The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  That cruel stretch of sea.

  And I will sing of this second kingdom

  Where the human soul is purged

  Made fit to leap up into Heaven.

  Here let dead poetry rise again.

  chapter eight

  WHERE IS ROLFA? (A CLIMATE OF CHANGE)

  Milena remembered the face of Chao Li Song.

  His hair and his beard were black and his eyes were narrow, hard and smiling. This was not an old saintly man, but a young Chinese outlaw who attracted women.

  ‘The problem,’ said the outlaw, ‘is time.’

  His two hands moved, one forwards, one backwards. ‘Time moves forward with the expansion of space. But space is also contracting, and time is moving backwards.’ The two hands met, as if in prayer. ‘They intersect at Now. Now is always timeless.’

  There was a whirring sound of cameras. ‘There is no single flow of time. There is no cause and effect.’ The outlaw pulled a face that was childishly sad. ‘There are,’ he said, ‘no stories.’

  Four years after Rolfa left her, Milena was Read by the Consensus. She was made into a story. A wave of gravity and thought slammed into her, filling her. All her memories, all her separate selves were inflated, like balloons. Her past was made Now.

  She remembered the night the power came back on. She was standing on Hungerford Footbridge, and it was crowded with strangers, crowded with friends.

  The cast of Love’s Labour’s were with her, Berowne and the Princess. Cilla was with her as well. They sheltered in a viewing bay on the bridge, a mass of people pressed around them. Along the river, the embankment was full of people. It was late in the summer evening, and the sky was a silver blue. It was warm and mild and the air moved in currents like silk ribbons. The Shell-Mex, a great grey building across the river, stood against the light in the west.

  Berowne was pregnant. Most people thought he looked grotesque. The foetus was attached to his bowel, and all the back of his body was swollen with it. He had to sleep in a sling. His beard had gone thin and his teeth were grey and fragile, speckled with white like a dog’s coat. He would have to grow new teeth after the birth. If he sat down suddenly, he would die. He would probably die anyway, giving birth.

  Milena thought he was very brave. Coming out with her tonight was dangerous. Life itself was dangerous, and there was something in Berowne’s acceptance of it that Milena found admirable.

  The Princess, the mother of the child, was with them, puce-pale and haggard from wishing she was more heartless. When Berowne had become pregnant, the Princess had tried to pretend that, beyond donating the ovum, she would have nothing to do with it. But she was here, with him.

  ‘Cuh!’ she said, trying to speak. ‘Cuh-could suh-see.’ Her lips trembled against each other, as if they could lose their balance. ‘Fuh! From the Shuh-Shell.’

  The Princess had begun to stammer in the spring. It was a virus. She had caught a virus, and it stopped her speaking. The only way she could speak smoothly, was to sing, to set the words to music. She refused to sing in public.

  ‘I wanted to be part of this,’ said Berowne, and held out his hands towards the spectacle. Even the septum of his nose had gone thin, the calcium leached from it. The wind stirred his thin hair as if with hope. The Princess hugged herself, forlornly.

  On the pavements of the South Bank, the mosaic pattern of many people shifted and stirred. Costermen carried barrels of beer on their backs, helped by children. The children turned the taps and filled the mugs, and danced playing bamboo pipes. All along the walkway, there were giant ash trees, and the branches were crowded with people. Beefy workmen sat astride the branches as if they were horses’ backs and they lowered mugs on rope, down to the children to fill.

  Over it all, dirigibles floated. Gondolas hung underneath them, full of people. Party members, of course. Tarties, thought Milena, the actress. They’re up there and we are down here.

  Then from underneath Milena, there came singing.

  Singing of sort, a kind of humming. The tide had gone out, and the river bed was shingled and muddy, heavy with the broken glass and torn rubber of history. Out from under the bridge came people. They moved across the mud, in fits and starts, like flamingos. They picked their way, heads bobbing back and forth, arms folded like wings. They stopped at once, all together, and stood on one leg, transfixed. All of them tilted their heads together in one direction, as if listening to something. Then they suddenly scurried forward, all in a flock.

  ‘Don’t look at them,’ said Cilla, for whom any form of extreme behaviour was only a way of attracting attention.

  Mud coated their heads like helmets, and they wore tatters of resin, bound to their bodies by nylon cord.

  ‘Those are Bees,’ said Berowne.

  Milena had never seen Bees before: they had been only a dim rumour for her. It was said that people’s minds were becoming disrupted. Their minds were becoming disrupted in unison.

  As Milena watched, all the Bees dropped, like puppets whose strings have been cut. They dropped down all at once onto their knees. They kowtowed as if to an emperor and began to scoop, furiously, more mud over their heads.

  ‘They’re supposed to be Snide,’ said Berowne, ‘but in a funny way.’

  ‘Fuh-funny!’ exclaimed the Princess in fear and bitterness. She had not wanted to bear a child for the sake of her career. What career was there now for an actress who stammered?

  There had been a change in climate, in many different ways. Behind the sunlight and celebration, everywhere there was an underlying tickle of fear and doubt. There were the Bees; now there was the stammering. People knew that something was going wrong with the viruses. They still did not want to think about it; they still did not know what to do about it; and so they came here to celebrate something new and good.

  On the embankment, the hurdy-gurdy men began to grind out fairground music faster than before. The costers began to call out the names of their wares with a fathering clamour, and a breeze began to blow, as if the river itself were stirring with anticipation. On Waterloo Bridge, people were standing up on horsecarts. People were lined up along roofs of buildings or leaded out of windows. Milena’s viruses told her: you are looking at half a million people.

  Across the river, on the face of the Shell-Mex, the hands of a giant clock were still. They had been still since the Blackout, the Revolution, ninety-seven years before. Tonight the hands would move, tonight at 10.30. There was enough metal now. The electricity would flow again, at first along the North Bank of the Thames only. But after that?

  It was getting late. There was a sudden surge forward on the bridge as people tried to inch forward, to see. Milena pushed backwards. ‘Stop shoving!’ she said. ‘We’ve got a pregnant man here!’

  ‘Smile,’ said Berowne to the Princess, and took her hand. She looked down at his hand, and compared it with hers, and shook her head. Time was running out.

  The people began to count, echoing their viruses.

  ‘TEN…NINE…EIGHT…’

  In the mud below, the Bees were rocked by each giant number, buffeted by blasts of thought.

  ‘SEVEN…SIX…’

  Milena thought: the town will be lit up at night. There will be film shows for the public on giant screens in parks. There will be videos. Different Estates will start vying for control of them. All of us are going to have to find different things to do.

  ‘FIVE…FOUR…’

  Berowne turned to Milena, and nudged her, smiling wanly. This was why they had come. Join in!

  ‘Three,’ murmured Milena, wary of joining in a mass.

  There will be a lot of sickness, she thought, a lot of new kinds of sickness.

  ‘TWO! ONE!’

  In anticipation, horns began to blow, and whistles to screech. There was a dull roar of noise, barely intelligible.

  ‘ZERO!’

  Nothing happened. There was a wave of laughter and ironic cheering as darkness deepened.

  ‘ZERO!’
the people called again. ‘MINUS ONE! MINUS TWO!’

  At ‘minus two,’ there was a leaping of light. Bam! Suddenly light flooded the face of the Savoy hostel for the homeless. A chain of lights hanging from lamp posts came alive with light.

  Bam! Spotlights were suddenly shining upwards on the face of the Shell-Mex. It gleamed, newly washed against the navy blue of the sky. Lights came on in succession all along the North Bank, in the boathouses and along the docks at the foot of the stone embankments. Light glinted on the granite length of Cleopatra’s Needle. Lights came on all along Waterloo Bridge. Bam, bam, bam, in quick time, pools of light, golden as if in sunset, spread in contrast to the darkness of the sky.

  Oh! the people signed. Oh! it was even more beautiful than they had thought it would be. They had all tried to imagine what it had once been like, the electric cities spangled with light, light in windows shining like eyes, and here it was, as if they had been transported in time. The electric city was reborn. This was to be called the Restoration.

  The Bees leapt to their feet, shivering with other people’s delight, and they jittered up and down in place, wailing, warbling in tongues.

  And on the face of the Shell-Mex, giant shadows slowly crept. The hand of the clock had begun to turn again, as if time had begun once more. It was as if the clockwork of change itself had started up once again.

  Milena felt the artificial light prickling on her Rhodopsin skin. Everything is going to change, she thought. There would be power now, light and holograms. It would be possible to perform the Comedy.

  All around her people whistled and stamped and cheered. Bam, bam, bam, the lights came on in succession, like memories.

  And Milena remembered being in a vehicle that could orbit the Earth.

  It was alive, and it floated, swollen with gases like the throat of a frog. It rocked in the wing as it drifted upwards. Below her, Milena the director saw England swing in and out of view.

  Milena saw huge autumn fields, golden brown with harvest. She saw lines of motion trailing through prairies of grain, blown by wind. It was as if the grain were the legs of the Earth. By waving them, the Earth turned. Between the fields, there were tiny copses of sycamore and beech. There was a river moving in a straight line, held by banks of coral. The shadow of the vehicle floated across the river, sending up a flock of ducks that flew in panic, the mass of their wings scintillating brown/white/brown as they flapped.

  England was a revelation to Milena the director. She had not been outside Greater London since early infancy, and she remembered almost nothing of her childhood. This was an unknown country, huge and full of life and forgotten, like childhood itself.

  There were villages below, with houses shaped like bee hives, next to ancient churches or barns made of stones. Giant pear-trees were stretched out on the ground beside them, pinioned to catch the sun and occupying whole fields. Children carried food on their heads out into the fields. Flocks of them ran in the Child Gardens, running and gathering and breaking apart like starlings in the air. Giant horses pulled machinery through the fields, churning up a golden haze of dust. Milena saw through the glass roof of a laboratory. Inside there were vats and tanks and rows of glinting dishes like sequins. She saw groves of bamboo, and people sitting in the sun, having their lunch.

  Milena saw many lives held in one pattern, the events in different fields, neighbouring villages. It was as if she could suddenly see the shape of Now, the simultaneity of life. She could see the shadows of clouds and an advancing front of weather. It was as if she could see the future of the children below.

  Elevated, she thought, in every sense of the word I have been elevated.

  Milena Shibush was going to produce and direct The Divine Comedy. She was going to produce it as she had always wanted to, filling the heavens with light and music, Rolfa’s music.

  Rolfa’s music filled her life. She heard it everywhere she went, in her mind. Even without the viruses to help her, she would by now have known it all by heart. The music had become a way for her to talk to herself. It she were alone, unhappy, perplexed, triumphant, she would find herself humming the music, and the music she had chosen would tell her what she was really feeling.

  Now she was humming the mountain theme, the music of climbing, that followed Dante’s footsteps up the mountain of Purgatory.

  In a flurry of cottonwool white, the landscape below was snatched away, with the suddenness of a viral illness. Milena was inside a cloud! She leaned forward to see, to remember. Everything was grey, like fog. Of course, of course a cloud would be like that! Soft and grey and full of dampness. Between the panes of cellulose that was the window, there was a pimpling of condensation. Milena had time to think: I want to see. Then the vehicle blinked. A fold of flesh slipped down between the panes, to wipe them.

  Milena was Terminal now. She could feel the vehicle all around her. She could sense the miles of its nervous system. She could feel her own position within that system, a concentrated knot at its very centre. The vehicle was alive, but it had no self. Milena was its self. The vehicle did whatever she wanted. The need was desperate and she withdrew from it.

  All down the centre of her head, there was a weight in a line. It felt like scar tissue, dead but somehow tingling at the same time. It was a wound, a disease. It was where Milena was Terminal, attached to the machine.

  The pressure on its gasbag was translated for her into altitude in kilometres. Wind velocity and direction, temperature and estimated time to ignition were all ticking through her mind like her own thoughts. She could feel the opening and closing of the creature’s valves, the seeping of its glands, its eagerness for a command.

  The vehicle had a scientific name, in muddled Latin and Greek: nubiformis astronautica. Most people called it the Bulge. The Bulge electrolysed water into oxygen and hydrogen. It inflated itself. Lighter than air, it drifted up to the border of the stratosphere. Then it mixed and electrochemically ignited the gases, to blast itself free from the Earth.

  ‘Fart-propelled,’ old Lucy of the Spread had called it once. Milena the director saw her in memory, her grubby fingers lifting up a pint in salute.

  Outside the window, the mist began to glow a pearly-white. There was suddenly dim light and shadow on Milena’s arm. Then as suddenly as someone gasping, the Bulge swept out over a landscape of white.

  And Milena heard the music of Heaven in her head, Rolfa’s music, the mounting bass line, the crying of the Angel voices. She was swept up between mountains of cloud, with highways of light and blue-shadowed valleys between. Remember, remember, she told herself.

  She rose higher with Rolfa’s music. There were plains of cloud below that looked crisp enough to walk on. There was a coastline, with bays and inlets and an ocean of air, with floating icebergs and islands of white. Outside the window, sunlight glinted on ice crystals. Something bobbed jiggling between them. There in the air, between the particles of ice, there were cobwebs, great nets of them, and there were aerial spiders dancing, legs akimbo. The spiders looked like Bulges, in their net of nerves, as if the universe were a series of Russian dolls, a smaller likeness contained in the larger.

  Overhead the sky was mauve. It was time for the Bulge to blow.

  Yes, Milena told it, and the Bulge began its internal dance, its heart pounding, closing its hiatuses, opening others. Milena felt its shell, a latticework of bone, begin to close around them. As its eyes closed, Rolfa’s music reached the peak of Purgatory, about to leave the Earth altogether. Rolfa wasn’t with her, and would not be with her, except in the music. Always present by her very absence.

  Tongues of flesh wrapped themselves around Milena to hold her in place. Milena felt the Bulge gather and clench for the blast. She felt in a line down her head like a collar that pulled a weight.

  I am not a Party Member, she thought, but they treat me like one. I still have not been Read, and they know it. I have not been Read, but they have made me Terminal. They need me for something. In a line down her hea
d, she felt another weight, something vast and tangled and the size of the planet. It was the Consensus. It was present by its absence too. It was watching, through her eyes, listening through her ears. It used her hands to do its work. Milena closed her eyes and waited.

  There was a dull roar in the bowels of the vehicle below, and the walls trembled, soft and slightly crinkled like chamois leather.

  How, Milena wondered, thinking of her life, how did I end up here?

  Then she sat back and surrendered to the roar.

  After Rolfa had gone, Milena had tried to find her. She remembered wandering through the Shell, through the Zoo, along the walkways between them, asking everyone: where is Rolfa? Where is Rolfa?

  Milena asked the little girls who worked at the desks of the Zoo. They giggled at each other’s joked and were slow to pay attention to her. She stood hopping up and down inside herself, trying to keep her hands still.

  ‘Rolfa. Rolfa Patel. She has probably just joined the Zoo as a trainee Tech. You must have heard something about her.’

  ‘No,’ said the child, her pink cheeks swollen with a smile, no trace of doubt or fear. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Well, you’ve heard nothing. Maybe the others have?’ Milena looked at the other two children. They were bargaining in low voices, arms folded, something about shoes.

  ‘Have you heard anything?’ Milena demanded of them.

  ‘We’re all linked,’ explained the first child. ‘Terminal. One of us knows something, all of us knows it. There’s been no Rolfa Patel.’

  Rolfa had disappeared.

  Milena looked for her in the Graveyard. She took a candle with her. In the golden light she saw that the dust of the floor had been undisturbed. It lay thick on the shoulders of the mouldering clothes that still smelled of sweat.

  Rolfa’s nest was empty. The desk was there, with a few spare pieces of paper still scattered about the floor, and a few dry pens still in the drawers. Milena stood in the place where this particular story seemed to have begun. The place produced a very slight sensation of sadness, a kind of lowering in the stomach, as if accelerating upwards at high speed, but it would have been an exaggeration to say the place was haunted for her. It had already become just another place. Milena wrote with her finger in the dust on the desk.