Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  'And you said "Funny kind of teapot.'"

  Cilia and Milena were finally friends. It had taken a long time. Milena always found it took her a long time to make friends. She knew that Cilia respected her, and that she had earned that respect. Milena could still not resist praise. Bad habits from the Child Garden.

  'Tell me about space,' said Cilia, firmly changing the subject.

  There was a hush all around them. Both Cilia and Milena were aware of it. Milena was no longer a director of small out-theatre. She was Ma, who had flooded the world with flowers. She was the producer of the Comedy. Cilia was its star, its Virgil. The regulars of the Zoo Cafe were too proud and polite to stare. But the quietness was there, of respect, of animal hierarchy.

  'Well. Space is beautiful,' said Milena. 'Earth is beautiful. The mountains looked like crumpled paper, but the more you focus on them, the more detail there is. And you can tell, you know, you can see how far down it is. This huge, far distance. And you're falling. You know you're always falling. There is a horizon, and you can see the boundary of the air. It is the most beautiful, blue thing.'

  It was like giving Cilia a gift, to tell her this, and tell her this in public. Cilia had a childish delight in being an Animal. Milena more than forgave it. It was one of the reasons she liked her.

  'And the hologramming,' said Cilia. 'Tell me about that. It was noon here. Low dark clouds. And then it started to rain flowers! And there was that beautiful music! All around us in the air.'

  'There was an Angel. He was the lens. He called himself Bob, and he was from London.'

  Milena steeled herself to deliver some news. 'He's the one who told me I should be married.'

  Cilia stopped stealing Milena's cake. 'And?' she asked.

  'I'm going to be,' said Milena, smiling into Cilia's eyes.

  'Hallelujah!' said Cilia. 'Really? Oh Milena, that's a sunny Feb.' She leaned forward, and kissed Milena on the cheek. 'Who to?'

  Milena began to smile in spite of herself. 'Mike Stone,' she said.

  There had been attempts to make heroes of all the astronauts. There had been public hologrammatic displays. Mike Stone was well known, but he had not become a hero.

  Cilia's smile began to fade. It almost went sour. 'Mike...' her voice trailed off. 'Ew!' she exclaimed in pity and horror. She held up a hand for silence. 'Don't do it, Milena,' she said, swallowing cake in a hurry. 'I know, it must have been beautiful up there alone with a man, any man, looking at the stars...'

  Milena had been longing to see what Cilia's reaction would be. She knew it would amuse her. 'The zero-grav toilet was replete with allure as well,' Milena said, smiling.

  'Can I speak frankly?' Cilia asked.

  'Cill, I've never known you do anything else.'

  'What you need is a tooch knave.' Tooch meant sexy. Knave meant wild boy and was pronounced 'kenabva'. Cilia leaned forward, and spoke in a low murmur that could not be heard by anyone else around them. The only thing that would be heard was the general message that a very serious, important heart-to-heart was being had in public.

  'Now that you're back, take a look at the Zoo Beauties. Any of them, Milena, has got to be better than Mike Stone. He makes me feel sick. He looks like he's got a broom stuck up his arse all the way to the top of his neck. He can't talk. He just sits there like somebody's wound him up too tight.'

  'All of this,' said Milena, 'is true.'

  Cilia's expression became deeply pained. 'I know,' she said, and closed her eyes with pity. 'I know. Men have not been good to you. They have looked right through you...'

  'Thank God for that,' said Milena.

  'But don't throw yourself away on the first one who pays you any attention. Am I offending you?'

  Cilia, dear heart, anyone else in the world would have smacked you in the choppers by now. Milena's face was split wide with a grin, and she felt like roaring with laughter. She shook her head to mean no.

  'Then why are you smiling?' said Cilia wisely, sadly. 'I always know, Milena. You always mask your pain with a smile.'

  Milena finally laughed out loud. She clasped Cilia's hand.

  'I'm marrying him,' she said, 'because I have absolutely no intention of marrying anyone at all.'

  Milena was learning how to be honest. Honestly deceitful? Or just too damn inflated to care?

  She looked back at Cilia, smiling, tougher man she had been.

  'I have no intention of marrying anybody, but the Consensus would like a nice story. So. It's going to get one. Marriage of the astronauts. Romance in the stars.'

  'You're going to give away the best part of yourself,' said Cilia in the weak voice of truth.

  'I gave that away a long time ago to someone else,' said Milena, also truthfully.

  'Any hope?' Cilia asked. She really was, when reality bit, a friend. The reasons did not matter.

  'No,' said Milena and shook her head. 'But it's nice to know that somebody knows. That you know.'

  A long pause. 'It was Rolfa, wasn't it?' said Cilia.

  Well what do you know? Milena nodded. Yup. Yes. Pretty good, Cilia. 'Do you mind?' Milena asked.

  'Mind what? About you being sexually drawn to a member of the same sex, but a different species? Why would I mind that?' Cilia was not on the firmest of ground at this point. Her delivery wobbled. 'No. No. No, I don't mind. It puts a lot of things into perspective. But I must make plain that my interests do not lie along similar lines.' She coughed, and tried to take a sip of coffee and missed, hitting her teeth with the edge of the cup.

  Cilia had not really wanted to know the truth. She had been ambushed by her more honest self.

  'I really wish you weren't,' she said, in a mournful rush.

  'Because it spoils the story?' Milena asked, lightly.

  'Because I'll always be wondering if you're sexually attracted to me,' she lifted the cup up again, thought better of it, let it drop.

  'Cilia. I think of you as my best friend. But I am not sexually attracted to you. Ask yourself this question. Am I Milena's type? Am I two and a half metres tall and covered in fur?'

  'Now you're making fun of me.'

  'No I'm not, Cill.'

  'Why didn't you tell me!' Cilia demanded, angry and heartstricken at the same moment. 'Now I feel as if I don't know you, just when I thought I finally did.'

  To Milena's mingled horror and amusement, Cilia began to weep. A huge fat tear slid down her face like melting ice cream. 'Am I a ludicrous person?' she asked suddenly, in all sincerity.

  'No. Why would I think that?'

  'Because you're smiling again.' Cilia had been made suddenly self-aware by the shock of the truth. She was not used to being self-conscious and was not very good at it. Her hands were all of a jumble. 'Why haven't you been cured? I thought they took sick people like you and cured them.'

  'There's a reason for that,' said Milena.

  Cilia realised what she had just said and her eyes closed with shame. 'Milena. I want you to know I did not mean that the way it sounded.'

  'The reason I have not been Read,' said Milena, holding to the point, 'is that the Consensus knows perfectly well what I am, and has decided not to Read me. Because it has a use for me as I am.'

  Cilia paused. 'Is that what Bob says?'

  God, she's bright.

  'How can you say you don't know me,' said Milena. 'When you have everything worked out?'

  'Because I can never be sure if it's me that's talking or one of my characters. Occupational hazard.'

  And a bloody fine actress too.

  'I always catch myself repeating my lines as if I'd just thought of them myself.' Cilia took a swig of cold coffee and made a face at it. 'Does Mike know he's being used as a cover?'

  A flash of steel in there somewhere too. I really do like you, Cilia, very much.

  'He wants the beautiful story too,' said Milena. 'For him, the story is the reality. I said no a hundred times. I said I am not interested a hundred times. He didn't even hear. He just kept on acting as if
we were courting.'

  'Yuck,' said Cilia.

  'I said that, too. But after a while, I began to think he was a kind of daffy. Deep down daffy.'

  'Is that why you like me?'

  'Only partly. Don't worry, Cill. I've thought about this a lot. I think it's the right thing to do.'

  Cilia reached across and took more of Milena's cake. It was made of slump protein and carrots. Milena rescued her glass of what was officially known as milk. People sometimes called it Seepage.

  Cilia seemed to be mulling over the cake. 'Do you know you're going to be made a People's Artist?'

  'What?' Milena's breath caught.

  'Well, they've got to do it. They're investing more in the Comedy than just about anything else. Not just the British Consensus, but the European Consensus. They can't do that for any old Vampire. Of course they've got to make you a People's Artist.'

  'Cilia have you heard any rumours about this?'

  'It's just logic, Milena. It's how the system works. You know that, you play it better than anyone.' Another large chunk of Milena's carrot cake disappeared. Cilia was wrong. Milena did not play the system.

  'I never wanted that Cill. I never asked for that.' Milena found she still did not want it.

  They give you that, they own you, or they think they do.

  Outside in the night, more bells began to ring. The sound seemed to be part of the starless sky. Someone else was ill.

  Bloody Consensus. I always end up doing what you want.

  The horror seeped back into the room, like an inky fluid from out of the corners. Milena thought of Thrawn McCartney. I went to space and thought I had left it all behind me. Now it's down to earth with a bump. They're letting people the. They will be killing them next.

  Milena stood up. 'I can't just sit here,' she told Cilia.

  She walked to Milton's table. Unease flashed around the uncertain faces. They're a little bit frightened of me, she realised.

  'Milton,' she said. 'I need to talk to you.'

  'Sorry, love?' Again the bulging corneas.

  Milena pulled up a chair beside him. Cilia stood next to her, and put a hand on her shoulder.

  'Milton, when I was in space, I worked with an Angel. I was Terminal with him, and I worked with him in the Fifth. I've just talked to Billy, who was with me in Love's Labour's. He's a Bee, and he told me what it's like and I swear to you, that the Bees see something not all that different from what the Angels see. Milton don't look away, just listen. There's nothing wrong with the Bees. They're perfectly healthy. They just see the world in a different way. We can live with them. Point two. A lot of the people who get sick with other viruses are going to be people we know, people from our Estate, Milton. The Zoo has a lot of money. Can't we set up some kind of hospice, some place to take care of them?'

  Milton shrugged and grinned. It really was all beyond him. I'll have to talk to Moira, thought Milena.

  Milton's girlfriend spoke. Her voice was raw. 'What's happening now must be what the Consensus wants,' she said.

  'What the Consensus wants is wrong,' said Milena. The sentence came to a point like a dagger.

  The girl gave an incredulous smile. 'You can't say that!' She looked around at all the other climbing Vines. 'You're saying that everyone in the world is wrong?'

  'Yes,' said Milena, eyes hard on her. She started to nod, in realisation. 'Yes, yes, yes, yes.' It was, she now understood, what she had been saying all of her life. The patch of luminous skin on her hand began to glow, fiercely, without her even realising it.

  It took a lot of extra work, a lot of sitting on dull committees. It took Moira Almasy to help her. It was not in its details an interesting story. But Milena managed to save the Bees and help the sick. 'Magic,' said Cilia.

  Milena remembered a dream.

  She was weightless in space, strapped to the bed to stop her drifting away. A headband held her down to the pillow.

  Out of that uneasy sleep, out of the light and the silence, Heather the Reader of Marx seemed to wheel her way towards Milena. Heather grinned in her wheelchair, amused at herself. Heather was wearing the robes of Virgil.

  'Look who's here to see you,' Heather said, beaming behind her pebble-thick spectacles.

  There was a voice in the light, in the silence. It spoke without words, but Milena recognised it. In the dream, she felt tears in her eyes, felt herself held in a great warm hug. Without words, the voice seemed to tell her to do Dante in her own way. It was giving her permission.

  Milena saw Dante walking along the Embankment Gardens. His eyes, his nose, his chin, were all fierce, dagger-like. He had been made political by the events of his age. He was a Vampire of History. He was going to the Zoo Cafe. He met the Animals of the Zoo, and saw mirrored in their eyes his own greed, his own rage, his own cunning. He climbed up the steps, and the sun rose over the roof of the Zoo; and the Sun was God. Rolfa's music said it was so.

  And Dante moved through steam from the coffee tureen to a bench, and sat across from Cilia, and she judged him. Prissy. Obsessive. Severe, she seemed to say. But she was like a spectre, her high voice ghostly rather than womanly. This was a Virgil who was neither man nor woman. There is a place she said, where there are spare clothes. And she led Dante through a gate, into the Graveyard, and the gate closed and locked. They fought their way through the darkness and the souls of the dead that looked like old and withered clothes, until they found a light.

  Rolfa sat singing at a desk. Lucy was with her, swinging her feet.

  We're Beatrice, said the voice.

  It really is you, isn't it, Rolfa? You really are here with me. Who else could orchestrate the Comedy? Who else could come marching back from the dead down a highway in my head? It's a highway made of scar tissue and it links me to the Consensus. And that's where you are, isn't it love? You're still there somewhere, singing in the dark.

  Milena went up and Milena came down and Milena did the Comedy in a different way, amid the tunnels of Leake Street and the scaffolding of the Zoo. Milena brought the Comedy down to earth.

  chapter fourteen

  HOP SKIP AND JUMP

  (PSYCHODRAMA)

  Milena fled from Thrawn. She moved out into the Slump, the vast estuary between London and the sea. In a sense, she was also fleeing from herself.

  She remembered a boy singing. He stood on the flat, polished prow of a boat, pushing the boat with a long punt pole. He was tall and lean and the muscles on his legs looked like polished driftwood.

  Mary oh lay ha

  Mary oh lay ha hoo

  Mary oh lay ha

  Mary oh I love you

  Milena was half asleep with relief at her escape. She would live out in the Slump, where no one would expect her to live, for three months. Then she would go up into space.

  Milena looked at the ripples of sunlight lazing on the surface of the coffee-coloured water. Her eyes sagged shut and her head nodded, and she listened to the water gurgling slightly against the overlapping planks of the punt. She heard the crackle of reeds as the boat slid between them, where the channel narrowed.

  There was a flutter of wings. Milena looked up. A moorhen, black with a red face was flying away. There was a thrashing sound in the water. A buffalo was dancing sideways away from them, startled. He looked at them with a mixture of timidity and outrage, water streaming from its muzzle.

  There were other buffalo, amid the reeds. A child's voice, hidden somewhere, called la la la la la la. Slim shadows darted between the high reeds, hidden excitedly. As the shadows ran, the silver tops of the reeds waved in the air. Overhead, the herons circled.

  'The buffalo, they can take the deeper water,' explained the boy. 'Out where you are, there is more shallow farming.'

  He pushed their boat out of its narrow back channel, up and onto a hillock of drying reed and water grasses.

  'Ach!' he exclaimed in disgust. 'It hasn't rained. Already, all my shortcuts are going dry.'

  He hopped out of the punt and dragg
ed it up and over the bank. Where his feet sank into the mud, bubbles of gas from rotting reeds escaped.

  'Is it a problem, the lack of rain?' Milena asked.

  'It soon will be,' he said.

  The boat oozed its way down mud, back into water, and he pulled it, still wading, between two houses, screened by high panels of woven reed. He leapt back into the boat, and pushed with a pole and the punt floated into a wide, straight canal.

  Reed houses lined the canal on both sides, all the way to the horizon. Air pollution made the houses in the distance glow golden as if in sunset light.

  The houses were shaped like loaves of bread, with tufts of uncut reed bristling at the top. They rested on firm foundations of Coral, and a low wall of Coral lined the canal. Hens ran through the dust of the bank. Women knelt over the canal filling kettles with water. In the right hand side of the channel small boats crowded together, stern to prow, low in the water. They struggled against the current, the children in them rowing furiously, heading upstream towards the Great Barrier Reef. The Reef kept the waters out of Central London. Beyond the gates of its locks lay the markets of the Pit.

  The canoes and punts were all on the razzle, taking private merchandise for sale. They were full of water cabbages, water cress, dried reeds, or the product of dried reeds, the soft new textiles made from stripping and drying water plants.

  'Lovely Tarty Woman!' a woman called to Milena, grinning. She knelt in the front of her boat. Jammed securely in the narrow boat was a wok over a charcoal stove. 'Lovely water chestnuts,' the woman called, 'toothy cabbage, all crisp, radishes, onions, slump, all swift fried now. You hungry?'

  Milena made herself smile as she shook her head. She had been told that people in the Slump would call her a Tart, and would mean no insult by it. Party Members were still a rarity out in the Slump. That was why the new Party house had been built.

  The boat boy took another shortcut, between houses. An angry Tyke stood up and shouted at him. The boy smiled and waved and called him Sir and Senior. The punt slipped past back gardens, carefully demarcated with reed fences. Water cabbages bobbed in rows; edible algae formed a smooth impenetrable coating over the water, like green ice. There was the chugging of generators on high Coral islands, and wires strung over the back gardens, feeding power to the houses.