Slow River

I was thinking, irrelevantly, of sea and sand and sitting on a log. Then of my last van de Oest project in the Kirghizi desert. Of a truck driving through a puddle, and Hepple.

“What?”

“I said, I want to strangle the little bastard. He could have killed my people. All for money! But why? That’s what doesn’t make sense. Who benefits? The whole thing smacks of organization, which takes money. Even if we had shut down for several days and managers lost their profits, it doesn’t mean anyone else would have made money. Unless it was a matter of market share, and even then-”

Market share. Hepple. A tent, wind singing along the dunes outside. Marley, saying something about…

“-divided up among several rival plants, so it wouldn’t be worthwhile.”

Silence.

“Are you there?”

“Um? Yes. Sorry.” The wisp of memory faded.

“Well, what should we do? Apart from beat the bastard to pulp.”

“Watch and wait.” A dissatisfied, incredulous silence. “We need more information.” There was something missing. Something important. Hepple. A truck. Tok. Marley. I shook my head. “We don’t know for sure that he’s responsible.”

“True.” Grudging. “He might not even know we know it’s sabotage.”

“If it is him, he’ll know what the plant managers know.” Her sigh was loud and long. “Meet me outside the plant at half five?”

“Yes.”

I picked up the hammer and a mouthful of nails and went back to building my planter—one of five. I was going to make an orchard. Me, the sky, some trees. Maybe bees would come up here after all.

The wood was new, still sappy and white against the silvery glint of the nails. Difficult to saw, but less expensive.

On a water worker’s pay, I couldn’t afford any better.

But there’s that thirty thousand tucked away. I tried not to think about that. If I didn’t spend the money I could pretend I hadn’t been in that bunker with Spanner.

I could ignore that awful dead-bone smile she had given me, the things I had said. The things I knew because of what I had done.

I thought about Magyar’s words: managers’ profits. Hepple wouldn’t be getting any this quarter. His own fault. His greedy attempts to shave expenses could have cost people their lives. Market share.

The hammer slipped and caught the edge of my thumb. I spat the nails out of my mouth and swore. Carpentry wasn’t my forte. Tok, now, he could have taken these bits of wood and banged them together in a second. Very practical and workmanlike. He was the kind of person who could take two twigs and a piece of string and make something interesting and sturdy. He had done beautiful things made of found objects dotted the grounds at Ratnapida. He had never been able to just sit, empty-handed. And then he had gone to study music. So hidden, after all. Close-minded. I suppose it ran in the family.

We had shared things, though. And he had helped me. Like that time by the pond when he had told me to find something to do, something to use as a shield against our parents’ interest. I hammered the nail home, set another in place with a tap. That afternoon had been sunny, like most Ratnapida days I remembered. Throwing grass stems for the fish. I hammered the nail in. Set another. Smiled as I remembered Tok telling me about sneaking a look at Aunt Nadia’s files. Lifted the hammer.

It came out of nowhere, a metaphysical hammer blow between the rise and fall of the real tool: Hepple. Market share. Jerome’s Boys. And it all fell into place.

Magyar was waiting for me in the locker room. The shift would not change for half an hour and everything was quiet. We sat next to each other on the wooden bench, not too close. “Jerome’s Boys,” I told her. “They were a dirty-work team run directly by the van de Oest COO, forty years ago.

They enforced the company monopolies, before the courts got around to it. Any means necessary. Which is why they were supposed to have been disbanded. Maybe they were, but someone’s had the same idea.” Magyar was staring at me as though I was crazy. “Look at when Meisener joined. Just a few days after Hepple started cost-cutting.”

“Hepple? This bunch of enforcers tried to wreck my plant because of that useless idiot?”

“No. Or, rather, yes: because of what Hepple did. In a way you were right. It’s about market share.”

“I’m trying very hard,” she said, “but I don’t see what Hepple’s got to do with it.”

I started again. “My… the van de Oests originally made their money by genetically tailoring bacteria and then patenting them. Every time their bugs were used, they got a cut. Then they retailored the bugs so that they don’t work unless they’re supplied with special proprietary bug food—which is where they make their real profit these days. Treatment plants need the bugs, the bugs need the food. The van de Oests license people to supply both and earn a lot of money for doing nothing. They have a monopoly. When Hepple canceled the food order in favor of generics, he was breaking that monopoly. Someone stepped in to protect it.”

“They would risk all this, thousands of lives, to protect a monopoly?”