Nicola Griffith - Slow River

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Magyar open her mouth and then close it. I knew how she felt. Microadjustments were a waste of everyone’s time. All of the strains used at Hedon Road were premium, genetically tailored van de Oest varieties, which bred true and, given the correct substrate and feeds, kept to a steady and reliable rate of growth. The automatic systems were finely tuned. Unless influent changes were sudden and massive, the system was capable of correcting itself.

In the overhead arc lights I caught the glint of sweat on Hepple’s lip. He was worried about something. Worried people are not always rational. Best to acquiesce. “Sir.”

“Good. Good.”

I wondered why he felt he had to repeat everything. I was uneasy now. Insecure people could be dangerous.

He must have misinterpreted my expression. “If you can’t keep up with the monitoring, then draft someone to help.” He looked around vaguely, alighting on Paolo, who had just climbed from the trough with an armful of cut bulrushes. “You there! Yes, you. What do you think you’re doing?”

Paolo, who was doing nothing wrong, stopped, uncertain.

I stepped between them. “He’s new here, sir. I’ve—”

“Don’t you have things to do, Bird?”

Magyar caught my eye, shook her head very slightly, then pointed to herself: Protecting Paolo is my job. She could probably do it better. I obediently turned back to the bank of readouts, but I listened hard, and kept them in my peripheral vision.

“As Bird says, sir, Paolo here is new, though he seems to be an excellent—”

“Yes, yes. Look, Cherry, I’m sure you have pressing duties elsewhere.”

Magyar could do nothing but bow to the inevitable. Hepple turned to Paolo, and smiled. Paolo waited.

“Now, Paolo, is it? Yes, well, as you’ve no doubt heard, Bird here will be conducting hourly test sequences on our bugs. The results of those tests, and the monitoring numbers, will come directly to me instead of Magyar. And I want you to bring them to me. Personally. Every hour. No matter where I am, or what you might be doing.”

That was ridiculous.

“Of course,” Hepple went on, “this does not give you any excuse to slack off in your other duties. Is that clear?”

Paolo nodded, expressionless.

“When I ask you a question, I expect an answer. Once again, is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.” His voice was thin and tight with anger. I moved around the instrument displays so I could see them both.

“Good, good.” Hepple slapped Paolo on the shoulder, pleased with himself now that he had found someone to bully. I don’t think he noticed the muscles bunch along Paolo’s jaw. “Now, I want you to take me through your little part in our operation. Don’t leave anything out.”

There was no sign of Magyar. I wondered if she was somewhere grinding her teeth.

Eventually, Hepple got bored and left Paolo alone to pick up the pile of rushes he had had to abandon. I walked up behind him. The support strap that stretched between his shoulder blades was vibrating slightly, and I could smell his stress sweat. I wanted to lay a hand on his thin back, but did not.

“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.