Slow River

Chapter 16

Lore is seventeen. Her final exams are done. Two weeks before the end of her last term at school, her mother calls.

“Are you ready to leave that place yet?”

Lore grips the table beside the screen. “You’ve decided? You’ll let me do it?”

“I’ve decided. I’ll let you do it.”

“Complete control?”

“No. You’ll be Marley’s deputy.”

“But—”

On-screen, Katerine holds up her hand. “Marley has graciously agreed to let you co-lead, unofficially, but I can’t justify giving you complete control of such a high-profile project.”

“High-profile? The Kirghizi project?”

“It is to the Kirghizians.”

And now Lore grins. Second-in-charge of a huge project. The one she has been waiting for. “When are we scheduled to start?”

“Our contract with the Kirghizian government is valid as of this afternoon. I suggest you talk to Marley. And Lore, don’t screw up.”

Lore packs, hands shaking—partly from a fierce exhilaration, partly from nerves. Ever since the company started bidding on this project she has had her heart set on it. She has disk after disk of plans, all ready to go. Working with Marley will not be too bad; she usually gets on well with her uncle’s husband. He’ll let her use some of her ideas, surely. She leaves without a backward glance, for the school, but she takes a taxi ride past the sex club for old times’ sake. She thinks briefly of Anne, the first one. She will never come here again. She will probably never use a sex club again. There is no need.

Lore makes several overflights of the Kazakhstan region three hundred miles north of the Aral Sea. The area is suffering from the Soviet Union’s disastrous attempts in the middle of the last century to turn the sun-drenched deserts of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenia, and Kirghizia into a vast cotton monoculture. The Aral Sea, once the largest body of water in Central Asia, is beyond immediate salvation. The Soviet regime drained the inland sea of two-thirds of its volume, diverting its sources, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, into thousands of miles of irrigation canals and ditches crisscrossing the new fields of cotton that stood where once there had been only arid steppe. Muynak, once the Aral’s largest fishing port, now stands forty-five miles from the water’s edge. Rusting hulls of abandoned vessels and barges line what was once the shore. When Lore orders the copter lower, she sees that many of the hulks have been scavenged for the metal.

The family has won the first of the multilevel, forty-year programs: to clean up the water table of Kirghizia and route the clean water back to the Aral. Marley has suggested that her initial brief should be the fertilizer, pesticide, and defoliant pollution resulting from wholesale crop spraying throughout the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties. He will deal with the biological contamination—bacteria, viruses, parasites, and algae. If she has any questions, all she has to do is ask. And he, of course, will have to approve any requisitions over ten million.

They are sitting in Marley’s project tent, which is actually a collapsible three-room stretch dome. Marley is drinking green tea, looking as sleek as a spaniel. Lore is impatient to get started. “What’s our plant and equipment budget?”

“One hundred and twenty million.”

“That’s not enough…” She thinks hard. “Labor?”

Marley smiles. His teeth are beautifully white. “I wondered how quickly you’d catch that. Almost one hundred million.”

Lore laughs out loud. “Then all we have to do is swap sixty or so from one to the other. Once we’ve got everything functioning, we don’t need much maintenance. Labor costs will be minimal.”

“Ah, but don’t forget that projects like this, for small countries, are as much about politics as pollution.” He raises his eyebrows, sips.

“I don’t understand.”

“Jobs.”

Lore sighs. Jobs. People. Votes. Much harder to deal with.

“However, that does not make the problem insurmountable. If you take the time to examine your budget sheet—”

“I’ve only just got here.”

“I wasn’t criticizing. If you take a look, you’ll see there’s a two million set-aside, labeled ‘misc.’ Some project leaders will use that as an emergency reserve, some will use it as a carrot in the form of bonuses to their labor force, others will use it in discreet bribes to local officials. Whatever is most expedient.”

“And you know some amenable local officials?” Lore is realizing that reality is not the same as designing systems on her screen. She is glad she is only the deputy.

“Let’s just say I know of them.”

“And you’ll… soothe their worries and smooth their palms?”

“No. You will.”

Lore knows she has asked for this responsibility. She also knows that her mother would not have given it to her if she was not ready. She does not feel ready, but she grits her teeth and begins.

She sweeps the minister for labor and the commissar of the treasury up in a whirl of lunches and dinners, gifts them with the latest in personal transport technology, and even gets one of her assistants to find the male minister a female companion. All the time that she nods and smiles and soothes and explains, while she dabs at her mouth or takes another sip of champagne, she frets. She wants to be working, to be building something, seeing her ideas take shape.

It takes nearly three days to get them both to sign off on the budget changes, and even then she has to promise to “forget” to post the changes with the relevant Kirghizi departments.

“Is it always like this?” she asks that evening in Marley’s tent.

“Usually worse,” he says. “It’s impossible to get everyone to agree. To get things to move and change, we need to bend the rules a little. Some of us enjoy it.”

“Do you?”

“No, but your uncle Willem—”

“Just call him Willem. You know he hates being an uncle.”

“—but Willem, I think, gets a secret pleasure from the wheeling and dealing. As does your sister Greta.”

“Greta?” Lore is astonished. “She always seems like such a…” She hunts for a polite synonym for nonentity.

“Greta is a much more powerful force in this company than most people realize,” Marley says seriously. “Your future might be smoother if you bore that in mind.”

Lore knows that Marley is trying to tell her something but she has no idea what. “What about the rest of my family?”

“Katerine does not wheel and deal. She cuts to the heart. That’s her enjoyment.”

“And my father”

“I don’t know what your father enjoys.” Nor does Lore, these days.

Although she is up the next day well before dawn, she does not want to be perceived as inexperienced and overeager. She spends an hour walking the desert. She hears no birds, sees no rodent tracks, senses no slither-and-hide of lizard or snake. Here, the desert is barren.

When it has been light for nearly an hour, she calls together her managers.

The solution is easy enough in theory—they will use an advanced oxidation process, a combination of ultraviolet, hydrogen peroxide, and titanium oxide to break the dioxins down to relatively harmless weak acids and carbon dioxide, which can then be further remediated with biological agents—but in practice, the task is massive. There will be factors unanticipated simply because of the scale. Lore reminds her managers of this and tells them that every detail, no matter how small, must be overseen, whether by them or by trusted assistants. Meticulousness might not eliminate problems, but it will reduce them. She outlines the preliminary schedule of shifts and leave for the next few months, but warns them this may have to change when they hit snags. She orders herself a new project tent, one with more amenities; she does not mean to leave the project HQ until everything is online.

It takes five months to get the vast UV-reflecting troughs built. It should have taken two, but the glass coating on the contractors’ first load is substandard, and has to be done again. Then there is some kind of ethnic conflict between the Muslim Kirghizians and their Orthodox neighbors, and many of the local workers are conscripted. Lore has dinner with the minister and manages to get her labor force exempted from the draft.

“Is it always as bad as this?” becomes Lore’s standard question.

“Usually worse,” comes Marley’s smiling reply. He is always ready with advice, both theoretical and practical, and Lore sighs and goes back to negotiating, or drawing, or simply shouting, whichever is most expedient. Half a year later, the pipeline is done, stretching south across the Kirghizi desert mile after mile to the Aral Sea. Lore is fascinated by it. She watches the first water hiss through the special glass tubes along the center of the troughs and begin to bubble as the absorbed UV changes the toxic dioxins to aldehydes, then carboxylic acids, and finally carbon dioxide. It will take forty years, but she has begun it.

“Did you know,” she tells Marley that night, “that all this, this mess, the ruin of a whole ecosystem, a whole generation of people, was practically for nothing? About eighty percent of the water carried by the original canals away from the Syr and Amu Darya never even reached the cotton fields! They were criminally inefficient. The canals were made of unlined sand. Can you believe that? Sand!”

The grandiose insanity of the initial scheme to turn a desert into cotton fields outrages Lore. She forces herself to read every study that has been made of the suffering population. The water minerals are running at 1.5 grams per liter, thirty-four percent of adults and sixty-seven percent of children suffer respiratory illness, and seven out of ten inhabitants have hepatitis. All because some maniac thought that climate, geography, and ecology were amenable to ideology.

The sheer scale of that idiocy prods her into a fever. She has to find some way to make a statement, create some monument to remediation as powerful, as awe-inspiring as that lunacy. So she squeezes the budget and builds tower after tower—artificial waterfalls. Water falls hundreds of feet, brilliant with the reflected light of bank after bank of alien-looking heliostats that focus on the cascades the power of sixty suns, enough UV energy to initiate the reaction of organic pollutants to CO, in less than forty-five seconds, the time it takes for the water to fall from the top to the bottom.

Mile after mile of these artificial waterfalls glitter in the desert, carbon dioxide fuming from their bases like smoke. Lore dreams of them at night, and wakes in the morning filled with their imagery, satisfied in a way she has never found before—not from sex or food, not from exercise or books or making films. From her mind, her planning, has come this scheme to change a tiny portion of the world. In forty years these rusted hulks will be gone, the birth pathology rate will fall from its current horrendous forty-one to something more normal, and people will fish again in the Aral Sea.