Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  Milena was beginning to discover that she was stupid. Other children, she was beginning to discover, had heads that were crowded full of answers. When Milena asked questions, her mother looked miserable, and her jaw thrust itself forward in something like anger. Already, when Milena wanted to get back at her mother, she would ask a question. Her mother, she knew, put things in her food, that made ill, to stop her asking questions.

  Her mother stood next to her now, towering in black. She shook Milena's hand to draw her attention back to the funeral proceedings, back to the hole in the ground, and the box that had been lowered into it, and the man in black who was speaking.

  The proceedings were endless and had no point. They confused elaboration with importance. There were birds in the air, cawing in a spiral, swept round and around in circles. What kept them together? Were there wires that strung them together, that kept them up? Why could birds fly and not people?

  The birds were important, the light on the roof was important. The fierce, black concentration of the adults on the dead box and the dead hole exhausted importance. By the time the adults were finished, the hole and the box would have no meaning. Milena knew the dead box and the black hole were her father. She knew he was gone. She was sorry. She had said she was sorry once, and meant it. There was no need to go on saying it. Sunlight fell like rain. The rain-light did not grieve. Neither did Milena. That was what adults found terrible.

  Her mother gave her hand another exasperated shake. The box was being lowered. More murmuring, and a shaking of water. Milena watched the light in the water. That was nice. It was like her resin watering can. It was as if her father had become a plant, to be tended.

  'She doesn't understand,' murmured Milena's mother, explaining, apologising. Milena, the infant, felt a surprisingly fierce wrenching of anger. I don't understand, do I? I understand as well as you do, thought the child. I just understand it differently.

  There was much more to endure. Soil was heaped. The villagers came forward, one by one, to say they were sorry, and take Milena's mother's hand, and lean down over Milena and say something false. None of them really knew Milena's family. Milena's family were strangers, to them, mysterious people who lived high on an isolated hill. One of them gave Milena and her mother a lift in a cart up the slopes back to their house. Milena sat in the back with sacks of grain, wanting the adults to go away. She wanted to be alone with her world.

  Finally, the cart left them, and Milena's mother went inside the house to change and Milena was left, standing in the garden, in front of a gate. Beyond it was a field.

  Beside the gate, there was a tree. Its leaves glowed with light; the trunk was riddled with deep cracks. Blossom was hung about its branches and the scent of it was like a thread, linking things together.

  Milena and the tree stood poised together, as if to escape.

  Then something spoke.

  'Lipy,' it said, naming the tree. Everything seemed to darken, as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. 'Tilia platyphyllos,' it said, pushing the tree into a framework of science.

  There had been anxious visits to the house from women in white. They had spoken in hushed voices to Milena's mother. Whenever the Nurses came, the voices followed. It was Milena's mother who let them do it to her. There was a silent war between them.

  Milena closed her eyes and groped in the darkness like a blind woman, until she touched them. The viruses were hot and roiling and tightly wound. She sprung them. They leapt apart as if wanting to be free. She silenced them. Milena waited with her eyes closed, to see if they would try to speak again. The viruses could darken the world with words. To Milena, it felt as though she were saving the world, and not herself.

  Slowly she opened her eyes again.

  It was as if Milena and the world had crept out of hiding together. The sun had come out from behind a cloud; colour was sprung from the heart of everything. Everything was encased in light, like a halo. Light went into and came out of everything. Light, like time, moved in two directions at once, an exchange between all things. Light and weight and consciousness itself, they all seemed to pull, steadily, orienting everything towards each other. The trees, the grass, the wooden gate, they were oriented towards Milena because she looked at them. They seemed to come closer to her. The lime tree leaned with all its weight, towards Milena, towards the field. The world glowed in silence.

  And it was as if her father quietly stepped up beside her. He seemed to be in the light, in the silence. He seemed as heavy and silent as the lime tree. He, too, seemed to lean out towards the field. Let me go, Milena, he seemed to say.

  The field was forbidden. It was unsafe. The field dropped off steeply at one end, where a wood began. Lines of larches stood bolt upright along the edge like the tails of squirrels ready to bolt.

  Milena did not believe it was unsafe. She stood on tiptoe, and worked the latch. There was a rising of wind. The gate swung open, as if by itself.

  Birds rose out of the trees into the sky. The long grass in the field waved, seeming to beckon. It was as if Milena and her father walked forward into the world. It was as if Milena's father were the wind.

  The wind seemed to sweep light and sound with it. The sounds of grass and trees rose out of the ground and bore up the birds, rising up and breathing into the clouds, the clouds shedding light, making highways of dust and haze, everything exhaling warmth, the breath, the song of the earth. It was as if the spirit of her father had been sprung. He seemed to leap out into the world and expand, as if the elements that had made him had finally been set free, to rejoin the world.

  Milena broke into a run. It was as if she were running with her father, a fat and waddling toddle, near to the ground, down the slope at gathering speed. She ran looking upwards. She threw out her arms, squealing, giddy, the world spinning. When she fell down, it was as if the grass had arms, to spread open and catch her. It was as if it caught her, laughing, and held her. Svoboda, said the earth.

  'Milena!' a voice cried behind her. 'Milena!'

  Fear, like winged monkeys descending.

  Milena felt herself snatched up from the grass, wrenched away from it. The grass seemed to reach out for her as her head tipped down and her bottom tipped up, as if she were weightless. She sickened, see-sawing to a fresh sense of balance. She didn't want to look, she didn't want to see, her mother's face.

  Her mother hit her. This was something new. Her mother hit her across her bottom, her dirty place of indignity and shame. Milena howled at this new and terrible thing. She howled and was tipped back upright. Her mother spoke to her. The voice was full of venom, hatred. Milena's white leg was seized. Her white shoe was shaken at her. The grass had left green slashes across it, and on the new white trousers. Exchange. You could not expect to move through the world and not let it touch you. What was wrong with the marks of grass? At least the grass had never hit her.

  Milena was whirled up and over the fence, as if by a cyclone. She was dumped, back where she belonged, on the other side of the gate. Her mother swept through it, and closed it, barred it. Milena could only see the columns of her trousered legs. She was struck again, across her bottom, and spun around by her shoulders. Howling with horror, her nose and mouth and eyes clogged, Milena was forced against her will to look at her mother. She looked at her with the mercilessness of a child.

  There was this tall grey thing. Its body worked in completely different ways from Milena's, all sharpness and angles. When it moved, there was a nauseating, lurching moment of hesitation. It was deciding. Have I moved into the future yet? Am I still in the past?

  Where, where is my Now?

  It never quite located itself. It would stop, start, stop again, flickering in and out of time, as if crossing in and out of it, never quite landing in Now.

  As if in a dream, when the worst thing is about to happen and cannot be prevented, the infant began to look up, tracking up the dry wall of the legs, the lumpy sweater with the long extensors for arms, spider's arms. And the hands
! They were riddled with veins and sticklike inner workings. They were not chubby and soft and round and accepting. The very skin of them was harsh, worn, as if it had grown a shell. The hands looked like crabs, hungry, working.

  Then up to the face.

  And the infant Milena saw all the desolation there, and she burst into fresh wails and cries of horror.

  The face was wrinkled and stretched and bony, blasted with dryness and lipstick. The eyes were dead, as if someone had tied a mask across them. The only thing in them was baffled loss, helplessness, and anger, anger and sorrow. The flesh hung, exhausted by the battle against itself and the world. The flesh began to shake, like the trees.

  And Milena's mother suddenly crouched down into a tight bundle, as if trying to become a child again herself, as if she herself were a child needing to be comforted. The crabs of her hands scuttled across Milena's back, and pulled Milena to her. Milena felt slimy tears across her own innocent cheek, and felt her mother quake with a loss that was beyond Milena's understanding.

  Milena felt the strange, inextricable tangle that was her mother, and felt the loss beyond naming, and Milena began to cry too, for everything: for her mother, for her father, for the love and the pain and the warfare between them, and for the world. Beyond the fence, the fields still glowed. The gate was barred.

  'It's called,' said Milena, the director, 'Attack of the Crab Monsters.'

  She was sitting in the Zookeeper's office. She was very concerned about her new grey suit. She was sitting crosslegged on stuffed bags, and the knees of her new trousers would bag and crease. She worried about marks on cloth and braced herself for the reaction of the people around her.

  They stared back at Milena, all expression on their faces suspended. They sat on the bags too. The bags were called Pears, and the people were pear-shaped, pears on Pears, their stomachs ballooning outwards. A large-boned woman sat folded across from Milena. Moira Almasy! thought the one who remembered, startled by the change. The woman's hair seemed less grey, her face less creased, as if she had suddenly become well after an illness. She was younger.

  Milton the assistant served tea in little cups on lacquered tables. The cups rattled and Milton insinuated with a smile. In the corner sat the Minister, now a scant but formal presence. His eyes were closed and he was perfectly still, his hands resting on his folded knees.

  Courage, Milena the director told herself. 'The opera is about...' she said, and hesitated. 'It's about an invasion of aliens from outer space. They look like crabs, but can talk. Well, sing. The idea comes from an old video that Thrawn McCartney saw.'

  The expression on the faces of the Pears had curdled from horror.

  'People like junk,' said Milena. 'In fact, they need junk. Junk is fun and harmless and makes no demands. People are starved of junk. Everything has been so terribly high-toned. I think if you ask the Consensus, it will tell you the same thing.'

  Milena the director glanced at the Minister. He sat unmoved, unmoving.

  'It's best to let the Consensus speak for itself,' warned Moira Almasy.

  'What other social benefits can you claim for this?' asked a man in the circle. 'Except for the fact that it is, as you say, junk?' He had an open, likeable face, a broad smile and hair that flopped over his forehead. Charles Sheer.

  You weren't so bad, Charlie, thought the Milena who was remembering. You just had other projects you wanted to promote. You wanted the money to go elsewhere. You didn't think I was very talented. You were probably right.

  'First,' said Milena the director, 'no one in the cast will use viruses. This should be made very plain. People are going to become very frightened of viruses.'

  That was the easy part.

  'Second, it will help people with their feelings of...' the director prayed for a delicate word,'... distrust for the Chinese.'

  Milena felt the room go still. There was an explosion of breath from Charles Sheer. But it is the truth, isn't it Charlie? 'I think you will find many people of British descent do not like the Chinese. They feel surpassed by them. Junk makes people feel good. So. This junk...' Milena paused to gain both breath and spirit. 'This work will be staged in the manner of classical Chinese opera. The music and the dancing will be classical Chinese opera.'

  'The crabs too?' demanded Charles Sheer.

  Moira Almasy was beginning to smile.

  'Of course,' said Milena. 'There are many precedents in the classical tradition of giant singing beasts — dragons for example. The spaceship will look like a Chinese dragon, in fact. It will land in the main courtyard of the Forbidden City. These will all be holograms created by Thrawn McCartney. Uh. No one has hologrammed scenes on this scale before, or from such a distance. We propose to use Hyde Park as the main stage. This will give us a chance to use to the full the new mind-imaging technology.' Milena coughed. 'The spectacle,' she said hopefully, 'should have some curiosity value.'

  'Ms Shibush,' said Charles Sheer. 'I am stunned. You have surpassed yourself. This makes your efforts to stage all of Dante seem almost credible.'

  That is the general idea, thought Milena to herself. We understand each other, Charlie. There is a bond between enemies too.

  The Minister sat still, without movement, as if the whole universe turned around him. On the hessian screens there were slashes of green, cartoon reeds reduced to one dead message. The screens were covered in blackheads of dust.

  For you keepers of the Zoo, everything must be worthy and have high purpose. For you everything must be part of the advancing social schedule.

  Me, I'm doing it all for Rolfa. And the Consensus — what does it want?

  'It does tie in with what we were discussing earlier,' said Moira Almasy in a low, quiet voice.

  All around them, the cartoon reeds slowly rotted.

  'I'm going to make a garden,' said Thrawn McCartney, in a voice that was supposed to be like a child's.

  There was a new machine. It took images from people's heads and turned them into light. Reformation technology it was called. The Restoration had led to it.

  All the light in the Thrawn McCartney's room was muddled, in disorder. It heaved in currents like oil and water that would not mix. An orchid, half-remembered, swam into queasy existence. It attached itself to a bush with branches like serpents. The branches writhed in place then suddenly froze. They and the flower were held in place for a moment, and then faded, forgotten. Grass gathered like a slowly poaching egg, a bleary smudge of green. There was a hedge, a few leaves pinpricked out of the mass of it. The sky was full of impossible sunset colours.

  I want to get out, thought Milena the director. She stood with Thrawn in some colourless centre, a point of view. There was no air, no sound, no clarity of image. Is this all you can remember, thought Milena, of trees and plants? Can you really see no more clearly than this?

  Milena found it nearly impossible to be honest around Thrawn. She would smile tolerantly, when all she really felt was anger. She would offer compliments as if to placate. She had become frustrated with herself. Why, Milena wondered, can't I speak?

  Thrawn placed an image of herself in the garden. At last there was something that Thrawn could see clearly. It was not Thrawn as she was. This Thrawn was tall and lissome and wore a spotless white dress. Her face had been subtly altered. It was beautiful now, and it was backwards. It was a face seen in a mirror, a face with the flaws removed.

  What an airy creature she was, this Thrawn, light as a feather, fleshless. The stringy, tormented tendons of her neck were gone, as was the desperate stare of starvation. This is why Thrawn never ate. She thought she could become like this creature. The creature danced, lean as a ballerina, bent over, arms like a swan's neck.

  'Now this is beautiful. Isn't this beautiful?' Thrawn demanded.

  The trouble with being dishonest is that it requires an ability to act. Milena could not. She shifted inside her quilted winter jumpsuit. 'We can see you quite clearly, yes,' she said.

  Thrawn had sensed enough. 'Th
is is a new technology, you know. No one has done this before.'

  'Oh, I know, I know,' said Milena, as if no criticism had been implied.

  'I mean here, you try it,' said Thrawn. 'Go on.'

  She took Milena by the shoulders and stood her in front of the Reformer. You had to stand in the point of view. Milena felt something in her head drain away, as if light, right in the centre of her head was gone. As if it now resided in the machine.

  'Don't be scared,' said Thrawn, arms folded, shaking her head in pity at poor Milena. 'Just try to imagine something and see what you come up with.'

  Milena had been rendered self-conscious, as she always was in Thrawn's presence. It was difficult for her to imagine anything. So she tried to remember instead.

  A garden.

  She remembered an autumn day, the smell of loam and fallen leaves, and geese overhead, ducks fluttering their wings against still water. She remembered water, and the rose bushes, with their spotted leaves, their last roses, nibbled by the shorter days.

  She remembered Rolfa, in Chao Li Gardens. She remembered the rose Rolfa had picked for her. The shock as Rolfa broke the law. She remembered the weight of the rose as it bobbed in her hand, and the scratching of the thorns against her fingers. She remembered the single, round, focusing drop of dew, catching the light.

  And suddenly the rosa mundi was in the room. It filled it with huge, dappled shaggy pink petals, curling brown at the tip, but soft and slightly rippled nearer the centre. It bobbed, poised for a moment.

  As if something had finally been set free, there was an avalanche of flowers. Milena did not know if she were imagining them in her head or seeing them in the room. What she saw and what she imagined were one and the same thing. She could feel them spill out of her head, as if some great living weight were pushing out flowers, giving birth to them. They tumbled through the room slowly, a turning kaleidoscope of flowers, remembered flowers each one different.