Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  che dietro la memoria no puo ire...

  for our intellect, drawing near to its desire

  sinks so deep that memory cannot follow it.

  It was the unperformed music of the Third Book, when Dante follows Beatrice into Paradise.

  It was the pattern of Rolfa, singing softly in the equivalent of a dream, even Rolfa was embedded in the logic and did its will. It was as if Milena were being sung to sleep in Rolfa's arms.

  Except for a little tickle along Milena's own crown. Somewhere outside this particular Consensus, Milena Shibush was still alive.

  Milena the dying woman lay on the floor of the Reading Room. Her hands were on the crucifix around her neck. She was trying to break the chain that held it, to pass it to Mike. She knew he was there but she could not see him. She faded in and out of consciousness with the pulses of the device in her ear. Only then did she remember to breathe.

  In...

  Out...

  In...

  She stopped.

  Out.

  Milena exhaled and it was as if the chain were broken. She breathed out and it was if she breathed herself out. She felt herself expand out of her body like a bubble. She emerged from herself and felt herself drift free.

  The spirit of Milena Shibush was exhaled from the body. She floated like a black balloon above the flesh on the floor, looking down on it. She saw Mike Stone on all fours, holding its hand. She saw Root, stroking the thin, dank hair. The body was not her. The spirit was calm and distanced, as if everything were close and faraway at the same time. The spirit suddenly grinned to herself as if there was a joke. The flesh on the floor grinned too. A comedy after all.

  Out there, away from the body, the world was beautiful, as if at the very summit of a mountain, so that the stars could be seen in daylight, as if a fresh, clear, cool wind blew through everything, carrying with it the sounds made by distance itself, the sounds a vast expanse will make simply by keeping still.

  Light flowed in and out of all things, and the wires were under them to be plucked. There was no pain and no hunger, no desire and no anger, no becoming only fulfilment only a delicious sense of imminent release. It was as if Milena Shibush were a pod of ripe seed that was about to scatter.

  The soul of Milena Shibush plucked the wires of the world, and they sang in the mind of Milena the pattern. They were both Terminal.

  Go! said the spirit. Go! Go! Go! The knowledge was passed. It was the knowledge of what it was to be free from the flesh, of how to breathe yourself out of the flesh and into the world, as God had once breathed life into it.

  The knowledge shivered through the wires to the patch of the pattern that was Terminal.

  Yes! thought the pattern. Angels! Angels, thought the pattern.

  And Milena the pattern breathed herself out.

  She exhaled herself out of the imprisoning flesh, out of the Consensus and into the framework of the universe itself.

  She poured herself like some viscous flowing substance, full of glowing tangles. She was made part of the Slide. She rose up out of the lines of gravity as an Angel, embedded in the universe, beyond harm.

  Milena the Angel looked about her, without eyes. Beyond light, beyond sound, there were the filaments of gravity. They were as taut as the strings of a musical instrument, fixed to the stars, fixed to the moon, and gathered in a knot at the centre of the Earth, where Dante's Satan froze.

  The filaments had pulled gas out of quantum vacuum, and also stone and the trunks of trees and the stars. The filaments embraced them all now in a glissando, holding the brick corridors of the Reading Rooms and the fleshy growths of the Consensus.

  The Consensus trembled with many half-formed voices. They were twisted together in a tangled vastness, spiralling clumps of thought that were attached to giant causeways of impulse. Thought was like a river that flowed down the stalks. The stalks rose up like cliff faces; there were turrets and chasms of personality. There were blown peaks that scintillated with memory, danced with it. Impulses forked, crackling, like lightning to China, to America. Milena the Angel pattern comprehended it as a whole. She could feel them all sizzling at the tips of the lines, the fifteen billion.

  And Milena remembered the sensation of twenty-two billion flowers pouring out of her head. She remembered the sense of exhalation. And, holding in her mind the flickering candlelight of each of those fifteen billion souls, she strummed the wires of the world.

  This way, the pattern said. You do it this way!

  Milena passed on to all them at once the feeling knowledge of what it was to be exhaled, to inflate like some beautiful balloon rising out of the flesh, to be blown, to waft free.

  To China, to Bordeaux.

  The spirit spun in delight, heavy with the seed of memory. Go! Go! Go! said the spirit.

  You're free, whispered the pattern.

  Before the Crowns could react, the knowledge was passed, through the wires at the speed of gravity. The wires became the knowledge, they were made of knowledge and of feeling. The Consensus gaped, slow and dinosauric, imprisoned in flesh.

  Like seed erupting from a pod, a cloud of Angels rose up, exhaling all together, unable to resist breath, like Adam. This breath was the kiss of life, reversed.

  The Consensus heaved and shuddered as its towers and turrets of flesh were vacated. The Consensus had been infected by a little scrap of pattern that was only half alive. The contagion spread.

  It was Milena who was the virus now.

  The selves of the Consensus were set free. They were scattered, no less in number than the many selves of Milena Shibush. They rose up as Angels, up the Slide, down the Slide, soaring through the universe, one with it. They weaved and rolled and spun in the network of lines with the joy of children bouncing on a trampoline. They had run away, as children always will, with both regret and relief.

  The children were free. The universe shivered at their touch.

  Milena in one motion had fought and obeyed. She had granted the last and most secret wish of the Consensus.

  It too had wanted to be set free from flesh. It had wanted to breathe itself out like its Angels, and travel the stars. But it had been afraid.

  Milena had taught the Consensus how to die.

  In the corridors made of brick, so snug, there was terror.

  Root the Terminal howled, and held her hand, feeling the great and beloved weight in her head lessen and grow small.

  'Baby! Baby!' cried Root in confusion.

  The great mind was emptying. All across the world, the Lower House fled. The Upper House roared in panic. Even some of those great souls leapt out of the flesh to be borne away by the Slide.

  We do not belong to you! the children cried.

  There was an undertow. Root felt it pulling. It nearly pulled her free from her body as well. She stood up from the floor, keening like an eagle. She held her own head, feeling her own self trying to leap. She wailed wordlessly, and turned and ran. She felt the wires in the bricks underfoot, felt the Angels slide up and through her, like a gasp of cold air, in the wires.

  The Angels lifted each other up. They rose together towards the heavens like motes of dust in the beams of searchlights. Milena the Angel felt them rise with delight. Flowers the, but they cast seed, and seed is life. It was as if the world had bloomed and borne fruit.

  Then something roared into her, blasting her with imagined music. The lines shook with it. It picked Milena up and swung her round and round, and roared even louder, with the sound of many voices in unison, the sound of flutes like knives, of sopranos like steam whistles.

  And where it held Milena, there was a sputtering of memory, of lanolin smells of rotting teeth, of hair in ears, of strong, smooth air playing cords of flesh like the strings of a violin, and of a voice as strong as heaven humming in the bones of the cheeks and the sinuses.

  The pattern of Rolfa caught Milena up and embraced her. It entered her and interpenetrated her. The pattern of their nerves, of their lives settled int
o each other. The lines jumped with impulses, releasing memory, exchanging recognition and yearning and fulfilment. They bathed in each other, crackling with memory, part of the universe, made of the forces of attraction. Milena, whose name meant Loving One became one with the one she loved.

  Go! Go! Go! cried the spirit of the flesh on the floor.

  Rolfa and Milena rose up the Slide. The Slide hummed with Angel being, like voices in a chorus. The Angels sang no words. They played the wires and were the wires. They sang the song and were the song. Music had only ever imitated it, as if catching an echo.

  Rolfa imagined music. She imagined the end of Purgatorio. She imagined stars falling like rain, splattering water onto both her and Milena. Milena could see the rain in memory, and she could feel it wash over her.

  Eunoe whispered Rolfa. The water that washes and restores the memory of the good.

  Words were sung in imagination:

  Ma perche piene tutte le carte

  But since all the pages

  ordained for this second song are filled,

  the rules of art now curb me

  and let me go no further

  Milena swirling within and outside the song felt the stars that pulled them and she felt the Slide, sliding through her. She felt the universe, its threads stretched tightly as if on a loom. She was the shuttle.

  The universe pulled, aching to embrace, yearning to haul all things together and hold them. The lines had pulled apart nothingness, stretching nothing into tiny, blazing vortexes, the energy called matter. Energy and matter were one, and both were made of the yearning, the ache in the heart that is creation.

  The Earth fell away beneath them, the moon half hidden behind it. The rocks and the soil, the plants and the mammals, the stars themselves all whispered in gravity. The stars and the Earth were alive, too. They very nearly thought. Their voices were like something half-heard on a radio, sputtering and meaningless, but trying, trying to speak.

  We rose out of them as Life because they needed us to. They needed us to see and to speak. Everything, even hate, was made of love.

  Io ritornai da la santissima onda

  I returned from the sacred water

  made whole, as are the trees made new with leaves

  pure and ready to rise to the stars.

  The Second Book was finished, and the Third could begin.

  On the floor, the flesh that was Milena Shibush remained behind. Mike Stone gazed in love and wonder at her face. Piglet held his hand and walked forward on newly imagined, newly living legs and leaned shyly over her. The face of Milena Shibush was ablaze with a smile of purest joy. The spirit saw the smile too. Her whole body was ablaze with the brightest fire, as if she were translucent, glass, illumined from within.

  In her hand, she could still feel Jacob's crucifix. Somehow the chain had broken. The hand reached up, blindly groping. The crucifix was enfolded in Mike Stone's hand, passed on.

  Milena thought of them all, Mike and Root, Lucy and Old Tone, the Babes. She thought of Thrawn and Rose Ella. The flesh on the floor was smiling at the whole of her life, at the panoply of it. It had ended in freedom after all.

  For the last time all the many selves of Milena Shibush were united. My turn now, thought the spirit. Like the Consensus, she was a framework to be emptied.

  Milena died.

  She settled into the silence and was divided. All her separate selves were freed: the infant and the child, the orphan in the Child Garden, the actress and the director, the wife and the People's Artist, Milena the Angel, Milena the oncogene, Milena who carried the Mind of Heather, and the Milena who remembered Rolfa.

  They rose up like the white pages of a written speech thrown to the winds. The pages blew like leaves, were scattered to their individual and eternal Nows. The Nows were no longer linked by time or by a self. They went beyond time, to where the whole truth can be told. It takes forever to tell the truth, and it is bound into one volume by love. That is the third book, beyond words or low imagining. Leaving Purgatory will have to be comedy enough.

  But that is not the end. There is no such thing as an end.

  It was still Easter in Czechoslovakia, and Loving One was climbing a hill with her parents, through a wood.

  She was still dressed as an angel. She wore a star and wings covered with crinkled resin. She was very tired, but her parents swung her between them through the air. It was as if she were flying.

  The slope of the hill became less steep, and there was more light: Loving One was swung out onto the top of the hill, where the larches stood bolt upright like the tails of squirrels. She looked about her and squealed with delight.

  At the top of the hill there was her home. There was the lipy, her lime tree and the hot white limestone house. The child broke into a run, shrieking with glee, into her field, over the grass that seemed to have hands and elbows, through the grass that seemed to part like a smile. Tatinka, Maminko, ghost-names ran laughing with her. There was the light flowing, there were the birds. The gates to the garden had been left hanging open.

  The gates would be left hanging open in each moment, here, now, in Czechoslovakia or in England. Always.

  THE END

  About the Author

  SF writer Geoff Ryman was born in Canada in 1951, went to high school and college in the United States, and has lived most of his adult life in Britain.

  His longer works include The Unconquered Country, the novella version of which won the World Fantasy Award in 1985; The Child Garden, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1990; the hypertext novel 253, the “print remix” of which won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1999; and Air, which won the Arthur C. Clarke and James Tiptree, Jr. Awards in 2006.

  An early Web design professional, Ryman led the teams that designed the first web sites for the British monarchy and the Prime Minister’s office. He also has a lifelong interest in drama and film; his 1992 novel Was looks at America through the lens of The Wizard of Oz and has been adapted for the stage, and Ryman himself wrote and directed a stage adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

  Table of Contents

  The Child Garden or A Low Comedy

  Enter the SF Gateway

  Contents

  Introducing The Child Garden Wendy Pearson

  Introduction Advances in Medicine (A Culture of Viruses)

  book one Love Sickness or Living in the Pit

  chapter one Everyday Life In Future Times (Windows in a Bridge)

  chapter two A Dog of a Song (Coming out of the Shell)

  chapter three Love Sickness (Holding a Ghost)

  chapter four Antarctica (The Indigent Gloves)

  chapter five Low Comedy (Just Us Vampires)

  chapter six Meeting Charlie, Charlie Slide (Surviving in Concert)

  chapter seven An Ultimately Fatal Condition (Love's Labours)

  book two For Milena Who Makes The Flowers or A Change of Climate

  chapter eight Where is Rolfa? (A Change of Climate)

  chapter nine Where is Rolfa? (Conditions of Weightlessness)

  chapter ten An Audience of Children (The Tree of Heaven)

  chapter eleven Forces of Attraction (Bouquets of Confusion)

  chapter twelve The Wild Humours (What Year is This?)

  chapter thirteen Down to Earth (Magic)

  chapter fourteen Hop Skip and Jump (Psychodrama)

  chapter fifteen People's Artist (The Whole Truth)

  chapter sixteen An Ending up of Friends (The Dead Spaces)

  chapter seventeen Terminal (Love Sickness)

  chapter eighteen The Armour of Light (The Child Garden)

  chapter nineteen Dog Latin (An Audience of Viruses)

  chapter twenty What Happens Next? (An Orchestra of Ghosts)

  chapter twenty one The Third Book (A Low Comedy)

  About the Author

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