Slow River

“It’s not for you to worry about what a given reading may mean, but you’d better know what the parameters of any substrate are, and know what to do if they rise above or fall below that level. When you’re assigned, your section supervisor will give you more precise details.”

We stopped at another air-sealed door. Hepple opened a panel in the corridor wall and took out a pair of dark goggles for me. He pulled up his own pair. “Goggles must be worn in the tertiary sector at all times.”

With his eyes covered, his mouth seemed plump and soft.

“Even though you will not be assigned to the tertiary sector immediately, the possession of eye protection is mandatory.”

He ticked something off his chart. “The cost of those will come out of your first wage credit.”

It seemed I had the job. I pulled on the goggles.

Hepple opened the door. The light was blinding: huge are lights hung from a metal latticework near the glass roof; bank after bank of full-spectrum spots shone from upright partitions between vats. It was incredibly hot and the air was full of the hiss of aerators and mixers and the rich aroma of green growing things. I had forgotten how much a person sweated in a skinny.

“This is where the heavy metals are taken out by the moss.”

I watched as a man and a woman lifted a sieved tray out of a vat and scraped off the greenery. “It’s recycled, of course.”

A woman carrying a heavy-looking tray of tiny snails walked toward us. I started to move aside to let her pass, but Hepple pretended not to notice and the woman had to detour. A little tin god, lording it over his tiny domain. He wouldn’t have lasted more than a day on one of my projects.

“Zoo-plankton and snails do a lot of cleaning up at this stage, along with the algae, of course.” women and men moved back and forth, harvesting zoo-plankton; checking nitrogen levels; monitoring fecal coliforms. Hard and busy work in the tertiary sector, but not dangerous.

We climbed up to a moving walkway that ran twenty feet above the floor. As we moved farther downstream and the water became progressively more clean, the heat lessened, as did the light, and the smell got better.

“Our main sources of income at this stage are the bass and trout, and the lilies.” As we glided past the hydroponic growth, the smell of flowers was almost overpowering. “We’re planning to convert to thirty percent bald cypress next month.”

That was ambitious, but I said nothing.

“Ah, here we are.” We stepped down from the walkway. It was a plain white room, full of thick pipes. One had a spigot. I recognized a pressure reduction setup. Hepple pulled a paper cup from a stack and held it under the spigot, turned the tap. The cup filled with clear water. He drank some. “Here, taste it. Cleaner than what comes out of your tap at home. Pure. And that’s our effluent.”

I sipped, to show I was willing.

He slapped a pipe. “This is it. From here the water is no longer our responsibility.”

He seemed to expect some admiring questions. “Where does it go from here? Out to sea?”

“Not so long ago, it did. And then we realized we had a practically foolproof system and started simply piping it back to the watertable.” I nodded. Standard practice.

“Now, though, even that’s not necessary.”

I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. “The water goes straight back into the mains?”

He looked amused. “Certainly. We avoid all that unnecessary transport of water, cut out the waste of time and energy and worker hours. Productivity has gone up twenty-three percent.”

I tried not to look as horrified as I felt. My half sister, Greta—a lot older than me—had told me, “Lore, there’s no system on earth that’s foolproof. One mistake with a waste-water plant and without that vital break in the cycle, you could have PCBs and lead and DDT running free in our water system. No matter how many redundancies there are, no matter how many backups, things go wrong.”

Hepple, obviously, had never heard that bit of wisdom. There wasn’t even a last-line human observer here in the release room. One major spillage upstream at the same time as a computer failure here and there would be thousands of immediate deaths due to central nervous system toxicity, followed twenty years later by hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from various cancers. The implications were dizzying.

He looked at his wrist. “Time’s getting on.” He stared abstractedly into space a moment. “We’re shorthanded in three sections this month but I think, with your experience… I imagine the Immingham plant gave you some ideas of nitrification and denitrification processes?”

I tried to work out how much Sal Bird would understand of this conversation. “You mean the tidal marshes?”

“Just temporarily, of course.” That translated to Just until you’re no longer at the bottom of the heap. Shit work. “The salary is scale, Grade Two, with an additional percentage for the unsocial hours. You’ll be paid monthly, in arrears. Questions?”