Slow River

She went into the kitchen to make coffee, try and distract herself. The weeds down in the back garden were turning yellow. She stared at them while the coffee bubbled. Weeds, interlopers, were always the last to die. They started small, but after a year or two they made themselves belong, put down strong roots.

Trying not to think about what she was doing—or she would panic—Lore went into the tiny hallway and pulled on one of Spa

The stairwell was damp, and fu

The hard part was reaching the street. People passed her, not looking, but she still felt horribly exposed. She was breathing hard.

The cut-through was five yards to her left. She ran. It was a brick-lined tu

At the other end was a gate. It was shut. She rattled the door. The knob came off in her hand, the wood was so rotten. She kicked it. The door split open. The wood smelled fruity and spoiled. She went through and lifted it back into place as well as she could. She was probably the first person to set foot back here in years.

It was hard to tell what had once grown here a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago when the row of large houses had originally been built. It looked as though no one had cultivated the place for a long, long time. Judging by the assortment of ancient appliances and precode concrete rubble, the place had been used as a tip for the last two or three decades. But everywhere—by the rusting washing machine, between the old tires, in between the broken paving stones—sprung weeds and small saplings. There were brambles and the remnants of what might once have been a rose garden. She squatted down by the tangle of thorns. They might be the variety that bloomed at midwinter.

This close to the ground she could smell the dark, cold, loamy dirt, a clean smell, one that reminded her of being small, watching while one of the van de Oest gardeners planted tulip bulbs. She dug her fingers into the leaf mold. It felt just the same.

There was a rotted-out lean-to by one wall. She poked at it, looked at the hole in the roof. It wouldn’t be too hard to waterproof it enough for gardening tools.

She stood in the middle of the barren garden, surrounded by walls and broken glass, and smiled. She felt safe here. Many of the windows of the surrounding commercial buildings had been bricked up. Unless someone looked down from Spa

She waited until Spa

“Like what?”

“Clear it first. Then see.”

“You’ll need all kinds of equipment.”

“Not as much as you think. And besides, you said you’d get me anything I needed.” It was a challenge. Lore remembered the weeds.

Spa

“A shovel, spade, rake, trowel.” Lore pictured the gardeners at Ratnapida. “A wheelbarrow. Heavy gloves. Some shears. Grass seed, Other things when I’m ready to plant.”

The Hedon Road night shift ended at two in the morning. I was exhausted, so tired I could barely manage to unstrap my back support and the wrist and forearm splints. My arms felt leaden as I stripped off my ski

It was cold, and mist made the streetlights smeary; the kind of night that reminded me that in this northern city, autumn was just an eyeblink between summer and winter. At this time in the morning, all the passenger slides would be garaged at the far end of town. I would probably freeze if I had to wait for one to answer a request tapped in at a roadside pole. Besides, until I got paid—until I was sure my records would hold long enough to get paid—I would have to be careful with my money.

A special call-out would mean a large debit from my PIDA. Six months ago I would just have jumped a ride on a freight slide. I knew all the times and delivery routes—Hedon Road, then Springbank, then Princes Avenue—but with my new PIDA it was no longer worth the risk. If I got caught, there would be a blemish on my record that could cost me my job. That would mean a new PIDA… and where would it ever end?

I was tired, but there was something about walking at night, when the streets were empty: my strides felt longer, stronger, and the cold made even my breath tangible. I was real. I was here. Nothing was complicated anymore. I no longer had to be ashamed. I was Sal Bird, aged twenty-five, and I worked for a living.

But when I got back to the flat I had to climb five flights of stairs, and when I opened the three locks on my door and turned on the lights, one of the first things I saw was my Hammex 20 camera and the edit box, and I remembered it wasn’t over yet, that Spa

In the kitchen I snipped the corner off a plastic bag and poured half a pound of soybeans into a pan. They smelled of dust, and rattled on the metal as I filled the pan with water. As the water heated, the bean skins suddenly wrinkled, as though the outside absorbed water faster than the rest. The water boiled, and the beans began to rock, and some swelled before others, so it looked as though they were crawling over each other. In the space of minutes what had been hard, shiny ivory ball bearing plumped out into sleek alien ovoids curled up like so many fetuses. Like frog eggs in the desert hatching in a sudden downpour. And I laughed.

I ate well, and slept better, and didn’t remember any dreams.

The mobile rake was churning up gravel and detritus. and trying to dig its way through the trough’s concrete bottom; even in the din of rushing water and pumps, I could hear its electric hum turn to an overstressed whine. I swore, pulled on my waders and went after it.

The troughs were directly under the high, dirty glass of the roof. It was getting dark outside, and the light that made it through turned the choppy surface the color of zinc and pewter, like the North Sea before a storm. The water stank of shit and pollution and rot, and as the trough deepened toward the center, so did the smell of volatile organic compounds. Fourteen feet out, foul, warmish water spilled over the top of my thigh-high waders. It made no difference that nothing would get through my ski

But Magyar had not written the rules, she merely had to follow them to meet the almost impossible productivity standards Hepple had set. And I doubted she knew any other way. She was smart, yes, and seemed to have good instincts, but she was untrained and unsupported. Hepple had no business appointing her to a supervisory position without even going through the motions of teaching her what she needed to know. No doubt he thought she would make him look good by comparison.

Even the orientation procedures were disorganized and sloppy. Magyar had surprised me on my second day by digging up a copy of the orientation disk. “Watch it in the breakroom,” she said. “It runs forty minutes. I want you back on station in forty-five.”

The carpets and walls of the breakroom were done in white and teal, and there were about twenty uncomfortable chairs and two screens, one tuned to the net—usually the news—the other to a video loop of swimming fish. There was a PIDA reader under each screen, but I didn’t have to V-hand it to run the disk.