Slow River

Before she goes back to school, she films the pond and the quay, every room of Ratnapida. When she goes back to her dorm room, she learns how to splice setting and character, and her films fill with porn actors wearing her parents’ faces, fucking doggy-style on the copter pad, hanging upside down from the stone quay, thrashing in the carp pond. They cry out with her parents’ voices, get dressed using the same habitual mannerisms. They are her parents. As her parents become more distant toward one another, Lore brings them flesh to flesh, sometimes inserting dialogue. It does not matter to her whether their words to each other are cruel or kind; they communicate, Her dreams become confusing.

Once she almost calls Tok, but then she gets scared. He will not understand. She watches her films, over and over, and wonders what sex is really like. She lies awake at night and listens to her school friends, wondering what they know, and what they do.

Chapter 11

The next day I plugged in my film library for the first time in months. I had to believe Spanner about the hole in the pattern; that was her job. My job was to create a short commercial that would be indistinguishable from the real thing; one that would persuade the rich to part with their money—and do it fast enough for us to get off the air, get the money out of the account, and disappear before net security could work out that their signal had even been piggybacked.

What would work best, I had decided, was an appeal based on charity to older people, those Tom’s age or thereabouts.

Those born before 1960 had the hardest time adjusting to change. They were the ones who would suddenly stop in the middle of the street as if they had vertigo when some shopwindow flared and called out, or get that haunted, bewildered look when the PIDA readers changed again, or the newstanks swapped to a different format.

It was a very specific expression: hollow-cheeked, eyes darting, looking for somewhere to hide. I had seen that same look on the faces of war refugees, or the foreign-speaking parents of native-speaking children. Older people were immigrants in their own country. They had not been born to the idea of rapid change, not like us.

I needed a thirty-second feature—but the real punch had to be in the first eight of those seconds. I needed to know what was going on in the world of commercial net entertainment.

I took breakfast into the living room and ate while I flipped through the offerings: a two-hour docudrama about a woman and her child fending off urban predators in a burned-out Sydney tenement; a lot of breathy pseudonews; an interactive version of The Thirty-Nine Steps. I watched that one for a while, fascinated at how the original film was utterly destroyed by turning it into a game, then finally settled down to a modern version of Shakespeare’s Othello. I only needed to watch about twenty minutes to see how visual fashions had changed in the months since I had left Spanner.

What seemed to be in favor was a kind of neomodernism, a fascination for details and emphasis on texture. What I had in my library would not be good enough. Oh, there were some tricks I could play: I could redigitize chunks of it, in effect reshooting frames to give the footage a “live” feel, enabling me to make the pans slower than the original, the focuses more lingering. But I would need to do some recording of my own. For that I would need a model.

I sipped at my tea. Maybe Tom would be interested.

I turned the screen off and stared out of the window. The sky looked the same today as it might have done a hundred years ago, or a thousand, or fifty thousand. I wondered what it must have been like to grow up in a community that stayed more or less the same, from birth to death. To be able to reach ten, or twenty-five, or fifty, and think, There, I’m not going to learn any more. I know enough to live my life.

Magyar stayed out of my way for the next few days, but I caught her eyeing me speculatively once or twice and knew that this was merely an undeclared truce; she had not given up. With the systems back up and the two extra bodies, it was almost relaxing.

I whistled as I transferred the figures on the board to a slate.

Paolo came into the readout station. “What does that readout there mean?”

“I thought you were trimming back the rushes on forty.”

“All done.” I looked. They were. He pointed to the green numbers again. “What does that measure?”

His limbs were still stiff, still carefully nowhere near touching me, but the expressionless mask that usually curtained his face had parted, just a little. It was like watching an anemone uncurl and expose its mouth, delicate and beautiful. “Nitrogen. In various forms.”

“What’s the difference between the kinds?”