Slow River

by Nicola Griffith

  “Paolo?” I said gently. “Paolo?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, stuffing rushes jerkily into a sack. He did not turn around.

  “I’ll talk to Magyar. She might be able to do something.”

  He whirled. “I said I’m fine.” Something about his pale, thin face reminded me of Tok. A muscle at the corner of his mouth jumped. His eyes were almost black with anger and humiliation.

  “I could-”

  “I don’t need a woman to fight my battles!” His voice was clotted and violent and I could not have been more surprised if he had hit me. We did not speak for the rest of the shift except when I monitored the viability of the microbes and gave him the figures to take to Hepple.

  “He’ll be sorry,” he swore. “You’ll all be sorry.”

  When I got home, it took me a long time to fall asleep. I dreamed of the loading yard at Hedon Road, of trucks screaming through puddles, trying to run me down.

  * * *

  Lore and Spanner came back from the Polar Bear and the windows of the shop under their flat were bright behind the shutters.

  “What do they sell there?” Lore asked, remembering the people coming and going that first night she had spent in Spanner’s flat.

  “Tired old porn. Want to see?”

  They went inside. The lighting was bright and cheerful, as were shelf after shelf of plastic products: purple silicon dildos, bright pink things that looked like modern abstract art and took Lore a moment to recognize as artificial vaginas. Several screens were running two-minute demo loops. Lore watched one. Spanner was right. The porn was old and tired, almost laughable. The characters moved jerkily and in several frames the skin color of the man’s body did not match his head. “I can do better than that.”

  “Yeah. Anyone who isn’t blind could probably do better than that.”

  “Does this stuff actually sell?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I want to see some more.”

  A woman with huge, meaty arms and several chins came out from behind the counter. “Then you have to pay for it.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Spanner. “No one would pay for this garbage.”

  “Lots of people do. You want it or not?”

  Spanner looked at Lore. “No.” The woman shook her head in disgust and lumbered back behind the counter.

  “Look at this one,” Lore said. Spanner glanced at it cursorily. “The sea in the bottom of the frame is a different color to that at the top. That’s just sloppiness.”

  “The people who watch these things aren’t looking at the sea.”

  “Maybe not, but it only takes a couple of minutes of programming to get the whole picture to mesh. I could do better than this with one hand tied behind my back.”

  Spanner peered at the screen. “He seems to be doing pretty well with both arms tied behind his back.”

  “And see that shadow on his thigh? Looks like it’s noon. But the sun’s setting.”

  Spanner looked. “I always wondered why these tapes seemed so odd.”

  “I was doing better work than this three years ago.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I’m serious. Let’s get out of here.”

  Later, in bed, Lore was just drifting off to sleep when Spanner spoke into the darkness. “What would you need to make those porn pictures?”

  “More equipment than we could afford.” Lore turned over, feeling sleep curling up along her backbone like a warm cat.

  “Tell me anyway.”

  * * *

  The next shift was even worse. Paolo was strung as tight as piano wire. Hepple appeared every forty minutes, asking about this or that, wasting our time, making everyone jumpy. My stomach began to ache. At one point, I thought Paolo was going to hit Hepple. At the break, someone turned the net volume up high, and what talk there was consisted of surly, one-syllable grunts. Everyone was tired and tense; I was almost glad to get back to work. I saw Magyar only once, two hours into the shift, and gave her a duplicate of the figures I was getting for Hepple. It made me feel better, somehow, that he wasn’t the only one with the information. She looked as though she had not slept at all the night before. We didn’t speak, but we nodded, like secret allies in enemy territory.

  An hour later Hepple told us he was raising the water temperature several degrees. “I’m trying to speed up the through time. Faster throughput means greater daily volume, which will up our market share. This plant isn’t working anywhere near full efficiency.” I wanted to bang his head against.the pipes. The only way to increase the throughput was to get a bigger work crew: keep the troughs clean and at peak efficiency. All the rise in ambient water temperature would achieve was a hotter work environment.

  Why was he doing this? I considered, briefly, the Health and Safety Council, but once they found a reason to be interested in an operation, they investigated everything and everyone connected to it. I could not afford that.

  I sweated in my skinny. The thick, humid air got thicker, more dificult to breathe. I felt trapped. The ache in my stomach reminded me of days with Spanner, unable to leave, unable to stay.

  Paolo wore his rage like a cloak. He stumbled often, and seemed to be moving more slowly. While I was taking yet another set of readings, Hepple came across him in the far trough, struggling to balance a floating tray of rushes that needed rooting.

  “Not there. Put them farther out, where they’ll do most good.”

  Farther out was where the rushes were already most dense. Paolo shoved the tray ahead of him, shouldering aside the rushes, getting scratched. He took one of the stems from the tray, bent, came up again with the root still in his hand. He pushed the tray back toward the edge of the trough.

  “Are you deliberately disobeying me, boy? I told you to plant these farther out.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t?” Couldn’t Hepple feel the rage and resentment burning behind Paolo’s blank expression?

  “The water’s too deep. I can’t reach.”

  “You mean, you’ll get your face wet if you try too hard.” Hepple smiled his soft-mouthed smile. “Get back out there and do it properly.”

  The tendons along Paolo’s neck writhed like snakes.

  “Well?” Hepple’s voice was dangerously pleasant.

  Paolo turned the tray around, pushed it back out. Hepple watched. I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “Sir!”

  He turned. “Yes?”

  “Sir, Health and Safety regulations state that at no time is an employee required to let contaminated water come into direct contact with his or her unprotected skin.”

  “Is that so?”

  I couldn’t afford to lose this job, but I couldn’t look at myself m the mirror if I stood by and let him do this to Paolo. “I just thought that for the good of the company you should be reminded, sir, in case something happened under your direct orders and Paolo decided to sue. Could be very damaging.”

  “It could, it could.” He did not seem very perturbed. “Thank you for pointing that out.” He turned back to Paolo. “Mr. Cruz, all of a sudden I find that you are physically unsuited to your task. We should never have hired you in the first place. People like you always bring trouble. You’re fired. You can work the rest of the shift, then collect your pay at the office.” He nodded at him pleasantly, then at me. “Thank you once again, Bird.” Just like that, too fast for me to even think about it. He walked off, humming to himself.

  Paolo’s face was the color of milky coffee gone cold in the cup. I didn’t know what to say. “Paolo, I’m sorry.”

  But Paolo wasn’t listening. He was staring out at nothing in particular, and trembling all over. He walked toward the side of the trough. His mouth was moving. He climbed out, walked right past me, muttering through stiff lips. I had to lean in to hear him. He was repeating what Hepple had said: “People like you. People like you…”

  “Paolo? Paolo, wait. Don’t l
eave. Just keep working here. I’ll get Magyar. We’ll sort it out. He can’t get away with this. He-”

  Paolo turned; his eyes were completely black. “Yes, he can. People like that can get away with anything when it concerns people like me.” His voice shook, and now there was a twisty bitterness mixed in with the anger. It scared me.

  “Just stay here. Don’t move.” I went straight to the monitoring station and called Magyar. “Hepple’s fired Paolo Cruz. No, nothing he’s done. You need to get here.” I was all ready to tell her I would talk to Kinnis and Cel and Meisener and all the others, that she would have a walkout on her hands if she didn’t come, but I didn’t need to.

  “That’s it, Bird. You tell Cruz not to budge. I’ll be right there.”

  Paolo was still standing near the trough, muttering. He did not seem to hear me when I called his name. I didn’t know what to do. I hesitated, then picked up some shears. At least I could keep an eye on him until Magyar got here. And I had my own work to do.

  “Bird!” Magyar was talking and striding past me at the same time. “Come with me. Cruz, you stay right there.” I don’t think he even heard her.

  I had to scramble out of the trough; she was not slowing down for anybody.

  We found Hepple in the floor office, a clear-paned box twenty feet up with a view of the whole primary sector. He was sitting down, making notes on a slate. Magyar slammed the door open and was talking before Hepple had the time to sit up straight. “You have no right to fire one of my workers. Misconduct, if any, should have been reported to me, and I would have made the correct decision. You had no right to go over my head.” I stood slightly behind Magyar, surrounded by reflections in the glass walls.

  Hepple and his reflection laid the slate aside, carefully, as though his conversation with Magyar would take only a minute and he did not want to lose his place. “He was insolent. We would have had to let him go anyway when we downsized the workforce.”

  Magyar was momentarily thrown. “Downsizing? When was that decided?”

  “This morning, I believe. So you see, it would have happened sooner or later.”

  “Wait. Just wait a minute. I thought you had grand designs to expand this plant, increase the throughput.”

  “I do, I do. But I persuaded the board that we don’t need as many people to achieve that goal.”

  Magyar shook her head like a dog worrying a rabbit and I watched her reflection’s hair shimmer back and forth. “This was the wrong way to do it. You tormented that boy. If nothing else, common decency should…”

  Common decency. The phrase rippled back and forth like the reflection of Magyar’s hair in the glass. She and Hepple were still talking, but I wasn’t listening anymore. Common decency… I finally remembered, finally realized what it was about Paolo and the way he moved that bothered me.

  All my fault…

  Guilt, mine, my family’s, stopped the breath in my lungs and pulled the muscles along my arms and legs rigid. But then fear—of him, for him, what he might do, all that bitterness—snapped me out of it.

  “Sorry,” I said jerkily to the air, and reached blindly for the door.

  Chapter 14

  Lore is fifteen. It is early March, and she is preparing to fly to Gdansk, where for the first time she will be assistant deputy project manager. An admin position, Katerine tells her, but a responsible one, nevertheless. Katerine will be taking charge personally.

  Lore is up late the night before they fly, running over last-minute plans—so that she knows what is going on, so she won’t embarrass herself in front of Katerine, or Katerine in front of others—when the phone rings.

  She accepts the call. “Tok!” He looks different, but at first Lore can’t pinpoint the change. Then she has it: his face has lost all trace of puppy fat. “How are you? It’s-”

  “I’ve been talking to Stella,” he interrupts. “It’s true. All of it.”

  “What-”

  But he talks right over her. “Watch yourself. You might be next.”

  Lore is glad to see him, glad to hear from him, but she remembers how he had fooled her for so many years. How he had never talked to her. How she felt betrayed when he left. And now he is being cryptic.

  “I haven’t had any idea where you’ve been the last year or so, and now you…” She remembers she is fifteen; grown enough to take her first official job for the company. “It’s late,” she says, then—unable to help herself—bursts out, “Do you have any idea how badly you’ve hurt Mother”

  Tok looks momentarily blank; then, incredibly, he laughs. “How much I’ve hurt her? Lore, look,” he shakes his head, “you don’t-”

  But the laugh and head shake are enough. She is grown now, no longer a child to be patronized, deceived; She cuts him off midsentence. She is tired, she tells herself. She has a lot of reading to do. When he is ready to apologize, he can call again.

  It is early spring in Poland. The remediation site is slippery with mud; small pockets of ice crackle under Lore’s boots when she takes samples for testing. The only wildlife she sees are worms, gray things that show a startling pink against the mud when a shovel cuts them accidentally in half.

  It is a short job, but the weather and the work are brutal. Tok does not call. Lore is so busy she hardly ever sees Katerine, except one night when she is idly flipping through the net and comes across her mother, giving an interview to one of the national channels. Katerine is smiling with that expert one-eye-on-the-camera-one-eye-on-the-interviewer stance Lore knows so well.

  “-efficient job at the old Gdansk shipyards,” the interviewer is saying. “How do you persuade your employees and team members to take on such difficult projects?”

  “It’s not hard,” she says. “I throw myself on their mercy. People love to be asked for help.” They actually like you better if you show some vulnerability, Lore remembers her saying at a party once, if you bare your throat and say please.

  Of course, Lore thinks. Everything Katerine does is for a reason.

  It is April by the time everyone is satisfied the bacteria are doing their job and Katerine decides it is time to leave the shipyards in someone else’s hands.

  “It’s autumn in Auckland,” her mother says. “It’ll soon be winter. I think we deserve a few days in the heat, don’t you?”

  They book themselves into a hotel in Belmopan, Belize. It is hot in the two weeks before the rainy season. Lore drives out alone to the beach every day to dive the reef, the second-largest barrier reef in the world, and the most beautiful. She tries not to think about Tok while she glides through the cool water with the blue tang and banded butterfly fish, through the aqua and rose of the coral. She rents a jeep and drives through the interior, stopping sometimes to film chechem and banak tree, sapodilla and blood-red Heliconia. There are leaves here the size of canoe paddles, and beetles as long as her thumb. All around her she can feel life—creeping, crawling, running, leaping from branch to branch.

  The nights are warm and soft, black skies streaked with bright city light, laughter, and the scent of honeysuckle and cold cocktails.

  Lore is in the shower when her phone rings. She ignores it. It rings again. She climbs out of the shower. It is her mother. “Turn on the news,” Katerine says. “They’re announcing the verdict on the Caracas class-action suit.” The screen clicks off. Caracas… Lore, undecided, finds a news channel, but then turns the volume up high and gets back in the shower, only half listening.

  “… great disappointment this afternoon in Caracas… Michel Aguilar, chief attorney for the plaintiffs, said earlier that this was a blow to all those who expected justice to ignore matters of privilege and influence…”

  Lore hums to herself as she soaps her legs.

  “… Carmen Torini, former head of the project in Caracas that…”

  At the sound of the familiar name, Lore turns off the shower and pads into the living room. Carmen Torini, surrounded by reporters and looking older than when Lore first saw her on Oster’s scr
een, is talking to the camera. “And we think it is an absolutely fair settlement. The van de Oest company has always maintained that it scrupulously obeyed the law and all guidelines of the federal government of Venezuela. We are not to blame for the terrible tragedy of twenty years ago. The project undertaken here, the bioremediation of groundwater contaminated by careless contractors in the past, should have proved faultless. It would have proved faultless if not for the greed of the government-supervised subcontractors. If greed had not motivated the substitution of the correct bacteria there would not have been the release of mutagenic toxins into the water table…”

  Lore, still watching, punches in her mother’s code. The news shrinks to a box in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. “When did you find out?”

  “A few minutes ago. The judge just called.”

  “And our liability?”

  Katerine laughs. Her eyes, green today, sparkle. “None. None whatsoever. We’ll help, of course—that’s only good PR—but at least we won’t be suffering variations on this damn lawsuit for the next three generations.” She punches the air in triumph. “See you in the bar.”

  Lore expands the news box. Now a mestizo woman is talking. She looks upset. “… got nothing! ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘it’s not our fault.’ Then whose fault is it? The government can’t afford to help. Look, this is my daughter…” She pulls a flat from her pocket, the camera zooms in. It is a picture of a limbless child, grinning. “She’s dead now. My only child. And thousands of others ruined because someone thought they could make some money. Because…” She seems to catch sight of something offscreen “Because of you!” She points and the camera pans wildly, picking up Carmen Torini, still talking to reporters. The reporters, sensing drama, part and let the two women confront each other. One, plump and weeping, beside herself with rage; one slim, well-dressed, patient.

  “You’re all so greedy! For the sake of making more money-”

  “It was not our fault. If our design specification had been followed to the letter, this would not-”