Nicola Griffith - Slow River

“But—”

“No, it’s not good enough. Lock the door behind me and watch.”

Lore, mystified as usual by Greta and her ways, does so. Twenty seconds later, the lock clicks back and the door swings open. Lore is suddenly terrified. She doesn’t care that it is Greta who went out of the door, she is sure it is the monster coming back in. She runs to the bed intending to climb under it, forgetting that it is a futon and not her own, high bed in Amsterdam. The door closes again and Lore opens her mouth to scream.

“It’s just me,” Greta says. But she seems distracted. “We’re going to do something about that lock.” And she sits down on the futon right there and starts contacting people on her slate. “There. Now let’s go eat breakfast.”

They are the only ones at breakfast and though the maid drops Greta’s croissant, Greta does not seem to notice. Lore nibbles at her own food and watches her sister surreptitiously over the rim of her juice glass. Where does she go all the time? she wonders. Wherever it is, it does not seem very pleasant.

The locksmith arrives only forty minutes later, and the three of them troop upstairs, again in silence. Greta simply points at the door and the locksmith nods.

It takes five minutes. Lore watches, fascinated, as the old lock is removed with something that looks like a cooking spatula, and a creamy ceramic square with a glossy black face replaces it. Lore thinks he has finished until he fishes a second from his pocket and fits it over the door and jamb on the hinge side. He doesn’t look Venezuelan. When the locksmith is finished, he pulls out a white key remote the size of a rabbit’s foot. He presses a button, and the black face turns to deep blue. “All yours.” He starts to hand the key to Greta but she nods in Lore’s direction and he gives it to her instead. He leaves.

“It’s a special lock system,” Greta says. “No one, and I mean no one, will ever be able to get through that lock. And because there are two, they can’t just take the door off its hinges, or knock it down They’d have to cut a hole through the middle. And the monster can’t do that.”

Lore looks down at the fat white key in her hand and wonders about monsters in the Netherlands.

“You can remove the locks and take them with you, wherever you go. I’ll download all the operating instructions to your slate later. You’d better choose the code when I’m gone. Anything you like. You can even make them different for each side. And you can use algorithms to make sure it’s never the same twice.” She taps the key in Lore’s hand. “Don’t lose that.”

After she goes, Lore sits on her bed, turning the locks on and off, listening to them thunk competently open and closed;

Greta leaves again the next day, and Lore develops a habit of reaching into her pocket to check she has her key whenever she is nervous.

I was surprised when Magyar somehow managed to get hold of a combination of handheld and portable PDs. She piled them up on the gangway and called the section, some twenty-odd men and women, together.

“You already know that the computer’s down. It’s going to stay down for at least a day. Systems want to dump the whole program, plus backups, to make sure there aren’t any other viruses. Meanwhile, these are handheld detectors. I’ll want readings every half hour—”

“There won’t be time!” a red-haired man called. He worked two troughs down from me. He was flexing his right arm, over and over, testing his new neoprene and webbing elbow support, making it creak. His name was Kinnis.

“Shut up and let me finish. And try to keep still while I’m talking to you.” The creaking noise stopped. “I’m not asking you to read every single trough every half hour—I only want readings from one trough per person. But make sure it’s the same trough, and make sure it’s from the middle. We want an idea of changes, got that? Good. Questions?”

“How long are we going to be doing this?”

“As long as it takes. Systems say they can’t guarantee they’ll have everything clean and back up in less than three days, but you know how much they overcompensate. It might only take a day. There again, it might not.”

“But how do these things work?” Kinnis asked, looking dubiously at the pile of equipment.

“Ask Bird. She seems to be an expert.” They all turned to look at me. I felt my blanket of anonymity evaporating, but it was my own fault. I managed to nod. What did Magyar suspect? Next time I would keep my mouth shut.

A big, rawboned woman called Cel looked at her waterproof watch, and said in a Jamaican accent, “We’ve another six hours of the shift to go tonight.”

“Yes,” agreed Magyar, “and those holding tanks have to be pumped out as well, so let’s not waste any more of it, shall we?” She strode off, leaving the workers to look at each other, then back to me.

I shrugged, picked up one of the smaller handheld PDs. “This is a photoionization device. It’s calibrated in parts per billion The bigger ones there, the portables, are in parts per trillion. They’re heavy, so maybe we can take it in turns.”

“I don’t mind heavy,” Kinnis said.

“You wouldn’t,” Cel said. “What do they measure?”

“Volatile organics. Totals only, I’m afraid.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad.” Kinnis picked up a portable, hefted it. “Easy.” He frowned, turning it around, looking at the case. “There’s no jack. How do you input the readings to Magyar’s master board?”

“You don’t. They’re old. The readings will have to be input manually.” They looked at me in disgust, as though it were my fault. “I know.” The job was hard enough without the extra work. I hesitated. I was no longer anonymous; I might as well be liked. “Look, seeing as I’m already familiar with these things, why don’t I come round the first time or two and collect your readings? It’ll save you some time.”

Cel looked at me suspiciously, as though trying to figure out what possible advantage I could gain from this. Then she nodded reluctantly.

I spent the next hour trotting from trough to trough, collecting readouts. Once I had everything, I saw we had a problem. The source of the problem was obvious. The solution wasn’t. If I called Magyar and explained, she would have even more reason to suspect me. Would Sal Bird have been able to work out what was going on—and if she had, would she have cared? I didn’t know. But if I ignored it, the whole system would gradually fall out of sync, and that could lead to danger for other workers in other sections.

I called Magyar. “Can you come down here?”

“I’m in a meeting with Hepple, Bird. Can it wait?”

I leaned against the readout console, trying to rest my legs a little. “Not for too long.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” She was. “This better be good.”

I handed her the record slate. “Take a look.”

Magyar glanced over them, frowned. “Lower than I expected.” Her skin stretched tight over high cheekbones when she narrowed her eyes. “How come you’re checking up on them?”

What would Sal Bird say? “I just thought it would save time if I went and collected the data, rather than everyone coming to the control center, one after another.” And it meant someone was on top of the subtle changes, minute to minute. Someone had to be. The dangers here were real. I thought about Hepple happily releasing our stream into the mains and what could have happened if there’d been a spill while Magyar had been debating whether or not to close down for a few minutes.

Magyar moved her shoulders, easing tension. “You think there’s something wrong with the PDs?”