The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  Milena paused. Milena hung back.

  She looked at the blue world with human eyes. She felt it through the strings, its surface crumpled, like some old woman’s face.

  ‘It’s too big,’ she said, scowling.

  ‘What you mean, love?’

  ‘It’s…sinful.’

  There was a space, empty and pure, and she was to fill it, with a show. Is there a flower called Hubris?

  My name is Milena Shibush. It is a Lebanese name, but my family were from Eastern Europe. My father died. My mother died. They were killed by the virus.

  The only virus is us.

  The Cherubim fell silent. The three axes spoke together. ‘It isn’t just you, you know, Milena. It’s all of us. The Consensus. The Consensus is all of us. It wants this. It’s the one that’s doing it really.’

  The stars and the black spaces between them seemed to say that it would be a violation. To make an image the size of heaven, for half of Earth to see.

  ‘Suppose God…’ she began to whisper and found she had no conclusion.

  ‘That’s a great, big, lonely word,’ said Bob the Angel. ‘Don’t know. He speaks too big. Too many connections. How could you speak to all the stars at once?’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Milena.

  All the stars at once, how could all the stars be dwarfed? Only Earth, little Earth, could be humbled. We humble what is about us. We humble ourselves.

  ‘There’s no time like the present, love. You’ve only ever got the present. You can’t do it in the past, or go dashing off into the future and hide there. Whenever you did it, it would have to be Now.’

  ‘Has everybody been told?’ Milena asked him. ‘Do people know this is going to happen?’

  ‘Of course they have, everybody’s ready. Everybody wants to see it. This is an event, girl, a real event. They’re all looking forward to it.’

  ‘I don’t want them to be afraid of it.’

  ‘Their jaws will hit their feet with wonder. And they’ll say, look at what we can do. All of us together. But they won’t be afraid.’

  ‘Bob. Could you break off for a minute?’

  The Angel seemed to darken. ‘Sure, love, sure.’

  The link in her head seemed to close. She had only one vision, now, of the inside of Christian Soldier, and the garden growing out of his walls. She blinked at it. She had expected the Bulge to look small in comparison with the universe. Instead it seemed vast, as if the walls of the Bulge were distant nebulae. Mike Stone was the size of Orion. His hands were clasped behind his back and he rocked nervously on his heels.

  ‘Is something wrong, Milena?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she gave her head a shake. ‘No, just nerves. It’s like a dream.’

  ‘Maybe this will help,’ he said.

  From behind his back, Mike Stone passed her the rose that Rolfa had given to her. It was the rose from Chao Li Gardens. It even bobbed in her hand. ‘I just saw it growing on the wall,’ he said. ‘Maybe you need it for reference.’

  ‘No,’ said Milena, grimly. ‘No, I don’t need a reference for this.’

  There it was, smelling of autumn, the tips of its petals brown with chill, a pale rose marbled with red, an imperfect rose. Milena blinked, and suddenly there were even dew drops on it. We’ll call them dew drops.

  ‘Milena?’ asked Mike Stone in wonder.

  Why, she thought, oh why do I have the rose, Rolfa, and not you? There was an ache in her throat from grief. I have the book and the rose and the music, but I don’t have you.

  You want to cover the world, Consensus? You want all the stars to see you in your greatness, do you? Well then let them see this, let them see this rose that you killed. You wanted her music, but you wanted it without her. So I will blast you with it, Consensus. Take it. Choke. Thorns scratch your throat.

  ‘OK. Bob, OK,’ she said. ‘OK, OK.’

  The Angel came towards her in wonder. ‘Milena?’ he asked. ‘What’s all this?’

  She tried to close her mind against him. ‘Do you want it or not?’

  ‘Steady on. It’s a cold rose, you know. It won’t burn, even if you want it to.’

  ‘There are people waiting. They want a show.’

  ‘All right,’ said the Angel, soothing. ‘But just one promise. We talk later, OK?’

  ‘Yes, yes, come on.’ Milena tried to pretend to him that her concentration was something that had to be seized and corralled like a wild horse.

  ‘Countdown,’ he said and ripped himself apart, and the Cherubim awoke again in a chorus and the eye in her head opened, and there was the harp, and the billions of crisscross strings.

  ‘Now,’ she said.

  And all the Cherubs pulled, like a net, catching the arrows from the sun and moon. The Cherubim were like crystals. They broke the light apart and reformed it, clutching it to themselves, pierced by the arrows, as if through the breast, dying for love.

  Cherubim murdered, love dead. Dead love returned fourfold. Feel the blast. Consensus, this one is for you. Here it comes. Image in her mind, the feel of smooth green stem, brown thorns, slight scent, the chill, the odour of roses and birdshit in pondwater, and the geese overhead, Rolfa’s fur touching her just lightly on the arm, and the rose.

  The memory caught the light, and was held by what it caught. The lens was gravity and gravity was thought and thought was memory. Light was filtered through memory.

  Her eyes were shut again. She opened them, and looked out through the window of the Bulge, and the window blinked, and when it cleared, there was an explosion of pink light that filled the window, pink like wobbling like a jelly, as if to fill the universe. Pink light falling in on itself, tumbling back into form, into focus.

  Milena gave a kind of strangled shot. Rosa mundi. Rose of the World. There, over the Earth, filling heaven, and it was her rose. Do you see it, Rolfa? Do you know what it is, do you know what it means? A rose of light the size of half the world. The rose of memory was also the rose of anger.

  It is rising up over mountains like some new flowering sun. In other places below, at midday, it is misty, high up in blue sky, pale like a daylight moon, pink-white, its shadows the same blue as the sky around it. It will be a pink glow behind monsoons in the south, where I can see them sweeping in arcs over the coastline. And in the east, it will be setting like the sun, streaks of cloud across its face, which it will pinken. In some places, the sun will shine through it, as if the sun wore a collar. Or a crown. Half the world will look up and see it and wonder at the way it shines, and it is shining out of my head, out of memory.

  The Earth that is humbled is yours, Consensus.

  ‘It’s big, Milena,’ said Mike Stone.

  Milena smiled a crooked grin. ‘That is the general idea, Mike.’

  ‘Roses generally aren’t big,’ said Mike Stone.

  ‘No,’ murmured Milena, almost as silently as the Angel. The rose was huge and angry, and the curling-back petals looked like blubbery lips.

  It’s a monster, she thought, like the Crabs.

  It wasn’t supposed to be a rose of arrogance, hubris, or anger, it’s supposed to be a rose of love, and a rose of love is small, small enough to be held in someone’s hand. This was supposed to be a gift.

  And then she thought: a gift to twenty-two billion people, both the adults and the children. A rose for each of them?

  A rose for each of them.

  ‘Now!’ she whispered.

  The rose dissolved. It broke apart scattering itself like the Cherubim. It fell like rain, as if a continent had crumbled into roses.

  She who had learned to make the viruses still and who had read Plato at six, who could remember every detail of one hundred and forty-two productions, she could conceive of twenty-two billion roses. She held them in her mind. She held them in space as they fell, the numbers of the Cherubim ticking past like floors in an elevator.

  Milena directed roses to the continents where there were people. To London, to Paris, to western China
to Bordeaux, to the Andes mountains. She directed them into the shadow, out of the cube, where they melted away like snowflakes. She could still imagine them falling, in her mind. These, she told the people below, are for you. She began to hear music in her head, music from the Comedy, from the end that was not funny but happy, great rolls and peals of music, drums and horns and cellos. Each not was familiar.

  The light below was wrenched into sound. The great chorus filled the shallow sky of Earth. The tiny roses descended, small enough to be taken by hand, though the hands that tried to grasp the roses of light would pass through them. The roses fell out of clouds, they fell out of the sun, they passed through the roofs of synagogues and temples, ghost roses as immaterial as the love from which they were made.

  The vision possessed her. The vision held her. Milena sat rapt and staring. The music hammered and roared its way to a conclusion, and the chorus sang.

  The love that moves the sun and all the other stars.

  She held all the roses still for a moment. They hovered wherever they were, in the core of mountains, in prisons, in the branches of trees, or just out of reach, in the air. Then she wiped them away.

  ‘Twenty two billion!’ she cried. She spun the seat around. ‘That’s more than the souls of the Consensus!’ The extra flowers had been for the UnRead. They had been for the children.

  The Cherubim were howling with delight. They had been of use. Christian Soldier crowded round her, hungry for a direction, willing to turn the whole of its being over to the growing of roses, willing to become a garden of flowers, if that was what Milena wanted. The component parts of the Angel rolled across the wires like the heads of dandelions and met and then exploded in a shower of gravity, all the lines singing in glee. Somewhere, deep beneath the waves of Milena’s consciousness, something dark and monstrous heaved like a whale. The Consensus. Even its pleasure was like an iron weight.

  But here in the world in which Milena lived, everything was dark and still. Beneath her, in the hold of the Bulge, racks of jelly wobbled like the map Angels were making of the universe. Spiralling through the jelly in smoky strands were cultures of viruses. Quarantined in space, away from dust and contamination, the codes of behaviour and memory grew out of the flesh of the Bulge.

  Milena had been able to find a platform for the Comedy in a garden of viruses. Mike Stone tended it.

  The rose of memory became the rose of confusion. It grew everywhere. The Bulge seemed to go mad, driven by desire. By breakfast the next day, rosa mundi covered the walls in identical copies of itself. There was a carpet of them on the floor and ceiling. They floated in a vase made of bone that the Christian fundamentalist spaceship had grown out of itself.

  Opposite Milena, Mike Stone sat dawdling over his food. His face was suffused with love. Love made him look goofy.

  ‘Do you like Moby Dick?’ he asked.

  It was early in their artificial day, and Milena had to pause to orientate herself to the question and to find an answer. ‘No,’ she replied.

  ‘I found the detailed descriptions of whaling techniques very interesting,’ he said. ‘From an engineering point of view.’

  ‘Do you think if I asked Chris to grow me a white whale, he might stop growing roses?’

  ‘I think it might overtax his capacity,’ Mike Stone said, his eyebrows knitted together. Was it possible that he was taking her seriously?

  A long explanation of protein ceilings followed. The Bulge was fed with amino acids from supply vessels and was fuelled by sunlight. Milena ate in silence and let Mike’s words wash over her. Some of it was new to her, outside her viruses, and she had found that, in a hazy, early-morning way, it interested her. She and Mike Stone had a similar appetite for details.

  Mike Stone was a trained virologist. He told Christian Solider which viruses were needed; he controlled and directed the mutations of its DNA. He directed it in orbit, he told it when to sleep. He could feel it shift and sigh with dreams that were half his. He provided it with a self.

  ‘We do everything together,’ Mike Stone looked tender and embarrassed. ‘He even worships with me every Sunday. He knows that he doesn’t have a soul, but he prays for mine. He feels that my soul is his soul. He wants to go with me when I die.’

  ‘Yuck,’ said Milena, over her scrambled eggs. It was bad enough having to suck them through a straw.

  ‘He wants to go with you, too, when you die, Milena,’ said Mike Stone. His face went even more solemn and sincere. ‘I want to go with you when you die, Milena.’

  Oh ficken hell, thought Milena, succinctly.

  ‘I’d be your Christian Soldier, too, Milena.’

  Ficken again.

  ‘I know you’re not Postmillenarian Baptist and are therefore damned, but I pray for your soul, Milena, for the good that I know is in you.’

  Milena paused for thought, and pressed shut her pouch of cooling egg. ‘I’ve got to go see the head,’ she said, and escaped. She floated upwards to the john.

  Inside the door, there was a bouquet of confusion, more roses, taped with a note. ‘For Milena who makes the flowers,’ it said.

  Milena fastened her boot clamps, and her shoulder straps to keep her in place. Finally and most importantly she tightened the seat belt. The toilet worked like a vacuum cleaner and it was absolutely necessary to maintain and airtight seal. Milena sat thinking: how long can I hide in here? How else can I avoid that man?

  Maybe I could pretend to be sick, she thought. Then she had an image of a worried Mike Stone, bringing her collapsible bags of tea. I can shower after this, that will take a half hour. Then maybe I can pretend I’m working. But after that? I’m trapped in here with him.

  After some considerable time, Milena emerged from the toilet. Just outside the door a snapping turtle floated in the air. It hissed, its beak opening wide, its eyes glaring. The air was full of floating snapping turtles and two large brown rabbits from Mike Stone’s childhood.

  Mike Stone reached up and caught hold of the turtle from behind. ‘I forgot to put on his little sticky boots,’ he said, apologetically. He stood in the posture of weightlessness, looking at Milena with anticipation.

  ‘I’d like to show you a picture of my mother,’ he said, still holding the turtle.

  ‘Can’t wait,’ said Milena.

  There was still a slight smile on his face, as if he were amused. Was he pleased? Can’t he hear the way I’m talking to him?

  ‘I like to think that you and my mother are a lot alike,’ he said.

  Suddenly hanging in the air was a hologram of Mike Stone’s mother. Milena had the unfocused back view. The face turned around. Mike Stone’s mother looked exactly like Mike Stone, except for a thick, pulled-back clot of white hair. A rabbit wobbled up to it and sniffed, hoping perhaps it was a head of lettuce. Mike Stone smiled, and caught the rabbit by its belly.

  ‘She was a very strong woman, too. I like strong women.’

  ‘I’ll start lifting weights,’ said Milena.

  ‘Would you?’ he asked, looking over his shoulder, pleased. ‘For me?’ Smiling he put the rabbit back in its cage. ‘Mother lifted weights,’ he said. ‘She could bench-press one hundred and twenty kilos.’

  ‘Golly,’ said Milena.

  ‘She said Amen after each set. She said she pumped for Jesus.’ He leaned over and peered into the rabbit’s cage. ‘That picture was taken just before she died. She couldn’t lift any more weights by then, Milena. Her hair went white. You know how in the old days, people’s hair used to go white? Well, Mama said it was a sign from heaven. She said that soon, people would be able to get old again. That God didn’t want us to die so young. He wanted us all to have time to get to know Him before we were called. I tell you, we had a special service for her, all around her deathbed. The whole family was singing.’

  In a voice of uncertain power, he began to sing himself. ‘Yes Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.’

  He gave up pushing lettuce thr
ough the mesh of the cage, for the rabbits to nibble. ‘I’ve been very lonely since she died.’ He stood waiting, as if for Milena to help him.

  ‘I’m sure you must have been, Mike,’ said Milena.

  The picture in the air between them faded.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ replied Milena.

  ‘Oh,’ said Mike Stone, ‘Well. That’s just the first time.’ He turned back to his rabbits.

  This is getting serious, thought Milena. Honesty, Milena, if you’ve learned anything, it’s the need to be clear and honest. ‘Mike. The answer is going to be no, no matter how often you ask. So please, please don’t ask again.’

  ‘I’m very faithful, Milena,’ he said, to the rabbits.

  ‘I don’t want you to be faithful.’ She gathered breath and strength. ‘I want you to be silent.’

  ‘Right-o-rooty,’ he said. ‘I’ll be silent.’ Then he looked up, and smiled, and the smile said: but I’ll always be here.

  ‘This,’ chuckled one of the Pears, ‘is insane.’ He looked delighted. Milena remembering could not now think of his name. He was dead now. She had not known that he was a friend.

  ‘It would work,’ Milena told him, quietly.

  Charles Sheer was sitting on his hands, his legs crossed, and he was bouncing quietly up and down.

  The Minister’s office had been repainted. It was mushroom-coloured now, with stripes of subtly contrasting browns and greys running round the walls. The screens were gone. So was the Zookeeper. In his place was the sleek young man, fatter now, in even more wildly printed trousers and shirt. Milton. Milton the Minister. He had gone plump and florid with success, and anxious to show he had something to contribute. The Milena who was living looked at his purple face with its swollen neck and young smile and thought: he’s not going to live long.

  ‘Buh!’ said Charles Sheer in a sudden plosive burst. The others turned. ‘Buh-buh.’

  The sound was appalling. There was something about it that made Milena physically queasy.

  ‘Charles?’ aside Moira Almasy. ‘Are you all right?’

  He looked at her with outraged dignity, terror and sickness in his eyes, and anger.