Nicola Griffith (20 page)

Lore looked at the frame lit on the screen. She did good work, but her library was so limited. “I need some live action. Or a bigger library.”

Spanner nodded and dropped onto the couch.

“You want me to stop?”

“No,” Spanner said. “Let me think about it awhile.”

Two days later, she disappeared for more than twenty-four hours. When she came back, she looked exhausted, but she was grinning.

“I’ve got something special.” She held up a vial full of some clear, oily liquid.

“What is it?”

“You’ll see. Come here.” Spanner dipped a fingertip into the neck of the bottle, rubbed the finger along Lore’s throat. She did the same for herself. “Just a little. It’s very concentrated.”

“It’s a drug? What kind?”

“You’ll see,” she said again, and her voice was low and multilayered, her eyes dark. Lore wanted to trace Spanner’s cheekbones with her fingertips, run her palm across her shoulders, reach down into her clothes, touch her, feel her moving under her hands. She wanted it urgently. She ached.

An aphrodisiac, then, a pheromone, but more powerful than any she had heard of, legal or illegal. This was unstoppable. Spanner began to unbutton her dress. Lore moaned.

“Anything you like, baby, anything.”

There were about thirty people in the big room, spilling out into the kitchen, onto the steps. Lore introduced people, though most of them knew each other better than she did. Everyone was drinking very steadily. She brought out snacks, made sure the music never faltered. She avoided Billy, who just stood in the corner and watched everything with his small, flat eyes that reminded her of all the things she tried not to think about.

“I don’t like him,” she hissed to Spanner in the kitchen.

“You don’t have to like him,” Spanner said. “Just be civil. This is business.”

Lore refilled her glass and went back into the living room. Her wine was cold and aromatic, like sunshine at thirty thousand feet. The music was loud and insistent. Ellen was talking to someone at the other side of the room; they were laughing. Lore sat on the floor and wondered where Ruth was.

When Spanner came out of the bathroom she moved slowly from one group to another, smiling, shaking people by the hand, touching a cheek. The whole party suddenly seemed to Lore a gross parody of the business parties the van de Oests had occasionally hosted before Ratnapida.

“What’s the occasion?” Ruth asked, and sat down next to Lore on the carpet.

“Hmm?” Lore was thinking about Ratnapida: long cocktail dresses, expensive jewelry, uniformed caterers. Always for a reason, to gain or cement advantages. Never for fun. From the other side of the room, Spanner’s finger glistened just before she touched someone under the ear.

“The party. What’s it for?’

“I’ve no idea,” she lied, and nodded over at Spanner, who was still doing her hostess bit. “She just came home one day and said, party time. So it is.”

Ruth looked at her curiously. “You know, you’re nicer than I expected. Not like Spanner’s usual—” She went red. “I mean. . .”

Lore wanted to tell her it was all right, but she knew that if she did, other things might come tumbling out—she would tell Ruth to find Ellen and run, now, before it was too late, before they were caught up in Spanner’s web.
And mine,
she thought,
I’m the one with the camera
. “Did you know the woman Spanner was with before?”

Ruth nodded. “And the one before that, and before that. They don’t usually last more than about six weeks.”

Lore looked into her wine. What would she do, where would she go without Spanner? “Have you known her long?”

“Less than two years.”

Lore wanted to ask more, but Spanner was heading toward them. “Ruth! Glad you could make it.” She touched the back of Ruth’s neck lightly. “Oh, there you are,” she said to Lore. “Why don’t you go get your camera?”

Spanner’s pupils were tiny: the antidote, Lore assumed. Her own probably looked the same.

There were three people on the bed when she went to get her camera. They did not seem to notice her as she edged past them and lifted the Hammex. She checked the disk on the way back to the living room, where Spanner drew her aside. “Make sure you get everything. We need all the live action we can get.” She nodded over to the corner where a couple was kissing.

No one took any notice of the amorous couple. It was not the polite ignoring of an inappropriate display of lust but, rather, that everyone was becoming engrossed in his or her own partner. Everywhere eyes were glazed, skin gleaming, lips moist. The air was thick with sex. While Lore watched, one woman started to unbutton the fly of the man opposite her.

Lore turned away, lifted the camera to her shoulder. A man was turning around his partner and pulling down her trousers. Lore cleared her throat, pointed to her camera. “It’s switched on,” she said to the air eight inches above their heads, “but I need your permission before I. . .” She trailed off. They completely ignored her. She licked her lips, remembering how it felt to be wrapped in the drug.

She saw Ellen with Ruth and hurried over, intending to stop them, get them out of there, but they were already kissing. From the other side of the room, Spanner was watching her.
Don’t let Spanner see even a chink.
“Do I have your permission to film?” she asked dully.

“Just don’t get in my way,” Ellen said, and reached up under Ruth’s dress.

Lore put the camera to her shoulder and filmed. Her face ached and her cheek, wet with tears, chafed against the eyepiece, but she filmed for hours.

When Lore edited the film, she swapped around heads and bodies, or used library heads. She needed these images—
they
needed these images—to make films that would sell for enough to feed them, at least until summer, but she could not bring herself to use her friends without some kind of disguise.

Weeks later she got a call from Ruth. “You bastard.”

“What—”

“The film. I saw it. At a friend’s. You bastard.”

“Ruth . . . Ruth. . .”

“You think asking
permission
all nice and proper makes it
right
?”

“Ruth, I wanted to warn you—”

“I didn’t see any pictures of you,” Ruth cut in.

Yes, you did,
Lore wanted to say.
You’ve seen pictures of me in far more humiliating circumstances; and my abductors did not even have the courtesy to swap my head for another’s . . .
And all of a sudden, Lore did not care. What did it matter that Ruth was upset? She, Lore, had been through much, much worse. Ellen had given permission of a sort, hadn’t she? And at least Ruth had enjoyed it while it was happening. Lore had not enjoyed one single minute of her ordeal.

She turned off the screen. Her mouth felt strange. She knew that if she looked in a mirror she would see her lip curling, like Spanner’s.

The first people into the breakroom were Meisener and Kinnis. Meisener flicked a look in my direction but said nothing. Maybe he’d heard something. Kinnis either had heard nothing or didn’t care. He went to the wall screen and V-handed the PIDA reader. He made a disgusted sound when the figures came up.

“Every month I check my wages—every month I hope someone somewhere made a mistake, or a program screwed up and I’ll be a billionaire. Every month it says I made seventeen hundred.”

“You should know better,” Cel said, sitting down to unwrap her food.

“Hey, Bird. You think I should know better? No, and I’ll tell you why. Hope is good for a person. You think I’d keep shoveling shit if I knew, really knew all I’d get was seventeen hundred?”

There were two other people waiting to use the reader to check their wages, so Kinnis moved aside. He sat between me and Meisener. “You got paid yet?” he asked Meisener.

“Na. Timed it all wrong. I’ll have to wait until next month now.”

“You?”

I blinked at him. Payday. Money. I nodded and joined the queue at the reader. Put my hand in when it was my turn, read the figures. Almost sixteen hundred. I had earned money, in my own right, without family help, without hurting anyone else. I drew my hand out and looked at it. I wondered if Paolo would get paid.

When I woke up the next morning the sun was bright and I lay in bed a few minutes, smiling. I was alive. I had the next two days off. I had been paid.

Sixteen hundred was not much, but it was manageable. I still had a chunk left from before—nine hundred, maybe—and the scam would net tens of thousands. I felt rich.

I took breakfast onto the roof and watched the clouds, the glints from the river. There were several barges on the water. I wondered what they were carrying today. Steel from Scunthorpe, maybe? I closed my eyes and let the breeze blow soft against my lids. People had been using the river for thousands of years. Wheat during Roman times. Clay before that. Maybe blue beads and young, scared slaves; a tun of beer. And before then, in the days when boats were hollowed-out logs, scraped goatskins, dried fish from the coast, dyed feathers for a religious rite. What had the weather been like then, and how had the air smelled? Maybe life had been more simple. Maybe it was possible to sit high up every day of your life and just sniff the breeze. Maybe not.

When I climbed back through the window, the sun was shining full on the west wall, adding yellow to the already acidic green. Very ugly. I turned away from it, then turned back. This was my flat. I could change the color. I didn’t have to tell anyone, or ask, or take them into account. I could spray everything purple and orange if I wanted. I laughed, delighted. Mine.

Perhaps something neutral, alabaster or beige. Or linen. No, not warm enough. Maybe peach? The possibilities were overwhelming.

I sat down at the screen and pulled up the inventory of a couple of decorating shops. There were little tables that showed you how to work out how much paint you’d need. I did that. Decided I could afford it quite handily. Except I’d forgotten all the brushes and dustcloths and cleaning fluid and trays . . . I added it up again. Still manageable.

But then I looked at the walls again, at the kitchen, the bathroom, the steep stairway and complicated gables over the bed. I’d never picked up a brush or spray gun in my life. Where would I start?

Maybe Tom could help? But he was old. The only other people I knew were Spanner, and my shift at Hedon Road, and I couldn’t, wouldn’t, ask them.

Or there were Ruth and Ellen.

I remembered that interview with my mother on the net.

How do you persuade employees or team partners to take on such difficult projects?
the interviewer had asked.

Easy
, she said.
People love to be asked to help.

Easy.

It took twenty minutes pacing the living room before I could bring myself to tap in their number.

Ruth answered. The tendons down each side of her neck tightened for a second when she saw me, but she managed a guarded smile. “Lore. What can I do for you?”

“I just got paid. And I know we agreed to have dinner sometime, the three of us, but I wondered if I could impose on you for some help instead. My flat needs decorating and, well, I don’t know how. I thought maybe you could give me, ah, some advice. If you’ve ever done it yourself. I mean, I’ve never even bought paint before.”

She was looking puzzled. “You want me and Ellen to come help you choose paint.”

“Essentially, yes.”

She smiled, and this time the skin around her eyes stretched. “You’re settling down, then?”

“Yes. The flat’s nice, except for the color. And the temperature. I think it’ll be cold in a month or so.”

“Then you’ll need Thinsulate paper for all the outside walls. Have you thought about colors?”

“You’ll help, then?”

“Of course we’ll help! Why don’t you bring the measurements and samples and things round and we’ll have dinner.”

Dinner. “When?”

“The weekend?”

I grinned at her so hard I think there were tears in my eyes. “The weekend would be wonderful.”

SIXTEEN

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 proj ect. 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 on-line.

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 li ter, 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 CO2 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.