Slow River,
by Nicola Griffith

ONE
At the heart of the city was a river. At four in the morning its cold, deep scent seeped through deserted streets and settled in the shadows between warehouses. I walked carefully, unwilling to disturb the quiet. The smell of the river thickened as I headed deeper into the warehouse district, the Old Town, where the street names changed: Dagger Lane, Silver Street, The Land of Green Ginger; the fifteenth century still echoing through the beginnings of the twenty-first.
Then there were no more buildings, no more alleys, only the river, sliding slow and wide under a bare sky. I stepped cautiously into the open, like a small mammal leaving the shelter of the trees for the exposed bank.
Rivers were the source of civilization, the scenes of all beginnings and endings in ancient times. Babies were carried to the banks to be washed, bodies were laid on biers and floated away. Births and deaths were usually communal affairs, but I was here alone.
I sat on the massive wharf timbers - black with age and slick with algae - and let my fingers trail in the water.
In the last two or three months I had come here often, usually after twilight, when the tourists no longer posed by ancient bale chains and the striped awnings of lunchtime bistros were furled for the night. At
dusk the river was sleek and implacable, a black so deep it was almost purple. I watched it in silence. It had seen Romans, Vikings, and medieval kings. When I sat beside it, it didn't matter that I was alone.
We sat companionably, the river and I, and watched the stars turn overhead.
I could see the stars because I had got into the habit of lifting the grating set discreetly in the pavement and cracking open the dark blue box that controlled the street lighting. It pleased me to turn on the deliberately old-fashioned wrought-iron lamps whose rich, orangy light pooled on the cobbles and turned
six centuries of brutal history into a cozy fireside tale; So few people strolled this way at night that it was usually a couple of days, sometimes as many as ten, before the malfunction was reported, and another week or so before it was fixed. Then I left the lights on for some random length of time before killing them again. The High Street, the city workers had begun to whisper, was haunted.
And perhaps it was. Perhaps I was a ghost. There were those who thought I was dead, and my identity, when I had one, was constructed of that most modern of ectoplasms: electrons and photons that flitted silently across the data nets of the world.
The hand I had dipped in the river was drying. It itched. I rubbed the web between my thumb and forefinger, the scar there. Tomorrow, if all went well, if Ruth would help me one last time, a tadpole-sized implant would be placed under the scar. And I would become someone else. Again. Only this time I
hoped it would be permanent. Next time I dipped my hand in the river it would be as someone legitimate, reborn three years after arriving naked and nameless in the city.
~~~The first thing she thought when she woke naked on the cobbDlesonw'tasr:oll onto your back.
She lay very still and tried to concentrate on the cold stones under hip and cheek, on the strange taste in her mouth.
Drugs, they had given her drugs to make her stop struggling, after she had... Don't think about it.
She could not afford to remember now. She would think about it later, when she was safe. The memory of what had happened shrank safely back into a tight bubble.
She raised her head, felt the great, open slash across her trapezoid muscles pull and stretch. Nausea forced her to breathe shallowly for a moment, but then she lifted her head again and looked about: night, in some strange city. And it was cold.
She was curled in a fetal position around some rubbish on a silent, cobbled street. More like an alley. Somewhere at the edge of her peripheral vision the colors of a newstank flashed silently.
She closed her eyes again, trying to tLhoinrke.. My name is LoreA.
wind was blowing now, and
paper, a news printout, flapped in her face. She pushed it away, then changed her mind and pulled it to her. Paper, she had read, had insulating qualities.
The odd, metallic taste in her mouth was fading, and her head cleared a little. She had to find somewhere to hide. And she had to get warm. Rain fell on her lip and she licked it off automatically, feeling confused. Why should she hide? Surely there were people who would love her and care for her, tend her gently and clean her wounds, if she just let them know where she wHasi.deB, ustaid the voice from her crocodile
brain,Hide!, and her muscles jumped and sweat started on her Ranks, and the slick gray memory like a balloon in her head swelled and threatened to burst.
She crawled toward the newstank because its lurid colors, the series of news pictures flashing over and over in its endless cycle, imitated life. She sat on the road in the rain in the middle of the night, naked, an bathed in the colors as if they were filtered sunlight, warm and safe.
It took her a while to realize what she was seeing: herself. Herself sitting naked on a chair, blindfolded, begging her family to please, please pay what her kidnappers wanted.
The pictures were like a can opener, ripping open the bubble in her head, drenching her with images: the kidnap, the humiliation, the camera filming it all. "So your family will see we're serious," he had said. Day after day of it. An eighteenth birthday spent huddled naked in a tent in the middle of a room, with nothing but a plastic slop bucket for company. And here it was, in color: her naked and weeping, a man ranting
at the camera, demanding more money. Her tied to a chair, begging for food. Begging...
And the whole world had seen this. The whole world had seen her naked, physically and mentally, while
they ate their breakfast or took the passenger slide to work. Or maybe drinking coffee at home they had been caught by the cleverly put-together images and decided, What the hell, may as well pay to
download the whole story. And she remembered her kidnappers, one who had always smelled of frying fish, half leading, half carrying her out into the barnyard because she was supposed to be dopey with the drugs she had palmed, the other one rolling new transparent plasthene out on the floor of the open van. She remembered the smell of rain on the farm implements rusting by a wall, and the panic. The panic as she thoughtT, his is it. They're going to kill mAen.d the absolute determination to fight one last time, the
way the metallic blanket had felt as it slid off her shoulders, how she pushed the man by her side, dropped the cold, thin spike of metal into her palm and turned. Remembered the look on his face as his
eyes met hers, as khneew she was going to kill him, asknsehwe
she was going to shove the sharp metal
into his throat, and she did. She remembered the tight gurgle as he fell, pulling her with him, crashing into a pile of metal. The ancient plough blade opening her own back from shoulder to lumbar vertebrae. The shouting of the other man as he jumped from the van, stumbling on the cobbles, pulling her up, checking the man on the ground, shouting, "You killed him you stupid bitch, you killed him!" The way her body would not work, would not obey her urge to run; how he pushed her roughly into the van and slammed the doors. And her blood, dripping on the plasthene sheet; thiOnkhi,ngs,o that's what it's for.
Remembered him telling the van where to go, the blood on his hands. The way he cursed her for a fool: hadn't she known they were letting her go? But she hadn't. She thought they were going to kill her. And then the sad look, the way he shook his head and said: Sorry, but you've forced me to do this and at least you won't feel any pain... And the panic again; scrabbling blindly at the handle behind her; the door falling open. She remembered beginning the slow tumble backward, the simultaneous flooding sting of the nasal drug that should have been fatal...
But she was alive. Alive enough to sit in the rain, skin stained with pictures of herself, and remember everything.
A taxi hummed past.
She did not call out, but she was not sure if that was because she was too weak, or because she was afraid. The taxi driver might recognize her. He would know what they had done to her. He would have seen it. Everyone would have seen it. They would look at her and know. She could not call her family. They had all seen her suffer, too. Every time they looked at her they would see the pictures, and she would see them seeing it, and she would wonder why they had not paid her ransom.
Her hair was plastered to her head. The rain sheeted down. She crawled into a doorway, realized she was whimpering. She had to be quiet, she had to hide. She had to lose herself. Think. What would give her away? She pulled herself up to her knees and tried to look at her reflection in the shop window, but the rain made it impossible. She scrabbled around in the corners of the doorway until the dirt there turned to mud on her wet hands. She smeared the mud onto her hair. After thirty days, the nanomechs coloring
her head and body hair would be dying off and the natural gray would be showing. Only the very few, the very rich wore naturally gray hair. What else? Her Personal Identity, DNA and Account insert. But when
she held out her left hand to the fiickers of light flashing in the doorway she saw the angry red scar on the webbing between her thumb and index finger. Of course - the kidnappers would have removed the
PIDA on the first day to prevent a trace.
She was alone, hurt, and moneyless. She needed help but was afraid to find it.
It was almost dawn before she heard footsteps. She peered around the doorway. A woman, with dark blond hair tucked into the collar of a big coat, walking with a night step: easy, but wary. One hand in her pocket.
"Help me."
Her voice was just a whisper and Lore thought the woman had not heard, but she slowed, then stopped. "Come out where I can see you." The kind of voice Lore had never heard before: light and quick and probably dangerous.
"Help me." It came out sounding like a command, and Lore heard for the first time the rounded plumminess of her own voice, and knew that she would have to learn to change it.
This time the woman heard, and turned toward the doorway. "Why, what's wrong with you?" The hand shifted in its pocket, and Lore wondered if the woman had a weapon of some kind. "Stand up so I can see you."
"I can't." Trying to imitate the slippery street vowels.
"Then I'll just walk along home." She sounded as though she meant it. "No." Lore tried again. "Please. I need your help."
The woman in the long coat seemed suddenly to shrug off her caution. "Let's have a look at you, then."
When she stepped closer to the doorway and saw Lore's muddy hair and nakedness, she grinned. "You need to get rid of the boyfriend or girlfriend that did this to you." But when the light fell on Lore's bloody back, the woman's tace tightened into old lines, and her eyes flashed yellow and wise in the sodium light. She fished something out of her coat pocket, slid it inside her shirt, and took off her coat. She held it out. "This might hurt your back, but it'll keep you warm until I can get you home."
Lore pulled herself up the metal and glass corner of the doorway, and stood. The woman caught her arm as she nearly fell.
"Hurt?"
"No." It was numb now.
"It will." That sounded as though it came from experience. "It's too cold to stand around. Just put this on and walk."
Lore took the coat. It was heavy, old wool. The lining was dark silk, still warm. "It smells of summer," and there were tears in her eyes as she remembered the smells of sunshine on bruised grass, a long, long time before this nightmare began.
"Put it on." The woman sounded impatient. She was glancing about: quick flicks of her head this way and that. Her hair, free of the coat collar now, swung from side to side.
Lore struggled with the coat. She flinched when the warm silk touched her back, but all she felt was a kind of stretched numbness like the opening of a vast tunnel. "My name..." Shock made her dizzy and vague. "Who..."
"Spanner." Spanner was scanning the street again. It was noticeably lighter. Another taxi skimmed by.
"Fasten the damn thing up. And hurry."
On that first night it seemed to Lore to be miles and miles from the city center to Spanner's flat. She learned later that it was barely a mile and a half. It was not that she had a hard time moving - on the contrary, she seemed to skim along the pavement without effort - it was more that the journey stretched endlessly and the false dawn blended with the sodium streetlamps to form a light like wet orange sherbet that always seemed just a moment away from fizzing, boiling off, leaving no oxygen. Lore knew she was ill. She remembered the blood, hers and his, the sharp tpilcakstiacs it dripped onto the plasthene.
She had a vague impression of a shop window and railings, and then stone steps. The stairwell was made of unfinished brick. The mortar looked old. Spanner must have opened the door then, because she found herself inside.
Spanner did not turn on any lights; it was bright enough with the streetlights washing in through unshuttered windows. Lore swayed in the middle of an enormous L-shaped room. Several power points glowed at one end, like red eyes.
"You need to sleep," Spanner said, "not talk. Here's some water. Some painkillers." Her voice sounded different in her own room, and she seemed to appear and disappear, reappearing with things - a glass, some pills; showing Lore the bathroom. It was like watching a jerky, badly edited film. "Here's the mat." A judo mat, by the west wall, under the windows opposite the curtained opening to the short limb of the
L, the bedroom. "I'll turn up the heat. You won't be able to bear anything on that back for a while. I don think we can do much about it tonight. Looks like it's scabbing over. I'll get a medic for you in the morning, and we'll talk then."
Lore knew she must be saying things, responding in some way she assumed reassured Spanner, but she was not aware of it. Spanner touched a pad of buttons on the wall. "I've set the alarm. If you need anything, or want to leave, wake me."
Then Spanner went into the bedroom and closed the curtain behind her.
Lore was alone. Alone in a room filled with shadows of furniture she had never seen before, things that belonged to a woman she did not know, in a city that was strange to her. Alone. A nobody with nothing, not even clothes. It was like being kidnapped again, but this time she had no escape to dream of,
nowhere to run to. Her sister had killed herself. Her father was a monster who had lied to her, year after year after year.
She stood in the middle of the room, aware of the strange smells and temperature, and knew clearly that she needed this woman Spanner; depended upon her, in a way that was shocking. Lore's fear was sharp, undeniable as a knife pressed against her cheek. It woke her up a little from her dreamy shock state. She was thirsty.
The bathroom was enormous, its window bare; It was too dark outside to see much, but she thought there were perhaps walls, and the remains of a path. She did not want to put the light on, but she could make out a yellowing, old-fashioned tub and huge, cracked black and white tiles. The water ran from the bulbous taps under low pressure, twisting like crossed fingers. She let it pour over her fingers
automatically, tasted with the tip of her tongue. Salty. Ions: probably chloride and fluoride and bromide ... and suddenly she was crying.
Her fingers turned cold under the tap as she wept. She would have to drink this water that wheezed out from old lead pipes, would have to accept what she was given from now on, and she would have to like
it.
When she had finished crying, she splashed her face with water and dried herself with a towel -

Spanner's water, Spanner's towel- and went back into the living room.

In the street twenty feet below, a freight slide rumbled to a stop but everything else was quiet. She looked down at the judo mat and imagined trying to sleep on it, facedown, back toward the closed curtains of Spanner's bedroom. Horribly vulnerable.
The judo mat probably weighed less than twenty pounds but it was awkward to handle. In the end she had to drag it behind her like a travois. Several things fell as she barged fifteen feet over to the east wall. She lay on her stomach facing the shadows. The freighter moved off again. She counted to two hundred and fifty-one before another passed. In the silence, she heard the creak of a tree limb rubbing up against the bricks of the outside wall.
As the streetlights faded and the sun came up, the red eyes glowed less insistently and the shadows before her shifted. An electronics workbench, she thought, and tools...
Lore dozed on and off until around ten in the morning, when the noise of passenger slides and people passing by on the street filled the room with a bright hum, There was no sound from the bedroom.
The living room was big, twenty by twenty-five at least. The centerpiece of the shorter south wall was an elaborate fireplace, cold and empty now. A variety of leafy green plants stood on the hearth and on a low tin-topped table nearby. There were some books, but not many. A rug. Then the couch and coffee.
table, all well used, not exactly clean. The carpet was rucked up where she had dragged the mat over it last night in the dark. Squares of bright sunlight pointed up the wear in its red and blue pattern. The tree outside cast shadows of branches and shivering leaves over the wall behind her. From this angle, all she could see of it was the glint of low morning sun through leaves already beginning to turn orange and red, but the leaves looked big and raggedy, like hands. Maybe a chestnut. She lay under its shadow and tried to imagine she was at Ratnapida, lying on the grass. The birdsong was all wrong.
A large proportion of the room at the north end was taken by two tables and a workbench, all covered with screens, data-retrieval banks, a keyboard and headset, input panel, and what looked like some kind
of radio and several haphazard chipstacks, all connected together by a maze of cable. She could not figure out what it was all for.
In what Lore would come to realize was a pattern, Spanner woke up around midday. She went straight from bed to the connecting bathroom, and about twenty minutes later emerged into the living room via the kitchen door, carrying two white mugs of some aromatic tea. The silk robe she wore had seen better
days, and in the daylight her hair was the color of antique brass. "Jasmine," she said as she held out a mug.
Lore reached for the tea. The red scar between her thumb and forefinger showed up clearly against the white ceramic. Moving hurt. Spanner nodded to herself. "I called the medic. He's on his way. And don't worry. He won't report this. Or you."
Lore felt as though she should say something, but she had no idea what. She sipped at the tea, trying to ignore the pain.
"I know who you are," Spanner said softly. "You were all over the net." Lore said nothing. "I don't
understand why you're not screaming for Mummy and Daddy." "I'll never go back."
"Why?"
Lore stayed silent. She needed Spanner, but she did not have to give her more ammunition. Spanner shrugged. "If that's the way you want it. Can you get any money from them?"
"No." Lore hoped that sounded as final as she felt.
"Then I don't see how you're going to repay me. For the medic. For the care you look like you're going to need for a while. Do you have any skills?"
YesL, ore wanted to say, but then she saw once again the red scar on the hand wrapped around her teacup. How would she get a job designing remediation systems, how would she prove her experience, without an identity? "My identity..."
"That's another question. You want to get a copy of your old PIDA?"
"No." The pain was hot and round and tight. The infection must be spreading. Again, she thought of his blood mingling with hers.
"Then you'll need a new one. That costs, too. And what do you want me to call you? I can't go around calling you Frances Lorien van de Oest."
"Lore. Call me Lore."
"Well, Lore, if you want my help then you'll have to pay for it. You'll have to work for me." "Legally?"
Spanner laughed. "No. Not even remotely. But I've never been caught, and what I do is low down on the police list - victimless crime. Or nearly so."
The only "victimless" crimes Lore could think of were prostitution and personal drug use. Spanner stood up, went to her workbench, brought back a slate. "Here. Take a look."
Lore, moving her arms slowly and carefully, turned it over, switched it on. Wrote on it, queried it, turned it off. She handed it back. "It's an ordinary slate."
"Exactly. A slate stuffed with information. What do you use your slate for?"
Lore thought about it. "Making memos. Sending messages. Net codes and addresses. Ordering specialty merchandise. Appointments. Receiving messages. Keeping a balance of accounts..." She began to see where this was leading. "But it's all protected by my security code."
"That's what most people think. But it's not difficult to break it. It just takes time and a good program. Nothing glamorous. This one ..."
Spanner smiled. "Well, let's see."
She sat down at her bench, connected the slate to a couple of jacks, flipped some switches.."Can you see from down there?" Lore nodded. On a readout facing Spanner numbers began to flicker faster than Lore could read them.
"Depending on the complexity of the code, it takes anywhere from half a minute to an hour." Lore watched, mesmerized. "I've yet to come across one that-" The numbers stopped. "Ah; An easy one." She touched another button and the red FEED light on the slate lit up. "It's downloading everything: account numbers, the net numbers of people called in the last few months, name, address, occupation, DNA
codes of the owner ... everything." She was smiling to herself. "What do you use it for?"
"Depends. Some slates are useless to us. We just ransom them back to their owners for a modest fee. No one gets hurt. Often we couch things in terms of a reward for the finder. No police involvement. Nothing to worry about."
"And other times?"
Someone banged on the door, two short, two long taps.
"That's the medic." But Spanner did not get up to let him in. "Better make up your mind." "What?"
"Do you want to work with me or not? Even if I don't let him in, there'll be a small fee for call-out, nothing you couldn't repay when you're able. But if he comes in here and works on you, then you'll owe me."
The medic banged on the door again, faster this time. "Sounds like he's getting impatient."
Lore had no clothes and no ID; she doubted she could stand. "I'll do it." Spanner went to the door.
The medic was not what Lore had expected. He was middle-aged, well dressed and very gentle. And fast. He ran a scanner down her back. "Some infection, It'll need cleaning." He pulled out a wand-sized subcutaneous injector.
"No," Lore said. "I'm allergic." "Patches, too?"
She nodded. He sighed. "Well, that's an inconvenience."
He rummaged in his bag. Lore heard a light hiss, felt a cool mist on her back, tasted a faint antiseptic tang. The pain disappeared in a vast numbness. She knew he was swabbing out her wound but all she felt
was a vague tugging. "Clean enough for now."
This time he took a roll of some white material from his bag. She shuddered, remembering the plasthene. He paused a moment, then unwrapped a couple of feet and cut it. It glinted. Some kind of metallic threads.
"What's that?"
"You've never seen this before?" Spanner asked.
Lore shook her head. The numbness was wearing off. "Here."
Spanner passed her a hand mirror. "Watch. It's interesting."
The medic, who did not seem to resent being cast as entertainment, was smearing the edges of her wound with a cold jelly and carefully laying the light material over it.
Then he unwrapped a few feet of electrical wire, attached it with crocodile clips to the material. "What-"
"Stretch as much as you can." "It hurts.
"Do the best you can. When this sets, it sets." She did.
He plugged in the wires. Lore felt a quick, tingling shock around her wound, and the gauzy material leapt up from her back and formed a flexible, rigid cage over the gash, still attached to her skin where the medic had applied the cold jelly. He put away the roll and the wires, took something else out of his bag. She watched him carefully in the mirror. He held it up.
"Plaskin."
This time the spray was throatier, lasted longer. When he was done, the raised white material, the jelly, and a two-inch strip of skin around the wound were all that pinkish bandage color that marketers called "flesh." She looked as though she had a fat pink snake lying diagonally along her spine. He tapped it experimentally, nodded in satisfaction. "You won't be able to lie down on it or lean against it, but you should be able to wear clothes in an hour or two, and the wound can breathe. For the next ten days bathe as normal. The plaskin will protect it. I'll come back to take it off, make sure everything's all right."
He put two vials of pills on the floor by her face. "This is all I have for now in the way of antibiotics and antivirals in pill form." She could feel the drying plaskin begin to tug at the healthy skin on her back. "Is
the pain very bad?"
"Yes."
He knelt and Lore felt a cold wipe, then, the sliding pinch of a needle in the muscle at her shoulder. She could feel the drug spreading under her skin, like butter. He stood and said to Spanner, "This cream is for when the plas comes off. It'll need rubbing into the scar three times a day to keep it supple. I don't have any painkillers at all in pill form."
"I've used needles before."
Lore wondered how Spanner knew about needles, but it did not seem to worry the medic. He pulled out his slate. "What name do you want to use?" He looked from one to the other.
"Lore Smith," Spanner said.
He scribbled. "This prescription is for the drug and disposable needles." He looked up. "Which pharmacy - the Shu chain do?" Spanner nodded, and he pressed the SEND button, tucked the slate
back in his pocket. "They'll keep it on file for seven days; after that it's invalid. Keep the dosage down if you can. And don't give it to her more than every six hours."
Lore did not like being discussed as though she were not there, but the painkiller was coating her face with ice and her brain with cobwebs. She lay in a daze as they moved off toward the door, still talking. He seemed unsurprised by her injury. She wondered what kinds of trauma he was used to dealing with, and how people usually got the kind of hurts that they did not want disclosing. Knife wounds, gunshots...
She fell asleep, woke up to swallow the two pills Spanner held out; a needle, in her buttock this time. She slept again. When she woke properly it was dark and she was covered with a soft quilt. She breathed quietly. Where the cloth touched the plaskin covering her wound, it did not hurt. She smiled at that. Such a simple thing, to not hurt.
Spanner was working at her bench, sharp halogen light pooling in front of her. She reached out, took a data slate from the pile in the shadow, hooked it up to a small gray, box, read something from the screen, laid it aside, took another slate.
Lore watched her for a while. This woman knew all about her: her name, age, family. If she cared to check, she could get information on education, hobbies, friends. Yet Lore knew nothing about her, did not even know if she had had any school, if she had ever been hurt, ever seen a medic under her real
name. If she even had a real name. Some people, she knew, were illegitimate from birth - the fact of their existence not recorded anywhere. But that line of thought was too frightening. She yawned loudly.
Spanner swung round in her chair. "I was beginning to wonder if I'd given you too many pills. How do you feel?"
"Thirsty. And I need some clothes."
"Both easily fixed." She stood up and disappeared into the shadow. Red power points glowed from the dark. She brought back an old, soft shirt, some underwear, trousers. No shoes, Lore noticed, but then she doubted she would be going anywhere for a while.
"We're about the same size, I think." Spanner went into the kitchen.
Lore sat up, sucked her cheeks in at the pain but made no noise. She pulled on the clothes.
Spanner brought back water and coffee. She set Lore's by the judo mat, took her own back to the bench.
Lore watched her awhile.
Spanner turned partway back toward her, impatient now. "What?" Her face glowed oddly in the white halogen and red power indicators. Like one of those late-sixties paintings that looked like a vase and then turned out to be two faces, Lore thought. She shook her head. Probably the drugs.
"If stealing from slates is so easy, then don't you worry someone will do the same to yours?"
Spanner made a hating sound, halfway between amusement and cynicism. "I don't often carry one. Or a phone."
The only time Lore had not carried a slate was on the grounds at Ratnapida. Even then, it had made her feel naked: unable to reach or be reached. Also untraceable. Probably what Spanner liked. "But when
you do," she persisted.
"Then I use this." She slid open a drawer and pulled out an ordinary-looking slate. "It's almost empty. I clean it every time I get back here. Take a look." She extended her hand. Lore had to drag herself up from her mat.
She looked it over, spotted the metal and ceramic protuberance immediately. "What's this?" "A lock."
"But you said any code could-"
"It's not a code. It's an old-fashioned insert-key-and-turn lock. No one knows how they work anymore. Safe as the most modern encryption. For most people."
"Most?"
"Hyn and Zimmer are so old that they remember some things. And they've taught them to me. But that's all beside the point. This lock is like my tracking device. If someone is sharp enough, but dumb enough,
to steal a slate that belongs to me, I'll want to know who they are. After they've tried to puzzle out this monster, they'll assume - wrongly, of course - that there must be some fabulous secrets on here, so sooner or later they'll start asking around for anyone who knows anything about locks. And I'll track
them down. And then we'll ha elittle chat."
Lore looked at the bump of metal and ceramic on the plastic slate. A little chat. She thought of the medic who patched up ragged wounds without comment.
~~~When it got too cold by the river I walked to the city mortuary and leaned against the wall, just outside the circle of heavy, yellowish-orange street light, and waited for Ruth. Dawn was well enough along to turn the lights into unpleasant turmeric stains on the pavement by the time Ruth stepped through the gates. I was shocked at how tired she looked.
"You look as though you could do with some coffee."
"No. I just want to get home."
Her voice was listless. She handed me a thin box.
"Her name and details are in there, too. She's a bit old but otherwise she's a very good match. From
Immingham. Anyway, it's the best I could do."
It was a small box. I rattled it dubiously. "Everything's there?"
Ruth nodded. "Though it's not a full set of fingers. The corpse was missing thumb and index from her right hand, but then I remembered you were left-handed, so it shouldn't matter too much."
She hesitated. "Lore, this has to be the last time."
I understood, of course. Between us, Spanner and I had done some pretty low things. Some of them to
Ruth. I tucked the box into an inside pocket. "How have you been?"
"We're managing. I go back on days soon. I'll be glad when I've finished with nights. I feel as though I
haven't seen Ellen for weeks. She's just leaving as I get home."
I envied them even that. "When you're back on the day shift it would be nice if you both came over for an evening."
"If you like." Ruth was too tired to hide her indifference. She turned to go.
"Ruth..." Maybe it was something in my voice, but Ruth stopped. "I mean it. I'd really like you to come. Just to talk. No favors. That other thing, the film. It's not... it won't..." I took a deep breath. "Things are different now. I'm not with Spanner anymore."
For the first time since she had walked out of the morgue gates, Ruth looked at me, really looked at me. I don't know what she saw, but she nodded. "We'll come. I'll call you."
At the river-taxi wharf, it was too early for the usual tourist hubbub so I took my coffee to a private corner table. The sun was coming up behind me, slicking the black-paned privacy windows and newly pointed brickwork of renovated dockside buildings bloody orange, like overripe fruit. Copters buzzed
and alighted like wasps.
I slid open the box and took out the neatly printed flimsy.
Bird, Sal. Female. Caucasian. Blood type A positive. .D.. OTBwenty-five. Four years older than me. It could have been worse. And all the other details could be fixed. In time.
The tiny black PIDA was in a sealed bag with a note attached in Ruth's haAnldrwearidtiyngs.terile.
Next to it was a plaskin pouch the size of a pink cocFkrozcehn. blood for DNA testsI.t did not feel cold. I slid the box open further, wondering if Ruth had forgotten the print molds, and then smiled.
"Bless you, Ruth." Inside, instead of the print molds I had expected, there were eight glistening plaskin finger gloves. Ready to wear. I could get started today. If Spanner would help.
Spanner never got up until after noon. I went home and slept for four hours. I had bad dreams: sweating
bodies, moving limbs, blood and plasthene. I woke up just before midday and stared at the angle of green-painted rafters over my bed. The room was long and narrow: bed at one end, under the rafter; matting in the middle, underneath the heavy old couch and spindly card table; larger table with gouged veneer at the other end, under the wide window. A ficus tree in a pot by the table. Beyond, sky.
I had to walk through the tiny kitchenette to get to the bathroom. I almost banged my head on the rafter over the tub. As usual, I felt dislocated. It was odd, to wake up alone and nameless.
Not for much longer.
It was midafternoon by the time I got out to look for Spanner.
Springbank, the road that had once groaned under a thousand rubber tires a minute, was now bobbled with gray vehicle ID sensors and laced with silvery slider rails that glistened like snail tracks in the late September sunshine. It was the first day in two weeks I had not had to wear a coat. Foot traffic was heavy, and sliders hissed to a stop at almost every pole to pick up or drop off passengers. The occasional smaller, private car hummed and dodged impatiently around the tubelike sliders.
The building, old and massive, was built of sandstone. The sign over the entrance was a picture of a polar bear. Inside, it was the same as all bars.
Spanner was there. I threaded my way through the smell of stale beer and newly washed floors toward the fall of dark gold hair, and slid onto the stool next to her.
Spanner lifted her head. We looked at each other a moment. It was strange to not touch. "It's been a while."
"Yes," It felt like a year, or an hour. It had been just over four months. I beckoned the bartender and nodded at the glass Spanner nursed between her hands. "A beer and..."
"Tonic for me."
There had to be a reason she wasn't drinking. People changed, but not that much. I tried to keep the tone light. "Waiting for anyone in particular?"
"Just sitting."
She knew I knew she was lying, but I had gone past the stage of being angry, of facing her with it. It w
Spanner's life, Spanner's body.
In here, the bright sunshine was filtered by old beveled glass and well-polished mahogany to a rich, dim glow, but it was enough to see the glitter in Spanner's eyes, the way she kept glancing up at the mirror behind the bar to see who came in the door. Her skin looked bad and she had lost weight. I paid for the drinks.
She sipped at hers. "How have you been?" She sounded as though she did not really care about the answer.
"Well enough." I hesitated. "Spanner, I've found some work, a job I might take. I need your help." She finally dragged her attention away from the mirror and looked at me. "What happened to all your
noble ideas about an honest living?" There was no mistaking the edge of contempt in her voice.
I had not expected this to be easy. "This is the last time. I want a new ID, a permanent one. I want to work, get an honest job."
"Ah. You need my dishonest help so you can make an honest living."
I looked at Spanner's face, at the hard, grooved lines by mouth and eyes that belonged to all those who had lived on their wits too long, and wanted to take her face between my hands, wanted to make her
face her own reflection and shoLuot,ok, look at yourself! Do you blame me for wanting to earn my

living in a way that's not dangerous? In a way that no one will ever be able to use to make me fee ashamed? But it had never done any good before.

"I've found a PIDA that might make a match. I need help with it." "Well, as you always said, I'll do anything for money."
"Spanner..." Even though I had tried to prepare for this, the pain of reopening old wounds was sharp and bright. I took a deep breath. "What's your price?"
"Let me think about it awhile."
We both knew what she would ask, eventually. "Fine, you do that, but I need the preliminary work completed now, within the next couple of days."
Spanner glanced in the mirror again, then at her wrist. She was getting nervous.
"I have an interview today," I pressed. "I should be starting work tomorrow, or the day after." "Fine, fine. Come by the flat tomorrow." Her attention was beginning to drift.
I sighed and stood. "Your flat, then, tomorrow." But she wasn't listening anymore.
When I reached the street door, a couple were just coming in. They were laughing, wore expensive clothes, good jewelry. I glanced back. Spanner was rising to meet them.
Outside, adjusting to the bright afternoon after the dim warmth of the bar, I hesitated. Those two were trouble. Maybe Spanner was too desperate for what they were offering to notice the casual hardness of their faces, the way their eyes had flickered automatically over the room looking for exits, checking for weapons.
I waited outside for nearly ten minutes before I realized I could do nothing to help. I left reluctantly, wondering why - after all she had done - I still cared.
TWO
Lore is five. Tok and Stella, the twins, are nine. They have been playing in the fountain in an Amsterdam neighbor's gardens. Lore has tried to catch the upspouting water in her mouth.
Tok is shouting at her. "Don't you want to know what it is that you're drinking?"
"It's water," she says, puzzled. "How do you know it's clean?" "But it's always clean."
"This is clean," he says, "but it isn't everywhere." Lore hardly listens at first. His eyes are bright and fierce, an almost turquoise blue, like the sky first thing in the morning when the day will be burning hot. Like the eyes of their father, Oster, when he is excited. But then Tok pulls up facts and figures on water contamination incidents over the last thirty years and Lore listens in horror. "All it takes is one sip of some of this stuff, Lore, and then when you're grown up, or as old as me, it's leukemia, which means your
blood goes yucky, or renal failure, that's when your kidneys rot and don't work anymore..." She is frightened, but refuses to cry. Stella would mock her for weeks. "Does it hurt?"
"Of course it hurts!"
Lore does not go back to play in the fountain and that night she has nightmares of drinking swamp water full of dead rats, and she never forgets to test the water again. Even in the water- and air-filtered
surrounds of the family holdings. Even on trips to luxury resorts in Belize and Australia. Even bottled
water, because all it takes is one chemical spill in the groundwater table and the eau de source can be full of benzene - there and gone again in the blink of an eye, missed by the randoNmevteerstitnagk.e

anything for granted,her mother often says, and Lore never does. None of the family ever do. It is the company motto when Lore's great-uncle patents the hundreds of genetically engineered micro-organisms

that now are indispensable in the world's attempt to clean up its own mess. It is what prompts the ever-careful van de Oests to guarantee future monopoly and profit by making sure their patented, proprietary bugs need their patented, proprietary bug nutrients. NAenvder take anything for granted prompts them to use the first gouts of cash to corner a piece of the nanomechanical remediation technology market, a corner that grows steadily for the next fifteen years.
THREE
The Hedon Road wastewater-treatment plant was on the east side of the river, the part of the city that grew during the Victorian era. The buildings were big and ugly: limestone, and sandstone partially eaten away by the corrosives in industrial soot.
I turned up at seven in the evening, and after a few perfunctory questions about name, age, and experience, the flunky showed me into a tiled locker room. He handed me a skinnysuit. "Get changed while I pull your record for Hepple."
"But I've only come here for an interview."
"You want the job, you talk to Hepple. You want to talk to Hepple, you wear this."
He left with a shrug that indicated he did not care, one way or the other. At least I didn't have to worry about the records. Sal Bird's employment history was good enough for this job.
It was an hour after the change of shift and the room was empty, though from somewhere down a corridor I heard the beating slush of a shower. I wondered if they used water from the mains, or siphoned off their own effluent I smelled chlorine. The mains, then.
I stripped to my underwear, then sat on the wooden bench and pulled the skinny from its package. I was expecting cheap government issue and was pleasantly surprised by the slick gray plasthene. It was about
a millimeter and a half thick - well within the necessary tolerances - and the seams were well made. I stepped into it, spent a couple of minutes wriggling my toes to get them in the right place, then hauled it over my hips and up to my shoulders. The smell of new plasthene on my skin reminded me of the sheet in the van, of dreams of blood and suffocation.
There was no easy way to skinny into these suits. You just had to squirm until everything was in the right place. I flexed my plasthene-covered hands, checked to make sure the roughed patches were at the tips
of my fingers and thumbs. There were seals above the wrist for those jobs that needed the extra protection of gauntlets. I did a couple of deep knee bends to see if the neck seal would choke me.
It had been a while since I'd worn one of these, and then it had been specially made. I was surprised at how well this one fit.
No one had said anything about a locker so I settled for folding my street clothes into a neat pile on the bench. They were probably not worth stealing, and I had not brought a slate or a phone extension. They couldn't trace you from what you didn't carry. Old habits learned from Spanner.
A man wearing a tailored gray cliptogether over his skinny entered through the door marked EXECUTIVE PERSONNEL ONLY. His face was young and bland. A pair of dark goggles hung loose around his neck and his name tag JrOeaHdNE HEPPLE. He checked his hand slate. "Ms. Bird? Sal
Bird?"
I stood. "Yes."
He looked me over. "Well, you know how to put on a suit, at least. I'm the acting shift supervisor." He handed me a magnetized name tag. "You must wear this at all times. It's also a miniature GC."
I slapped it onto the magnet over my left breast. Sal Bird, age twenty-five, with two years' experience at the waste-water depot of Immingham Petroleum Refinery would know that a GC was a gas
chromatograph, and what it was for. Johne Hepple, though, was taking no chances.
"It'll let you know if the atmosphere is contaminated to dangerous levels by changing color." "Industry standard?"
Hepple looked confused for a moment, then adjusted his expression to one of superior amusement. "Superior to standard, as is all the equipment used here."
I nodded politely but mentally rolled my eyes. For now I'd just have to assume it used the standard color system, but if I got the job I'd make sure I asked another worker. If there was any kind of leak, I wante to know exactly what I would be dealing with.
Hepple talked as we toured the plant. "The six city stations process more than twenty million gallons of household wastewater per day. The Hedon Road plant is the biggest, at between four and four and a half mgd."
"Just household?"
He gave me a long look. "Of course."
I nodded, trying to look satisfied. I just hoped that his reticence came from a feeling of superiority and not from ignorance. Household wastewater was anything but. It also included the runoff from storm
drains. Which were prime sites for both deliberate dumping by waste-generating companies - large and small - and accidental spillage. Even if there was a spill in Dane Forest, forty miles from here, the contaminated water would find its way through underground aquifers to the city system. And those spills could be anything. Literally anything. I was glad that plants like these always had a large, specifically designed overcapacity. With people like Hepple in charge, we'd need it.
We climbed onto a catwalk over a hangarlike area where huge plastic troughs lined with gravel stretched into the distance. Bulrushes rocked and swayed in the water below. The air was snaky with aromatics
and aliphatics. The workers below were not wearing masks but I said nothing. Sal Bird would not.
"This is the initial treatment phase where influent goes through simulated tidal marshes. The influent point itself is at the far end, housed in the concrete bunker." He pointed, but then we got off the catwalk in the opposite direction and went through an access corridor. It was noticeably warmer. "We have eighty
parallel treatment trains here, and an impressive record. The Water Authority mandates less than thirty parts per million total suspended solids; we average eight. The biological oxygen demand needs only be reduced to twelve ppm, but even with extremely polluted influent, our effluent rarely tests out at over seven."
I had learned at age twelve, from my uncle Willem, that in a properly run plant the average BOD should never be higher than two ppm, but I didn't say anything. Hepple hadn't mentioned heavy metals or any of the volatile organic compounds, either, and I wondered what the plant's record was like on those.
We walked among enormous translucent vats filled with swimming fish and floating duckweed. Pipes ran everywhere: transparent and opaque, plastic and metallic, finger-thin and bigger around than a human
torso. I could feel the vibration of larger pipes running under our feet.
"The fish graze on this weed," he said, "and if we have overgrowth we can harvest for animal feed. Further on we grow the lilies that are the real commercial backbone. But nothing, nothing at all, is wasted." He came to an abrupt halt.
"According to your employment file you've worked at the Immingham Petroleum Refinery. What was your speciality?"
"Continuous emission monitoring," I said, knowing full well that in this solar aquatics and bioremediation waste-water plant there was no such job.
"You'll be assigned something suitable, of course, but whatever your role, the one thing to bear in mind is that this plant - the four and a half million gallons coming in, the thirty-five million gallons on the premises, and the four and a half million going out - is one giant homeostatic system." He waited for me to nod. Probably wondered if I knew what homeostatic meant. "The more polluted the influent the more plants
we grow and the more fish we harvest, but the effluent is always the same: clean, clean, clean. The only way this can be achieved is through attention to detail. As you're used to a monitoring post, we might start you off in TOC analysis."
I asked, because Sal Bird would have. "What's TOC?" "Total organic carbon analysis. Of the influent."
At the initial stage, where none of the workers wore masks. One of the dirty jobs.
We stepped through what looked like an airlock into another closed corridor. Hepple fussed with the seals and we started walking again.
"It's not for you to worry about what a given reading may mean, but you'd better know what the parameters of any substrate are, and know what to do if they rise above or fall below that level. When you're assigned, your section supervisor will give you more precise details."
We stopped at another air-sealed door. Hepple opened a panel in the corridor wall and took out a pair of dark goggles for me. He pulled up his own pair. "Goggles must be worn in the tertiary sector at all times."
With his eyes covered, his mouth seemed plump and soft.
"Even though you will not be assigned to the tertiary sector immediately, the possession of eye protection is mandatory."
He ticked something off his chart. "The cost of those will come out of your first wage credit." It seemed I had the job. I pulled on the goggles.
Hepple opened the door. The light was blinding: huge are lights hung from a metal latticework near the glass roof; bank after bank of full-spectrum spots shone from upright partitions between vats. It was incredibly hot and the air was full of the hiss of aerators and mixers and the rich aroma of green growing things. I had forgotten how much a person sweated in a skinny.
"This is where the heavy metals are taken out by the moss."
I watched as a man and a woman lifted a sieved tray out of a vat and scraped off the greenery. "It's recycled, of course."
A woman carrying a heavy-looking tray of tiny snails walked toward us. I started to move aside to let her pass, but Hepple pretended not to notice and the woman had to detour. A little tin god, lording it over his tiny domain. He wouldn't have lasted more than a day on one of my projects.
"Zoo-plankton and snails do a lot of cleaning up at this stage, along with the algae, of course." women and men moved back and forth, harvesting zoo-plankton; checking nitrogen levels; monitoring fecal coliforms. Hard and busy work in the tertiary sector, but not dangerous.
We climbed up to a moving walkway that ran twenty feet above the floor. As we moved farther downstream and the water became progressively more clean, the heat lessened, as did the light, and the smell got better.
"Our main sources of income at this stage are the bass and trout, and the lilies." As we glided past the hydroponic growth, the smell of flowers was almost overpowering. "We're planning to convert to thirty percent bald cypress next month."
That was ambitious, but I said nothing.
"Ah, here we are." We stepped down from the walkway. It was a plain white room, full of thick pipes.
One had a spigot. I recognized a pressure reduction setup. Hepple pulled a paper cup from a stack and held it under the spigot, turned the tap. The cup filled with clear water. He drank some. "Here, taste it. Cleaner than what comes out of your tap at home. Pure. And that's our effluent."
I sipped, to show I was willing.
He slapped a pipe. "This is it. From here the water is no longer our responsibility."
He seemed to expect some admiring questions. "Where does it go from here? Out to sea?"
"Not so long ago, it did. And then we realized we had a practically foolproof system and started simply piping it back to the watertable." I nodded. Standard practice.
"Now, though, even that's not necessary."
I couldn't quite believe what I was hearing. "The water goes straight back into the mains?"
He looked amused. "Certainly. We avoid all that unnecessary transport of water, cut out the waste of time and energy and worker hours. Productivity has gone up twenty-three percent."
I tried not to look as horrified as I felt. My half sister, Greta - a lot older than me - had told me, "Lore there's no system on earth that's foolproof. One mistake with a waste-water plant and without that vital
break in the cycle, you could have PCBs and lead and DDT running free in our water system. No matter how many redundancies there are, no matter how many backups, things go wrong."
Hepple, obviously, had never heard that bit of wisdom. There wasn't even a last-line human observer here in the release room. One major spillage upstream at the same time as a computer failure here and there would be thousands of immediate deaths due to central nervous system toxicity, followed twenty years later by hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from various cancers. The implications were dizzying.
He looked at his wrist. "Time's getting on." He stared abstractedly into space a moment. "We're shorthanded in three sections this month but I think, with your experience ... I imagine the Immingham plant gave you some ideas of nitrification and denitrification processes?"
I tried to work out how much Sal Bird would understand of this conversation. "You mean the tidal marshes?"
"Just temporarily, of course." That translateJdustot until you're no longer at the bottom of the heap. Shit work. "The salary is scale, Grade Two, with an additional percentage for the unsocial hours. You'll be paid monthly, in arrears. Questions?"
I was just glad I still had a lump of money left. How did other people manage without pay for a month? "Good. I'm sure you'll enjoy working with Cherry Magyar, your section supervisor. You should find her
understanding. She's new at her job, too. I promoted her myself, just two weeks ago."
We did not shake hands. No welcome-aboard speech. He just nodded, told me to get myself assigned a locker for the skinny and goggles, and to report back at 6 P.M. sharp tomorrow.
It was cool outside. I walked the mile and a half back to my fifth-floor flat, trying to sort out how I felt
about starting a job as a menial in a plant I could have run in my sleep.
I didn't expect to get much sleep tonight. That direct mains release setup would give me nightmares.
~~~While her back healed, Lore's days passed in a haze of drugs and conversations at odd times of the day or night. Spanner would disappear some evenings and not return until the following afternoon. On the mornings she was alone, Lore had nothing to do but watch the window.
There was always the tree, of course. Even when she could not see it, she could hear it. The leaves hung down like dead things now, and when people walked past, she heard their feet crunching on those that
had already fallen. She spent hours watching the sun travel across the warm sandstone of the building opposite. When she got well enough, she sat up against the window. When the sun was at just the right angle, she could see where layers of sandstone had been blasted away to cleanse it of the soot: acid, black effluvium from generations of factories, coal-burning fires and, later, combustion engines. The sandstone shone a deep, buttery yellow early in the morning, bleaching to lemon and then bone as the light increased. She guessed at the shape of the building she lived in by the shadow it cast, on the one opposite.
She listened to the morning chorus of sparrows and the evening calls of thrushes as people came and went in algal tides. She liked to drowse while the pigeons on the window sill cooed and whirred their wings. The sill was white with their excrement. She wondered what they found to eat in the city. Once, waking from a thick, Technicolor afternoon dream, she found a squirrel on the cable outside, watching
her. She could see the muscles and tendons of its haunches as it gripped the thick cable with tiny claws. It had eyes like apple pips, hard and opaque. Then it ran off, tail twitching.
But the window could not keep her occupied all the time, and then Lore would wonder if the man, the kidnapper she knew only as Fishface, had really died, if the police were still looking for her. Perhaps the other one, Crablegs, had confessed, or been found. Maybe Tok had already denounced Oster.
Once she tried to access the net, to check back on the news, see if any bodies had been discovered, what the police were doing about finding her, but she was locked out. The keyboard was dead, and voice commands resulted in nothing but a flat, still screen. She did not mention her attempt to Spanner. She wasn't ready. Not yet. She began to wonder if this whole episode was a drug-induced nightmare, some scheme of her supposedly loving father.
But then Spanner would return from her jaunts crackling with manic energy and a restlessness that did not disguise her fatigue, and Lore would understand that it was all too real.
Lore never asked where Spanner had been, but she wondered what she did in those hours that made her so tense. Business, she supposed, though she wondered why Spanner had to get so wired to transact a supposed victimless, low priority crime. Sometimes it would be two or three hours before Spanner's
deep blue eyes stopped their constant roving around the room, alighting on windows, doors: checking, always checking, as if for reassurance, the exits.
After a wreck, when Lore could get around the flat a little, Spanner called her over to the screen. "Sit," she said. Lore sat on the couch.
"It's me," Spanner told the terminal. The screen lit to light gray. "It's voice-coded. Won't even display the message-waiting light unless I tell it to. I'm going to set it up to accept certain commands from you." Lore felt herself being studied but she refused to give Spanner any idea of how it made her feel to be
controlled like this. She said nothing.
Spanner sighed. "This is just a precaution on my part. I want you to understand why I'm doing this. I don't want you calling Mummy and Daddy when those painkillers start to wear off and you realize what a mess you're in. I can't afford any kind of notice, never mind the kind of wrong conclusion the authorities might jump to if they find you here, injured, and half out of your mind on drugs."
Lore kept her face still, but she remembered a tent, drugs, being naked. Was this any different?
"I'll allow any passive use. That means you can listen to my messages. Or some of them. You can access news. But you can't interact: no talking, no sending messages, no shopping. I'll bring you anything you
need. At least for now." "I'm not a child."
"No," Spanner agreed. "But this is the way it has to be."
The first time the screen bleeped when she was alone, it was a man's face that appeared: black spiky hair, blue eyes, thin eyebrows, smile like a cherub. "Remember those chicken hawks we came across last month? If you're still interested, get in touch."
That was it. Even with all Spanner's precautions the message had not said much. But Lore knew about chicken hawks. That was not victimless crime.
When Spanner got home, she went straight to the screen, took the message, called back. "Me. Yeah, I'm still interested. Usual place? Fine."
Lore waited for an explanation. "Billy," Spanner said. "Business."
"I thought you said your business was victimless." "Yes."
"Where there are chicken hawks, there are chickens getting hurt."
"You know more than I thought you might." Lore just nodded, and waited. Spanner sighed. "We got the information from some straight-looking punter's slate: he runs a daisy chain."
"Daisy chains?:
"A ring of fresh young faces. Younger than chickens. This one and his friends like them younger than four."
Lore felt her cheeks pulling away from her teeth in disgust.
"It's not much to my taste, either. So what Billy and I do is put a tap on him. Blackmail," she amplified. "A certain rough justice to it, don't you think? Those who hurt others get a taste of how it feels to be powerless, and we make money. All very neat."
Lore stared at her. Spanner thought she was some kind of Robin Hood. "But the kids still get hurt."
"Often they stop molesting them, once they've been burned." "Often isn't always."
Spanner shrugged.
"You don't care, do you?"
"It's business. We can't go to the police because they'll want to know where we got our information. Besides, it could get dangerous if we meddled too far."
Lore remembered Spanner coming home with flushed cheeks; the hectic eyes, the sharp jaw where her teeth were clenched together and could not or would not let go, not for hours. Blackmail. "And who else do you blackmail?"
"No one who doesn't deserve it."
No one who can't pLayo.re thought about chicken hawks and daisy chains. "You could send an anonymous tip to the, police."
"We've done that. Now and then. When we think the situation warrants. But without solid evidence, they don't usually take any action."
Lore saw that the lack of police action suited Spanner just fine. If the men who ran the chains weren't making money, they couldn't pay quiet fees to insure silence.
Lore dreamed that night of being rolled, dead-eyed, into a plasthene sheet and tipped into a grave. On the lip of the grave, throwing shovelfuls of wet mud, were cherubs called Billy, laughing, and Spanner holding something out of reach, sayiWngh,en you're all grown upa,nd Lore, who could not close her
eyes because she was dead, saw that what Spanner held were manacles.
She woke up gasping and clutching her throat, remembering her lungs fighting the plasthene for air, a cupful, a spoonful, a thimbleful. It was morning. Spanner was gone, but the screen was lit to a sunburst of color and a cartoon of a rabbit with a thought balloon saying, Call who you want. It's open to your voice. Lore stared at the screen a long, long time. She would not call the police. She wondered how Spanner
had known that. She did not feel too good about it.
Spanner was still out when the medic returned in the early evening. He pronounced Lore's back to be healing well and left her a tape-on plaskin sheath to wear when she was in the bath or shower. "The rest of the time, let the wound breathe. You won't need any more injectable painkillers. These distalgesics should do," He handed her a bottle of brightly colored caplets. "You need anything else?"
He seemed in a hurry, and Lore wondered what mayhem or despair he was rushing to. "Do you ever wonder where your patients get their injuries?"
She thought of a three-year-old, and what injury an adult might do her or him in the name of need. He looked at her with sad eyes. "There's no point. I just do my best to heal what I find."
When he had gone, she went into .the bathroom to look at her back. It hurt to twist and turn, but she looked at the scar in the flyblown mirror as best she could. It stretched diagonally from her right shoulder blade to the lower ribs on her left side. At the top, it was nearly an inch wide. She could not bear to loo at it. She stared out of the window into the backyard instead. It looked as forlorn and closed in as she
felt: a fifteen-by-forty patch of rubble and weeds and what might be scrap metal, surrounded by a
six-foot-high brick wall; barren and broken and played out. The walls were topped with broken glass set in cement.
The door banged open. Lore pulled on Spanner's robe, tied the slippery silk belt, and went into the living room. Spanner was snapping on switches, humming. She looked up at Lore and smiled. "I've got
something for you. Be ready in just a minute." She punched a couple of buttons, read the bright figures that came up on her screen, then, satisfied with whatever the machine was doing, she popped something small out of one of her decks.
"There." She held out her hand. On her palm was a round black metallic button. A PIDA. "It's for you. Just a temporary, of course."
Lore pulled her robe tighter with her right hand and looked at the slick black button. Her new identity. She was not sure if she wanted it. "Where did you get it?"
"Friend of mine works for the city morgue. Once they've been through official identification, and embalmed, corpses aren't too particular about their PIDAs. Don't worry. Ruth's a stickler for hygiene.
It's probably cleaner than you are and, anyway, this one won't be going under the skin. Well? Don't just stand there, hold out your hand and I'll put it on for you."
Lore held out her left hand.
"You'll need to hold it in place for me."
"Let me sit down." She had to let go of the robe to keep the PIDA in place on the scar that was fading to pink. Spanner used a pair of scissors to cut a square of plaskin to shape.
"Not as fancy as the medic's spray, but this kind has one advantage." She pulled off the backing, carefully laid it over the PIDA. "It says your name is Kim Yeau. I've added the middle initial L., but just the initial. Less is better. The PIDAs will change, but as you get to know people, you'll have to have a stable name, one we can call you by. You have forty-three credits. You're eighteen." She looked up at Lore. "That's right, isn't it?"
Spanner knew damn well how old she was; this was just her way of reminding Lore how much she knew, that knowledge equals power. Lore didn't say anything, but the muscles in her forearm tightened.
"Hold still."
Lore stared at the top of the head bent over her hand. Spanner's scalp was creamy white, untouched by UV. Lore wondered how long she had been living a nocturnal existence, how long she had been rifling corpses and blackmailing and stealing. What did that do to a person? And yet Spanner did not seem
bad. Just interested in looking out for herself. Maybe because no one else had ever been there to do it.
"You'll have to be careful how you use this. It's just a superficial job - it'll get you on and off the slides, pay for groceries or a download from a newstank, but that's it. Avoid the police. Don't try to get any licenses or whatever." Spanner squeezed the skin around the PIDA and the webbing, and straightened.
"There. Should hold for a couple of weeks. The plaskin will match your natural skin color in an hour or so." She held Lore's arm up to the light, admiring her handiwork.
Lore could feel Spanner's breath on her skin, the robe slipping open, revealing her breasts. "Beautiful," Spanner said.
Lore looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Her hair was wholly gray now, and grown past her ears.
"Can you cut hair?" she called, but Spanner was working and did not hear. She opened the medicine cabinet, looking for scissors. There was a tube of dye on the top shelf. Brown. She tapped it thoughtfully against her palm. The sooner she could change the way she looked, the sooner she could get outside the flat, feel less... dependent. Brown would do to start with.
"Can I use this?" "Um?"
She stepped into the living room. "This dye. Can I use it?" Spanner did not look up from the screen. "If you like."
"I can't imagine you with brown hair." "It's not mine."
The dye around the top of the tube was not crusted and dry. It had been used fairly recently. Lore stared at it for a while.
In the bathroom, she read the instructiWonest. hair. Apply generously with comb. Wipe off any

excess from skin. Leave for ten minuteIts.seemed simple enough, though not as easy as the way she was used to, when all she had to do was run a bath, pour in the nanomechs, and submerge herself for thirty seconds. With nano dyes and antinano lube, one could layer diferent colors on body hair, like silkscreening, and the results were clear, clean, and crisp. But nano dyes were for the rich.

This dye was a sticky paste. It was not brown, as she had expected, but a curious greenish yellow. It smelled like rotting leaves and had the texture of mud. She massaged it into her scalp, remembering to do her eyebrows and eyelashes.
When she had rinsed and dried, the mirror showed a strong chestnut. It suited her, suited her eyes, her mouth. She liked it. She turned this way and that, letting the cool northern light that seeped into the bathroom and reflected from the tiles play over the hair. It looked so good it was probably pretty close
to her natural color. She smiled at her reflection: disguising herself by making her hair her real color had a certain ironic appeal.
She walked into the living room. "What do you think?" Spanner turned after a moment. Said nothing.
"What's the matter?"
"I'm not sure brown is the right color." Lore flushed. "I don't understand."
"Come into the bathroom with me." Spanner positioned Lore in front of the mirror, hands on her shoulders. Lore did not like the possessive feel of those hands, but it was Spanner's bathroom, Spanner's mirror. "Now, take a look at yourself, a really good look. Then look at me."
Lore studied herself. Brown hair, straight brown eyebrows, clear gray eyes, skin a little paler than usual but still tight-pored and healthy. Thinner than she used to be. Even teeth. She thought she looked remarkably good, considering what she had been through. "I think I look fine."
"Now look at me."
Spanner's skin was big-pored over her nose and cheek-bones. There was a tiny scar by her mouth. Her teeth were uneven, her neck thin. Her complexion had a grayish tinge, like meat left just a little too long. Lore thought she looked a lot better than Spanner.
Spanner was nodding at her in the mirror. "Exactly. You see the difference? You're too damn... glossy. Like a race-horse. Look at your eyes, and your teeth. They're perfect. And your skin: not a single pimple and no scars. Everything's symmetrical. You're bursting with health. Go out in this neighborhood, even in rags, and you'll shine like a lighthouse."
Lore looked at herself again. It was true. Eighteen years of uninterrupted health care and nutritious food on top of three generations of good breeding had given her that unmistakable sheen of the hereditary rich. She was suddenly aware of the cold tile under her feet, of the cracks she could feel between her toes. It was not yet winter. She wondered what it would be like to be cold involuntarily. She touched her eyebrows, her nose. How strange to discover something about oneself in a stranger's bathroom. "I
assume it can be fixed."
Spanner dipped her hand into a pocket and pulled out a stubby buzz razor. Lore backed away from the flickering hum of its blade, remembering blood, the plasthene sheet. Spanner laughed, lightly enough, but Lore heard the cruelty in it: Spanner knew Lore had been scared, and enjoyed it. "It's for your eyebrows. Cut them a bit, make them uneven." Lore took the sleek black razor, not taking her eyes off Spanner.
"I'm going to get a different dye, one that doesn't suit you as much.."
Spanner brought back red dye and some peroxide. "And here." Spanner gave her a tube of depilatory cream. "Get rid of the rest of your body hair, unless you want to dye it strand by strand."
In the shower, her hair and the cream washed away in gelatinous clumps, leaving Lore as smooth and bare as a baby. Naked in a new way.
Spanner wiped the mirror free of condensation and Lore, still dripping, looked at her new self. The red hair made her face pale, pinched and hungry as a fox. Spanner stood behind her and stroked her hair. "Red was the right choice," she whispered, and kissed Lore's left shoulder blade. Her hand ran down Lore's ribs, over her hip, up her belly. "So smooth."
She kissed the back of her neck. "Lift your arms."
Spanner ran her palms over the hairless armpits, down over the hairless breasts. Lore could feel
Spanner's nipples pebbling through her shirt up against her shoulder blades. Condensation ran in streaks
down the mirror. Lore watched Spanner's hand reach down and cup her naked vulva. She closed her eyes, listened to Spanner's hoarse breath in her ear.
I am hairless and newly born.
It did not matter that Spanner might have seen her helpless and naked on the newstanks, because this was not the real Lore. This was someone different, someone's creation. A construct. One she could hide behind. One that would make her safe. Just as she thought she had been with her father, Oster. Only this time, she was aware.
She opened her eyes again and watched.
~~~Cherry Magyar turned out to be young, about twenty-three, with hair as thick and wiry as a wolfhound's, and hard brown eyes with a hint of epicanthic fold. Her skinny was deep green. Her thigh-high waders, fastened with webbing straps and Velcro cuffs over her hips and waist, were black. The six-inch-wide stomach and back support was bright red.
"We're three shorthanded, so I hope you learn fast." Her voice was coarse and vivid.
"Yes."
"Well, we'll see."
I had to work at not wrinkling my face at the smell down here: raw sewage, volatile hydrocarbons, and something acrid that I couldn't place. If there were any air strippers installed, they were not working. I was not surprised. The space was at least as big as a city block, and sixty feet high or more. I couldn't even see the far wall. But the wall nearest to me was brilliant with safety equipment: the bright yellow of emergency showers, drench hoses, and eye baths every thirty yards; fire-engine-red metal poles that
were in reality fire-blanket dispensers; the green-and-white-checkered first-aid stations; hard aquamarine for breathing gear...
"I'm going to put you on a combination TOC/nitro analysis and basic maintenance. They're both full-time positions, but we don't have enough people. I've been doing the TOC myself the last two weeks. Hepple says you're experienced. I need someone who knows what they're doing. You've done TOC analysis before?"
Sal Bird had not, but I doubted Magyar would have the time or inclination to backcheck her records. "Yes."
We walked for a few minutes along the cement apron that ran in front of the huge troughs that lay parallel with each other, numbered from left to right, one to eighty. If I was expected to work here and oversee the maintenance of one or more troughs, I'd wear myself out just walking to and fro. She opened the heavy, soundproofed door of a concrete bunker and motioned me ahead of her.
Inside was a vast, white space threaded through with silvery pipes. Four and a half million gallons a day thundered through those pipes, and the noise was a full-throated roar. Magyar leaned toward my ear and shouted, "Think this is loud?"
I nodded. She grinned and gestured for me to follow her. We went through a narrow doorway into what
looked like an empty room. She hit a button on a plastic panel and a ten-by-ten section of the floor slid back.
The roar became a bellow, a deep chasm of noise, old and ugly, big enough to grind its way through the crust of the world. I clapped my hands over my ears, but the noise was a living thing, battering at my ribs, vibrating my skull. We stood at the edge of a pit where water rushed past, twisting and boiling. It was
like standing on the edge of creation. Magyar was laughing. I was, too. That kind of noise puts a fizz in your bones.
Magyar hit the button again and the floor slid back into place. My ears rang with the relative quiet. "The only reason I like getting trainees is the excuse to open that thing up."
We went through another doorway, but this time the door slid shut behind us, cutting off the noise entirely.
It was a small room, faced with banks of digital readouts, and the same spigot and pressure-reduction setup I had seen for testing the effluent. Magyar became all brisk efficiency.
"The equipment is two years old. These readouts here are for your TCEs and PCEs. This one's
nitrogens. Keep an eye on that. We get a fair amount of HNO3 - that's nitric acid - but the bugs break it down to nitrate and nitrite. Got to watch those levels, and the difference is important. Nitrate's what the
bugs use as an oxidizing agent, turning it to nitrite, then nitrogen gas. But watch the nitrite. If levels get too high, the bugs die off and all we get is nitrate and nitrite instead of nitrogen gas. But if we get rid of it all, then the duckweed downstream's got nothing to feed on."
"What bugs are you using?" "The OT-1000 series."
I nodded. The van de Oest OT-1000 series was tried and true. A strainP,semuadionmlyonas

paudimobilis , for the BTEX and high-molecular-weight alkanes; B strain for chlorinated hydrocarbons; and probably by now the C strain that had been new when... before... I stopped thinking about it and looked instead at the readout for vinyl chloride, a vicious carcinogen. That was the red flag as far as I was concerned. VC levels told an observer a lot about the health and ratios between aerobic and anaerobic, methanotrophic and heterotrophic bacteria.

Magyar was still talking. "Here's your methane. Other volatiles like toluene and xylene. Biological oxygen demand, but don't worry about that, BOD's not our problem. Though if it goes much above the indicated range" - she pointed to a metal plate inset above the station, inscribed with chemicals and their safe
ranges - "pass it along to me. My call code's written up there, too. Beginning and end of each shift I'll want a thumbprinted report. The slates are here."
She pulled one down from a shelf and handed it to me. "Everything clear enough?"
She seemed a bit muddled, conflating more than one process, but I just nodded. "I think so." "Good. These readouts over here are remotes from the dedicated vapor points, but they're often
swamped during a big influx. And these two figures, in green, are the combined remotes from the online turbidimeter. The top one is NTU. Last but not least-" We walked three paces to a readout in red. "-the water temperature." Magyar stopped. "What does it say?"
"Twenty-seven point three degrees. Celsius."
"That's what it should always say. Always. Not twenty-seven point six or twenty-seven point one. Twenty-seven-point three. That's what the bacteria need."
For a denitrification-nitrification process, heterotrophic facultative bacteria were usually comfortable anywhere between twenty-five and thirty degrees, but I just nodded. "What about emergency procedures?"
"That should have been on the orientation disk." "I haven't seen an orientation disk."
Magyar swore. "Hepple said... Never mind. I'll see what I can do. Meanwhile, anything comes up that looks out of place, call me. Immediately. If your GC goes pink, find one of these red studs-"
She pointed to what looked like red plastic mushrooms that bloomed every five meters from walls and floors and ceilings. "-twist it through three-sixty, push it all the way down, and get out ASAP. But make good and sure that your GC really is pink. The buttons shut down the whole system. That costs enough to mean that you'll be out of a job instantly if you make a mistake. You got that?"
I nodded.
"Good. Then we'll move on."
We went back to the troughs. "One worker for every two troughs according to the original design, but we operate on three per, and some are having to handle four." She pulled the slate off her belt, scrolled through a list, replaced it. "I'll assign you two, numbers forty-one and forty-two, while you're working TOC analysis."
I opened my mouth, changed my mind, and shut it again. She lifted an eyebrow. "Something to say about that, Bird?"
"TOC and nitrogen analysis is pretty important at this stage? I knew damn well it was. Magyar nodded. "I'm just not sure that it's possible to keep a close eye on the readouts as well as maintaining two troughs."
"Then you'll just have to try extra hard. Any other questions?"
Does anyone here know what they're doing? "What about masks?" "Do you see anyone else wearing a mask?"
"No..."
"Masks are available on request. But they'll slow you down, and if you can't keep up you'll be fired." Magyar's voice seemed almost kindly, but her eyes were flat and hard. "You'll soon get used to the smell. Besides, management doesn't take kindly to agitating for more so-called safety rules."
"I understand." Health and Safety regulations mandated the wearing of respiratory protective devices in the presence of short-chain aliphatics like 1,1,2-trichloroethane and aromatics such as
1,4-dichlorobenzene, but I wasn't going to argue the point here and lose my job on the first day for being a suspected union organizer. If I lost this job, my Sal Bird identity would be useless. Ruth would not help me again, and I did not want to have to ask Spanner. I said nothing.
Magyar nodded and left me to it.
The first thing I did was find the schematic handbook. It was tucked behind the slates at the readout station. At the first break, I looked it over.
The plant was well designed: good automatic monitoring and lock systems. In the event of a massive spill, all pipes would shut down, the plantwide alarm sound, and the alert sent out to county emergency-response teams. An expert system then decided how far the pollution had spread and the
pipes and tanks would be pumped out into massive holding tanks. I checked the capacity. Six hundred thousand gallons. Adequate. Even better, the whole system could be overridden on the side of caution and shut down by hand. There was a first-response team structure outlined. I examined it with interest.
Apparently, we should all know about it, and how to access self-contained breathing apparatus and other protective gear.
It was hard looking for the gear without appearing to be poking into others' areas of work, but eventually I found it. There were only four sets of SCBA where there should be more than two dozen, and just two moon suits. A pile of EEBA - emergency escape breathing apparatus - all tangled together. I wasn't surprised. No one ever expected to have to use the lifeboats.
The schematics for the sensors and chemical controls looked good, but the maintenance schedule told another story: there was plenty of water, of course, for the sprinkler system, and plenty of regular foam, but someone had decided not to bother replacing the alcohol-resistant foam canisters. That smelt of Hepple: ARF had a short shelf life, and was expensive. Ketone spills were very rare. It probably seemed like a reasonable risk.
Air scrubbers; multilevel valves for sampling vapors and liquids heavier than air and water; incident control procedures ... They were all there. I wondered how familiar Magyar was with all this. I hoped I would never have to find out.
FOUR
Lore is seven. Her father, Oster, is brushing her hair. It is high summer. Outside, the buildings are washed gold by the sinking sun, but inside Lore's bedroom the ancient wooden paneling sucks in what light manages to get through the tiny window set deep in the thick fifteenth-century walls. Oster has
almost finished with her hair, but Lore wants him to stay longer with her instead of running off and talking to Tok about his stupid pictures, or playing with Stella's hair, which she has just started dyeing yellow. Lore thinks about Stella's yellow hair. Lore's hair - and Oster's and Katerine's, and Tok's and Willem's
and Greta's - is gray, like Lore's eyes. Gray all over. "Why is our hair gray?"
Oster puts the hairbrush down, pulls back the bedcovers, and motions for her to climb in. "You won't let me go until I explain everything, will you?"
"No," she says seriously.
"A long time ago, in a fit of ostentation-" Lore froowstnesntation but does not interrupt. "-your
grandmother had the color-producing allele turned off, She was rich-" "As rich as we are?"
"No, but rich enough to be stupid. Anyway, she was so rich she did not know what to spend her money on. Doctors had just discovered that those people with pigmentless hair - gray with age, or white-haired albinos - got a lot of cancer in the scalp. That's because without pigment, the hair acts like a fiber-optic cable, conducting ultraviolet from sunlight straight to our follicles, bombarding them with mutagenic
radiation." She frowns and he sighs, tries again. "Like the telephone wire brings your mother's voice and picture to you when she's out in the field." Katerine never calls her when she goes away to strange places to work, but Lore says nothing. It would only upset Oster.
"So when people get old and their hair turns gray, they get cancer?"
"No. They just dye their hair black or brown or dark red or whatever, or wear a hat." "Is that why Stella dyes her hair? To stop the cancer?"
"No. Stel changes her colors because she wants to. Like your mother changes the color of her contact lenses." He smiles and ruffles her hair, the hair he has just brushed. Lore pats it back down. "She doesn't have to, none of our family do, because Grandmama van de Oest was so rich she could have genetic treatment - do you understand what genetic treatment is?" Lore nods, even though she doesn't. He is crossing and uncrossing his legs, which means he is getting restless. "She had genetic treatment against cancer. It's very, very expensive, and it takes a long time, and it hurts."
"Then why did she do it?"
"Because she was stupid and too rich. She-" "Does that mean we're too rich?"
He looks at her for a long moment, his blue eyes still. "I suppose it does."
He doesn't say anything for a minute, and Lore has to prompt him. "So Grandmama pays a lot of money for the cancer stuff..."
"Yes. And then she paid a lot more money to have her genes fixed so that all her children would have gray hair and the anticancer protection. Her way of saying to the world, look, I'm so rich I can afford to have this expensive anticancer treatment so I don't need to care about having gray hair. And, like a lot of stupid and wasteful things, it became fashionable. Which is why your mother has gray hair, too."
Lore sits up in bed so she can see herself in the mirror on the dresser. She turns her head this way and that, touches her gray hair. "Can we turn the gene back on?"
"Yes, but it won't make any difference to you, Only your children." He holds the covers, waiting for her to slide back down.
"Why didn't you turn it back on?"
"I did, but your mother didn't. She wanted you to have all the visible trappings of the rich and powerful. As she said to me at the time, you can always dye it. Now lie down."
Lore does. "What color am I supposed to dye it?"
"Any color you like." He goes to the window and pulls the curtains closed. Lore frowns at his back. "But how will I know which color is the right one?"
Right, wrong; on, off, yes, no. She is used to black-and-whites, but at seven Lore is suddenly realizing she can make of herself what she wills. When she is old enough she can have red hair or golden
eyebrows or hot, dark lashes like spiders' legs. And no one will tell her she is wrong, because no one will know. She could become anyone she wishes. But how will she know she is still herself?
She stays awake a long time, thinking about it. How does Stel know who she is if every time she stands in front of a mirror, she looks different? Before she falls asleep, Lore resolves that she will never, ever
dye her hair. FIVE
I knocked, the two short, three long taps we used to use. Spanner opened the door. Her eyes were gummy and vague.
"We agreed I'd come here. Yesterday. In the bar." "Right." She let me in.
I noticed the changes immediately. It was not just that someone else had been living there for a time - the different smells of soap and shampoo left behind in the bathroom, the exotic spices half-used on the shelf over the microwave - it was other things. We had never kept the place scrupulously tidy but it had felt
alive and cared for. Now the worn places in the rug were dark with ground-in dirt and several plants were brown and curling. The plastic eyes of the power points were dull and cold and the equipment on the bench was covered in dust. I tried not to think about how she must have been supporting herself the last few months.
I couldn't help glancing at the bench again. She noticed, of course, and laughed the laugh I had first
heard a few months before I left, the ugly one. "Don't worry. I haven't lost my touch." She ran her fingers through her hair, and the familiarity of the gesture here, in this flat, almost gave me vertigo.
"Let me see the PIDA."
I handed over the baggie. "It's sterile."
Spanner carried it over to the bench. She took off covers, Ripped a couple of switches, then pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves, took the PIDA out of the bag, and slid it into the reader. She scanned the information that came on-screen. "How much detail do you want?"
"Not much for now. Change the fingerprint ID and physical description to start with. And add my middle name, of course."
She nodded. "Less is better."
It was as though that single sentence had been echoing in the flat for nearly three years, as though I had
somehow just stepped out for a while and stepped back in to hear it once again. Less is better. If only she had kept to that axiom. I wanted to grab the PIDA, leave the flat, and never come back, but I did not know anyone else who could do this for me. At least, not anyone as good as Spanner. As Spanner used to be. "I have the fingerprints ready to go."
"Let's have those, too. You've used them to open an account?" "Not yet."
"Good. You remember some things, then, despite your distaste."
I sighed and pulled a list from my pocket. "Here are the things I want. Her education and employment background are fine for now - unless someone wants to pay for an extensive backcheck."
Spanner just nodded for me to put the paper down on the tabletop by the screen. "You could make us some coffee."
I went into the kitchen, put on the coffee, and opened the cupboard under the sink. The watering can was still there.
Most of the plants around the flat were beyond revival. I watered them anyway. I stopped by one pot
for a long time. When I had bought the cheese plant for her it had been just over four feet tall. When I le it had been nearly six, the leaves as big and glossy as heavily glazed dinner plates. And now the cheese plant was dying, the edges of its leaves yellow and parchment thin, the trailing aerial roots hanging like the shriveled skins of snakes.
"Put it on the table," she said when I brought out the coffee. "I'm just about done here."
I sat, and after a minute she joined me. It felt very strange to be sharing the same couch. "So. Payment."
"Yes," I said, and waited.
"That scam you were so keen on a few months ago. The net ads for charity. Think it's still possible?"
"I can make the film, and it'll bring in money. Can you do the rest?" I deliberately didn't look at the dust on the bench.
"No problem." She made a dismissive gesture. "The hard part is going to be start-up costs."
"I've got nothing left. Not to speak of." I wondered briefly what it would be like to get a paycheck. Another three weeks to wait for that.
"I'll provide start-up, then, on condition that it comes out of the pot before we divide it." "Fifty-fifty?"
She laughed. "You already owe me, remember? Seventy-thirty."
"Sixty-forty." I didn't care about the money. All I wanted was the PIDA. I was bargaining because
Spanner would think me weak if I didn't. I wondered how dangerous her creditors were, and how much she owed them.
"Sixty-forty, then." She didn't bother to hold out her hand. I wasn't sure what I would have done if she had.
"How long?"
"I'll need to work out what equipment we need. And then I'll have to find it. Hyn and Zimmer should be able to help."
I stood. There was no point talking further until we found out about equipment. "I know the way out." I walked back to my flat, thinking about Spanner and her dying plants.
Trees are not delicate. You can do all kinds of things to a fully grown tree - drench it in acid rain and infest it with parasites, carve initials in its bark and split branch from trunk - and it will survive. It is not presence but absence that will kill a tree. Take away its sunshine and it will stretch vainly upward, groping, growing etiolated, spindly beyond belief, and die. Take away its water and its leaves wrinkle, become transparent, and fall.
I tilted the watering can into the pot of my ficus tree, watching the brown, granular soil darken and smooth out as it absorbed the water. I sprayed the leaves, wondering when the light green of the leaves grown in the summer, summer when I had left Spanner, had blended with the seasoned, deeper green of all the others. And then I cried.
I was still crying when I went into the bathroom. It was small, painted peach and cream, and everything in it was clean, but somehow it still reminded me of the bathroom Spanner and I had shared. Even the mirror, which was new and square.
I turned the cold tap, splashed my face. Enough, I told myself sternly. But how ecnoouludghit wbehen
even the clear, cold water streaming into the sink reminded me of the first time I went into Spanner's bathroom? How could it ebneough when I looked into the mirror and even the hair framing my face was the fox red Spanner had chosen?
I looked at my hair more closely and sighed. The gray roots were beginning to show again. That would have to be fixed before I went to my new job.
I had never liked red. I would buy some brown dye, and I would let my eyebrows grow back. Symmetrically.
~~~Lore's back was healed and her hair was a different color. She was as disguised as she was going to get. She was getting restless. She had been inside the fiat for several weeks and, before that, the kidnappers' tent. Now she was afraid to go outside. She sat by the livingroom window and watched the
sky as it turned to November gray, and shuddered. It was so big, so open. She tried to imagine being out under the whipping clouds, among the people who all seemed to be hurrying toward destinations she
could only guess at. But she had nowhere to head for. And she would be without a slate, without a real identity, with no one to call if she found herself in trouble. And people might recognize her, might stare and point...
She went into the kitchen to make coffee, try and distract herself. The weeds down in the back garden
were turning yellow. She stared at them while the coffee bubbled. Weeds, interlopers, were always the last to die. They started small, but after a year or two they made themselves belong, put down strong roots.
Trying not to think about what she was doing - or she would panic - Lore went into the tiny hallway and pulled on one of Spanner's jackets. She did not pause to zip it up. She had to think for a moment before she could remember the door code Spanner had given her three weeks ago; then she opened it and went out.
The stairwell was damp, and funneled the cold November wind right through her thin jacket. But it was still enclosed.
The hard part was reaching the street. People passed her, not looking, but she still felt horribly exposed. She was breathing hard.
The cut-through was five yards to her left. She ran. It was a brick-lined tunnel under the overhanging flat, about eight feet high and less than a yard wide. Her footsteps echoed.
At the other end was a gate. It was shut. She rattled the door. The knob came off in her hand, the woo was so rotten. She kicked it. The door split open. The wood smelled fruity and spoiled. She went
through and lifted it back into place as well as she could. She was probably the first person to set foot back here in years.
It was hard to tell what had once grown here a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago when the row of large houses had originally been built. It looked as though no one had cultivated the place for a long, long time. Judging by the assortment of ancient appliances and precode concrete rubble, the place
had been used as a tip for the last two or three decades. But everywhere - by the rusting washing machine, between the old tires, in between the broken paving stones - sprung weeds and small saplings. There were brambles and the remnants of what might once have been a rose garden. She squatted down by the tangle of thorns. They might be the variety that bloomed at midwinter.
This close to the ground she could smell the dark, cold, loamy dirt, a clean smell, one that reminded her of being small, watching while one of the van de Oest gardeners planted tulip bulbs. She dug her fingers into the leaf mold. It felt just the same.
There was a rotted-out lean-to by one wall. She poked at it, looked at the hole in the roof. It wouldn't be too hard to waterproof it enough for gardening tools.
She stood in the middle of the barren garden, surrounded by walls and broken glass, and smiled. She felt safe here. Many of the windows of the surrounding commercial buildings had been bricked up. Unless someone looked down from Spanner's bathroom or kitchen, no one could see her. She looked up at the windows. They were blank, reflecting only the scudding sky.
She waited until Spanner had taken off her shoes, then told her she wanted to do something with the garden.
"Like what?"
"Clear it first. Then see."
"You'll need all kinds of equipment."
"Not as much as you think. And besides, you said you'd get me anything I needed." It was a challenge. Lore remembered the weeds.
Spanner smiled and pulled a slate to her. "Give me your shopping list, then."
"A shovel, spade, rake, trowel." Lore pictured the gardeners at Ratnapida. "A wheelbarrow. Heavy gloves. Some shears. Grass seed, Other things when I'm ready to plant."
~~~The Hedon Road night shift ended at two in the morning. I was exhausted, so tired I could barely manage to unstrap my back support and the wrist and forearm splints. My arms felt leaden as I stripped off my skinny and showered. I was too tired to bother drying my hair. I regretted it as soon as I stepped out of the ugly pseudo-Victorian plant gates.
It was cold, and mist made the streetlights smeary; the kind of night that reminded me that in this
northern city, autumn was just an eyeblink between summer and winter. At this time in the morning, all the passenger slides would be garaged at the far end of town. I would probably freeze if I had to wait for one to answer a request tapped in at a roadside pole. Besides, until I got paid - until I was sure my records would hold long enough to get paid - I would have to be careful with my money.
A special call-out would mean a large debit from my PIDA. Six months ago I would just have jumped a ride on a freight slide. I knew all the times and delivery routes - Hedon Road, then Springbank, then Princes Avenue - but with my new PIDA it was no longer worth the risk. If I got caught, there would be a blemish on my record that could cost me my job. That would mean a new PIDA... and where would it ever end?
I was tired, but there was something about walking at night, when the streets were empty: my strides felt longer, stronger, and the cold made even my breath tangible. I was real. I was here. Nothing was complicated anymore. I no longer had to be ashamed. I was Sal Bird, aged twenty-five, and I worked
for a living.
But when I got back to the fiat I had to climb five Rights of stairs, and when I opened the three locks o my door and turned on the lights, one of the first things I saw was my Hammex 20 camera and the edit box, and I remembered it wasn't over yet, that Spanner still wanted payment.
In the kitchen I snipped the corner off a plastic bag and poured half a pound of soybeans into a pan. They smelled of dust, and rattled on the metal as I filled the pan with water. As the water heated, the bean skins suddenly wrinkled, as though the outside absorbed water faster than the rest. The water boiled, and the beans began to rock, and some swelled before others, so it looked as though they were crawling over each other. In the space of minutes what had been hard, shiny ivory ball bearing plumped out into sleek alien ovoids curled up like so many fetuses. Like frog eggs in the desert hatching in a sudden downpour. And I laughed.
I ate well, and slept better, and didn't remember any dreams.
The mobile rake was churning up gravel and detritus. and trying to dig its way through the trough's concrete bottom; even in the din of rushing water and pumps, I could hear its electric hum turn to an overstressed whine. I swore, pulled on my waders and went after it.
The troughs were directly under the high, dirty glass of the roof. It was getting dark outside, and the light that made it through turned the choppy surface the color of zinc and pewter, like the North Sea before a
storm. The water stank of shit and pollution and rot, and as the trough deepened toward the center, so did the smell of volatile organic compounds. Fourteen feet out, foul, warmish water spilled over the top of my thigh-high waders. It made no difference that nothing would get through my skinny; I felt soiled. And I could almost feel the hydrocarbons easing down my throat, smearing my lungs with filth. I was angry. Magyar had no right to deny basic safety precautions and procedures to her shift.
But Magyar had not written the rules, she merely had to follow them to meet the almost impossible productivity standards Hepple had set. And I doubted she knew any other way. She was smart, yes, and seemed to have good instincts, but she was untrained and unsupported. Hepple had no business
appointing her to a supervisory position without even going through the motions of teaching her what she needed to know. No doubt he thought she would make him look good by comparison.
Even the orientation procedures were disorganized and sloppy. Magyar had surprised me on my second day by digging up a copy of the orientation disk. "Watch it in the breakroom," she said. "It runs forty minutes. I want you back on station in forty-five."
The carpets and walls of the breakroom were done in white and teal, and there were about twenty uncomfortable chairs and two screens, one tuned to the net - usually the news - the other to a video loop of swimming fish. There was a PIDA reader under each screen, but I didn't have to V-hand it to run the disk.
The video was terrible. It wasn't just the production values that were bad; there were several major errors in the procedures described, errors that would continue to echo down the line like Magyar's insistence that the bugs could not tolerate even the slightest deviation in temperature. The information was simplistic at best: "In the primary section, specially tailored bacteria break down some of the more toxic compounds. Think of them eating ammonia and excreting other, less toxic chemicals, like nitrite..."
Worse, there were half a dozen blatant edits where worker safety information had been taken out, probably by Hepple. No details about warning signs of the deadly chlorine gases that could build up, or methane explosions like the one that had killed four hundred workers in Raleigh, North Carolina, six or seven years ago, even though I had seen the red methane-release handles at the emergency station. The simple evacuation drill was clear - use this exit, not that; turn this off, not that - but unexplained. More worryingly, there was no mention of the stakes, the regional impact of polluted water if someone really screwed up their job: nothing about spontaneous abortion and convulsions, or violent dehydrating dysentery, spinal meningitis or central nervous system collapse.
"I hope you got something out of it," Magyar had said when I gave it back. "You need to look out for yourself in a place like this. Pay attention to the machines. They can be dangerous."
I had not known what to say. The machines in and of themselves were not dangerous - if you followed safety procedures. But you could not follow safety procedures that you were not told about. I wondered how much Magyar herself knew, how much she pretended not to know in order to keep her job. I had contented myself with a nod and a thank-you.
I circled the rake, which was still madly trying to dig its way to Australia. The month before I started this job, another worker had his left leg torn up by a mobile rake that had got stuck. Statutory regulations
stated that a machine should never be approached while in operation, that it should be deactivated by remote, then towed out of the water and examined by a qualified technician.
At Hedon Road, there was never time: turning the machine off and then on again in less than thirty minutes damaged it. The rakes were temperamental enough without adding to their unreliability, and we
were so shorthanded that the unwritten rule was: Shove it out of the hole and keep it going. Once in the clear, whatever was clogging its tines usually got whirled off. If you couldn't find and retrieve what it was that fouled the blades in the first place, you just hoped that the next time the machine encountered it, it wasn't your shift.
It looked as though the right front tines were jammed. I stepped carefully in front of the stilled metal, hoping it wouldn't restart on its own, and leaned in and pushed. The rake chugged, sputtered, then moved sluggishly on its way. A two-foot length of bulrush floated to the surface.
Until I had started work at Hedon Road, I had not cared one way or another about bulrushes. After ten days on the job, I hated them. They were good at what they were intended for - facilitating the anaerobic and aerobic cycles of denitrification and nitrification, and buffering the rest of the system against toxic
shock - but they were incredibly difficult to manage. Their tough, fibrous stalks fouled all the maintenance equipment and their fluffy cotton seed heads clogged air intakes. The rakes, of course, were designed to cut the rushes before the heads ripened, but because they had about thirty percent downtime - most of it, of course, during the night shift - we were always behind schedule.
When Magyar had walked by three days ago and seen me pruning the rush heads by hand, she had said nothing, but the next night the other workers had been issued with shears, and instructions to work out
their own system for keeping the rushes trimmed. She may have been poorly trained but she was not stupid. She had nodded at me afterward, but said nothing. I found myself liking her.
I pulled down the record slate and started to check the readouts. Smart or not, good instincts or not, Magyar wouldn't take kindly to being shown too many times how to improve things by a new worker. I could not blame her for that. I wondered how my father would have handled the situation in my place...
And then I was standing staring at the slate without seeing it, tears rolling down my face. What was I doing here? I didn't belong. I could run this place in my sleep. I shouldn't be waist-deep in other people's shit. I could be back on Ratnapida, lying on my back in the sun-warmed grass watching the clouds, making up stories with Tok about industrial counterespionage ... And we would eat dinner with Oster
and Katerine, and Greta and Stella; Willem and Marley would be staying for the week...
But Stella was dead, Oster was not who he had pretended to be for all those years, and my family had refused to pay my ransom. There was no going back because what I wanted to return to had never existed, except in my Oster-woven version of reality.
I shoved the slate back on the shelf, angry for letting self-pity distort everything. Reality at Ratnapida would more likely be the family sitting at the table, pretending not to see me, pretending that the kidnap and abuse had never happened, that they had not received, not watched - over and over - the tapes my abductors had made for the net. My reality and theirs were different. Looking back, they always had
been. The family had refused to hand over the money quickly enough for my abductors, but I doubted they would see it that way. Some might say it was their fault I had been subjected to such public humiliation, their fault I had ended up killing. But if I went back now they would just sip pinot grigio from crystal glasses, eat salad from Noritake china, and pretend that I had not been treated as a thing, had not had to scrabble to survive, that nothing had changed. And I would have to look at Oster and wonder if the decision not to pay had been deliberate, because I knew too much.
No. There was no going back. I had known that when I lifted the rusty nail and stabbed it into Fishface's neck. That part of my life was over.
I breathed hard, and clenched and relaxed my face muscles. Self-pity could creep up on anyone, but I
would not let it happen again.
A flickering readout caught my eye. Readouts were not supposed to flicker. Another flashed from 20.7 to 5 to 87 and back again. That made no sense at all. Then all the readouts went berserk.
I lifted the phone, tapped in Magyar's call code. "This is station four, primary sector." I had to shout over the trilling station alarms.
"What is it, Bird?"
"I have readout anomalies." "Which ones?"
"The whole bank. Going wild. Nothing makes any sense." Magyar did not reply immediately. She probably did not know what to do. "I need your authorization to cut the flow to the secondary sector."
"But we don't know that there's anything wrong with our stream..." She sounded scared. "We don't know that there isn't, either, and they don't have the sensors we do."
"It's probably computer failure. Or maybe the monitors have gone down because of backflow. Flooding."
"The flood warning didn't go off We have to-" I broke off. Judging from the entire bank of instruments going crazy, it probably was simple computer failure. There was another way. "Look, I think there's a way I can cut the stream temporarily and divert it to the holding tanks. Fifteen minutes won't do anyone
any harm. Secondary sector might not even notice. And I can take some readings manually, if you have a handheld photoionization detector around."
There was a moment of silence. "There's one in the locker that's about knee height. In front of you. Get me your results ASAP."
The PD turned out to be an old-fashioned portable of a kind I had not seen since I was a child. It was calibrated in parts per trillion. I lugged the case out of the influent bunker and along to my trough. It took me a while to remember how to assemble it. Thigh-deep in water, I hoped I would not stumble into one
of the irregular gouges the rake had from in the gravel. With the weight of the PD I would overbalance and I had no barrier protection for my face. The machine bleeped softly in my hand. Everything looked good so far.
It was full dark outside now, and the water, under its surface of reflected bright white, looked black, like ink. If the lights here went out, I wondered, would I be able to see the stars reflected in the troughs only i someone went onto the roof and cleaned off years' worth of grime.
Ten minutes later, when I waded out, Magyar was waiting, thumbs hooked in her belt. "The readings are fine. Dead on normal."
"Good." I waited for her to say I told you so. The holding tanks would now have to be pumped out and cleaned. A lot of extra work for a shorthanded shift. She just nodded at the PD. "That's not a handheld."
"It's all there was."
"Looks heavy."
"It's not so bad when you're in the water. And, anyway, it feels a lot lighter than they used to when I wa thirteen."
She gave me a strange look. "I'll have to take your word for that."
I pretended not to notice her surprise, but I was disgusted with myself. First self-pity, now nostalgia. It led to slips I could not afford.
SIX
Lore is nearly seven and a half. The family is staying with friends in Venezuela for month or so over
Christmas. Greta is there, too.
The only image Lore really has of her half sister, Greta, is grayness: gray hair, gray eyes, and a gray kind of attitude to life. She is almost always away somewhere looking after the family interests. She is much
older, of course - twenty-five now - and Lore tends to treat her more like an aunt than a sister, partly because Greta, even when she's around, seems so distant, withdrawn. Not unkind, just preoccupied with whatever it is that always makes her look stooped and check around corners before turning them. Lore has never seen her laugh, though sometimes she does smile. At those times Lore thinks she looks beautiful: her face stretches sideways a little, shortening it, taking away the grooves and hollows and shadows, changing it from gray to gold.
Lore's most vivid memory of Greta has to do with the Dream Monster.
Lore is asleep on her stomach with the covers thrown off the bed - how she always sleeps in a hot climate - when suddenly she is woken up by the monster. It has her pinned down and is breathing hot fire on her neck and groaning like a beast. She shrieks, and pushes, and doors bang open down the corridor, lights come on, and she must have blanked out for a minute or two, or maybe she really was dreaming, because then Katerine is sitting next to her on the bed, still dressed, and Greta is in the doorway, with Oster pulling on pajama trousers.
"A dream," Katerine is saying to Lore. She turns to Greta and Oster. "Just a dream." But Lore is still shaking and realizes she is crying.
"What is it?" Oster says, and kneels by the bed. He takes her hand. "If you tell me what you're afraid of we'll fix it."
"Wasn't a dream," she hiccoughs. She has to make them understand. "It was a monster." "Of course it was a dream, love," Katerine says with a smile. "How could it have got in?" "Through the door."
Oster makes a shushing gesture at his wife. "A monster? Well, I don't much like the idea of a monster being loose when we're all trying to sleep, so you tell me all about him, and then we can keep a look out. He ruffles her hair, which she carefully smooths down.
She knows he is humoring her, but it doesn't matter, because at least he will listen. "It was big and heavy only not heavy like a rock, heavy like..." She doesn't know how to deHsceriabvey itl.ike the end of

everything. "Very heavy, anyway. It made monster noises. And breathed hot air." She shudders. That air had felt so bad, like the breath of something dead.

"Well, the solution seems easy enough. If it came through the door, we'll give you a lock. A special lock that monsters can't open. Only people. Will that do?"
She considers it, then nods. By this time, Katerine is looking at the time display on the ceiling. "It can wait until tomorrow. It's past three already and I have that net conference at nine."
Lore is not sure whether her mother is talking to Oster, or to Greta who is still and silent by the door, o to her. She turns a mute look of appeal to her father.
He sighs. "I'll deal with it, Kat. You and Greta get to bed." They do. "I think we'll be lucky to find a lo at this hour. But there might be a place... Will you be all right on your own for half an hour?"
In answer Lore climbs down from the bed, puts on her slippers, and tucks her hand into his. He looks at her, then smiles. "Together it is, then."
In the end, they take the lock from the pantry door. It is an old-fashioned thing, attached by magnet to jamb and door, the mechanism a crude combination lock. But when they get it onto her bedroom door, and Lore wraps the combination cylinder with her hand so that even Oster can't see what number she chooses, she feels better. Oster tucks her up, kisses her forehead, and when the door closes behind him, she hears the satisfyincglick that means no one can ever come in here again until she rolls each of the white counters to its proper number.
She is getting dressed the next morning when Greta knocks at the door. She opens it proudly. Greta seems awkward. "Did you sleep better, later?"
Lore nods, then shows Greta her lock. Greta frowns. "This isn't good enough." "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 timseh?e 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.
SEVEN
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?"
I should have said I didn't know, let her figure it out, but I didn't know how long that would take, and I couldn't bear to see a system fail due to simple ignorance. "No. Just the way people are using them. The highest concentration of airborne volatiles is at the center of the trough. Where the water is deepest."
Magyar understood at once. "And those soft bastards don't want to get wet." "You can't blame them," I said tiredly.
"Yes, I can."
All of a sudden, I saw how young-looking that stretched skin was, how her anger covered vulnerability.
She didn't know what to do. I felt sorry for her. "If you wanted, I could probably come up with a formula to calculate the real concentrations, assuming they all go to about eight feet out."
The muscles around Magyar's eyes and mouth tightened even more. She looked as though maybe her ancestors had ridden horses on the Mongol steppes. "That won't be necessary." She looked at her watch. "I'll talk to you about this later."
Stupid. That was so stupWidh. y was I risking myself like this?
I never much enjoyed the forty-five minutes midway through the night when, by law, the section took a break. I managed by being amiable and guarded to those I could not avoid, and then taking a chair out of the way, near the screen showing the tape loop of fish. Watching the endless play of light on water, the dance of angelfish and eel, was the only time I allowed myself to indulge in memories of the past. The
tape reminded me of the reefs of Belize, where I had swum at fifteen. I could ignore the sweat and the stink as twenty-some people stripped their skinnies to the waist to free their hands to eat.
Usually I was left alone to eat the food I brought with me, while the rest of the shift complained about work, argued about the net channel, and played rough, incomprehensible practical jokes on each other. This time, Magyar was waiting for us.
"Turn that thing off," she said. "You people get paid to do a job. I'm paid to make sure you do. Sometimes both our jobs are easier than others. Now is one of the hard times. I've been looking over the readings you've given me in the last two hours, and they're no good." There were groans and one or two angry protests. "Oh, be quiet. If you'd walked those extra few feet into the middle of the troughs as you were supposed to then I wouldn't have to say all this." She looked at them one by one. "I've requisitioned chest-highs instead of the thigh waders, but they won't be available until tomorrow. I've also asked for hazard pay for the whole of this shift." There were a few smiles at that. "Don't get your hopes up. You know management."
Now the smiles were knowing. I could not help admiring the way Magyar manipulated her audience.
"One more thing, people. From now until the program is back online, I'll be checking readings
personally, at random. Anyone who is more than five percent out will be fired on the spot. Now get back out there and do your job."
The workload, which had been hard and dirty, became almost unbearable. When we stripped and showered at the end of the shift, there was a lot of muttering about taking sick days. I just kept my head down and tried not to think about the fact that I seemed to be the only one there who really knew anything about the system.
My dreams were bad that night. Long, tangled images of plastic sheets and blood, and lying on my stomach, face in a pillow, choking while whoever was on top of me humped up and down and breathed in my ear. I woke up drenched in sweat, tight and heavy with need.
I knew if I tried to do something about that need it would fade away into mocking memories of Spanner holding up the vial of oily drug and laughing.
I got to work a few minutes early. The computer was still down but there had been no emergencies during the afternoon.
When we were dressing for the shift, Magyar and two new men came into the locker room. One was wizened and bowlegged but seemed spry enough. He flashed a grin at the shift. The other one was just a teenager, with jet black hair and brown eyes. Something about the way he held himself, a strange mix of ramrod back and careless limbs, bothered me.
"This is Nathan Meisener" - the older man nodded - "and Paolo Cruz. I made Hepple pull his finger out on those vacancies. I thought you might appreciate the help."
There were one or two laughs but I wanted to yell at evYeoruyotnhei:nk two extra people will make

a difference if a fireball rips through herKei?nnis slapped Meisener on the back and Cel called out, "Hope you can swim," as she pulled on her waders.

"Right, people. Time to get to work." They began to file past Magyar. For all her apparent joviality, I could tell by the flush in her cheeks and line of her jaw that she was angry about something. Magyar pulled aside Kinnis and then me before we could walk past. "Kinnis, you take Meisener here. He has some experience, but it was a while back." She watched as Meisener followed Kinnis down the corridor.
I could feel the other one, the teenager, looking at me. "Cruz, you'll be following Bird around for a day or two. She knows a lot more about the way things work around here than you might think."
It was impossible to miss the bite behind those words. I did not like that. Was she suspicious enough yet to backcheck Bird's records? As if I didn't have enough to worry about.
I shepherded the new man ahead of me and felt Magyar's hard, bright eyes boring into my back all the way down the corridor. Paolo, though he must have noticed, said nothing.
During the next couple of hours, as I showed him the ropes, pointed out that his back support had the over-shoulder cross straps for a reason, he hardly spoke at all. Something about him still bothered me. I watched him as he walked out into the trough, PD held at waist level.
"Not the talkative type, is he?" Cel said from behind me.
No."
"Not like that Meisener. Talking a mile a minute." She lifted the PD she was holding. "How do you reset these things again?" I showed her. Cel clipped the PD to her belt, then nodded at Paolo, waist-deep in
the water. "Let me know if you need me to take him off your hands for a while." I was surprised at her friendliness. "Thanks. I might."
"New ones are always a pain." She looked at me assessingly. "Usually, anyhow." She waved, and moved off back to her own troughs. I returned my attention to Paolo.
Water sloshed as he strode another couple of feet deeper. I had watched several people taking their readings by now, and the one thing they all had in common was the gingerly way they walked through the polluted wastes. I did it myself. It was not just the possibility of overbalancing; you never knew what you were about to step on, or through. It was hard not to imagine the floating feces or lumps of glutinous matter, the variety of things, organic and nonorganic, that people flushed down their toilets or that
wriggled their own way through the municipal drains. It did not matter that your legs were protected by a double layer of polyurethane and plasthene; you could still feel the slimy things that bumped against you.
Paolo waded to the edge of the trough, seemingly unconcerned by what he might be treading on. He held out the PD. I waved it away. "Just read them out, it's quicker."
He did. Every fourth or fifth word, I caught an accent; not the softened consonants of Castilian, or the nasal vowels of Central American Spanish. Something else. Like the way he waded through the foul
water unconcerned, it felt as though it should be familiar, and it bothered me. I shook my head at my own imagination.
"You want me to stop?" He was looking at me. anxiously. "No. You're doing fine."
When he finished with the readings, I held out my gloved hand to help haul him out of the trough. He pretended not to see it, and climbed out unaided. I could tell by the hunch of his shoulders that he was embarrassed about deliberately avoiding my hand, and wondered why. I did not ask.
I watched Paolo on and off until the break, and it was when I was handing him the scrape, a short metal tool for unclogging the rake tines, that I realized he had not refused my help - he had refused my touch. Oh, he was very adept, graceful even, but he always made sure his hand never touched mine, or my foot his, when we were thigh-deep in the water, me holding back the bulrushes for him to clip the heads.
While I finished up the rushes I sent him back into the trough to do the next reading, and this time, when he waded out to the edge, I made sure I held out the clipper handle for him to grab. He accepted without hesitation. His smile was warm and very young-looking, completely at odds with the message sent by his
stiff, almost disdainful body language.
That stiffness reminded me of something, but when I tried to remember, all I could conjure up was a vague memory of Katerine, years ago, grinning in triumph at something on the net. That was it. I went back to work.
Magyar was waiting for us again in the breakroom. Kinnis. turned off the net without being asked.
Magyar smiled, but it was not pleasant. "Some of you will be pleased to hear that, as of twenty hours today, all personnel on this shift who spend time in the water, which is to say all of you, will wear masks and full-body barrier protection at all times. As mandated by Health and Safety regulations. You never know when we could get an unexpected visit from an inspector." She looked directly at me and it wasn't hard to tell she was angry. I had a bad feeling I knew why.
"Some of you, of course, will not be pleased at the cost, which will come out of your next salary credit, and all of you will no doubt be annoyed at the reduction in productivity and subsequent reduction in
salary, But blame that on those that make the rules and regulations." Her voice was husky with anger. She looked at me again, and I understood: she thought she was preempting me. She thought I was a Health and Safety inspectoSrh. e was implementing these changes, to save her job. No wonder she was angry. Productivity would go down, and soon Hepple would be on her back. And she blamed me. "Questions?"
No one was about to ask her questions when she was in this kind of mood.
"Well, then. I'll expect you back on shift, with masks, in exactly-" She looked at her watch. "-forty-two minutes."
On her way out, she gave me a tight, matte-eyed nod. It was impossible to mistake the direct challenge. Cel noticed, and turned, puzzled. I managed to shrug and look surprised, but underneath my skinny I was slippery with sweat.
"Why's she got it in for you?" Kinnis asked, but he looked wary, as though wondering if talking to me was a mistake.
"No idea." My heart felt cold and dense and suddenly I wondered if my accent sounded right, if the quick, liquid syllables were thickening, if just by listening to me everyone would know who I was. I felt dizzy and horribly exposed. At least Magyar hadn't actually checked my records yet, or I wouldn't still be here. But it was only a matter of time. I had to get Spanner to speed things up. I fumbled my way to my locker.and took out my food, trying to seem unconcerned. My hands were shaking. I needed to sit
down.
Paolo was already sitting near the fish screen. I sat next to him, but not too close. I said nothing for a moment, not trusting my voice. He sat quietly, watching the screen. He was not eating.
"Here." I held out half my food, then remembered and put it on the table next to him instead. "You can bring enough for two tomorrow."
"I thought..."
"There is a cafeteria, but you have to scrub down and change before they'll let you in. And the food
takes a long time and costs a lot. And it's full of executives and supervisors who'll stare at you like you're a bug."
"Thank you." He bit into the sandwich hungrily. I made a mental note to bring food tomorrow, anyway. He looked as though he needed to eat as much as he could afford to buy.
Kinnis and Meisener sat down opposite us. They must have decided it was safe to talk to me, after all. "So, Paolo, where're you from?"
"I've lived here since I was two years old." The words themselves were neutral enough, but I could hear the tension behind them. He didn't want to say any more.
Kinnis opened his mouth to ask another question, but Meisener was already talking.
"I was born here, but I've not spent much time in the city the last twenty years," he said. "Been all over the world. Army for a while, then mechanic for EnSyTec. Went everywhere. Then I got fed up of traveling, wanted to settle down, have kids, Took a job in Sarajevo, working the sewage lines. Got married."
"You have any kids, then?" Kinnis asked, forgetting Paolo.
"Two." And then they were pulling out pictures, talking about their children.
Paolo seemed to enjoy being included in their conversation without having to contribute. I was left to wonder how to deal with Magyar.
When I got home that night the message light was blinking on my screen. I hit PLAY before I took my jacket off; maybe it was Ruth and Ellen, inviting me round.
It was Spanner. "Hyn and Zimmer will be at the Polar Bear tomorrow night. Meet me there."
It turned itself off. I had not realized how much I'd been hoping for Ruth to call. I sat by the blank scree for a long time, listening to the deep, three-in-the-morning quiet.
I woke several times during the night, my heart beating too fast, wondering whether I should call the regional Health and Safety Council about Hedon Road.
~~~Lore followed Spanner down the dark stairwell and into the warm night. She kept her eyes down, fixed on Spanner's feet, refusing to look at the emptiness of outside. The wet asphalt sparkled in the sodium streetlights. She managed to get to the bar across the road without sweating too much.
The Polar Bear was dim and warm and no one looked up when they entered.
Lore had never been in a place like it. The casual bars and open-air cafes of Europe, the restaurants of Australia and tea rooms of India had not prepared her for this fecund, dark place, rich with the fruity scents of beer and layered with muted conversation. The wooden floors and bar surface were highly polished; the bar itself bellied out in biscuit-colored porcelain molded with grapes and leaves and bottles.
"It looks pregnant," she said, fascinated, wanting to go up and touch it, but Spanner was walking toward a table in the corner, and she followed.
An elderly couple were already seated. Spanner pulled out a chair. "This is Lore."
"I'm Hyn and he's Zimmer, but don't worry if you get us mixed up, a lot of people do."
Spanner went to the bar to get the drinks and Lore was left at the table with a man and a woman who looked like dried tobacco leaves with berries for eyes. Hyn and Zimmer. These were the people who
knew something about locks.
They seemed utterly at home in this setting, but Lore suspected they might blend as easily with the woods as this urban nightscape. She wondered if they were brother and sister, or whether they had just grown to resemble each other in the bizarre way of some couples. She searched for something to say. Her early training, the endless meetings with local and national dignitaries, took over. "It's an unusual name, the Polar Bear."
"Legend has it that a polar bear escaped from the zoo three hundred years ago, and was shot on this site." Zimmer sipped his dark brown beer. They seemed to find her amusing.
"What do you do?"
Zimmer laughed, a robust bouncing laugh that surprised Lore. "We're fences, my dear. And very good ones. And you?"
"I don't know."
"Don't worry. Spanner will soon fix that."
Spanner will fix th..a.t She looked at her tiny, faraway image in the mirror behind the bar and touched her red hair.
Spanner came back with beer. "Make it last. After this we're heading uptown. You'll need a clear head. Time to start paying me back."
Lore discovered that they worked well as a team. One would smile and take a drink to a table near a small group. The other watched from the bar. The rich, confident people found in the bars Spanner chose could not resist a woman on her own, whether from bad intent or the best of motives.
"Come sit with us," one would say, if it was Lore's turn to sit by them, and offer her a drink, which she always took. And she would talk, and then maybe get hysterical with laughter, or cry, whichever would
get the most attention, and perhaps spin them a story about being down on her luck, which was easy to do, with her accent and her bearing, and then Spanner would slide up behind them while they were fussing with handkerchiefs or orders for more drinks, and take one slate, or two. Rich people, Spanner said - and it seemed to be true - always left their slates in their jacket pockets, jackets that they hung over the backs of their chairs as though no one would dare to steal anything of theirs. Which, probably, no one had before. After all, what good was a slate to someone else? And after a while Lore would recover, and thank them decorously, and leave. She and Spanner would leap on the nearest slide or, if it was after two or three in the morning, swing onto the carapace of a beetling freighter, clutching hold of the emergency door release with their right hands - keeping their left hands, their PIDAs, shielded from
the antenna on the top, because if the tiny beetle brain of a freighter sensed a human aboard, it would stop dead in its tracks. Freighters could be dangerous, but Spanner - and soon Lore - knew all the routes, all the stops, all the timetables.
Sometimes they would giggle uproariously, especially when it had been Spanner doing the
poor-wee-thing-all-alone, because as they slid through the deserted city she would recount at the top of her lungs the outrageous stories she had spun for the rich and gullible victims.
Sometimes, if it had been dangerous work, or the alarm had gone out just minutes after they had left the bar and they had had to run, leap from one freighter to another, they would open a bottle of champagne at home and watch the pale liquid fizz like their adrenaline-rushing blood, and they would laugh again, and drink, and tear off each other's clothes and fuck like wild animals on a pile of slippery gray slates.
It seemed to Lore on nights like this that she had had no other life before right now, here, every pore open to the wild night's feel, every follicle attuned to changes in the air, every taste bud and nerve cell hot and fluttering. She knew that sometimes Spanner made money from other people's suffering, but she did
not have to see that, and she had suffered, too. Everyone suffered. It was just a question of making sure she was using them, and not the other way around. She would not be fooled again, not the way Oster had fooled her. Never again. And in the middle of sex she would look up at Spanner moving over her and wonder if those half-closed eyes were laying the newstank images of a naked, weeping Lore on top of the real Lore.
On nights like that, too, when Lore slept she often dreamed of being back in the bar, only now when she cried for these strangers it was for good reason, and she would wake up sweating in the hollow of the brightly colored quilt, remembering Tok, or Crablegs; her mother; Stella screaming in the fountain; and
she would wonder which parts of her life were real.
Sometimes, Spanner still went out on her own. Lore pressed her face against the glass, watching until Spanner was out of sight, and wondered where she went. Although it was getting easier to go out with Spanner at night, she still did not have the courage to do it on her own. And when they were out, it was Spanner who dealt with the world. Lore hid behind her: not literally, of course, but behind a cloud of
aloof silence. It had always worked when she was a child, a van de Oest. It never occurred to her that it might not work now, when no one knew or cared who she was. Spanner had snapped at her a couple of times to not stand up so bloody straight, she was drawing attention. So she learned how to move like Spanner, alert and upright, but withdrawn, ready and wary. She learned how to slide together the
beginning and ending of her words, to cut out the crystal pronunciation of her childhood. She gradually learned to become someone else, someone who recognized the thin, hungry face in the mirror, the red hair and naked vulva. But she still never went out into the open on her own.
There was nothing specific of which she was afraid, just ... everything, as though the world were a gelatinous beast that would fall upon her and suffocate her. The open spaces, the feeling that her back was naked, that people could see through her clothes; that someone would recognize her as that heiress
who was kidnapped three or four months ago. And her heart would kick under her ribs, and the muscles behind her jaw and in her throat would tighten as though someone had a thick, soft ribbon around her neck and was pulling very, very slowly.
On good days, she managed to get out into the garden. The hard part was getting past the front door. She would put her hand to the wood, and suddenly Hthaivnek, I got my glovesA? nd so she would
check her coat pockets. Yes. She had her gloves. She would open the door a craAckre, tmhiynkr,oots

showing? and have to close it again, go to the bathroom and check her hair. And then she would have to stand by the door, breathing deep, telling herself iot nwlyasa few secondson the streeOt.nly a few

seconds. Sometimes she hated herself for this fear. But then, if it was a good day, she would rip open the door in a rush and shut it and run down the steps, into the passageway, through the wooden gate that

now had a new, shiny lock and a bolt she could push from the inside, and she would be safe.
Sometimes she spent hours in the garden, breaking concrete with a pick, hauling it into the barrow, sorting the bricks by hand into two piles: one to throw away, one to keep to make a raised flower bed. Many of the weeds she left alone. They had fought to be there; she wasn't going to be the one to pull them out. Besides, they were green and growing, and most of them would flower in spring and summer.
Today she took a spade and started turning over the hard dirt. She leaned her weight into the spade, enjoying the way the steel bit into the black dirt, trying hard not to slice any worms.
Something rustled in the undergrowth by the west wall.
Lore went still. Listened. Nothing. She must have imagined it. She bent to her digging. Heard it again. She put her spade down carefully, not wanting to startle whatever it was, but when she got near the
tangle of weeds and dead wood and what looked like it might once have been a bicycle frame, there was a flurry of movement. She squatted down, peered under the foliage. An eye gleamed, and a tail lashed in the shadows. A cat.
They stared at each other. The cat was not pretty. Its ribs were showing, and one eye was closed, probably missing altogether. She could smell its breath, a thick, hot stink as though it had been chewing on dead things.
Lore backed away carefully. It needed feeding, that was obvious, but if she left now, would it ever come back? And if it did, did she really want the responsibility of caring for a verminous, ill animal? It was probably dying. And if she went inside to get food, she would have to come out again. Run the gauntlet twice in one day.
The cat was pushed as far back against the wall as it could get. It hissed, hissed again. Its upper right canine was missing. Maybe it was old, and had come here to die. It moved its head back and forth, looking for a way past Lore.
She wondered what was in the kitchen that a cat might like to eat, and visions of the poor starved thing wolfing down cold rice, or scraps of two-day-old sushi or beans, trying to lick its whiskers afterward,
made her sigh. Now she would have to feed it.
She brought out two saucers, one with raw egg, the other with defrosted ground veal. The cat was gone. She put the dishes down in the undergrowth anyway, and went back to her spade. She did not see the
cat again that afternoon.
When it got dark, she went out one more time. The plates were empty. She smiled.
She watched the net but there was never anything about her kidnapping, no stories about bodies. Not surprising. She was old news: she had been taken at the end of August and it was now December. What was unusual was the absence of information about the van de Oests. Nothing.
She scanned the business then environmental sections - still nothing. It did not make sense.
And then one day, on the news, there were her father and Tok, standing shoulder to shoulder by the fountain at Ratnapida. Tok, she noticed, was taller than her father now.
"We know she's out there somewhere," Oster was saying, "and we want her to come home."
Tok, circles under his eyes and a broken air to his stance, nodded. "Please," he said directly to the camera, "Lore, come home. It's ... Everything's sorted out." He looked utterly defeated.
Four months ago, Tok, with just a few breathless sentences about why Stella had killed herself, had destroyed the image Lore had built of Oster over the years. She had loved her father; she had thought he loved her. But he was a monster. It had all been a lie. And now Tok - Tok, her brother, Stella's twin - was siding with him, telling her to come home, it wsoarsteadll out . She did not understand.
Although she and Spanner slept together, although she might owe her life to Spanner, Lore knew instinctively that letting Spanner see chinks in her armor was dangerous. So the afternoon Spanner called from the kitchen that they had run out of bread, and suggested that Lore go to the market because they needed some other things, too, Lore knew she would have to go, would have to conceal her fear and saunter casually out into the daylight on her own.
The day was thinly overcast. The clouds spread the light into an eye-aching blanket that made her wince. It was colder than it looked. Her breath, coming in great panicky gusts, froze like gauzy sheets in front of her face. She wished she had worn a hat. She did not go back for one; she knew she would not be able to leave again.
The market sign flashed three hundred yards away. Lore started walking. If she kept her eyes on the s she would be all right. She crossed at the ceramic safeway she and Spanner always used when going to the Polar Bear. Safe territory. Known. But then she was walking north along the pavement and people were walking in front of her and across her path and toward her. There was nowhere she could look where they would not be able to see her face. She walked faster.
The market was strange: small, but with that cavernous feel of tight-margin enterprise. She picked up a basket and wandered down the first aisle, trying hard to not look as bewildered as she felt. To look vulnerable was to be vulnerable. It was all bar codes and machine voices calling out prices as her basket passed. The only people she saw were shoppers.
She picked up a head of lettuce and turned it in her hand. There was dirt on the underside. She put it back on the piles of lettuces picked up another. They were all dirty. She chose one that seemed less grubby than the others, and moved on to the carrots. It was peculiar to see them all lined up on their sides and tied together in bunches. On the rare occasions she had, shopped in the past, the vegetable section in Auckland had been a series of gleaming white vats, where the lettuces and dwarf radicchio, the spinach and bok choy grew hydroponically, right there in front of you. If you wanted something, you picked it yourself. You knew it was fresh, you knew where it had been, where it had come from. These vegetables seemed... dead. Not like real vegetables at all. Where had they been grown, and how? And how did you get them clean?
She laid the carrots alongside the lettuce. The aisles did not seem very well organized. After she had walked up and down them all twice, she found the bread next to the entrance.
She joined the lines at the checkout, realized that the woman in front of her, and the man next to her in another line, both had their vegetables in plastic bags. She wondered if they brought the bags with them. The line was the worst part. People in front of her, beside her, behind her, breathing her air, all comfortable, assured, confident through having undergone this simple procedure a hundred times, a
thousand times. Natives in this particular stratum of culture. In a strange country, all Lore would have to do was smile and shrug, and say loudly in English or Dutch or French that she did not understand what she should do: foreigners were allowed to make mistakes. Natives were not.
She moved one step closer to the checkout. The woman in front of her turned casually, nodded, looked at her basket, turned back to the front. Lore almost panicked and threw down her bread and vegetables. Did normal people only buy vegetables and bread? Would the woman think she was strange because her things were not in plastic bags?
In her imagination that one casual glance became a searching stare, the nod a sharp gesture of condemnation.
Was it her hair? Her clothes? But then the woman was checking her goods through the scanner,
V-handing her PIDA into the metal-and-ceramic jaws of the debit counter, packing her things - canned goods mostly - into a plastic string bag and leaving. The scanner bleeped at her softly. "Next customer, please. Next customer, please."
Lore waved her lettuce and carrots and bread through the scanner one by one, as she had seen the woman do. Then she stuck the V of her hand into the debit counter. It clicked green. The man behind her cleared his throat impatiently. She scooped her things up and walked quickly out of the door. Eyes
followed her as she almost ran back down Springbank, across the safeway.
Spanner was working when she got back, frowning over a pile of slates. Lore's hands shook as she put the lettuce in the refrigerator. It was two days before she went back out into the garden.
One day Spanner came home around noon and announced that they would go to the park. To Lore's relief, they took back streets and cut-throughs and crossed the long-abandoned railway line to enter the park from the side.
Pearson Park was a pocket-sized patch of green in the middle of the west side of the city. Once, it had been part of the estate of some rich Victorian family. The statues they had erected at the jubilee of Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Empress of India, remained untouched. Victoria herself, her white marble jowls turning slightly green with moss - like the shadow of a beard - graced a plinth in the rose garden. Albert, Prince Consort, lorded it over the pond and its score of mallards and moorhens and
muddy-looking geese. Most of the birds were now asleep on the tiny island, head under wing, or begging scraps of bread or rice from the few hardy souls, well-wrapped against the cold, who were eating lunch away from the office. An oak tree, probably not much younger than the statues, Lore thought, had been half pulled up, pushed sideways, and trained to grow across the pond: a gnarled, moss-slippery bridge.
Its roots were dug like long, bony fingers into the asphalt of the path. Lore shivered.
"You'll be warm where we're going," Spanner said. She led Lore around the pond toward a Victorian conservatory, all white wood and glass greenhouse, with clouds in every shade of gray scudding along its panes. Lore followed Spanner past the little window where a bored employee sold seedlings and
saplings, and inside.
It was like walking into a line of hanging laundry, still hot and wet and smelling of earth and sunshine and fresh rain. She felt as though she had stepped through a mirror into another world, where the ash and charcoal, the grim mercury and zinc and lithium vanished into the living colors of the tropics. A bird shrieked. The light was bright, and reflected from the vivid orange of half fruits at the bottom of the aviary cages, on the flash of a purple-throated hummingbird, on huge, blowsy red flowers.
"Heliconia..." Lore said, in wonder, and lifted her face to smell. The ceiling was three stories high, and the whole space was lush with greenery.
"How the hell did you know that?"
"I've been in the jungle. Before." Before all this.
She felt suddenly that her carapace had been ripped off, like a shiny scab, and she was open, raw and pink, to everything: the brilliant sherbet green of a parakeet's tail; to a dozen variations on brown - leaf mold, dead moss, peat, bark, beetles; to the crunch of their feet on the gravel paths that wound between
the vines and palms and trailers that spanned the fifty or sixty feet from loam to glass ceiling. It was these plants that seemed to interest Spanner.
Spanner stopped in front of an enormous green tower with trailing aerial roots and leaves that were fringed and full of natural holes. Lore tilted her head up, up, and was lost in the soaring spindle-weave of foliage, the tracery of diferent greens overhead, the architectural density of it all, like a great, Gothic cathedral.
She wondered why Spanner had brought her here.
"Monstera deliciosa, that's its Latin name," Spanner said. "The people who first brought it back from
the jungle called it the fruit salad plant, because that's what the fruit tastes like." Her face was tilted up at forty-five degrees, and Lore could imagine her tramping through the tropics, braving unknown hazards to collect specimens, just to say shbee'den there, a new place. But there were no more new places. Lore suddenly thought of Stella. Her sister and Spanner were very alike. They were the people who suffered because they were made for exploring the edges, pushing the boundaries. But the only boundaries left
were inside.
She wanted to ask Spanner why she was letting down her barriers. Why now? She asked, instead: "Where does it come from?"
Spanner shrugged. "Nowhere, now, except hothouses." She lifted up her face again. "I've been coming here for six years, watching for fruit. I wonder what they'd really taswtehalitkeki-nd of fruit salad?
Once I dreamt I found a pineapple as big as a barrel on the floor. When I ate a bit, it tasted like strawberries." Her smile twisted at the last minute. "Imagine calling something that grows fruit salad a cheese plant ."
Later, as they walked the half mile home, coats wrapped tight against the winter chill, Lore silent and waiting, Spanner suddenly said, "It's my birthday tomorrow."
Lore looked at Spanner's inwardly focused eyes and knew it would be pointless to ask her how old she was.
When they got back to the flat, Lore took off her jacket and went into the kitchen to make coffee. When it was done, she headed back to the living room but paused in the doorway. Spanner, still in her coat,
was staring into empty space. Lore had never seen her look so vulnerable. She didn't think she had made a sound, but Spanner's gaze came back to the room, and focused on her. "I'm going out."
"But-"
"What?" Spanner's voice was harsh.
Lore looked at the cup in her hand. "Nothing." "Don't wait up."
Lore stood where she was until the front door closed; then she went back into the kitchen and carefully poured Spanner's coffee down the drain. After a moment, she poured her own away, too.
Moving slowly, numbly, trying not to think, not to let in the pictures of Stella and Spanner, their loneliness - no, theeimr ptiness - she picked up her coat. She buttoned it deliberately.
Don't think about siht,e told herself again, only this time it was the outside she was trying not to think about, the big wide world full of open sky and strangers who might take a casual look at her, then look again, then open their mouths to shout, to point... She opened the door and headed back to the conservatory.
It was four in the morning and all the lights in the flat were off when Spanner got back. Lore heard the chink of a bottle against the wall. "Put the light on before you kill yourself," she called. Then she got out o bed and watched from the doorway as Spanner tugged off her jacket, tripped over the rug, saw the
four-foot cheese plant, and stopped.
Lore walked barefoot into the living room. "Happy birthday." Spanner started to cry. Lore held her.
When the shift finally ended I was almost glad I had to go to the Polar Bear to meet Spanner. At least while I was worrying about her and my PIDA, about Magyar checking up on Bird's records, I wouldn't
be sweating over the score of things that could go wrong at the plant.
Outside it was cold and clear. Winter was coming. When I got to the Polar Bear my face was red and my hands tingled with cold. Hyn and Zimmer were already there, with Spanner. I got myself a drink
before sitting down. I took off my jacket and nodded at them.
Zimmer nodded back. "Spanner tells me what you want. We don't get requests like that very often." "It's rare," Hyn agreed.
"And we don't know of anyone who's holding what you need." "But you could find out," Spanner said.
"Oh, yes," Hyn said, "but do you really want us to?" I took a sip of my beer. It was cool and nutty. "They're not the kind of people it's wise to know."
Spanner laughed. "Nor am I. Nor are you, not really." No one said anything about me.
Hyn and Zimmer looked at each other. They seemed troubled. "Do you really need this equipment?" "Yes."
Zimmer touched my wrist with one brown gnarled finger. "And you?" His eyes looked more like berries than ever, and still bright, but older somehow.
I nodded reluctantly. "Yes."
Hyn sighed. "Then we'll do it. But it'll be expensive." We all knew she was talking about more than money.
"How much?"
Hyn shrugged, looked at Zimmer. "Fifteen thousands. Maybe more."
That was more than I had expected. "I'm not-" "We'll get the money."
I looked at her. "Spanner, I don't-"
"We'll have the money," Spanner repeated to Hyn and Zimmer. "Just let us know when and where, and you'll have it."
I had never seen them look so unhappy, but they nodded and stood. They left their unfinished drinks on the table.
Hyn and Zimmer were scared, but danger was just an adventure to Spanner. It put her in a good mood. We sipped at our beer in silence. This was not the only kind of danger I was in. If Magyar decided to us some budget on a backcheck of Bird's record, she would see straightaway that I knew more than I had a right to. And then she might be able to justify a deeper search. And that meant she would find out Bird
had died a while ago. And then I was in real trouble. Might as well take advantage of Spanner's good mood.
"I changed my mind about the PIDA records. I need that information substituting as soon as possible." "When?"
"Yesterday." "No problem."
Silence again. This time it lengthened until I couldn't bear it any longer. "Where will you get the money?" "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 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 fiat 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.