Slow River

Chapter 3

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 read Johne 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 wanted 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 translated to Just 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 pay. Lore 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, saying, When you’re all grown up, and 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 look 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 instructions. Wet hair. Apply generously with comb. Wipe off any excess from skin. Leave for ten minutes. It 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 strain, mainly Pseudomonas 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.