Slow River

Chapter 10

Lore is twelve. It is one of those rare days when both Oster and Katerine are busy at the terminals and she is free to do what she wants. It is July, and hotter than usual on Ratnapida; the constant hum of the air-conditioning drives her outside, to the carp pools. Tok is already there, lying on his stomach, dipping a blade of grass in and out of the water. His sketch pad blinks, forgotten, in the grass.

He looks up. “If you do this with the sun facing you, sometimes the fish think it’s an insect or something, and try to grab the grass.” Lore plops down next to him and watches while he dips the grass in and out, in and out.

“I can’t see any fish.”

“They’re there. You probably scared them away.” He throws the grass away. A breeze catches it and drops it in the center of the pool. They watch it turn slowly on the water. “So,” Tok says finally, “Mum and Dad giving you some peace for a change?”

Lore nods. They watch the grass blade some more. It drifts into the tiny eddy near a stone.

“Hang in there,” Tok says softly. “It’ll get better.”

Lore sighs, lies full length on the turf. “How do you cope?”

“It’s not as hard for me. They leave Stel and me alone; maybe they see us as belonging to each other somehow.” He shrugs, then smiles wryly. They both know Stella belongs to no one. No one has seen her for two months; they get occasional net calls from Macau and Aspen, from Jaffna and Rio. “And I’ve got my art. I can say, ‘This is what I want to do with my spare time, until I join the company.’ They tend to leave me alone.”

“I don’t have anything.”

“Find something.”

Lore nods.

“So, what has Dad all hot under the collar?” Tok asks.

“Some emergency about patent law in the Polynesians,” she says. “He thinks the government might disallow our proprietary rights on the Z. mobilis pyruvate decarboxylate gene.”

“Dad’s pet ethanol project.” Lore nods again. She can no longer see the grass blade. It must have sunk. “Oh well, if Dad gets nowhere with the law, Mum’ll send in the dirty-tricks department.”

Lore sits up. “The what?”

Tok grins. “Didn’t think you knew about that. The dirty-tricks department are the ones who do all the dirty jobs. Illegal ones. Off the record.”

“You’re making this up.”

“Nope. Read about it for yourself. It’s in Aunt Nadia’s personal file—”

“How did you get into that!”

“I’ll show you if you like. Anyway—”

“What does it say?”

“I’m getting to that. It talks about a bunch of boring stuff, accounts, company coups, that sort of thing, but it also talks about ‘Jerome’s Boys.’ Remember Jerome Gladby?”

“The old man?” The last time Lore saw her grandmother’s crony, an ex-COO, he was in a wheelchair, his booming voice reduced to a thin creak.

“He wasn’t always old. Years ago he used to run a group of people who did nothing but fix things that couldn’t be fixed by any other means. They carried guns, false ID, everything.”

“You’re kidding!”

“From what Nadia’s journal says it sounds like they did anything necessary: spread disinformation, stole things, sabotaged rivals’ plants. It was just getting interesting when Greta came on the net and kicked me out of the files.”

“Greta?” Lore is astounded. “I thought she was in Hangzhou or somewhere.”

“Zhejiang. She was just on the net, I guess. Anyway, she cut me out of those files clean as a whistle. Said little brothers who meddled in people’s private business came to regret it. Then she was gone. And when I tried to get back in, the files were deleted. Or she’d hidden them somewhere.”

Lore shakes her head. There is no point trying to figure out Greta’s motives; she has always been unfathomable. Instead, Lore tries to imagine what it would be like to have Jerome Gladby’s clandestine power. “Do you think that old man used to run around like a commando, pockets stuffed with knives and earwigging bugs?”

They laugh. “I bet all he did was sit in a secret room somewhere and issue coded orders over the net.”

“Hey, maybe they took pictures of rival CEOs beating their dogs and blackmailed them?”

“Or planted government information in their bags and had them arrested by the police…”

“Or faked up footage of them doing things with children…”

They amuse themselves for nearly an hour with imaginary exploits that grow more outrageous. They laugh until Lore’s stomach hurts.

She is still grinning when Oster finally emerges from his net conference and they go for a walk together along the beach. He rubs his eyes every now and again, and sighs,

“Everything go all right”

“Mostly. But they’ve got some new hard-line government in power who want to throw away all international protocol and claim all foreign assets as their own, especially intellectual property.”

“But you fixed it?”

“I think so. We’ve formed a loose coalition with other corporations—especially publishers and the entertainment business, who get all their money from copyright—and we hope that the threat of massive sanctions will cool the new government’s ardor.”

The sun is almost setting. Lore picks up a piece of driftwood and throws it as far into the reddening sea as she can. “But if that doesn’t work you could always send in a couple of assassins, right?” she asks as they resume walking.

“Now there’s a nice thought. It would solve a lot of problems.”

Lore wipes sandy hands down her shorts. “Then why don’t you? I don’t mean actually kill people, but, you know, make sure that things don’t go quite right with, oh, I don’t know, the national power system or something.”

Oster laughs as they walk, and Lore laughs along with him at first, but then she gets more serious.

“Is it true? I mean, could you do that if you wanted?”

He stops, looks at her closely. “Where on earth did you get that idea?”

“Tok was telling me about Jerome’s old group.”

Oster looks nonplussed. “But that group was shut down years ago, in my mother’s day.”

“So it did exist?”

“Yes. But it doesn’t anymore, at least not in that form, anyhow. Now it’s a legitimate troubleshooting team.”

They walk on some more. A cormorant dives into a wave. “So why was it shut down in the first place?”

“It got out of hand.”

Lore, imagination running riot, pictures grim men and women with drawn guns. “I don’t suppose they liked that. Did they shoot anyone?”

Oster bursts out laughing. “Sometimes I forget you’re only twelve.” He ruffles her hair. She smoothes it back patiently. “Look, let’s sit down a minute.” They find an old, half-buried log and sit facing the sea. “The lubricant behind all corporate machinery is money. My mother didn’t have to use threats. She didn’t have to fire anyone. All she did was reduce the funding for the group and tighten their accounting methods. Illegal operations are very expensive: materiel is purchased on the black market, bribes have to be made in the right places, cleanup operations are time-consuming and delicate. They simply can’t work without lots of liquid cash. No funds, no operation. So those who missed the glamour days went away and found some other kind of work, and those who are left have the souls of accountants. All that double-dealing stuff is history.”

Lore feels relieved but vaguely disappointed.

Lore is almost thirteen. She has mulled over Tok’s advice for several months. For her thirteenth birthday she asks for, and gets, a camera and edit board. It is not hard to use: point the camera and record; slide the disk into the edit board, chop out sequences, and paste it back together to make whatever you wish. Despite herself, she becomes interested, soon exhausting the possibilities of one camera and one board and largely unaware subjects. She adds a storyboarder with basic library. Now she has thousands of faces and voices that she can dub in over those of her family.

Oster and Katerine think of her films as a diverting hobby, and after Lore has shown them deliberately inane clips, they do not ask her what she is up to. So when she asks for new library cards for her storyboarder, they smile indulgently and buy them, not asking what she is playing with. In this way, she obtains several adult libraries.

She starts with Tok’s subscriptions to art zines and parlays them into membership in all the online camera zines she can find, hanging silently in the net, soaking up all the tricks with camera, edit board, and storyboarder that professionals, enthusiastic amateurs, and self-labeled underground anarchists boast of to each other. She never leaves messages, never lets anyone know she has been there. She trades in one camera after another until she has a Hammex 20, with which she can make films as crisp and sophisticated as any net entertainment. She keeps learning and begins to enjoy her secret life.

She discovers that if she wanders the house and gardens with her camera, Katerine does not start conversations about bioremediation in Bangui or Luanda. If Oster starts talking about getting up before dawn to go game fishing, Lore casually mentions that she will be up most of the night, filming moonlight on water for her latest art documentary. Soon she carries the Hammex with her wherever she goes, but the films she makes are secret.

Her films are wish-fulfillment, for a while: Oster and Katerine eat romantic dinners together, kiss, hold hands, disappear smiling into the bedroom. Lore, whose body is beginning to wake, wonders how her parents look when they are in bed. She watches some of the standard pornography scenes from her library, then learns how to morph the faces of her parents onto the bodies of the library actors.

Before she goes back to school, she films the pond and the quay, every room of Ratnapida. When she goes back to her dorm room, she learns how to splice setting and character, and her films fill with porn actors wearing her parents’ faces, fucking doggy-style on the copter pad, hanging upside down from the stone quay, thrashing in the carp pond. They cry out with her parents’ voices, get dressed using the same habitual mannerisms. They are her parents. As her parents become more distant toward one another, Lore brings them flesh to flesh, sometimes inserting dialogue. It does not matter to her whether their words to each other are cruel or kind; they communicate, Her dreams become confusing.

Once she almost calls Tok, but then she gets scared. He will not understand. She watches her films, over and over, and wonders what sex is really like. She lies awake at night and listens to her school friends, wondering what they know, and what they do.