Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  Helicopters roared over the tops of the purple trees, that sighed and swayed. White tubes were spat out from the machines. The tubes wrapped themselves around the trees. The Garda came swinging down the white web, white boots swinging.

  'There'll be merry hell now,' said Root.

  There were screams behind them as people suddenly surged forward; a wave of them broke against Root's back. Root and Milena were swept forward along Marsham Street, towards Horseferry Road.

  The Bees tried to run too, but they were held by the lines of life all around them, from the crowd, from the forest of the Consensus. They ran in slow motion, as if time flowed more sluggishly for them. Perhaps it did.

  The Garda raised the palms of their hands, and tubes burst forth from their palms. The tubes shot towards the Bees, whipping around their arms and legs.

  'Leave them alone!' whispered Milena.

  The Bees were entangled in the translucent tubing. They fought against it as it drew them together in a net. Then the tubes leapt up like the tongues of frogs catching insects, high into the sky, silver against blue, hitting the helicopters and sticking to them. Very suddenly, the Bees were elevated five or six at a time, as if taking wing. They were hauled skywards towards the bubbles of the helicopters.

  'Milena!' they called, as if for salvation, kicking their protein-starved, scrawny legs.

  Root pushed her way onto Horseferry Road. It was blocked with reined-in carts, or with bundles that people had let drop in order to watch. Milena felt a burning in her belly, like very severe indigestion. Root swung her shoulders from side to side, shoving people to one side. She came to a thinning of the crowd and began a burdened run. Milena could feel the swaying back and forth of the volumes of flesh on Root's thighs.

  From all over the floor of the Pit, bells were ringing. There was the light clamouring of the signal bells of each Estate. There was the heavy, droning toll of church bells, and the great din of the bells of Westminster Abbey. Everyone's face was turned towards the sky. The helicopters rose over the tops of the buildings of Horseferry.

  Root slowed to a staggering walk. She dodged round the carts stopped in the middle of the embankment road. Milena slipped out of her grasp. 'Can you walk?' Root asked her. Milena nodded. Root led her down the granite steps of the embankment, to a jetty, on the river.

  On the river, the horse ferry floated in place, the tillerman and the passengers crowded into its prow. Beside the jetty, in a small barge, two Slump Bobbers gazed up at the sky. Behind them was a cargo of mattresses. Root stepped down into their boat.

  'You get us out of this,' she said to the two boys, leaving no possibility of denial.

  'What's that all about?' the Slumpers asked.

  'Just some bloody Bees,' said Root and helped Milena step onto the mattresses. 'You lie down there,' said Root.

  'Lo, she's not ill, is she?' one of the boys asked. 'We can't sell them if people think there's sickness on them.'

  'Oh! Everybody's ill. Don't tell anybody and they won't know,' said Root, slapping the boy's shoulder. 'Go on, now, the Garda's pulling people in.'

  The boys pushed the boat away from the jetty and one of them danced across the mattresses to take the till. A small, dirty sail was unfurled.

  Milena lay on her back, listening to the slopping of water under the prow and along the sides of the boat. It was a comforting, satisfying sound. Milena felt more at peace. Looking up she saw the ancient buildings of the embankment and their bamboo scaffoldings. She saw people clinging to the bamboo, leaning out or up to see. Bees dangled from threads in the sky. The helicopters chopped their way through the mix of gases that bore them up. They headed east and south, bound for Epping, or the New Forest or even the South Downs. The Bees would be dumped there. But they would return.

  In her hand, Milena still held a human rose. She lifted it up to her nose to smell it. It was perfumed, like freshly washed, soapy human skin. 'It's all so bizarre,' she said. She sat up and leaned on one arm, to look behind the boat.

  All along Lambeth Bridge traffic had come to a halt and groups of people singing and marching arm in arm were spreading the news. They talked to people in the carts, animated, waving their hands. The word cancer kept cutting through the air between them. There were threads of song, from Singers no longer able to keep quiet.

  But in the quiet on the river it seemed to Milena that she saw something else moving among and through the people on the bridge. Something seemed to impel them forward, sweeping them along with it. It seemed to push behind them, and force its way out of them, pouring out of their eyes and mouths, making their hands leap and their feet spring. It was as if she were seeing the force of life, moving through them.

  Milena looked at the people, looked at life, as if she were being borne away from it. What have I done? she asked herself, amid the sound of helicopters and church bells. Life had forced its way through her like a bush through soil. Life has a will. It needs things. It needs us to grow wings, or larger brains, or pads on our elbows, and we do. That's how it was done, she thought, remembering the foliage growing out of Bees. Life had a need, and need hammered on the door of our genes until the genes were changed by will. That's how we grew, up from the slime. We needed hands, and made them. Only now, Lord, now we know we can do it. It will all happen faster.

  Milena saw the clouds over Lambeth Bridge. That's how there are spiders in the sky. They thought themselves into that shape. She smiled. Give the Bees time, she told the helicopters. Give them time, and they will live up there, suspended between ice crystals on the tubes. Will you drive them from there too?

  That's what we are becoming. The Bees are our future. Life wants us to be more like plants, there's not enough room on the planet now for hunters. We're growing new shoots in so many directions at once, the Consensus will never be able to hold us. The Bees and Lucy and the GEs and the Singers. We're a new forest growing out of the old. We're pushing it back.

  A big Thames barge slipped past them, making waves, making them rock. Root looked around the sail.

  'You comfortable now?' Root asked.

  Yes, yes in a way I am.

  Milena fell asleep.

  She woke up with a familiar, acrid tingling in her nostrils. It was the smell of home. It was the smoke of cremation from the Estate of Remembrance. There was the singing too, the undertakers warbling with their tongues, the mourners passing over their dead, singing old hymns. Milena saw flowers from the boats and biers bob past their boat. She did not look up.

  Bees had been dumped in the Slump, and they had adapted so quickly that they were now a nuisance. They had grown huge flat pads like the giant lilies. They floated on them and fed on them. Milena saw that they had gathered around the graceful hangar of the Party Estate. She groaned and closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep.

  She heard the Slump boys shouting at the Bees and felt the boat turn to the side and the boys push against the rooted human lilypads. 'Shoo! Shoo!' she heard Root shout. She felt a scraping of woven reed underneath the boat as it was pulled ashore.

  'Here, Lady,' said one of the Boys.

  The slopes of the tiny artificial island were covered in Bees.

  Milena, Milena, Milena, said all the Bees all together, and there was a rustling of their many branches. Milena saw the faces of her neighbours, pinched and unhappy, staring out of their upper windows. The What Does stood guarding the door, a cloth wrapped around her face against disease. A charcoal stove was burning wet reeds to make smoke, to clear away the sickness.

  There was a smell of coffee. The What Does husband was scrubbing the lintels with coffee from a bucket. He turned and looked up, and flung the rest of the coffee on the ground to make a path for walking on.

  'Oh, bloody hell,' said Root.

  Overhead there was the sound of helicopters.

  Milena stepped out of the boat onto the woven shore. She began to walk towards the Bees.

  'Where are you going?' called Root in dismay. As Milena approached t
hem, the Bees made a sound like many doves and arched their arms over their heads, to cut out some of her thought. Those on the shore waded backwards into the brown water. Milena stood on the shoreline, facing the water, which looked as heavy and golden as oil, a reflection of sunset heaving sluggishly on its surface.

  'You'll have to go,' Milena told the Bees. 'If you stay, the Garda will come again, people will be angry. I am not going to be staying here anyway. I will be in hospital and I won't be well. Try to stay away from me. Try to find places where you are safe and I will try to come to see you when I can.'

  From out of the water two men came wading, one on all fours, carrying roses in his mouth. The other had lost all his teeth, and his golden hair had thinned to nothing on top. Uncombed coils of it hung matted down the side of his head. 'Hello, Ma,' he said, in a perfectly ordinary way. He was the King. 'Remember Piper?' He stroked the head of the dog-man.

  'Yes,' said Milena, in a whisper.

  'He remembers you. He remembers that you saved him. He's a good dog.'

  Piper dropped the flowers at her feet, and stretched down low, looking up at her, tongue out of his mouth. There was eagerness and love in his eyes.

  'Good Piper. Good boy,' whispered Milena and began to scratch him behind the ears.

  Piper gave a yelp of pleasure and shook his bottom from side to side, trying to wag a tail he did not have.

  'He thinks you are his mistress,' said the King.

  You had to understand Bees to know that it was a sacrifice for them to give up Piper. They loved him. You had to understand Bees to know what a tribute it was for them to give Piper to her.

  Milena sighed with weariness. Here I go again. She knew what she was going to do. 'Come on men, Piper,' she said, ruefully. 'Come on boy. Or girl. Whichever.'

  'Home,' said the Bees, all together, in chorus. 'She takes him home!' They were smiling.

  'What did I say?' shouted Root. 'I said you had to be the one who gets taken care of!'

  'You had all better go,' Milena said to them. She stumbled as she walked up the coffee-washed pathway. Piper tried to caper about her ankles, but his knees were not sprung like a dog's ankles.

  'You're not taking that tiling!' exclaimed Root.

  'He's not a thing,' said Milena, and her voice suddenly thickened and she found she was weeping. 'He's alive.' To her that was suddenly the most precious thing.

  The Bees began to withdraw, bowing and stepping onto the lilypads of their brethren. There was commotion in the water as roots pulled themselves free and pushed the lilypads away from the shore. As the helicopters turned back, as Piper nittered and wriggled and tried to pant, and as Root shook her head with misgiving, Milena began to climb the stairs that led to her home. She felt something sluggish in her loins, the ebbing of the life that still washed all about her in waves.

  She opened her door, and Mike Stone came rushing forwards from the balcony, his face full of alarm, full of questions.

  Milena tottered towards him, fell against him. 'Mike,' she said. 'I've got cancer.' It was not until Mike held her that she realised. She had made herself ill, out of love. But Love of what?

  chapter eighteen

  THE ARMOUR OF LIGHT

  (THE CHILD GARDEN)

  On Milena's twenty-first birthday, she and her friends went for a picnic in Archbishop's Park, near St Thomas's Hospital.

  Al the Snide carried the wine and the fruit juice. Cilia carried the basket of food and Peterpaul carried Mike's chair. Mike had designed and built it for himself. It supported him from the shoulders and thighs, leaving his swollen buttocks to hang free. Mike had developed a waddle. He walked by shifting his hips from side to side and letting his feet follow. There was a football pitch in the park, covered in vividly red grit. Some boys who were playing on it stopped to laugh at him.

  Milena expended her strength by walking up to the boys. They saw her and fell silent, then shared embarrassed smiles. They knew they were going to be told off but they were nice enough to accept it as their due. They also knew who she was.

  Milena was bald, and her head leaned forward insecurely on a thin neck, tendons straining. She had started to wear make-up, like an actress. Cilia put it on for her, giving her skin a lightly tanned, purple colour with a smear of silver around the eyes. The silver suited the purple but could not hide how deep the flesh had sunk into the sockets of her skull. Milena smiled with rose-coloured lips, knowing that she showed too much gum and that the grin made her look like a death's head.

  'Don't laugh,' she told the boys gently, through the cane screen around the pitch.

  The boys shuffled, looking at their feet. One of them had a nasty graze on his knee that trickled brown-black down his leg.

  'Someone had to carry you, before you were born,' she told them. 'Who knows, maybe you'll be pregnant one day.'

  The boys chuckled, shook their heads. 'Oh, ta. Don't think so.'

  'Maybe your wife will insist.'

  'She'll be lucky,' murmured one of the boys.

  'Are you sorry, lads?' she asked them.

  They nodded. Milena blew them a collective kiss. The Princess came up behind her, little Berry pulling in another direction. 'Come with us, Milena,' she sang, to the beginning of Faure's Requiem. Requiem eterna. I know, thought Milena, I know she's a Singer and cannot help her choice of music, but I wish she would sing something other than a requiem. It's so mournful.

  Little Berry lived with his mother now, and had done since the Princess had met Peterpaul. They were all Singers. Berry never talked. Sometimes now, especially when he was alone with Peterpaul and the Princess, he would not use words at all. When he was eating, he sang. Different foods had different themes. He sang them over and over, even with his mouth full, celebrating.

  He wore a cowboy hat. Milena had worn one for a time, when her hair had started falling out, so he had wanted one too. The hat was black and red, and had a thong and a toggle that was pulled up tightly under his chin. There was circle of white cotton bobbles all around the underside of the brim. Berry loved his cowboy hat. For him, it was alive and there were particular songs devoted to it.

  The Princess was trying to help Milena, supporting her by one arm, while pulling Berry, who was leaning with all his weight and all his being towards something he wanted. He sang about it to himself, but the adults couldn't think what the song was about. The trees? The football pitch?

  'It's Piper,' said Milena. Terminals were also empaths with people as well, slightly Snide. As Milena weakened, her ability to Read people improved. 'He wants to ride Piper.'

  The Princess paused and looked up at Milena with a kind of helpless concern. Is she trying to find a song? Milena wondered. There are no songs that ask if a man who thinks he's a dog can give the virus to your child.

  'It's all right, Anna. I've checked. Piper is not infectious, not contagious, nothing.'

  A Speaker could have lied and said that was not a worry. Singers couldn't lie. Trying to lie clogged the music just as speech clogged the words. The Princess went silent until she could sing something else. 'What would you do if someone found him, someone who knew who he used to be?'

  'Give him back?' smiled Milena, and shrugged.

  'What if it was his wife who found him?'

  'That would be sad,' said Milena, smiling dreamily. 'Especially as he thinks he's a female dog.'

  Milena felt calm today, she always felt better with people around her. It was at night the terror came, the cold, clinging sweats, the pacing around the room, the life-devouring fear of death. Mike, poor Mike, would wake and hold her as she quivered next to him, teeth chattering.

  Milena was immune to the cures. She had unstitched the suppressor genes they tried to give her. So they gave her immune suppressants, so she could catch the cure, and the cancers raced ahead. The cancers ached at night with growing pains. She felt them in her mind, and tried to find the spirals, the spirals that could change with thought. But she had never had so many cells to change before. She ha
d never been so tired or confused before. She sometimes thought, that at night while she slept another part of her, obeying the old program, made the cells cancerous again.

  At times, she could find the idea amusing. I can fight off any illness, and so I'm dying, because all the cures are diseases. Haven't things become just the slightest bit confused?

  The only other cures they had were the ancient ones, and they were illnesses too. They killed cells in your body. They made you queasy or sleepy or confused. They parched your throat and made you so nauseous you couldn't hold down a glass of water. Your hair fell out.

  Other things were happening. The patch of fluorescent skin on her palm had spread up and over her arms onto part of her face. Parts of her glowed in the dark. She could feel other things happening in her genes, strange attempts at mutation, trying to grow new things altogether.

  All of that was better than the euphoria. When the terror got too bad, happy drugs were given to her. Then she would talk in a loud, swaggering voice of what she would do when she got better. How she would quit the theatre and become a space pilot. She would believe it. The memory of Mike's face, all its muscles strained, his encircled eyes wincing, told her that he would rather not sleep at night man see her wheeling with joy and mad relief.

  But today was a good day. Today everything was in the most perfect balance.

  'Milena. The chairs are up,' called Mike, already sitting, balanced in a criss-cross bamboo framework. It was Mike who called and not Peterpaul. Peterpaul did not like to call in public, in song. The days of persecution had been brief, but Peterpaul was still wary.

  Milena suddenly felt a nose bump against her hand. She never had to call Piper. He knew when to come. He was more intelligent than most dogs. Perhaps he had been given an empathy virus. When he was human. He had been trained now to wear shorts in public, and slept in a wicker basket in the hall.

  'Pi-per!' sang Berry, and chuckled hoarsely, clambering up on to his back. Milena and the Princess began to walk across the grass, hand in hand. Piper crawled beside them on hands and knees, panting with his tongue hanging out, a wide doggy grin of contentment.