Slow River

by Nicola Griffith

“Does it matter?”

  No, not really. I already knew.

  When I got back to my flat, the air seemed stale and lifeless. There was no message from Ruth.

  I heated soup, glad of the machine sounds and the occasional soft pop as the liquid bubbled. I ate slowly.

  Once the bowl was empty and washed, I had to face the silent, empty flat.

  I could sleep, of course, but then what would I do in the morning? I sat in front of the screen, checked to make sure that a power hit had not wiped out any message that might have been left. I drummed my fingers on the desk, then pulled up my projects file.

  When I first left Spanner I had spent days at the keyboard, inputting all I could remember about the Kirghizi project, then triple-copied the file, and extrapolated from each: one was the perfect scenario, with no setbacks of any kind; one involved random minor difficulties—a failing of one of Marley’s bugs, the occasional breakage of the UV pipeline; the third was the catastrophe file—every breakdown, human, environmental, and mechanical, that I could envisage. It was the one I played with most. It usually reached the point of no return after about three months simulated time—two hours realtime. When that happened I wiped it back to the point where I had left it, nearly three years ago.

  Tonight, when I pulled up the digital image of the pipeline stretched like a blazing crystal snake across the desert, I knew that was not what I wanted to see.

  I changed the image to night, the perspective to the view a small nocturnal rodent might have from the desert floor. The ceramic support pylons and the vitrine troughs became huge, menacing. I darkened the sky to an eerie indigo-black, brought out the stars. Northern constellations burned like specks of magnesium. Better. I added cloud cover. The smeary, milky hint of a moon. I wondered what it would be like to sit out there, with the water overhead hissing endlessly. I wondered if a small rodent might mistake the hissing for the rasp of scale against sand, run terrified into the night from a snake that was not there. The whole world changed if you just altered your perspective a little.

  I shook my head. For all I knew, the pipelines could lie like a broken dinosaur skeleton, crashed onto the sand, dry as dust, the victim of some interethnic conflict or other.

  For the hundredth time I contemplated, then rejected, calling up information on the project from the net. There was always the possibility of someone smart—my family, or the kidnappers—having a trace out for that kind of inquiry. I had no doubt that they were still looking for me.

  I turned the screen off and went to the fridge. I pulled a beer free of the four-pack, then changed my mind and dragged the whole thing from the fridge.

  One of the reasons I had taken this flat was because the livingroom window opened outward onto the fire escape. From the fire escape, I could get to the roof. It was an old building, with a complicated roofline. There was one place, near the middle chimney stack—which had been blocked off years ago and served now to vent gas appliances—where the roofs rose in steep pitches on either side and I could lie on my back, face to the sky, hidden from the world. I had built six big planters up there, and filled them with dirt. One of these days I would get around to planting something in them.

  That was where I took my beer.

  Every city has a different-colored sky. In Amsterdam, the only city I had known until I was five, it had been gray-blue, a particular low-country Protestant shade that spoke of cheeses and oil paintings and grassy dikes. On Ratnapida it had been like light, clear glass. This city’s sky made me ache. It could have been so beautiful: full of reflected river light and that soft, clear ambience that you only get near a northern sea. But the city glow stained the atmosphere like a muddy footprint.

  I propped myself up by the chimney stack and opened the first can. The beer tasted cold and bitter, like the winter-morning frost I used to scrape from the old iron railings outside the family home in Amsterdam. The night was very clear. It was freezing up here. I shuddered, forced myself to drink down more frost and iron. Halfway down the can, I started to warm up.

  About five miles away I could see the twinkling night lights of the bridge—the largest single-span suspension bridge in the world. And the owners were still in debt, even thirty years after opening it to paying tragic. They always would be. There weren’t that many private cars anymore, and the local government had negotiated an annual fee for the slides that crossed and recrossed the river. The national government, of course, and ultimately the taxpayer were the big losers: the government had fronted the money, the contractors had spent it, and now the taxpayers were paying again, this time in local taxes for the slides.

  I crumpled my can, opened another.

  Corruption. It all stank of corruption. As did anything connected with any kind of government. There were layers upon layers upon layers. I thought about Kirghizia: the minister for labor and the commissar of the treasury whom I had wined and dined and eventually bought off. All so van de Oest Enterprises could make more money.

  But that wasn’t strictly true. It would also benefit the Kirghizians in the end, They would have clean water again. I sucked at the can. It was empty already. The third one was difficult to open. My hands were cold. I looked out at the bridge. Maybe the builders had told themselves that the local people would benefit in the end—after all, they would now be free to travel straight across the huge river instead of detouring fifty miles or more. But no one had asked the people. It had all been decided by those who met over white linen and Hashing crystal, who chatted over the wine and shook hands over coffee And took home hundreds, thousands, millions. And probably slept tranquilly every night.

  I remembered the woman, the city executive who had taken Spanner and me to her flat in her private car; the heat; the film; what we had done… Local government. She hadn’t been hurting for money. I wonder if she even knew how corrupt she was.

  Did I know how corrupt I was? What did “corrupt” mean, anyways? I had never set out to hurt anyone, but I was wearing the PIDA of a dead woman. Bird was now nothing more than a plume of greasy smoke easing up into the night sky and being torn apart by the wind. I wondered what Sal Bird, aged twenty-five, had been like. Whether she had loved or been loved. If she liked her food, or smoked. What her favorite films had been. Whether she shouted out loud when she came. I wondered if anyone had grieved for Sal Bird.

  I wondered if anyone had grieved for the man I had killed. I didn’t even know his name. And he had been kind to me, in his way. I remembered his eyes as he knew I was going to kill him. I pushed that thought away.

  I wondered if anyone grieved for me.

  So, was I corrupt? I had killed a man. I was hiding from my family and living a lie. And everyone I met shied away from me. Ruth. Now Magyar. Everyone except Spanner.

  When I was finishing the fourth can, I realized I was standing at the edge of the roof. My toes poked over the gutter. One more step. No more Sal Bird, aged twenty-five. No more fear about being found out; no more worries about dangerous people coming looking for me or Spanner; no more responsibility, feeling like I was the thin human wall between an unsuspecting city and an accident waiting to happen. It could all just stop. Here. Now. After all, Frances Lorien van de Oest had died a long time ago.

  Dawn was breaking.

  I stepped carefully back from the edge.

  Chapter 8

  Lore is eight. One afternoon she sits with Oster in his office, watching patiently while he scrolls through several resumes. Her parents are just starting the cycle of argument and recrimination that will end in divorce a dozen years later, but Lore does not yet know this. All she knows is that her mother has accused her father of being out of touch with the workings of the vast organization of which he is the titular head, and her father has decided to take an interest in one of the van de Oest company’s new ventures—the commercial production of fuel-grade ethanol.

  He is talking half to himself and half to Lore as he works. “Now, do I choose this woman, the gene splicer, or should I go w
ith James here, who performed so well on our Australian project?” Lore cranes over his shoulder, trying hard to understand exactly what her father is getting at. “Or maybe Carmen Torini?” He smiles at Lore then. “Stop peering from behind me like that. Get your own chair. Pull it up.”

  Lore does, feeling very grown-up at the sight of their two gray heads reflected side by side in the computer screen, like equals.

  He pulls up the three resumes. “Here we have three people who might do. This one is a researcher. They think in a certain way. They like elegance, theories. For this project we need someone different, someone who can smile and say, ‘Well, that didn’t work. Let’s try again.’ So then we come to James. He can make people work beyond themselves—look at what he did in Bulgaria last year when what we thought would be a simple bioremediation of a phenol spill turned so complicated.” Lore loves it that he does not turn to her and ask if she knows what phenol is, or what bioremediation means. He trusts her to ask, or to look it up later. “But they were all tried-and-tested techniques, Nothing new or innovative there.”

  Lore frowns. “But if what he did worked, why isn’t that good enough?”

  “You could ask your mother that.” He shakes his head. “Sorry.” He taps the screen. “It’s not so much what he did, it’s what he didn’t do. No brilliant shortcuts. No new high-efficiency methods. No record of him even contemplating anything not already done.”

  “Not everyone can think of new things.”

  “No, and there’s a place for good, steady people like James. Our business is built on them. But the reason we’re a leader, the reason we’re so rich, little one, is that your grandmother, and your great-great-uncle before her, did think of new things, and were smart enough to patent them.” He smiles gently. “And I was smart enough to marry your mother.”

  Lore says nothing to that. She senses that there is a great sadness in her.father, but she knows, somehow, that it is not something she can fix. She does not want to think about it. “Who’s Carmen?”

  He pulls up a picture of a woman of about thirty: black curls, brown eyes, a touch of arrogance. The picture shifts to the corner of the screen and three text boxes appeared. “She hasn’t been with us long. Joined up from EnSyTec four years ago. Started as a quality control manager. Moved up to assistant project manager. Then your mother chose her to head that project in Caracas.” He frowns. “Lots of innovation there.”

  Her father stares at the screen for a long time, Lore wonders what he is thinking about. He looks sad again.

  He switches the terminal off abruptly and turns to face Lore. “I’m not like your mother. She always has to be doing, always in control. That’s good, in its way, but it’s not my way.”

  Lore nods, wondering if he expects her to take sides. He sees her wariness.

  He ruffles her hair, laughs. “Don’t look so serious, little one. People are allowed to be different.” Lore wonders if her mother knows that. “Shall I tell you why this organization works so well without me? I understand good management. Some people would rather hire people less intelligent than themselves, thinking that in comparison they will look great. But that’s not the way it really works. The secret of good management is to appoint smart people to work for you. It makes you look good, and it means you don’t have to do so much work. Remember that.” Then he looks very sad and says in a low voice that Lore is not supposed to hear, “And if you’re as good at it as I am, you become redundant.”

  Lore is ten when the family moves. The company is not the same as the family, Lore’s father is fond of saying, and it is time they had a place where they can put down roots, where Tok and Greta and Katerine can come home from their various projects and rest; where Stella can join them if she chooses; where Oster himself can stop off on the way to and from meetings in Beijing and Singapore, and Lore can come during school holidays. Where they can learn to be a family again.

  Katerine leaves all the details to Oster. “Just make sure it’s finished-” She checks her schedule. “-by early March. I have a window then.”

  The Buccaneer Archipelago lies off the northern coast of Western Australia. Cicely Island, near the southern tip of the chain, is all black rock, lush tropical foliage, and white beach. Oster buys it, renames it Ratnapida, Island of Gems, and builds a house.

  Lore is the first to see it. Oster comes to her school in Auckland three days before the end of term. “I want you to see it fresh, as it’s supposed to be.” And though they fly from Auckland to Perth, then take a copter from Perth to Beagle Bay, Oster insists they travel the last ninety miles to Ratnapida, Island of Gems, by boat.

  “The key to this place is leisure. It has to be approached in the right spirit. You and I can appreciate that.”

  The boat is a two-masted yacht but the wind is in the wrong direction so the captain uses the silent magnetic water propulsion. The noise of the sea is eerie.

  It is mild for the subtropics, eighty degrees, and Oster wears shorts and a life jacket. They head northwest along the coast and the afternoon sun shines directly on his chest. The wiry gray body hair is almost golden in this light, and all of a sudden Lore knows what color his hair would be if his mother had not turned off her color-producing allele. She wonders idly what color hair her mother would have. One could often tell natural hair color from a person’s eyes… She has seen her mother with brown eyes and black, violet and deep blue, green and hazel, but realizes with a shock that she does not know their real color. She has no idea of the color of her mother’s eyes. She nearly asks her father, but does not: she is scared he might not know.

  The boat docks at a wood and stone quay in a bay that has been scooped out of the black, volcanic rock. The island ascends in tiers of path and step and miniature waterfall to the house. When Lore sees it she understands immediately that this is her father’s way of proclaiming who he is. His way of dyeing his hair. She also knows her mother will hate it.

  “It’s beautiful!”

  Oster smiles.

  It takes them more than an hour to climb to the house because Oster wants to show her every pond, every silent carp and lily, every arrangement of stone and water and hidden grotto. Lore follows him from pool to bench to bright bloom, laughs when a huge blue butterfly lifts from a purple flower by her feet. The gardens are very like him: playful, rich, and secret. Eventually they reach the top of the rise, where the secret places give way to formal grounds which give way to patio, then porch, then the house itself, almost as if there is no dividing line between inside and out.

  The house is based on Indonesian styles: polished wood, high ceilings and low, stone sculpture, water, cool rooms. The gates are old iron filigree, the doors imported from a recently demolished temple. Lore is walking through her third room of wood and screen and slowly moving ceiling fans when she realizes she has not seen a single net terminal.

  “Where are they?”

  “There aren’t any. Not in these rooms.” He leads her through to the south side of the house. The change is subtle but definite. The curves of polished wood become more angular, the ceilings brighter, the air more brisk. Huge windows open to a long, long lawn with an intricate, tiled area at the far end. “I tried to disguise it a little.” Lore looks more closely at the lawn, at the tiles, and notices the discreet gray stubs of sensors and sound controls. A copter pad. “When we’re in a hurry, we can fly out.”

  Neither of them mentions Lore’s mother.

  For the first few months, the house on Ratnapida seems to be doing the job Oster intends. He always makes sure he is at the house a few days before Lore arrives at the end of the school term from Auckland. Sometimes Uncle Willem and his husband Marley are there; sometimes they can only fly in for a day or two. Tok, now a tall, serious fourteen-year-old, comes home from his school in Amsterdam, and Greta flies in from the field. Stella, who seems more like seventeen than fourteen, is there at odd times; sometimes she is sent home from school in disgrace in the middle of term, sometimes she spends the holidays wi
th friends. Her hair is always a different color and her accent changes depending upon fashion.

  Lore sees more of her mother than ever before. Perhaps under pressure from Oster, perhaps due to some last vestige of maternal feeling, Katerine makes sure that if she is not already there when Lore arrives, she turns up within a day or two. And Lore, nearly eleven, is allowed to stay up long after dinner, sipping water while the others drink coffee and wine, talking of projects, and work, and new techniques. Her eyes glaze with fatigue long before the talk winds down, and more than once she wakes up in bed and knows that her father has carried her there after she has fallen asleep at the table. But every night she struggles to stay awake, to listen to her family talk, afraid that if she falls asleep she will miss the rare and wonderful feeling that her mother, her father, her stepsister and twins and uncles all love the same thing. For a while she can believe that there is nothing wrong, that she is safe and loved and protected by a family that is whole.

  One night, after dessert is just a trace of cream in her glass and the wine is gone and even Tok seems glazed and heavy-eyed, Willem pauses in the middle of filling his coffee cup and looks directly at Lore. “You’re almost eleven.”

  Lore is startled, unused to being noticed in the evening. “Day after tomorrow.”

  “And I haven’t got you a present yet. Is there anything special you want?”

  I want to be grown-up and then I’ll be safe. Safe from what, exactly, she does not know. That confuses her, so she seizes on the symbol of adulthood closest to hand. “I want some coffee.”

  Willem turns to Katerine and raises an eyebrow. “Not very ambitious.”

  Even at ten, Lore knows when she is being patronized, and one of her father’s favorite sayings pops into her head. “Sometimes the little things are harder to achieve than lofty goals.”

  Marley bursts out laughing. “Give her the coffee and just be thankful she didn’t ask for brandy.”

  Lore glances at her mother, who is smiling at Marley, and at Oster, who is smiling also, but shaking his head. “Sorry, little one,” he says, “I have a special surprise for you tomorrow for which you need to be up bright and early.”