Slow River

“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 liter, 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 CO, 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.

Chapter 17

Ruth and Ellen owned a tiny house in a row of sixteen, all painted bright, primary colors. They faced what had once been a brickyard. The yard had closed down unexpectedly four weeks after they had signed the mortgage, making their home instantly worth thousands more. The yard, Ellen told me as she took my coat, was being converted into a seed nursery by one of the big garden-center chains.

Ruth showed me the living room—small, but with ingenious shelving—then led me into the big kitchen. Ellen followed but said nothing.

There was a bathroom extension, compact and rather chilly, and a back door that led out onto several square feet of concrete.

“We’re going to turn it into a patio or something, but we need to get the inside of the house fixed up first.”

“It looks fine to me.” And it did: clean, bright, open.

“You should have seen it before. Upstairs is still a bit of a mess.”

Ellen handed me a big glass of cold white wine. I drank it as I followed Ruth to look around upstairs. Ellen filled it again for me when we came down.

We sat in the bay window of the living room, at an old table with scarred legs covered with a cheerful cloth. Handmade stained-glass shades colored the lamplight, dimming it enough, so that I could barely see the thin patches in the chenille curtains. The room felt warm and vibrant and jewel-like, and I wondered if they knew how much I envied them.

Ellen brought in soup. We started to eat. I did not know what to say. I had hurt these two a while ago, yet here I was, eating their food.

I cleared my throat, waved my spoon at the walls. “Do you think these colors would suit my flat?”

“Tell us what it’s like.” There were rich shadows under Ruth’s cheekbones, along her jaw.