Regeneration

by Stephanie Saulter

  Rob winced again, but Radbo registered the barb with equanimity. “I understand the desire for independence,” he said, “but there is safety in numbers.” Although he was speaking to them both, it was on Mikal that his eyes rested. “It’s best to negotiate when everyone’s at the table.”

  9

  In long-distant days before the scourge of the Syndrome decimated the city’s population and overturned many of its historic divisions, the area now known as Sinkat Basin had been a dock for the pleasure boats of the wealthy. Decades of abandonment saw richly appointed vessels sink down to oblivion, steel rust into nothing, and once-stout wooden jetties crumble into jagged, rotting teeth that poked up out of increasingly stagnant water as the channel connecting the basin to the river silted up. The basin grew foul.

  Some of the first gillung prototypes were put to work restoring the channel and clearing and expanding those old berths, a practical demonstration of the uses to which the hardy new water-breathing subspecies could be put. When emancipation came in the form of the Declaration, London’s gillungs reclaimed the area as the fruits of their forebears’ uncompensated labor, and expanded the dredging and reclamation even further.

  Now gems and norms of every description mingled in a colorful, noisy flow of bright clothes and brighter hair: exploring the bridges and quays that crossed and knitted together this watery village, watching technology demonstrations and holographic displays, playing with interactive modules, investigating booths selling everything from food and drink to scarves made of whisper-thin algae silk and vivid thermo-sensitive biopolymer bodysuits, to waterproof tablets and cranial bands.

  A flurry of attention continued to follow Aryel as she strolled through the TideFair with Lapsa, but the media thicket had dissipated. Vessels came and went through the access channel to the Thames, maneuvering within the designated lanes. Markers hung in the water to indicate the safe depth for anyone needing to cross paths with boat traffic, but in the rest of the basin gillungs swam just below the sun-dappled surface, their movements swift and graceful, and endlessly fascinating to the visitors swarming topside.

  One of the most popular attractions was proving to be the TestDive, a ten-minute simulation of life in the gillungs’ world. It was part of a larger exhibit on the complex biology of their oxygen exchange system, with delicate gill tissue simulacra and detailed anatomical projections meant to reflect the “All Humans” theme in the current school curriculum. Eli thought it was a potent reminder of just how radical human gemtech had been, and of the irreversible legacy it had left behind.

  He and Callan had walked around to where the basin met the Thames, taking in the sights with an anonymity that would have been impossible had he been with Aryel. Like Gaela, Callan’s skin was pale and his hair glowed flame-red; unlike her, his eyes were untroubled by ultraviolet light, and he wore a fashionably flamboyant coat in radiant royal blue that had already made Gaela flinch when she’d greeted him earlier. Now they stood looking at the river, chatting and enjoying the sunshine for a few minutes before their lunchtime rendezvous with Aryel and Rhys.

  A seagull soared off one of the buoys marking the channel entrance, arrowing past them as they turned to go, shrieking as though offended. Glancing down at the water, Eli saw the flickering shape of a swimmer turn in from the river; no doubt that was what had startled the bird. It might have ignored a seal, but nothing in its evolution could have prepared it for a fully aquatic primate. He grunted in satisfaction.

  “Muttering to yourself,” said Callan, sauntering along with his hands in the pockets of the swirling coat and face tilted up to the sun, “might not be considered an entirely healthy sign.”

  “Sorry. Seagulls. Gillungs.”

  Callan burst into laughter. “That’s too cryptic even for me.”

  Eli grinned. “I was thinking how much they’ve changed our sense of what’s possible. Gillungs, not seagulls.”

  They paused, watching a portly visitor in drysuit and divemask climb awkwardly down a ladder into the water while he explained his theory. Callan watched in appreciation as the norm’s guide slipped in with barely a splash and stayed suspended in the water column, waiting for her charge to finish descending.

  “I see your point,” said Callan as he and Eli resumed walking. “It’s scaring them though, isn’t it? That’s what Rhys says. It was hard enough for norms to accept us into society; they didn’t bank on us changing it.” He gestured at the water. “Us—gillungs—you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean. And yes, there’s going to be resistance, and some of it will no doubt get nasty. But societies don’t run backward, Callan. There’s no way to unmake the last twelve, twenty, fifty years. The reality of gems—particularly gillungs—has transformed technology, literature, the arts, even the way we understand our own history. It’s almost like a new mythology, weaving its way through the entire culture, becoming indelible: no matter what happens next, that reality will always be there.”

  Not almost like a mythology, Eli thought; it’s exactly that. He had grasped at a metaphor and hit on a truth. He could feel the revelation zinging around in his mind as it gathered up, sorted, and reshaped his understanding. It made him want to laugh with the joy of discovery. He thought Callan must have noticed, but the younger man was leaning over the rail, calling out to someone below, “You all right, friend?”

  He was answered by coughing.

  Eli stopped and leaned over too. A gillung man was standing on a narrow slipway, still calf-deep in the water, leaning against the embankment and spluttering. Eli recognized the bodysuit: it was the man who’d swum in from the river just a few minutes before. He was bent over, still coughing, and splashing water onto his face.

  Callan had hurried to the head of the slipway and now he started down it. “What’s wrong?” he asked again. “Do you need help?”

  The man shook his head, blinking. Eli, at the top of the slipway himself now, did not recognize him; but then so many new gillungs had flooded in over the past few years as demand had grown for an estuary work force that it was no longer possible for everyone in the neighboring communities of the Squats and Sinkat, much less the sprawling new settlements in Limedog further downstream, to know everyone else.

  “I’m okay,” the man said, as Callan reached the water’s edge and stopped. He sounded as though he was from Eastern Europe, maybe somewhere around the Baltic. “Just couldn’t get my breath. Was weird.” He shook himself, but the shake threatened to turn into a shudder.

  “Maybe you’re coming down with something?” Eli suggested, thinking how odd it would be if that were true. Gillungs, even more than most gems, had astonishingly robust immune systems.

  “Don’t know.” He squinted at the water, as though the sunlight was hurting his eyes. “Everything went so strange. The river felt wrong.” He looked back at Callan and Eli, his gaze moving from Callan’s radiant hair to Eli’s graying, and decidedly nonglowing pate. “Is that what it’s like? When you’re ill?”

  “Could be,” Eli replied, registering that the question had been directed at him. “Depends what the illness is.”

  “My husband’s a doctor,” Callan said. “He should be here by now; he’s doing the afternoon shift at the medics’ station. We’ll take you there.” He was starting to shrug out of his coat. “Put this on. Stay warm.”

  “Hey, no, it’s okay,” said the man, “but thanks. It’s not so bad now, and I’m almost home.” He pointed to a decidedly unglamorous amphibious building a little way along from Thames Tidal. “I probably just need some rest.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Nice of you, though. Appreciate it.” He raised a webbed hand, stepping back down the slipway. “Name’s Tamin. Thanks, yeah?”

  “I’m Callan,” said Callan. “Don’t mention it.”

  “Eli,” said Eli. “Look after yourself.” They watched as he dived beneath the boat lane and was gone.

  Callan and Eli walked back to the booths through crowd
s lively with holiday spirit. The tide was advancing out in the estuary, and as the water level rose, infostream displays tracked the amount of power generated turbine by turbine, minute by minute, inch by inch. Friends called each other to look, or tapped up panels that took them through the physics of energy capture, or simply stood and stared as though hypnotized by the slowly morphing infographics.

  “It’s so clever,” Eli overheard a young woman say, her voice slightly awestruck. “All that energy from something that just happens anyway.” She was leaning in to her companion, hand in hand, and the adoration with which she looked at the other girl was such that he doubted that TTP’s telemetry was the sole source of her enchantment. But it was a sentiment he heard echoed again and again as they circled the basin.

  Callan wore a thoughtful smile. “It’s what you were saying,” he remarked. “This is transformative. Things may go well or they may go badly, but they can’t go back.”

  “Beautifully put. Can I steal that?”

  He chuckled. “Be my guest.”

  Rhys was waiting for them. Eli got a quick handclasp before Callan wrapped an arm around Rhys’s waist and kissed him, saying, “Hello, sweetheart. Very canny of you, volunteering for this.”

  “Wasn’t it? I knew it would get even a workaholic like you out of the house. Don’t even,” he added, as Callan affected a gasp of indignation.

  “Fair cop,” Callan conceded. “How long before you’re on duty?”

  “About an hour.”

  “We almost brought you a patient,” said Eli, and described the encounter with Tamin.

  “Strange. Is he coming in?”

  “He said he was feeling better; he went home to lie down.” Eli looked around. “Where’s Ari?”

  “Around the back, talking to Sharon. About you-know-who.” Callan’s jaw tightened, and Rhys slipped a comforting hand into his.

  “The boys are with Mikal?”

  “No, with Gaela and Eve over by the kids’ area. I haven’t seen Mikal. Sharon said he was talking to reporters a couple of hours ago, then she lost track of him.” Rhys’s nostrils flared slightly and he smiled. “Here they are.”

  Although Eli had had years to get used to Rhys’s ability to tell, by smell and hearing and other barely understood cues, exactly where everyone within ten yards of him was, it still sometimes took him by surprise. It was another second before Aryel Morningstar appeared under the tent, blinking away the sunlight. The rumble of conversation dropped as she threaded her way toward them. Sharon was a step or two behind, listening to messages with the tilted head and frown that they all recognized as Detective Superintendent Varsi in work mode.

  Aryel looked as serene as a mountain lake, though even he could not always tell when she was really untroubled or just putting on the right face for the occasion. Sharon, for all her unflappable professionalism, had never been any good at pretending. She growled something into her earset and came off looking cranky.

  “Don’t ask,” she said to their inquiring faces. “Police business. You don’t want to know. I don’t want to know.”

  “So leave it,” said Rhys. “It’ll be better after lunch.”

  “Thanks, but I really should reclaim my children. Maybe even find my husband while I’m at it.”

  “How come he’s not working the crowds and pressing the flesh?”

  “Because he’s the one being pressed and worked today. I got a message from somewhere in the bowels of Thames Tidal.”

  “Pilan.” Aryel sighed.

  “Not just Pilan.” Sharon’s smile was tight. “Apparently there are three different players, trying to back him into three different corners—it’s like some overwritten vid drama, with extra scheming.”

  Aryel’s eyes widened in surprise. “Three?”

  “Oh yes. I’ll let him tell you all about it. He’ll probably have some thoughts on our other looming challenge as well.”

  Sharon shook her head in disgust as Eli claimed a table and Rhys and Callan joined the line that Horace and Delial were briskly serving. “There’s a bit too much getting ready to go wrong for my taste. I prefer my crises to be spaced out.”

  “I wouldn’t call it that,” Aryel objected. “Just a number of suboptimal events—”

  “—possibly all occurring at the same time,” Eli offered.

  “My love, you’re not helping.”

  Sharon snorted. “I smell crisis, and so do you. Both of you. We’ve been here before.” She perused the list of offerings on the screen above Horace’s head. “They have fig cake? What the hell—get me some, would you, Rhys? I’ll take it for the boys. Most of it.” She sat down. “I could use five minutes off my feet. Gaela’s got the kids corralled in the play tent. She won’t mind.”

  Gaela was in fact outside the Child’s Play tent, leaning against the safety rail with her eyes half closed, breathing deep and slow. The riot of light and color, the spitting, sparkling whirligig dynamos and the strange subtle blur of radiation from the charged jellyfish batteries combined with the shouts and laughter of a dozen children at play, had brought her to the edge of a migraine and an accompanying bout of synesthesia. She’d left Lapsa, Agwé, and Jolay to keep an eye on the kids and stepped away from the sensory overload. If she used it early enough, the breathing technique had a good chance of turning aside a headache that would otherwise batter her for hours in wave after wave of garishly colored pain. She gave herself ten minutes, gazing at the water through slitted eyes as she slipped into the pattern that would help calm her misfiring synapses.

  So she did not notice the man in the pleasantly dull brown raincoat who paused and watched her keenly before he stepped beneath the canvas. He moved quickly, putting as many bodies between them as possible.

  When he emerged a couple of minutes later, she was straightening up and shaking back her hair as she worked through the last of the routine. Her body language was signaling an imminent return to the fray. The man dodged behind a clump of noisy teenagers camped on the quayside and cut in front of an elderly couple rambling arm in arm, moving with a swiftness at odds with the rest of the TideFair topsiders.

  By the time she turned around, he was gone.

  10

  The TideFair was barely over before the first reports began to come in.

  Gabriel knew that something was amiss the next morning when half the people who showed up to work at the Thames Tidal office were shivering and coughing and complaining of a strange, itchy ache in their lungs and gill tissue. Pilan, himself wrapped in a thick sweater and scowling with the effort to appear healthy, ordered them all to go home before they spread whatever it was even further, but by the afternoon many were arriving at the local hospital, aching and bewildered. By evening more than twenty gillungs had been admitted.

  The onstream reaction was predictable, but Gabriel had half a day’s head start. His monitor apps flagged the first, slightly quizzical socialstream posts commenting on the unusual phenomenon of gillungs seeking medical treatment. Those posts were quickly consolidated by newstream aggregators, and journalists began to file their own stories. By then he and Lapsa had conferred with Thames Tidal’s publicity service and with the hospital, and were ready with a statement. It confirmed that company members were among a number of gillungs who had suddenly fallen ill, and that the health services were working to establish the precise nature of the ailment. Those affected were in a serious but stable condition. Anyone with similar flu-like symptoms was urged to seek medical attention, especially if they had been at the TideFair.

  “Did it have to say that?” Agwé asked, sitting beside him in the big TTP project offices, watching as the reactions scrolled past. “It makes it look like we think whatever it is started here.”

  “We don’t know it didn’t, Ag. The TideFair is one thing everyone who’s sick has in common—maybe we had an infected visitor wandering around, coughing on people.” He shrugged. “There’s no point putting out a Thames Tidal press release if we’re going to pretend it doesn’t hav
e anything to do with us.”

  “I don’t remember anyone coughing on anyone. I don’t remember any coughing at all. And if that’s what happened, why aren’t any norms ill?” Agwé looked at him accusingly. “We’re not supposed to be the ones who get sick.”

  Gabriel made a face at her. She said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I know, but do me a favor and don’t say it like that onstream, okay? That’s why they’re getting so worked up.” He flapped his hand at the screen. “If there’s some bug that can make even gillungs ill, what’ll it do to the rest of us?”

  “Probably nothing, seeing it’s just us who are ill.”

  “So far, Ag. So far.”

  That fear was the focus of much of the stream commentary: there was sympathy for the sick and worry over what the sudden shortage of staff might mean for the power plant, but also bile from a vocal few who could barely contain their glee at the discovery of a weakness in the upstart water-breathers. Lacking concrete answers and cautious about trying to spin the story without them, Gabriel felt powerless to do much more than monitor the tide of opinion, which built as the day wound down, the news spread, and the numbers in the hospital increased. Vidcam crews gathered expectantly outside the Thames Tidal airlock, in the same spot where they had, the day before, assembled in the morning sunshine to salute the company’s ingenuity and ambition. This time they were bathed in artificial light and a palpable air of schadenfreude.

  Gabriel groaned and dropped his head into his hands.

  “What’s the point of all this?” asked Agwé rhetorically. “They already know everything we know.”

  “They’re not here for news. They’re here to ask questions they know we don’t have answers for in the hope that we’ll be pushed into saying something they can take out of context. I thought you knew about journalism.”