by Geoff Ryman
Raisa (again!) 2085
They carefully picked their way over the heap of slates. They jumped and danced through a wall of bitter nettles. Milena stumbled over something and pulled it out. It was a tiny brass bedstead. It was all black and chewed except for one little floral ring around it, bent but still bronze-coloured. Milena suddenly could imagine it new, part of a child's bed, a child's bed with a duvet covered in small blue flowers. She imagined the child in it, a little girl with long brown hair, sweet and soft and innocent and privileged. She looked up at the windows, empty now and staring at the sky. What would she have thought, Milena wondered, if she had known what was coming?
It was as if the building were a train, carrying lives with it like passengers, moving at high speed until it hit the barriers. Then there was wreckage.
Rose Ella's father went off one summer morning early, in a wagon train. He and seven other men were off to Cumbria to fetch new stone. All the Row was gathered to see them off. Everyone waved. Milena had come early to wave as well. Rose Ella wept, though she couldn't say why. She had some kind of bad feeling. Something awful could happen on the road to Cumbria.
For the next month, there were still dances in the Row, with fewer fathers to dance with. The music became sadder. Milena remembered Mala, playing her fiddle. The fiddle was tucked under chin, and her eyes were faraway, remembering, and the sound of the fiddle was high and sad and sweet, coaxing out the heart of the old songs.
It was the music of home. Milena felt she had found a family, a people, a place. She thought she had found a future as well.
The ocean currents were unstable. The Gulf Stream moved back and forth. Bleak, blasted summers could be followed by howling winters, choked with snow.
Towards the end of that summer, it rained. Milena spent whole days in the Row, reading books, hearing the rain on the roof while Rose Ella knitted and her sister made immortal flowers. Paving stones dropped underfoot, spurting up mud. The ground was a muddy morass. The turf in the parks was as springy as mattresses. The trees hung their drenched and heavy leaves low, dripping water.
Then one evening, the bells began to ring. They all began to ring, every bell in the City. There were rivers of sound flowing in the air.
A pattern of three rings called for a doctor. Two warned of fire, and one chime with a beat of silence signalled a flood. These bells had no pattern. They were a continual ringing of alarm.
There was a bell at the corner of Gower and Torrington. Milena could see it from her bedroom window. Tykes were still ringing it, when she heard hooves. A crier came galloping out of Gower Street. She did not dismount. The crier stood up in her stirrups and bellowed in a clear and penetrating voice, 'Everyone please listen. There is a hurricane coming. There is going to be a hurricane tonight.'
The Tykes asked the woman something. She looked down and looked up, and answered to everyone, 'The Balloons have seen it, and it is coming. A hurricane is on its way. You have about four hours. Please nail shut all shutters. Remove loose material from the streets. Take shelter. Take supplies of food with you. Thank you.' Then, vermilion-checked, the woman sat down, and hauled on the reins to turn the horse around. Milena heard the hooves retreat.
The Senior of the Gardens ordered all furniture to be piled up against the windows. Brave Tykes with nails in their mouths, edged along ledges to hammer bamboo over windows. Clothes and bedding were carried down into the lightwells. The doors were closed and locked. Fire drill was observed. Wardens searched each room before hammering shut the doors.
Then, huddled together in the core of the building, everyone waited. They looked up the lightwells at the sky. The clouds were yellow, full of dust. The wind shook at first, with a sound a bit like a window shaking. Then it began to moan, across the opening of the well, blowing it like some musical instrument.
The wind slammed down the lightwell with sudden spurts like a fist. There began to be the sound from somewhere of things falling, crashes and booms and spreading tinklings of glass.
The children gathered together under blankets, holding each other's hands.
I should have gone to the Row, thought Milena. I should be with them. And she hoped that Rose Ella, and Mala, and Senior Fenton would all be all right. But most of all, she thought of Rose Ella.
Milena saw birds overhead against the sky. She saw them in a flock, peeling away in spirals. Then she saw that they were four-cornered. They were resin tiles torn away from the roof.
The network of bamboo poles against the walls began to creak. A Nurse suddenly threw herself against the children, gathering them up. Her wrist caught under Milena's chin and crowded her backwards. Milena was about to yelp in protest, when all the drainage system rose up from the walls.
It spilled water. Huge droplets clattered on the concrete. The shafts of bamboo caught on themselves; they were twisted around, wrenched; they split apart in strands. The system rose up in a tangle, and seemed to draw a breath; then fell down into the lightwell, an avalanche of bamboo spears.
From the safety of the basement corridors, the children squealed.
The rain began, great lashings of it, moving like ghosts in the air, against a fluorescent sky. Nestled amid the foundations, the children heard things being driven into the walls above them. They could hear a grating sound, and a spreading crackle like lightning moving through stone. They felt a click. The click sounded in their vertebrae, just at the base of their skulls. 'Ooooh,' said all the children in wonder.
Water began to swirl around the drains in the floor of the lightwell, frothing white as it slipped down. Wreckage was swept over the drains. They began to back up. Very suddenly, Milena's feet were wet. A sheet of water extended itself down the basement corridor. The children made sounds of dismay and disgust. Those who had been sitting, stood up crying or laughing.
They would have to stand all night. Fear and exhilaration both faded. It was wearisome having to stand, wet and cold. Water rose up over the tops of their shoes. The steady whiring of the wind made them sleepy. They nodded their heads and longed to be able to lie down. Sudden batterings startled them and made them jump. Some of them wept with exhaustion. The Nurses shushed and tutted and held them and called them darlings and babes. Some of them wept too, for their own lost homes, their parents. Their parents seemed to speak out of the howling wind.
The rain eased, the flood retreated. The children sat down in puddles, too tired to care, and the Nurses stroked their heads until they fell asleep, moaning like the wind.
Milena thought of Rose Ella and was suddenly awake.
The sky over the lightwell was a silver-grey, cloudy but full of light. Everyone else was still asleep, a tumble of arms and legs. Milena stepped out from under the arches onto the floor of the well.
A train wreck. Bamboo lay in twisted heaps. There had been a shower of glass and tiles. The walls were bare in patches. The roof showed naked timber, still looking fresh and cream-yellow at its heart.
Milena went to the door of the staircase, and when she pulled it open, a shower of glass crystals poured out, down from the staircase, over her feet. She shook her shoes and climbed up over glass and wood and lumps of plaster.
The walls of the stairwell were cracked in places and there was a light scattering everywhere of dust and rubble. She turned the corner of the stairway, leading to the front door. The corridor was full of leaves and branches, as if invaded by vegetation. A tree had fallen into the Child Garden.
Milena stood looking at its curtains of leaves at her feet, and the jigsaw-puzzle bark. 'Oh no,' she whispered heartstruck. It was her tree, the Tree of Heaven. The wind had pulled it down. Oh no, oh no, she kept thinking, not my tree, not my beautiful tree. She stepped through its broken branches that still smelled of sap and green wood. Leaves brushed her face like tender hands.
A great gash had been torn through the front of the building where the tree had fallen. The doorway was gone. Stone and brick and bars of twisted metal lay all around the tree. Milena climbed
up onto the trunk, where the main branches met and looked down its length. Around the base of the tree, a halo of roots arched up above the ground.
This far, she thought, it used to be this far down to the ground. When it stood.
She walked along its trunk, out from under the unsteady wall of the building. She stood in the middle of the street. Her bedroom had been wiped away. Someone's bedstead lay half buried in rubble, twisted and flattened. Lengths of bamboo had been driven into the walls as if they were hammered nails. The shutters had been torn away, and all the windows broken.
Milena thought of her tree, how tall it had stood, how it had been the first thing she had seen every day. She murmured for it, out of pity. 'Tree. Oh, tree.'
She had not known that a tree could take root in you as well as in the soil, and that when it was uprooted, it was from your life as well as from the ground, as if it were pulled out of your own breast. Poor tree, full of wet leaf, in high wind, in damp weak soil. And you had stood so long, for a century or more so tall.
Milena wandered dazed in too many clothes, all her clothes worn at once, coat and jumpsuit and squelching boots. All the scaffolding was gone, all the windows. The old weak buildings of London had fallen as well. They lay stretched and broken across the streets. If they still managed to stand their upper floors were indecently exposed. Disorder embarrassed them, made them look foolish. A cart with no wheels half-hung out of a dignified old room. The polished doors, the moulded plaster, the glass of the sash-cord windows were scattered like cards. The work of the Restorers had been undone.
Milena walked down Gower Street to the Row.
The roof was gone. There was old furniture all about Bedford Square. Already the Restorers were picking mournfully through it, shaking their heads, scratching them. Women stepped out over rubble, over fallen beams, carrying tea. Oh no, Milena thought again. Not this too. Not the beautiful Row, with its beautiful things. Milena's feet slipped on wood panelling. Hay from the stables was distributed in drifts, like snow. Two of the fathers stood side by side, unmoving.
'They'll have to give it all over to the Reefers now,' one of them said. 'Bloody Coral.'
'Milena!' wailed a voice. 'Oh Milena, Milena!'
It was Rose Ella. The two girls ran to each other and hugged each other, and encouraged by each other, burst into tears, and sobbed, shaking in each other's arms.
'Oh, Milena, it's gone. It's all gone. It's all broken.' Rose Ella's lip was torn, black with dried blood, and tears were like snail trails on her cheeks.
'Our beautiful house!' exclaimed Milena.
'Come on, my love, have some tea,' said Rose Ella. They helped each other like two old women, across the ruin of the square to the tea. There was smoke from somewhere. A cooking fire? Milena hoped so. She was hungry and cold.
'Stay here,' said Rose Ella. 'You stay here with us, eh?'
So, under canvas, thrown up to keep out the rain, Milena went to live, finally and briefly with Rose Ella.
One wing of the Row was still in place. All the children were bundled up together in rooms, to sleep together on mattresses. Milena was shaken, made truly insecure by the blast. Her life had been completely overturned twice before. Somehow, that made her weaker, not stronger. Her teeth rattled. They had not done that since her mother had left her, bereft and alone among strangers. Milena was back in that blank, black unremembered time. Her fingers were dirty, there was no water to wash. She was frightened. She hid from people. She just wanted Rose Ella and her family, no one else. She hid from the Nurses of the Child Garden. She saw them coming, picking their way over the fallen plaster, on the second day. She darted back, and nipped into a cupboard under a staircase. She pulled fallen curtains over herself. She heard Rose Ella say: 'Oh I'm so sorry! We should have told you, Milena came here to stay with us. Oh, this is awful! You must have been looking all this time.' Rose Ella called for her. 'Lena? Milena? I don't think she's here.'
Then Milena heard Rose Ella whisper: Not well. Poor thing, she's taken it badly. Better if she stays with us.
That night, on the mattress they shared, Milena clung to her tightly, as if to drifting wreckage at sea.
'Milena love, I can't breathe! Please!' said Rose Ella.
'Svoboda,' said Milena. Czech? She was speaking Czech? She had forgotten Czech, surely! Rose Ella rolled over, away from her, and Milena was left alone with terror. The stars were terror, the dark was terror, but most especially the past, the unremembered past was terror. She fell asleep in fear, her hand resting lightly against the back of Rose Ella's soft, smooth neck.
She woke up some time before dawn. She thought she was seeing a dream. She woke up in a fallen ruin, with strewn familiar objects. There were the four small cannons, too heavy for the wind to take. It seemed to her that she was looking at the ruin of her life. The ruin of her life had always been there, unrealised, since Milena had lost a father, lost a mother, lost a language, lost her very self, lost it forever behind layers of growing up, layers of loss, layers of scorn, self-hatred, ceaseless work, unfulfilled hopes. Lost it where there was no childhood, nothing simple or safe or sweet or whole.
Except that next to her was Rose Ella. Rose Ella was there as in a dream, kissed with the faintest light of early sunrise, the first clear dawn since the hurricane. Milena looked down at Rose Ella, beautiful, asleep, hair fallen from her face, nightrobe fallen open, and there was her beautiful breast. It was young and small, with a dark nipple. Stranded somewhere between sleep and dream, suspended in a kind of stillness in the light, and in the light mist, thinking how much the breast looked like a mother, Milena kissed the nipple. She took the nipple in her mouth.
Rose Ella's eyes opened with a snap.
She looked round at Milena.
Milena looked at her, dazed loving.
Rose Ella sat up. She pulled the duvet up over herself. She sat there staring, ice cold. Milena began to sense at last that something was horribly wrong.
'Milena! What are you doing?'
'I don't know,' said Milena truthfully.
It was said of the orphans that they were sexually advanced. Some of them, after all, were engaged to be married even before Reading. It was said darkly, that some strange things went on in the Gardens, before the orphans were safely Read, safely Placed, safely cured by viruses. Orphans were admired, held up as ideals, the children who became adults first and most completely. They were made ideals in order to help people be less afraid of them.
Orphans reminded people that they would the. Orphans meant their own sudden extinction. Orphans revealed too clearly the forced growth of everyone's children. People thought the darkness in their own minds was caused by something dark in the minds of the orphans. People feared that orphans would contaminate their own children with precocious thoughts, or sexual adventures. Milena did not know that she had been a test of tolerance.
Rose Ella stood up, still holding the blanket. She jerked it away, from Milena's grasp. She turned and stalked away. She looked back over her shoulder at Milena. She was crying. She put her hands to her face, and began to walk more quickly. She gave her head a shake. She began to run, over the rubble, hobbling in bare feet.
Milena lay back on the mattress. She let herself realise what had happened. They would say it had happened because she was an orphan. She was an orphan; maybe they were right. They would send her away.
Mala came with her steady smile. Only the smile was strained now, slightly glazed like the grins on the lost porcelain statues.
'Milena. Hello,' she said, crouching. 'You're very upset by all of this aren't you?'
Milena was frozen, like some trapped animal. She felt fallen like her tree. She looked at Mala's knees. She couldn't bear to look up at her face.
'You've got a lot of problems, Milena. It's understandable. You've lost your parents. And you do have certain disabilities. And we've tried to help you with those, for your sake, and to help Rose Ella with her work. And I like to think we've done some good. But it's up to y
ou now, dear. You're going to have to do some development yourself. You're going to be Read, and cured of all sorts of things. That's going to happen very soon now. And, maybe after that, when everything's settled. Well.' She paused and touched Milena's arm, or rather, her sleeve. 'Well, maybe you would like to come back to see us then.'
'Where will I go now?' Milena asked, her voice thin, choked, forlorn.
'The other orphans are moving into the Medicine. It's quite a sturdy building. Sturdier than the Row.' Milena could see the knees twist around to look at the rubble and to regret. Memory of her own grief made Mala more firm.
'I think you better go now, eh, Milena? Before everyone else starts getting up and wonders why. Here. Here are your boots dear.'
Milena lay still as the boots were forced on her feet.
'I don't want to go,' she whispered.
Mala sighed. 'I know, dear. But it's for the best.'
Milena stumbled back through the ruins, as dazed as the last time she was injected with virus, hard virus that had been shoved directly into her veins with a needle. The dosage had nearly killed her. She had thrown up blood. She had tossed on her bed for days, and wandered befuddled for weeks, the genetics of knowledge churning in her head. But even then the viruses did not take hold. The mighty Doctors had examined her, held her flesh in their cold hands and peered at her. They took samples. The mighty Doctors must know why the viruses didn't work. They had stopped even trying after that final dose: they had stopped making her ill. They left her alone to be unwell in her own way.
And they had sent Rose Ella.
'And we've tried' said the child bitterly. 'To help Rose Ella with her work.'
Milena found herself in the lobby of the Medicine.
There were Nurses sitting at a desk. Everything had been swept up or replaced by the children. Everything seemed so smooth and clear. The eyes of the Nurse flitted briefly over Milena. They saw her charcoal hands, the dirty face, the clothes white as it in mourning from the dust of rubble.
