Slow River

Chapter 2

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 random testing. Never take 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. And Never 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.