by Geoff Ryman
The infant's ears were plugged and her nose was plugged, but she felt no desire to breathe. She was one with her world, and it was a world of love.
And Milena remembered that world turning inside out.
The fluids left her, suddenly. A clinging veil settled over her, still warm but slightly harsh. And men the convulsion began, the expulsion. The world pushed her out. The infant knew one tiling: she had started this. She had worked at herself. She had felt like an old tooth coming loose, and so she had tried the power again, the power to move. And it seemed that she had broken the world. She felt horror and fear, but above all regret, as if the world were wounded.
The world pushed, caressing no longer, and the infant knew death, the death of the world and she grieved as she was being born.
For the adult who remembered, sensation was as jumbled as a roller coaster, great peaks and sudden fallings. All things were terribly important, the sounds, communicated through flesh, the clackings of separation, the slitherings of movement, the lapping of the walls like giant tongues, the pumping in her ears and veins. The world parted, like lips.
Giddyingly, inside became outside, as if Milena herself was being born out of herself, swapping places, mother and daughter. Suddenly, all inside had been swallowed up.
It took a moment — each moment a different universe — for air to envelop her. Air was new. It was dry, searing like fire. It burned her face; it burned her whole body. There was blazing light, and stinging gases. The infant was gripped about her ankles, and where she was held there was a sizzling abrasion as if her skin was being fried.
Suddenly she was fighting. There was a swelling in her, as if she was trying to start the pumping up again. Something gave. But the pumping was not outside her now, but smaller and contained in her. Air rasped its way like sandpaper over her tongue, down her throat. She felt an ache across her chest as the aerole of her lungs inflated — pop, pop, pop, one after the other. She roared in pain.
She was lowered onto soft warmth. A ghost of paradise returned. Dimmer now was the pumping, louder now was the murmuring voice. She lay on top of her old world. She covered it now. This world was in layers. Panels of warmth descended over her back, rough, but comforting as they lay still on her, weighing her down, pushing her, it seemed. The infant hoped. Was she going to be pushed back inside?
Then something clattered on a tray, horribly sharp like something rammed into her ears, and she began to wail again. The infant was wailing for the vastness of things, and an already forming sense of all the things she had to learn. The voice soothed her, the warm fingers stroked her, and the infant remembered what had been lost. It's still here, the voice seemed to say, it's different now, but it's still here. Here, but different.
Layer on layer of life folded over the infant. Lungs breathing, two hearts pumping, all the organs with their rough surfaces and hidden spaces, all of them turning in and out of each other like patterns in a kaleidoscope.
The infant was left there, on her mother's stomach, to sleep. She dreamed of tunnels of light, and sealed places full of fluid, and things dim in the fluid, cushioned, floating, safe.
Milena remembered crawling.
She remembered the braided rug, padded sections in a concentric pattern. They swirled under Milena's fingers and smelled of cat.
The old world was forgotten now, driven out by the wealth of this new one. The infant looked up, and the world still seemed concentric, fragmented.
It looks, thought the adult who was remembering, like a Picasso painting.
There was a room, in this her second and forgotten world. The room itself was not familiar at all. The room was jumbled, cast in layers, like many photographs of the same room. Things had so many sides, it was difficult for them to hold their shapes. The back and sides of the chair were just as present as the front. They drifted in and out of view, overlapping each other. They were now near, now far. Anything she liked seemed to come closer. She reached out for it, thinking it was coming to meet her.
Milena saw the top of the spout of a watering can. The adult who was remembering recognised it, with a jolt. The watering can had a rough, screw-on cap with holes in it that turned the water into a spray. The infant's eyes focused on the cap and brought it together as a whole. The world spun around it, fragmented as if seen through a jewel.
The infant reached up and touched the watering can, felt the recalcitrance of the cap. The hardened resin would be difficult to turn against the resin spout. She tasted it. There was a flavour of pine. It clung to her tongue, clung to her lips. Milena was not sure whether she hated it or not.
There was a voice, warm behind her. 'Ne, ne,' something said, warmly, deeply, 'Ne, Milena.'
Ne was a strange word. The infant had not yet exhausted its meaning. Whenever it was said, it was best for her to go still. It was a powerful word, but she herself could say it over and over, shaking her head, and it had no effect.
There were trouser-legs, beige. There was a man, a tall skinny man with a beard. He had several faces, all turning at once, until they focused. Milena knew him, by his beard, by his black eyes, and by the veins in his hands. When the hands were kind, the world was a delight. The hands picked her up, full of power, and nestled her on her father's warm lap. Milena was kissed on the head, and there was a warm sound, a chuckling. Then cloth was laid before her, and the man's hands began to sew. On the table there were needles, slivers of bamboo. Light was reflected on them, a rippling stream of it, like a river. Milena reached for the needles.
'Ne, ne, Milena, ne,' said the voice. Ne could mean no needles, no light.
'Milena! Amin!' called a voice from outside the room. The words were signals, full of import but imprecise, like the waving of flags.
Milena flew. The man lifted her up and swung her through the air. The air was warm like fingers, and Milena saw her world, the swirling carpet far below her. She squealed and laughed. She was swung through a doorway that seemed to meet itself from several different directions and angles at once. Milena passed through it, and out into the garden.
There it was in memory, as if a place could the and have a ghost. There was the bench, top and bottom at once, slats of warm wood, dappled with shifting shadows. What made the shadows, what made them move? Great roots went up into a tangle in the sky, all rough, scintillating with wind, showing silver-pale undersides in waves. Vines crawled overhead, on a frame. Beyond them, there were trees. They rose even higher than the vines up into the sky, towards the clouds.
The infant looked away. The trees were beyond comprehension. She could not pull them near to her, she could not make her eyes focus.
And there, stepping in and out of dappled shadow, there came Mami.
Mami was a word that grouped many things about the woman into a bouquet: the smiles and the warmth and the red trouser suit. Mami knelt down and kissed her. Mami with her beautiful face. Then Milena was carried towards the table, held upright by both her parents, each one holding her hand. On the table was her red bowl. Milena was sat down, and a napkin was tied around her. Milena didn't want the napkin. Ne, she said, but the word had no effect. A cool spoon of sweet pablum was lifted up to her mouth. Milena wanted to feed herself, but was not allowed to. In the sunlight, she accepted that.
The pablum was delicious and made her laugh. That made Mami laugh too; Mami was glad when Milena was, so Milena laughed again. On the table there were round, red plump things that would be cut open and scooped out, all pulpy, onto Milena's plate.
Sunlight brewed on her skin, hatching something. Milena looked down at the kaleidoscope of her arm. She saw the smooth surface of her perfect skin from many angles. She saw a cell of her skin lift like a lid. Something was being born out of her. It was the same colour as Milena, a mild magenta. It was tiny and wriggling. The infant was delighted. Was this how things grew? Out of each other? Did worlds grow out of people in the same way? Or did people grow out of things, out of trees perhaps?
Words came like flags. Mami sp
oke, like the wind spoke, and the sounds were soothing. The sounds meant the little wriggling things were good. Mami held out her own long arm next to Milena's. It was armoured by mites as well.
Milena had something of her own. She looked at her creature. She knew that she and her creature protected each other. Milena felt love for this tiny thing that was alive and intimate with her. The idea was implanted: I grow things out of myself.
The trees sighed in the wind. The sun baked the hot white wall, and made the vines overhead glow with light. Birds whistled. People laughed. This world was paradise, too.
The kaleidoscope turned.
Milena lay in her blue crib, in the dark, but the dark had gone evil.
From the bars of her crib, toy painted heads grinned at her discomfort. The sheets were clammy, another damp veil, and a smell oozed out of Milena, a sour tang that ruined her perfection. The infant knew her perfection had been damaged. All along her arms and into her head, there was a buzzing. A numb vibration hummed in the tangle of her nerves. The infant had not known she was a tangle until then.
The Milena who was remembering thought: this is virus. This must be the first time they gave me virus.
The infant howled, as if to expel it.
The door opened, and the infant hoped for comfort. Milena swallowed the sounds of crying in anticipation. There was a fluttering of light, and the mouth of a lamp opened, bringing light, but the light looked orange and sick as well. Mami came, cooing, and leaning over the blue crib. She lifted Milena up and patted her, but nothing changed. As Milena was jostled up and down, she sensed in her mother a kind of grim forebearing. Her mother said something cool, with a twist in it, a false sing-song note at the end. It seemed Milena's mother was determined she should be ill. The infant did not understand the words. But she understood their import. In some way her mother condoned this; in some way her mother was part of it. Milena knew then that she would not be helped. The whole world was sick and ill and twisted, dim and ill-suited to itself. It had been invaded, not by music or by love, but by something alien.
The aliens tried to speak. They tried to speak inside Milena. The words were muffled, like voices heard through a womb. Milena could feel the voices stir, like larvae. Words had been deposited in her head like grubs. They began to seethe.
It was the world that was threatened, and Milena wanted to save it.
Ne! thought the infant. She resisted. Ne, ne!
The alien words were woven, like blankets, out of thread. Milena could feel the thread, touch it with thought. The threads were tightly stitched. At first Milena could only feel how harsh they were, like blankets on her skin. Then she felt more carefully. The threads were ladders, tiny, granulated. The ladders were spirals. They spun about each other in a double helix.
Ne! Milena told them, and the grubs went still. She could feel the ladders change. The ladders fell silent, moulded themselves to her thought. She hunted them with thought. She gave chase, through the spider's web of her nerves. Ne! she told the invaders, and they went still and tame, waiting to be filled.
The viruses were supposed to fill her, but Milena filled them instead. She made them her own. Ne was the word of rejection. Ne was the word of independence, of freedom. It worked when you had power.
The infant Milena was touching the DNA of the viruses, and changing it to her own purpose. That young? thought the adult who remembered. I knew that much, so young? How much else did I know, before words?
The viruses went still. They would now store information. Milena was augmenting her own memory. She was making a bigger, silent self, a larger No.
She opened her eyes.
Her little room, with its doilies and dolls still looked ill and evil, the orange lamplight as steady as a headache. Even the face of Milena's mother looked ill, baggy, tired. You, thought the infant. You did this!
It was the betrayal that made the infant howl and wail.
To the Milena who remembered, each shift of memory made the world tamer and more secure. It became more adult, less like leaves scattered in layers, and more like butterflies pinned in rows under glass. With each shift, the adult felt more at home, could find her bearings with more ease. Emotions came with names, already controlled and bearable. Milena the infant now knew words. But these were words that she had learned for herself. The words belonged to her.
The room around now came in only one focused shape, four walls. The wooden table, the wood-burning stove, the rickety chairs, the bean bags on the floor, the string of garlic, were all as the adult remembered them. They showed only one side of themselves at a time. Outside the windows, there was blazing daylight. Milena could now hear the ticking of the clock in all its soulless regularity. Tick-tock time.
'Milena,' said her mother, quietly. 'Your father wants to talk to you.'
Tatinka, her mother called him. The words unleashed a sense of loss. Milena, the adult felt an undertow tug of strangeness, of loss. The adult had lost a language.
Milena felt another chasm open up under her. Time had hauled her away from her mother and her mother tongue. She felt the vertigo.
The infant was looking at her mother's face. There was something very grave and serious in the world. It made her mother quiet and noble, and Milena's heart swelled with love. Her mother was young and beautiful, and now noble as well. Her mother took her hand, and led her out of her old world, into another one, through the door to her parents' room. Her parents' room was where Milena went at night, when darkness frightened her. This room was darkened now. Milena felt panic.
'Is it night? she asked. The infant lived in a world where day could become night without warning.
'No, Milena. Its just the shutters. The shutters have been closed.
The room smelled acid like sour lemons. Milena the infant knew that smell. It rose off your body, from the tangle, when the world went sick.
The walls were brown, the sheets were brown, everything was jumbled, and dirtier than it should be. Her father was brown and jumbled, crucified on a bed. His black hair pasted slick and flat over his forehead. Now that Milena was older, people only had one face at a time. Words, even Czechoslovakian words, gave things only one face. This face had black stubble and dark flesh around the eyes.
Milena's mother nudged her toward the bed. She stood next to him, at face-level, and a hot, damp arm was drawn around her. He was burning. Milena knew then that he had the illness. He had the burning and the shaking. He looked at her with eyes that were different, a stranger's eyes. Milena went wary. They could take your father and give him someone else's eyes.
'Svoboda,' he croaked.
Like Ne, the word meant freedom. But it was a Czech word, and not the same as English freedom, and never could be. Svoboda was something natural like apples, like the earth. Like paradise, the way to it was barred.
You can fight it, Tato. You think at it, and it changes. You can do that can't you Tato? Milena wanted to explain, but couldn't. Then she thought he would know that already. She had already been taught that adults always knew more than she did. Tato took Milena's hand in his own. Milena could smell the hand. He spoke in rough and alien voice.
'Be good, Milena.'
Adults were always telling her to be good. It was not possible to know what good was. It always seemed to change. Milena knew she could not promise to be good; she wasn't sure what good was. She didn't want to lie, but she knew she could not say no. So Milena nodded yes. She knew it was a lie, so didn't say the words. She wanted to be good, but if he had to ask, did that mean she really wasn't good? What should she do to be good? No one ever seemed to be able to explain it fully. The word good seemed to spread out, diffuse, as part of the brown walls.
'Milena, answer your father.'
They were going to make her say yes. Yes was the word of acquiescence. It was the word of powerlessness.
Milena murmured, yes. Her mother made her say it again, louder. Her mother's hand was on her shoulder, pushing her closer to her father, who was sick
and who smelled. They both wanted something from her, and she could not think what it could be, however much she wanted to give it. She wanted to give it as long as she was not pushed.
The future, thought the one who was remembering, they want some promise of the future.
'Kiss your father,' her mother told her.
He smelled and was wet, and already he was not her father.
'Milena, don't be naughty. Your father wants to kiss you.'
There was something awful in her mother's voice. It was not her mother's voice. Her mother could become someone different too. Milena felt the hand on her shoulder like a claw. She was afraid. Any moment she would weep from fear, and that would be bad. She leaned forward, sticking out her lips to give her father a quick nip on the cheek. But his arm pulled, and her mother's hand pushed, and his hot, wet sticky face seemed to swallow hers, and he smelled of beds and illness, and his wet lips were on hers, coating them with moisture.
Milena hated it. She stepped back, shaking inside. She wanted above all else to wipe her face, her lips, her forehead stained with someone else's sweat. Above all else, she wanted to escape the transforming sickness. They let her go, and she ran out into the daylight, from the darkness, out into the garden, into the air.
Milena remembered standing until her legs ached, outside a church. She was wearing new white clothes, that her mother had made from sheets. The church was white, small and squat with thick walls and a dome on a spire. There were old lead plates on the roof, and Milena looked at them, sensing how warm they would be in the sun. She loved the dull burnish on them. The lead plates were made of metal and Milena had not seen many things made of metal.
Milena had asked her mother what the lead plates were and had been shushed into silence. Milena's mother did not like it when Milena asked questions when other people were around.
