Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

'Doesn't seem that there's too much to do. Your friends are very nice. They tried very hard.' He looked down at his hands, and his smile broadened ruefully. 'I don't think Cilia's terribly interested in self-directed mutation mechanisms.'

  'Just say that it means the Bulge can grow chicken meat out of itself,' she told him, sitting next to him. 'That's all they want to hear. They just want the excitement.'

  'I don't find outer space exciting,' he said, simply.

  'You must be the only one who doesn't,' she said.

  Come on, Milena, she told herself. Begin, Milena, begin, say it quickly, the dishonesty can be killed, the knot can be cut with single word of truth. She sat with him on the Pear. 'This is going to be a... ah... a strange kind of marriage,' she began, and was stopped, as if by a virus.

  He nodded, tamely, in agreement. 'I can't get an erection,' he said. Milena wasn't too sure that she heard correctly.

  'Sorry, Mike?'

  'I'm impotent,' he said, quite directly, without, now, a trace of embarrassment. 'I'm afraid that our conjugal relations are not going to be entirely existent.'

  Milena could hardly believe her luck. She hoped she could keep the relief out of her voice. 'Mike. I want you to know how much I appreciate this. Your telling me, I mean. The important thing is the marriage. Physical satisfaction is not the main thing.'

  After all these years of doing without it anyway.

  'I didn't think you liked sex either,' he said. 'I had a pretty good idea that you were the sort of girl I was looking for.'

  Milena was less sure she was pleased by this.

  'You were obviously a very, very nice person who was not physically attracted to me, or to men in general.' His expression really was rather tender. 'I like cuddles.'

  Milena could feel herself blushing furiously. She felt that she had been caught out in some way. She discovered that both hands were on her cheeks, feeling how plump and hot they had become.

  'I hope I didn't mislead you,' said Mike Stone. 'I tried very hard not to play the tooch knave,' he said.

  The very idea of Mike Stone playing tooch knave restored some of Milena's humour. Playing tooch? On what, Mike, the violin? 'Mike. I never thought you were a knave.' Her hands were lowered from her face. 'Did I mislead you?' she asked.

  'Not for a moment,' he said, obviously thinking that this would reassure her.

  'I'm scared,' she said. It was an explanation. She surprised herself by saying so.

  'Of what?' he asked.

  'These days? Of the dark. I'm scared of the dark, since Thrawn. Isn't that funny? Thrawn used light. I should love the dark. And I'm scared of... of the viruses and what they're doing... and of... of you.'

  'That's understandable, I am pretty weird,' said Mike Stone. He meant it. 'I can't say for sure if I'm scared of anything at all.' He meant that, too. He shook his head. 'I can't think of anything that scares me. There are just some things that I can do and some things that I can't. I'm always amazed by the things you can do. You seem to get people to do things just by talking about what's got to be done. You seem to be able to talk to pretty near anybody. That's because you're frightened. I think you can do all that because of the fear. I do the best I can without it.'

  'You're not, are you? Frightened?' She saw what he meant. She had thought it was fear that made him stiff and awkward. She was beginning to see now that it was instead a quality of precision, like a watch, exact and unselfconscious.

  'Only because I don't feel there's anything to lose. If I can't do something, like talk to people, there's no shame. I tried. I did my best. If I can do something, there's no shame. I did my best.'

  I'm going to like you, thought Milena. I'm going to like you more and more. I don't think this was a mistake, after all.

  'I'd like to go to bed,' he said. 'I'd like to hold you. You always look cold these days. I'm very hot. I have very hot feet.'

  'I knew someone else who had very hot feet,' said Milena. It had been so long since anyone had held her. She looked up at him. In fear.

  We could of course spend time cooking a meal that neither of us wants to eat. He could get out his violin, and I could comment on his playing. But the tension would remain. There would still be this to face. To do anything else would be an evasion, a dishonesty. And so this must be faced, even in fear, and I do feel fear. Prissy, obsessive, severe, that's what Cilia said. Am I still those things? I don't like this. It makes me feel estranged from myself, as if I have to give myself up. It makes me feel alone and exposed, an orphan.

  Mike Stone let Milena lay on the bed in most of her clothes, and then went to the bathroom to wash, knowing instinctively that she would not like the smell of men. He came back, naked and neutral, and his body was more bizarre than she had imagined. In the midst of her fear, she saw that his body made her smile.

  He was stretched upwards, very tall and thin, like something by Goya, with narrow sloping shoulders, and a washboard tummy, and arms and legs that were all knots and angles. His hips were very broad, almost feminine, with broad spaces between the thin legs. He was hairless except in unexpected places, on the shoulders, or in a ring around his nipples. His nipples were so pale and small as to be invisible.

  Mike Stone had a huge and useless dong. It flapped back and forth between his thighs, smelling of soap, like some hapless passenger on a bumpy train ride, and his testicles hung by such a slender thread of scrotum that Milena found she had sympathy pains in places she didn't have. She was curious to see male genitalia, out of the mildest and most objective sort of interest. He settled next to her in the bed, and she wondered what she could do. She thought of stretching out her hand to touch him, to touch his penis. Something made of iron stopped her, as if a virus. She could never do that. She felt a stirring of distrust. What if he had lied, what if he would now come to life, and force her? Instead he put his arm under her head, and cradled her up, and lay her face on his chest, settling with a sigh.

  Milena felt human flesh again, warm, against hers.

  She was surprised by the body. She had thought that men would feel knotted and muscled and hard, all bone and sinew. His wiry flesh was still soft and smooth, warm and sheltering. She shivered in his grasp, still afraid. Experimentally, she put a trembling hand on his chest. He turned his face and looked into her eyes, with the preternatural trust, the animal simplicity, the brown eyes of a child. She smiled back, and found the fear began to melt.

  He made a grunt of satisfaction. They lay still and quiet as dark descended. Milena had found a harbour, a place of refuge that was warm in the unseasonable chill.

  During the Summer of Song, the summer of drought, each day began high and early with silver light filling an empty sky that looked like the inside of a bell. The floors would still be warm underfoot from the day before. There was no water to wash with; the water Milena drank was still hot in its wooden bucket from the previous day. Everything stank of rotting reed, and there were no more flowers at funerals: the flowers had all died.

  By the middle of September, it had not rained for four months. The upper reaches of the Estuary were dry. Milena had to walk across the Slump to the main channel of the Thames, which was still navigable. In all that dreadful summer, those early walks were the thing she hated most.

  The algae and the water plants had dried into something like papier mache, a tough, leathery coating over the mud, over the stones. When it burst underfoot, dust and a dank smell like crypts escaped. There were a few shallow farming ponds left.

  Milena remembered approaching a pond, and the ground ahead seethed. Hundreds of frogs lolloped into the brackish water. Overhead, marauding herons circled. It was seven o'clock and already the heat was like a hammer. Already Milena was drenched in sweat, her lips were cracked and her throat dry. Children sat, disconsolate on the banks, feeding on sunlight, no longer bothering to chase the herons away.

  'Good morning!' Milena called to them, trying to be normal.

  The children looked at her in fear and silence. They sat u
p and edged away.

  Milena rocked as she walked, moving her head up and down, left and right. She was escaping the disruption in her eyes. When she looked in the mirror she saw someone with the eyes of a lizard, closed over with a metallic, gleaming surface. The eyes are the doorway into the soul; her mirror lenses denied all sorts of exchange besides exchange of light. People would look away from her, repelled. She saw the world, with its bright sun glaring on white stones and bleached plants through a dim blue filtering.

  In the blazing heat, Milena wore gloves. She wore a heavy shirt that buttoned down around her wrists, she wore thick trousers and a scarf around her face. If any of her skin was exposed to light, the torment would begin. Light would concentrate just under its surface until it burned. There were blisters around her eyes.

  Milena walked past the children into the dead rice paddies, where she would be alone. She walked with dread. Whenever she was alone, the images began.

  A hump of dried algae appeared to rise up. Something human struggled out from underneath it, a bare arm, a blistered face. The face was bruised and torn, and the hump of algae rocked back and forth on top of it, smiling with white false teeth and glass eyes, sputtering as it breathed. Thrawn was being raped by it. 'Stop her,' the face pleaded, looking at Milena. 'Stop her, please.'

  Milena's knees wobbled and her feet seemed to turn sideways on the stones; she walked like someone with a neural disturbance. She staggered through the image. She walked through the pumping mound of algae; her feet walked through the pleading face. You are not there, she told herself. You do not exist. Her fists were clenched. She was being worn down.

  Milena had to walk around the edge of a long-dry fish-farm. There had been too many trout to save. Their corpses lay stinking in the bleached, baked mud. There were flies. They tickled the corners of Milena's mouth. Milena waved them away.

  Suddenly a pile of dead fish heaved back and there was Thrawn McCartney. She had been opened up too, her softer portions eaten away. She opened her mouth to speak and flies ascended from it in a cloud.

  'Milena!' said the swirling cloud of flies. The flies swarmed around her, buzzing. 'Milena! Milena!'

  Milena steeled herself, hunching her shoulders and walked on. She was confronted with the scattered bodies of fish, almost to the horizon. She decided they were not real. She walked on and her feet slipped in the slime of rotten fish. That upset her more than anything else that morning. There was a sharp stab of anger, and then despair. My new shoes, she thought. My beautiful new shoes. I knew I ought to carry them! Now they'll stink of rotten fish all day. People will see the crazy lady rock and shiver and then they'll smell her. She tried to wipe the shoes on dried clumps of grass. The grass was as white and as brittle as china.

  She walked to the main channel of the River Thames. At low tide, the river was now no more than roughly four or five metres across. It wound its way through a stinking softness of mud and drying salt, up to the white gates of the Great Barrier Reef.

  The Barrier rose up like a range of snow-peaked, rolling hills in the distance. Even through the filter of the lenses, the Great Reef glistened in the fierce sun, as if mirror dust had been thrown over it. Milena could feel the light reflected from it on her skin. The Reef stretched away towards the South Downs, and north towards Tottenham. Its foundations were a stained and mottled brown from lichen and the mud and the waters that had retreated. Its gates, the locks, were left hanging open. There was no need to keep back the waters now.

  On the banks a crowd of people waited for taxis. The docks of the taxi station, with its walkways and awnings were now stranded far up the shore, away from the dying river. The people waited disconsolately under broad-brimmed hats. They wore shorts and airy shirts and sandals. Some of them stood sinking into mud, staring away from the world. Baskets full of their goods waited untended on the shore. There were dried and shrivelled onions, a last few nurtured radishes, whole herds of frogs killed for sale before they died of drought and disease. Downstream, the banks were white with birds gathering by the water that was left.

  As Milena approached, spiders scuttled backwards ahead of her. They had leering cartoon faces. Their grins were mad and mocking, the eyes bright with violence. Sticks and stones. You think that can hurt me? Milena felt her jaw jut out with determination under its sweaty woollen mask. Do you? Hurt? Hah? Even without thinking, her head wobbled from side to side, to escape the disruption in her eyes.

  She joined the line for the water taxis and the images ceased. Her nostrils were plugged to keep out light, her ears were plugged. It was a little while before she realised that someone had been calling her by name.

  'Milena? Milena!' he was saying.

  She turned around to see a farmer burned black-purple from the sun, under a broad hat. He wore shorts and an oatmeal coloured toga. Mud was going dry and grey on his ankles and rough resin sandals. Then she focused on the face.

  It was Al, Al the Snide. He carried a basket of shrivelled, slimy coriander leaves.

  'My God, what's happened to you?' he asked her. He took hold of Milena's arm, and pulled her to one side, away from all the people, from the babble of their thoughts.

  Milena knew what he saw. He saw a woman with mirror contact lenses, who never stopped rocking, very slightly, and whose ears and nostrils were stuffed with cotton wool, and whose mind seemed to be full of images of madness. A woman who believed she was being persecuted, that someone was beaming images into her head, or into the air all around her.

  Milena tried to think at him, very clearly, in the silence.

  I've got someone angry at me, she told him, without words. She is the best hologrammer in the world. She tried to burn out my eyes. Thus the mirrors. Now, everywhere I go, when I am alone, she hounds me with very unpleasant imagery.

  She kept backing away, drawing him up the bank, away from the others. Away from other people, he could Read her more clearly.

  I'm telling you this because you're Snide, and you can see what I see.

  He began to look anxious, and with a tug on her arm, brought her to a stop. Then she pushed it all at him, the carcass in the living-room, the flies, the sun in her retina, and the things she had just seen.

  'Do you believe me?' she asked him out loud, so he would remember to answer her in words.

  The Snide's mouth hung open for a moment, and then he answered, choosing his words very carefully. 'I believe... that you believe it.'

  Milena knew what that meant. How could she expect anything else? It sounded like madness even to her.

  'Right. Fine,' she said, in a flat voice and began to walk back to the taxi station. She looked at her feet as she walked. Her shoes that now stank of fish grinned up at her with the faces of fish. The blubbery fish mouths were painted red with lipstick, and the eyes were ringed with blue make-up and mascara.

  See that? She jabbed the thought towards the Snide, and spun around to show him the shoes. My shoes, she cubed faces onto my shoes. Did you see it? Just then? It was in the light! It was real! It was real!

  Al the Snide watched her warily. No, he had not see it. Milena turned away in a fury of disappointment and walked back into the crowd. The crowd was stirring. Dimly, Milena began to hear the sound of a taxi's engine. People were climbing up the slope of the bank for their baskets. Milena stood in line. Al rejoined her.

  There's no way for you to tell, is there? she asked him in her mind. All you can Read is my memories, and they may or may not be mad. All you can tell is that I believe them. So now you tell me, Milena thought, distinctly, what has happened to you? Al looked confused and shook his head and held up his hands in helplessness. Too many people. He couldn't Read her clearly.

  'How long have you been farming coriander?' she asked Al aloud.

  The water-taxi was drawing near, a round, heavy black tug with a tiny steam engine. 'No moorings, no moorings,' a boy on the deck was shouting. 'You'll have to wade to us!'

  People rolled up the bottom of their shorts, or plunged
into the brown water that was infested with bilharzia. The Snide answered, warily, looking about him. 'They're after me,' Al said, murmuring, thin-lipped.

  Milena couldn't quite hear. She pulled out an earplug, and leaned towards him.

  'Since all this Singing, they're after anyone who plays with the viruses,' he said, standing up straight and looking away from her as if they were not talking. 'They've got Snides out after all of us now. I've got to stay with people all the time too, to hide. Like you had to, from me.'

  'I need your help,' whispered Milena.

  He closed his eyes. 'They want to wipe me,' he said. 'They're wiping everyone.'

  Please?

  And Al's eyes looked back into hers with terror. He shook his head. 'I can't lift my head above ground.'

  Milena closed her eyes and nodded. She took hold of Al's arm, as if to say, I understand. Her hand was shaking. I must look mad, she thought, and tried to smooth down her hair. I didn't remember to comb my hair.

  Al was still looking at her, and his eyes were full of horror. Am I really that bad? Milena thought. She pulled off her stinking new shoes and began to wade towards the boat.

  They slid down the mud into the water. Milena's immune system sent Mice crawling all over her knees and ankles. The crawling itched. The water was thick and hot, and the mud felt like porridge suffused with bits of twig. Milena rinsed her shoes and then they climbed up rope ladders into the boat. It was crowded. Everyone stood pressed close together. Milena had a wall of sweaty backs pushed against her face. There was no conversation. The boat pulled away from the bank, and the people in it sweltered, smelling of mud and reeds. People clung to the outside of the boat, hanging on the rope ladders.

  The taxi chugged its way through the locks. The gates were open, the wooden walls were going grey and dry. There were gaps between the timbers where the wood had shrunk. The Slump and the Pit were now on the same water level.

  There were high Coral embankments with steps rising up from the docks. They cast cool, delicious shadows. Relieved to be in shade at last, the passengers began to climb slowly, one step at a time, to savour it.