whatever else you might say about him, Pilan isn’t underhanded.”

  “You and I know that, but would the saboteurs? If not, how would they expect to capitalize on the damage they caused?”

  “They’d have a plan to reveal it somehow—leak it to the streams, maybe? Remain anonymous?”

  “Or not reveal it and use the threat as blackmail?”

  “How many possibilities have we got? Thames Tidal announces that something went wrong, and everyone gets worried about the technology. Thames Tidal says nothing, someone else does and the public thinks the technology is flawed and that the company can’t be trusted to be honest about it. Or Thames Tidal says nothing, and then someone else holds them over a barrel.” Gaela looked for Eve before focusing once again on Sharon. “But the reality is that none of those things are going to happen, because Thames Tidal does know it was sabotage and has reported it to the police. They’re going to repair the damage, put new safeguards in place and meet their launch date anyway. So what’s the contingency plan for that?”

  “With any luck there won’t be one.” Sharon’s frown deepened. “If the plan was to reduce public confidence in an already controversial project, my guess is it’s about to backfire, and that means whoever’s behind this will either have to back off or up the ante.”

  “You think they might try something else?”

  “I don’t know. But Mik says Thames Tidal is putting some very powerful noses out of joint, and a submersible isn’t the kind of gear your average disgruntled citizen can easily lay their hands on.” Her voice was grim as she watched the three children, now scampering back toward them. “I doubt this is over, Gaela. It may be just the start.”

  3

  Aryel Morningstar concentrated on the mnemonic, mentally holding the pattern of what she wanted to retrieve. Her clasped hands were still, but when a row of icons appeared on the desktop screen, she visibly relaxed.

  The young man sitting next to her chuckled. “You still don’t entirely trust it, do you, Ari?”

  “I’m getting better.” She poked at the thin wire of the cranial band, its dull platinum set off by
her dark hair, with an irritation he knew she would not have shown in front of many others. “It’s important to stick with it, set an example.”

  Rhys inclined his head in acknowledgment. His elder sister’s silent endorsement was something most marketeers would kill for. His own band was tucked up beneath tight curls of ruby-red hair that shimmered faintly against his dark skin.

  “Sales not as strong as you’d like?”

  “Not yet. Industrial orders are growing, but individual consumers are slower to adopt—which is a problem, because it looks like Herran’s profit-share in psionic interface equipment is going to have to prop up genmed reproductive assistance for a while yet.”

  “You don’t think we’ll be getting more public funding?”

  “I think it’s going to be tight for some time. You know there’s a lot of tension around special support for gems—they can’t deny care to people who are already damaged, obviously, but the Opposition is using that to argue that future genetic engineering should be minimized, which to them means reducing gem characteristics in the next generation. Is that what we want?” She gestured at the screen.

  “No, it isn’t,” Rhys replied. “Trends over the past few quarters show quite the opposite.”

  He leaned forward, using his own band to take control of the display, moving seamlessly between mental commands and hand gestures as they reviewed expenditures from the charitable foundation to which Herran had endowed his earnings from Bel’Natur. As they’d come to expect, there was a small but steady demand for specialized genetic medicine to counter the unique illnesses that afflicted some gems and which were tending to become more problematic with age; corrective gene surgery, so that future generations would not suffer in the same way; and most controversial of all, engineering compatibility so that dissimilar gems could conceive and bear healthy children together.

  “What about mixed couples?” Aryel asked. “Are they also holding on to the gem inheritance?”

  He gestured at the screen. “According to this they’re trying not to select against either parent if they can help it. The Sharon-and-Mikal model is pretty standard. I reckon much of that’s down to them setting such a public example.”

  Aryel pondered that. The Varsis’ high-profile careers had meant many stream images of the happily blended family: sweet little double-thumbed Sural in his father’s arms, gangly, gregarious Misha holding his mother’s hand.

  “They’re not usually too much of a challenge,” Rhys added, “but we are starting to see more of them.”

  “Hence my wish for a spike in cranial-band sales. Is Callan using his for translation work now? He started to tell me something at Gabriel’s party but Eve charged in and we never got back to it.”

  “He is; he loves it. Herran helped him customize a couple of apps and Callan says it lets him work much faster.” Rhys smiled, midnight-blue eyes sparkling with tenderness. “He’s engaged in a pitched battle with some ancient mathematical texts in Sanskrit at the moment. I was so late getting home from the hospital the other night I thought I’d get sacked for negligence—instead I ended up having to drag him out of the clutches of some thousand-year-old Indian philosopher.” He pretended to pout.

  As Aryel laughed he realized it was the first moment of light-heartedness he’d seen in her today.

  “We have become a tribe of workaholics,” she agreed, “and Gabriel not the least. I’d love to ask him how we might make the band appealing to more users, but he’s so busy—not just Thames Tidal, but keeping up with his coursework—that I don’t dare.”

  “He’s a pretty effective advert for the band himself. He told me that there are people at college who he’s sure only got one because of him, and even one or two others at Sinkat. Even though they can see that he keeps his active or on standby so he can’t possibly be reading them.”

  Aryel looked serious again.

  Too serious, he thought, given the subject matter.

  “It isn’t fair that he should have to do that, but it was even harder on him before. He’s found it a lot easier to fit in now that people know the band blocks his telepathy. But releasing that information bumped his stream profile back up a little, which was unfortunate. There’s Eve to consider, and—” She broke off, looking weary.

  “What’s going on, Ari?” he asked gently. “Something’s on your mind, I can tell. Is the funding situation really that bad?”

  “It’s not that—well, not entirely.” She nibbled at her lip, brushed a finger along the cranial band again, dropped her chin onto her hands.

  Rhys didn’t need his acute situational sense to know she was not just anxious, but considering how much of her anxiety to share.

  “We’ve come such a long way, Rhys,” she said at last. “We’ve done so well, so quickly. We beat the godgangs and outflanked the Reversionists—in fact, we’ve infiltrated the mainstream so much we’ve made them look like cranks and outsiders. When Gabriel was born you and I were gemtech refugees, running and hiding, terrified of what would happen if we were caught.” She waved an irritated hand at the room in which they sat. “Now I have an office inside Bel’Natur, of all places, and you’re a doctor in the genmed service we forced them to help fund. And not just that: Mikal’s practically an elder statesman of London politics, our sister’s a global superstar, Pilan and his team are revolutionizing the energy industry—”

  “—and aquatech agriculture and textiles are booming. So what’s the problem?”

  “Our gains aren’t universally admired, are they? Opposition is growing, and this time it’s not just fundamentalists and fools. A lot of people are very scared of Thames Tidal—quantum storage has the potential to wipe out the biomass industry completely, and while political progressives might be okay with that, a lot of norms won’t be. They’re beginning to realize that huge numbers of jobs could just disappear. There’ll be new ones created, of course—but they’re not going to be available to everyone, are they?”

  “No,” Rhys said thoughtfully, “not if it means working underwater—the gillungs will definitely have the advantage there . . .”

  “Quite. And who hardly ever shows up in your reports?” She gestured at the screen. “Gillungs, who tend to partner with each other and thus have uncomplicated pregnancies—which means they can have more children, more quickly. The gem baby boom is getting increasing attention on the streams and it’s clear to anyone who’s looking that gillung babies are a big subset of that.”

  “So you think there’s going to be a backlash?”

  “I think it’s already started. The United People’s Party lost a chunk of their majority at the last election, and a lot of that was down to voters being upset about how fast the world around them is changing. When change manifests as fewer business or job opportunities, it gives them a way of thinking and talking about it that they’re able to convince themselves isn’t bigoted. So they turn to the Traditional Democrats, who have the backing of big business and have always been more popular in the suburbs and rural areas—”

  “—where biomass agriculture is a big employer,” Rhys finished. His elder sister’s political instincts had always been far shrewder than his; he wondered how long she’d seen this coming. “I get it. No wonder funding for procreation is an issue.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Is there anything we can do?” He smiled, though he no longer felt cheerful. “Of course, by we I mean you.”

  “You’d be better off meaning Mikal. He’s well placed to influence the players, far more than I am—and anyway, I’m not sure how much I should do. It was an easier decision when we were disadvantaged and endangered, when things were so clearly unequal. Now I wonder whether the right course isn’t just to sit back and let it play out. But things could so easily spiral out of control, especially if—”

  She had been gazing into the distance as she spoke, musing almost, but now she broke off and glanced sharply at her brother.

  He was accustomed to her piercing gaze; he was not accustomed t
o it being so troubled. “If what, Ari?”

  She hesitated for a long time before answering, as though to put off whatever further complication she was about to share with him, or regretting having to share it at all.

  “Our significant other,” she said, “is back in play.”

  On the way home, Eve was full of questions. “How come you and Aunty Sharon were talking so much?”

  “What else should we have been doing?”

  “Playing with us.”

  “We did.”

  “More.”

  “We couldn’t have managed much more, Evie. You and the boys wore us out.” Gaela affected a weary sigh. “Aunty Sharon and I aren’t as young as we used to be.”

  “You mean when she was a police officer?”

  “She still is.”

  “She’s a superintendent,” Eve said, as if this was as far away from regular policing as it was possible to get.

  “Detective Superintendent,” Gaela corrected automatically. “That’s still a police officer, just a very senior one.”

  “Can she still arrest people and stuff?” Eve threw the words out as though they were a challenge.

  What’s she got a bee in her bonnet about now? Gaela wondered. She said, “She certainly can.”

  “Were you talking about arresting people?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Were you talking about us?”

  “Us who?”

  Eve rolled her eyes. “Me and Mish and Suri.”

  “Honestly, Eve. Do you think you three are the only interesting things there are?” She scrambled her fingers across her daughter’s head affectionately.

  “I guess not,” Eve said, sounding doubtful. And then, hopping backward and looking up at her mother, as she had earlier with her brother, “Mama, how come Gabe is named Gabriel and I’m named Eve?”