Slow River - Nicola Griffith Page 0,133

her, and I was glad. “What do you want me to say? That I hate you? I don’t.” And I didn’t. I didn’t feel much of anything except sorrow that she could not and would not see the chances and choices and possibilities of change I felt everywhere about me. And it wasn’t just because I was a van de Oest. Stella had been a van de Oest, and she had killed herself. Greta had been brought up as one, and she had twisted and stayed twisted. You had to allow change, you had to want it. You had to believe you deserved it. Spanner did not hate me; she hated herself.

I left her sitting there alone, looking at her reflection in her beer. I wondered what she saw.

The medic had a clinic in the center of town. I had to offer him a triple fee to open up for me for a nonemergency.

There was no nurse. He cleaned my left hand himself, worked on it quickly and efficiently, and closed up the incision with a plastic staple. He sprayed it with plaskin. Put a small sticking plaster on the top. “That’s to remind you it’s stapled. Otherwise, you might forget and try to use it.”

I wondered how many times he had saved people’s lives, or how many times he had tried and failed, without notifying the authorities. His eyes were very tired, downdrooping, like a bloodhound’s. He was exhausted. What would happen if there was a gunshot wound, or a serious stabbing to attend to, and he was too tired?

“Doctor,” I said on impulse as he collected his instruments in a tray, “if I made a donation, would you give me some information about one of your past clients?”

“No.”

“For thirty thousand?” He hesitated. “For thirty thousand now, and a yearly stipend—enough to hire an assistant for the night shift? I’ll put it in writing if you like.”

He put the tray down and looked at me steadily, his eyes more like a dog’s than ever. “What’s the question?”“Did you treat a man, just over three years ago, with a wound to his neck? A man about six feet tall. The wound would have been about here.” I pointed to the left side of my neck, at the carotid.

“What kind of wound?”

“Puncture. Tear. Made with a long, rusty nail. And if you did treat him, did he die?”

He said nothing for a long time. “Let me ask you a question instead. You know I need the money—the clinic needs it. If I refuse to give you confidential information, would you withhold it?”

The man had saved my life. He knew it, I knew it. I sighed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.” That wasn’t enough. The thirty thousand was stolen, anyway. “You can have the thirty thousand. No strings attached.”

He went to his terminal and for a moment I thought he was going to pull the information I needed, all the case notes, because I had made the selfless choice—like the child in a fairy tale being rewarded by the old witch in disguise. But life isn’t a fairy tale. He was making up my bill.

He held it out.

“Thank you,” I managed, and headed for the door.

At the wharf, the lights were still out from my last visit. The surface of the river was choppy in the wind. I watched it awhile. The riverbank is the one place in the jungle where an animal is visible from the air and the ground.

The grate in the pavement was hard to lift one-handed, and I got a bruise on my wrist when it fell the first time I tried. It seemed appropriate. This should not be too easy and painless.

Turning on the lights was like stepping out into the open. “My name,” I said to the wind, to the river rolling to the sea, “is Frances Lorien van de Oest. I live here.”

I would spend the rest of my life by the river, being visible.

I got to the plant just as the shift was leaving. Magyar was the last out. Maybe she had been waiting as long as she could, giving me extra time, or putting off the possibility that I might not be there. Her shoulders were hunched against the wind, her face pinched and worried. Her head turned this way and that, searching.

I stepped into the light. “Magyar.”

When she saw me she smiled. It was like opening the door of a furnace: a blast of light, fire, warmth. For me. This woman’s eyes were bright and lively, full of herself and her vision of me. I could see myself there, if I looked.

I held out my hands. She took them, then lifted my left hand to the light. “What happened?”

“I had the false PIDA removed.” For a while, I would be nobody but the Lore I had made. We stood in the street, wind howling around us, Magyar’s hair streaming behind her. I imagined her in my kitchen in the morning, skin warm and smelling of sleep, that beautiful hair tucked behind her ears, making coffee, talking of this and that. “Come home with me.”

“Yes.”

We walked hand in hand down the street. When I met my family again, I would introduce them to both of us.

© KELLEY ESKRIDGE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicola Griffith (nicolagriffith) is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she taught self-defense and fronted a band before discovering writing and moving to the U.S. She is the author of the novels Ammonite, The Blue Place, and Stay, and she is coeditor of the Bending the Landscape series. Her work has been translated into several languages, and she has won a variety of awards. She lives in Seattle with her partner, writer Kelley Eskridge, where she takes enormous pleasure in just about everything.

BY NICOLA GRIFFITH

Ammonite

Slow River

The Blue Place

Stay

More praise for

Slow River

“A dark and intensely involving story . . . In Slow River, Griffith—with language brilliant and clear as sun-glittered water—delineates a woman’s struggle to remain herself and to stay alive.”

—The Phoenix Gazette

“Griffith’s heroine, Lore van de Oest, is a futuristic lesbian Patty Hearst. Kidnapped from her wealthy family shortly before her eighteenth birthday, Lore is abused, degraded, and ultimately left half dead on the streets of an unnamed European city. Salvation comes in the form of Spanner, a charismatic outlaw, who both seduces and manipulates Lore. . . . This is a character who always knows who she is. And that puts Lore, along with her creator, among the most intriguing women in sci-fi.”

—Deneuve

“With her first novel Ammonite . . . Griffith revealed herself to be fluent in presenting realistic science and its implications, capable of cinematic clarity in her prose, insightful with emotions and character. . . . Replicating many of her debut’s themes and strengths, Slow River nonetheless expands into new territory.”

—The Washington Post

“With its persuasive characters trying to form identities in an unstable society, its midnight streets and shabby apartments, and its vast industrial engines, Slow River is a powerful prose poem on issues that are already with us. . . . It’s a worthy and radically different successor to its author’s acclaimed debut.”

—Locus

Preview of Slow River

She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore van de Oest was the daughter of one of the world’s most powerful families . . . and now she was nobody.

Then out of the rain walked Spanner, an expert data pirate who took her in, cared for her wounds, and gave her the freedom to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore if she didn’t want to be found: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped . . . but she paid for her newfound freedom in crime, deception, and degradation—over and over again.

Lore had a choice: she could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner . . . and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and inventing her future.

Yet only by confronting her past, her family, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be . . .