Slow River

Lore towels her hair dry. It was not Torini’s fault that the locals had tried to cut costs and improve their profit margin by using a generic substitute for the specially tailored van de Oest bacterium around which the whole project had been designed. She thinks about the project in Gdansk and what might happen if, sometime in the next eight months, some greedy or stupid contractor swaps out one bacterium for another. Disaster. She makes a note on her slate to review the continuing supervision of this project and the others in which she has so far been involved, Mistakes happen, but they can be prevented. Then she turns off the screen, dismissing the matter from her mind. It has nothing to do with her and there is a cold drink waiting in the bar.

Chapter 15

Common decency. I pushed my way out of the floor office and began to run. It was difficult to breathe in the hot, humid air by the water, and by the time I reached the readout station, I was gasping. I ran from trough to trough. No Paolo.

I stopped a moment. Think. I had to think. How would he be feeling? What did he know about the plant? Where would he go?

“Sabotage? How could someone sabotage this place?”

“Any number of ways, but the best place would be right at the beginning… ”

The influent. I ran.

There are times when the brain can’t deal with what it sees, so part of it sits back and the rest looks closely at some irrelevant piece of information. I noted that the concrete under my feet was shuddering with the weight of water coursing beneath it; that when the huge trap in the floor was pulled back the air not only hissed and roared with the exposed flow, but that it tasted different.

And why, I wondered, were people who were about to kill themselves so compulsively neat?

Paolo’s skinny was beautifully folded, collar top-and-forward the way shirts are sold in their cellophane packages. I had never been able to fold clothes like that. His limbs were piled just as neatly next to the skinny, all except one arm, which lay on its own to the side. I wondered idly how he had managed to take off that last arm, the right, I think. I supposed the designers had worked out a simple push-and-twist method.

Paolo was belly-down at the corner of the open trap, torso balanced over the chasm, lowering his throat toward the buzz razor jammed into the space between cover and floor.

“Don’t,” I said. Don’t, because it will please Hepple; because it will make a mess and I’ll have to clean it up. Don’t, because you won’t be able to change your mind later; because if you do, oh, I’ll feel guilty, so guilty, and I won’t, ever, be able to make it up to you…

He couldn’t hear me, of course, but he saw me, saw my lips, and his muscles knotted long enough to hold his upper body away from the humming blade, a few inches above the point where he would fall, and I moved gently, not too quickly, and lifted the slippery, ugly razor free. I flicked it off. The muscles over his ribs were tight and absolutely still. He hung in the balance. I didn’t think I could hold him up if he started to fall.

“Don’t move,” I said. “Don’t move.” I put the razor down carefully, not wanting to make a sudden move, a noise that might startle him out of his stasis. His skin gleamed with sweat. I knelt, braced one hand on the floor, and slid the other around his waist. If he wanted to, he could throw us both off, and we’d be sucked away in seconds and drowned, if we weren’t crushed first. He doesn’t know you’re a van de Oest, I told myself. I could feel him trembling.

I heaved him away from the edge.

He lay on his back, limbless, staring at the ceiling. I had the urge to apologize.

I got up and hit the stud that closed up the floor. I could hear his harsh breathing. I picked up the pile of limbs, carried them to his side. “Which one do you want first, right or left?”

“Right.”

We were both very matter-of-fact. There was no other way to be. I reconnected the prosthesis to his right shoulder, then turned away politely while he snapped on the other arm and then the legs. When he had put his skinny back on, I squatted down beside him and handed him the razor. He slipped it under his left cuff with a practiced motion. Carrying a razor was a habit. I wondered how I would have felt, before, if I’d known that.

His eyes were brown, opaque. “You shouldn’t have stopped me.”

“Why?”

For a moment I thought he would not bother to answer. Then he looked at me for a long time, and asked, “Who am I?”

“Paolo Cruz.”

“No. I’m nobody, a nothing.” So bitter. “The only person who cares that I exist is my brother. He brought us, me and my sister, here from Venezuela, to lobby for our rights. But my sister died, and no one will listen to me or my brother. ‘It was all settled long ago,’ the courts say. They’ve given us nothing. Except these plastic arms and legs. And maybe that’s all me and people like me are worth.”

No, I wanted to say. But why should he believe me? Who had there ever been to tell him any different?