Nicola Griffith (8 page)

SEVEN

I was surprised when Magyar somehow managed to get hold of a combination of handheld and portable PDs. She piled them up on the gangway and called the section, some twenty-odd men and women, together.

“You already know that the computer’s down. It’s going to stay down for at least a day. Systems want to dump the whole program, plus backups, to make sure there aren’t any other viruses. Meanwhile, these are handheld detectors. I’ll want readings every half hour—”

“There won’t be time!” a red-haired man called. He worked two troughs down from me. He was flexing his right arm, over and over, testing his new neoprene and webbing elbow support, making it creak. His name was Kinnis.

“Shut up and let me finish. And try to keep still while I’m talking to you.” The creaking noise stopped. “I’m not asking you to read every single trough every half hour—I only want readings from one trough per person. But make sure it’s the same trough, and make sure it’s from the middle. We want an idea of changes, got that? Good. Questions?”

“How long are we going to be doing this?”

“As long as it takes. Systems say they can’t guarantee they’ll have everything clean and back up in less than three days, but you know how much they overcompensate. It might only take a day. There again, it might not.”

“But how do these things work?” Kinnis asked, looking dubiously at the pile of equipment.

“Ask Bird. She seems to be an expert.” They all turned to look at me. I felt my blanket of anonymity evaporating, but it was my own fault. I managed to nod. What did Magyar suspect? Next time I would keep my mouth shut.

A big, rawboned woman called Cel looked at her waterproof watch, and said in a Jamaican accent, “We’ve another six hours of the shift to go tonight.”

“Yes,” agreed Magyar, “and those holding tanks have to be pumped out as well, so let’s not waste any more of it, shall we?” She strode off, leaving the workers to look at each other, then back to me.

I shrugged, picked up one of the smaller handheld PDs. “This is a photoionization device. It’s calibrated in parts per billion. The bigger ones there, the portables, are in parts per trillion. They’re heavy, so maybe we can take it in turns.”

“I don’t mind heavy,” Kinnis said.

“You wouldn’t,” Cel said. “What do they measure?”

“Volatile organics. Totals only, I’m afraid.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad.” Kinnis picked up a portable, hefted it. “Easy.” He frowned, turning it around, looking at the case. “There’s no jack. How do you input the readings to Magyar’s master board?”

“You don’t. They’re old. The readings will have to be input manually.” They looked at me in disgust, as though it were my fault. “I know.” The job was hard enough without the extra work. I hesitated. I was no longer anonymous; I might as well be liked. “Look, seeing as I’m already familiar with these things, why don’t I come round the first time or two and collect your readings? It’ll save you some time.”

Cel looked at me suspiciously, as though trying to figure out what possible advantage I could gain from this. Then she nodded reluctantly.

I spent the next hour trotting from trough to trough, collecting readouts. Once I had everything, I saw we had a problem. The source of the problem was obvious. The solution wasn’t. If I called Magyar and explained, she would have even more reason to suspect me. Would Sal Bird have been able to work out what was going on—and if she had, would she have cared? I didn’t know. But if I ignored it, the whole system would gradually fall out of sync, and that could lead to danger for other workers in other sections.

I called Magyar. “Can you come down here?”

“I’m in a meeting with Hepple, Bird. Can it wait?”

I leaned against the readout console, trying to rest my legs a little. “Not for too long.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” She was. “This better be good.”

I handed her the record slate. “Take a look.”

Magyar glanced over them, frowned. “Lower than I expected.” Her skin stretched tight over high cheekbones when she narrowed her eyes. “How come you’re checking up on them?”

What would Sal Bird say? “I just thought it would save time if I went and collected the data, rather than everyone coming to the control center, one after another.” And it meant someone was on top of the subtle changes, minute to minute. Someone had to be. The dangers here were real. I thought about Hepple happily releasing our stream into the mains and what could have happened if there’d been a spill while Magyar had been debating whether or not to close down for a few minutes.

Magyar moved her shoulders, easing tension. “You think there’s something wrong with the PDs?”

I should have said I didn’t know, let her figure it out, but I didn’t know how long that would take, and I couldn’t bear to see a system fail due to simple ignorance. “No. Just the way people are using them. The highest concentration of airborne volatiles is at the center of the trough. Where the water is deepest.”

Magyar understood at once. “And those soft bastards don’t want to get wet.”

“You can’t blame them,” I said tiredly.

“Yes, I can.”

All of a sudden, I saw how young-looking that stretched skin was, how her anger covered vulnerability. She didn’t know what to do. I felt sorry for her. “If you wanted, I could probably come up with a formula to calculate the real concentrations, assuming they all go to about eight feet out.”

The muscles around Magyar’s eyes and mouth tightened even more. She looked as though maybe her ancestors had ridden horses on the Mongol steppes. “That won’t be necessary.” She looked at her watch. “I’ll talk to you about this later.”

Stupid. That was so stupid.
Why was I risking myself like this?

I never much enjoyed the forty-five minutes midway through the night when, by law, the section took a break. I managed by being amiable and guarded to those I could not avoid, and then taking a chair out of the way, near the screen showing the tape loop of fish. Watching the endless play of light on water, the dance of angelfish and eel, was the only time I allowed myself to indulge in memories of the past. The tape reminded me of the reefs of Belize, where I had swum at fifteen. I could ignore the sweat and the stink as twenty-some people stripped their skinnies to the waist to free their hands to eat.

Usually I was left alone to eat the food I brought with me, while the rest of the shift complained about work, argued about the net channel, and played rough, incomprehensible practical jokes on each other. This time, Magyar was waiting for us.

“Turn that thing off,” she said. “You people get paid to do a job. I’m paid to make sure you do. Sometimes both our jobs are easier than others. Now is one of the hard times. I’ve been looking over the readings you’ve given me in the last two hours, and they’re no good.” There were groans and one or two angry protests. “Oh, be quiet. If you’d walked those extra few feet into the middle of the troughs as you were supposed to then I wouldn’t have to say all this.” She looked at them one by one. “I’ve requisitioned chest-highs instead of the thigh waders, but they won’t be available until tomorrow. I’ve also asked for hazard pay for the whole of this shift.” There were a few smiles at that. “Don’t get your hopes up. You know management.”

Now the smiles were knowing. I could not help admiring the way Magyar manipulated her audience.

“One more thing, people. From now until the program is back on-line, I’ll be checking readings personally, at random. Anyone who is more than five percent out will be fired on the spot. Now get back out there and do your job.”

The workload, which had been hard and dirty, became almost unbearable. When we stripped and showered at the end of the shift, there was a lot of muttering about taking sick days. I just kept my head down and tried not to think about the fact that I seemed to be the only one there who really knew anything about the system.

My dreams were bad that night. Long, tangled images of plastic sheets and blood, and lying on my stomach, face in a pillow, choking while whoever was on top of me humped up and down and breathed in my ear. I woke up drenched in sweat, tight and heavy with need. I knew if I tried to do something about that need it would fade away into mocking memories of Spanner holding up the vial of oily drug and laughing.

I got to work a few minutes early. The computer was still down but there had been no emergencies during the afternoon.

When we were dressing for the shift, Magyar and two new men came into the locker room. One was wizened and bowlegged but seemed spry enough. He flashed a grin at the shift. The other one was just a teenager, with jet black hair and brown eyes. Something about the way he held himself, a strange mix of ramrod back and careless limbs, bothered me.

“This is Nathan Meisener”—the older man nodded—“and Paolo Cruz. I made Hepple pull his finger out on those vacancies. I thought you might appreciate the help.”

There were one or two laughs but I wanted to yell at everyone:
You think two extra people will make a difference if a fireball rips through here?
Kinnis slapped Meisener on the back and Cel called out, “Hope you can swim,” as she pulled on her waders.

“Right, people. Time to get to work.” They began to file past Magyar. For all her apparent joviality, I could tell by the flush in her cheeks and line of her jaw that she was angry about something. Magyar pulled aside Kinnis and then me before we could walk past. “Kinnis, you take Meisener here. He has some experience, but it was a while back.” She watched as Meisener followed Kinnis down the corridor. I could feel the other one, the teenager, looking at me. “Cruz, you’ll be following Bird around for a day or two. She knows a lot more about the way things work around here than you might think.”

It was impossible to miss the bite behind those words. I did not like that. Was she suspicious enough yet to back check Bird’s records? As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.

I shepherded the new man ahead of me and felt Magyar’s hard, bright eyes boring into my back all the way down the corridor. Paolo, though he must have noticed, said nothing.

During the next couple of hours, as I showed him the ropes, pointed out that his back support had the over-shoulder cross straps for a reason, he hardly spoke at all. Something about him still bothered me. I watched him as he walked out into the trough, PD held at waist level.

“Not the talkative type, is he?” Cel said from behind me.

“No.”

“Not like that Meisener. Talking a mile a minute.” She lifted the PD she was holding. “How do you reset these things again?” I showed her. Cel clipped the PD to her belt, then nodded at Paolo, waist-deep in the water. “Let me know if you need me to take him off your hands for a while.”

I was surprised at her friendliness. “Thanks. I might.”

“New ones are always a pain.” She looked at me assessingly. “Usually, anyhow.” She waved, and moved off back to her own troughs. I returned my attention to Paolo.

Water sloshed as he strode another couple of feet deeper. I had watched several people taking their readings by now, and the one thing they all had in common was the gingerly way they walked through the polluted wastes. I did it myself. It was not just the possibility of overbalancing; you never knew what you were about to step on, or through. It was hard not to imagine the floating feces or lumps of glutinous matter, the variety of things, organic and nonorganic, that people flushed down their toilets or that wriggled their own way through the municipal drains. It did not matter that your legs were protected by a double layer of polyure thane and plasthene; you could still feel the slimy things that bumped against you.

Paolo waded to the edge of the trough, seemingly unconcerned by what he might be treading on. He held out the PD. I waved it away. “Just read them out, it’s quicker.”

He did. Every fourth or fifth word, I caught an accent; not the softened consonants of Castilian, or the nasal vowels of Central American Spanish. Something else. Like the way he waded through the foul water unconcerned, it felt as though it should be familiar, and it bothered me. I shook my head at my own imagination.

“You want me to stop?” He was looking at me anxiously.

“No. You’re doing fine.”

When he finished with the readings, I held out my gloved hand to help haul him out of the trough. He pretended not to see it, and climbed out unaided. I could tell by the hunch of his shoulders that he was embarrassed about deliberately avoiding my hand, and wondered why. I did not ask.

I watched Paolo on and off until the break, and it was when I was handing him the scrape, a short metal tool for unclogging the rake tines, that I realized he had not refused my help—he had refused my touch. Oh, he was very adept, graceful even, but he always made sure his hand never touched mine, or my foot his, when we were thigh-deep in the water, me holding back the bulrushes for him to clip the heads.

While I finished up the rushes I sent him back into the trough to do the next reading, and this time, when he waded out to the edge, I made sure I held out the clipper handle for him to grab. He accepted without hesitation. His smile was warm and very young-looking, completely at odds with the message sent by his stiff, almost disdainful body language.

That stiffness reminded me of something, but when I tried to remember, all I could conjure up was a vague memory of Katerine, years ago, grinning in triumph at something on the net. That was it. I went back to work.

Magyar was waiting for us again in the breakroom. Kinnis turned off the net without being asked.

Magyar smiled, but it was not pleasant. “Some of you will be pleased to hear that, as of twenty hours today, all personnel on this shift who spend time in the water, which is to say all of you, will wear masks and full-body barrier protection at all times. As mandated by Health and Safety regulations. You never know when we could get an unexpected visit from an inspector.” She looked directly at me and it wasn’t hard to tell she was angry. I had a bad feeling I knew why.

“Some of you, of course, will not be pleased at the cost, which will come out of your next salary credit, and all of you will no doubt be annoyed at the reduction in productivity and subsequent reduction in salary. But blame that on those that make the rules and regulations.” Her voice was husky with anger. She looked at me again, and I understood: she thought she was preempting me. She thought I was a Health and Safety inspector.
She
was implementing these changes, to save her job. No wonder she was angry. Productivity would go down, and soon Hepple would be on her back. And she blamed me. “Questions?”