by Geoff Ryman
Milena changed the subject. ‘Would you like to be in the show?’
‘What me? Do one of my turns?’ Lucy was so pleased that her cheeks bunched up into pink apples. ‘I couldn’t. Not any more. I’ve lost my figure.’
‘You’re lovely and slim,’ said Milena, looking at the tiny wrists and lumpy blue veins.
‘Good bone structure,’ said Lucy. ‘Put me under strong lights and nobody will know the difference. Er. Do they have good strong lights these days?’
‘They’ve just come back,’ said Milena.
‘You wait long enough, you come back into fashion.’ Lucy bit her lower lip. ‘So I don’t supposed it will be a problem, then, will it?’ She wrinkled her nose, confidingly. ‘My previous, I mean.’
‘Your previous what?’
‘Convictions,’ said Lucy, and waited.
Her previous beliefs and principles? Milena did not understand.
‘I don’t know why everyone made such a fuss really, it was just a little business on the side with credit cards. Quite innocent. It was how you survived in those days, black economy, payment in cash or kind, turning a few tricks…’
‘Lucy!’ exclaimed Milena in wonder. ‘You’re a criminal!’
Lucy looked offended. ‘I was a cabaret artiste. A bit of snide went with the job. I mean we was very Alternative. We used to do scathing political and social satire. Politicians, the Royal Family. I always played the Queen.’ Lucy drew herself up, smoothed her waist with her hands. ‘We had her in fishnet stockings and roller skates.’ She suddenly launched herself back into the previous subject. ‘I mean, these big companies was all insured. It was the voice-printing that got me. I thought I could imitate the voices, you see, on the phone.’
‘Did you go to prison?’
‘No!’ said Lucy scornfully. ‘They could see I wasn’t a criminal type. Six months suspends and a nosy Probation Officer was all I got.’
The Cow Toms arrived. Translucent bags full of rice and broth and bits of chicken. The waitress opened the bags up. Her face was full of hate. She cracked eggs as if they were heads into the broth, stirred them in, and threw in herbs.
‘Is that good enough for you?’ the waitress asked.
‘Porridge,’ sighed Lucy. ‘That’s all anyone eats. Fried veg and porridge.’ They she remembered her manners. ‘It’s lovely,’ she told the waitress. ‘My niece takes such good care of me, she’s such a good girl.’ She patted Milena’s hand. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she assured Milena, her face twitched. ‘Raw egg.’
‘It will cook in the broth,’ Milena told her.
‘Thank you, darling,’ Lucy said to the waitress, who was already walking away, her shoulders slightly hunched.
The natives are restless, thought Milena. She suddenly missed the beautiful calm that had been the very stuff of London life only two summers before.
‘I know you’re not my niece,’ confided Lucy. ‘But you’re so good to me. And I don’t know who you are.’
‘Neither do I,’ said Milena. ‘Let’s eat it while it’s hot, while we can, before it gets cold.’
The beautiful past, as glimmering and faraway as a star.
By winter, everything was covered in snow.
chapter thirteen
DOWN TO EARTH (MAGIC)
Mike Stone was in love, and so therefore was Christian Soldier. The vessel was by now a real garden. The walls were covered with moss and fern and cedar and bay and baby palm and holly, all improbably mixed. The floor had sprouted grass and ivy had entwined itself around the column that supported Milena’s chair. Most wonderful of all, there were now birds. They rustled within the leaves, and sometimes sang, huge American robins and red-winged blackbirds and tiny English finches. There were other birds, too, that Milena did not know.
The birds of Czechoslovakia.
Milena was playing the first scene of the Comedy over and over in her mind. She didn’t see the flowers. She was trying to find some way of making her first scene work.
The first trial scenes had already been broadcast. Fifteen minutes of Dante in the wood had been seen over half the Earth below, between clouds, over mountains. The Terminals below reported that the broadcast was a success. Reformation worked, even on an astronomical scale. But Milena did not like what she saw. She had thought that Dante’s allegory would work best if the imagery was kept simple and clear and literal. She had loved imagining Dante’s wood. She imagined dead branches, with moonlight glinting on the sinuous, shiny patches where bark had come away. She imagined the soft, thin green coating of lichen on the nodules of broken twigs. There were scuttlings in the darkness, and tiny frightened eyes.
All sides of each object had to be imagined. Milena found that she could do this. All sides swam fragmented in her mind, suddenly focusing on one area of space. She built up an image focus by focus. The swimming fragments reminded her of a cubist painting. Cubism for cubing, she thought. Picasso was simply painting what he saw.
The wood she created was beautiful but it was not evil. Even in darkness it was a garden. Dante’s forest was supposed to be a symbol for the corruption of the human soul. To Milena it seemed such a terrible thing to do to a beautiful forest.
And the symbolism was redundant. An audience of viruses would already know what the wood meant. Viruses would supply people with all the necessary references. They would whisper as Dante stumbled through the wood, halfway through his life. Remember, the viruses would say, remember Isaiah 38.10, ‘In the midst of my days, I shall go to the gate of hell.’ The viruses would remember the Aeneid and its forest scenes. They would know that the lake of the heart meant the ventricle in which fear was supposed to reside. Dante limped with sin, the left foot being appetite and will.
The whole problem was one of redundancy. Rolfa had known that. That’s why she decided to leave all the narrative words unsung. Otherwise the chorus could only keep telling us what we were already seeing.
The character of Dante was wrong too. Milena had cast one of the Babes, Peterpaul, to play him. He was thick-wristed, beefy, and stomped on firm male legs. Milena had thought he would be a kind of Everyman. But Dante was no Everyman. In all the drawings she had seen, Dante was fierce, with eyes and nose and chin like daggers, a politician in a murderous age. That was the right image. Peterpaul, she realised with reluctance, would have to go.
Milena let the recording play on, in her mind.
Here came the animals. They were symbols too. Milena’s heart sank when she saw them. The lion, the leopard, the she-wolf and her heavy human wickedness. A lion is not murderous, a she-wolf is not greedy. Milena stopped the recording, and tried to re-imagine them with human faces.
Unbidden by her conscious mind, each of the beasts grew the face of Thrawn McCartney. With a shiver in her heart, Milena’s mind leapt out of the focus, out of the Comedy. She let Rolfa’s music play on, softly. The music was the only part of the opera that worked.
Milena looked up. Mike Stone was standing over her, holding out his violin as if offering it to her. ‘Would you like some music, Milena?’ he asked.
‘Why not?’ said Milena. The Comedy, it seemed, was beyond help.
‘I’ve taught Chris how to play Bruch’s violin concerto. Would you like to hear that?’
Milena felt a smile creeping over her face again. She had to admit that Mike Stone had a certain kind of charm. ‘You’ve taught a spaceship to place Bruch?’
‘He takes the cello and drum parts. He grows strings and hums,’ said Mike Stone, gangling with enthusiasm.
From just outside the focus, Milena heard the first sung words of the Comedy. Dante had met the spirit of Virgil and was singing. ‘Have pity on me, whether you are ghost or definite man.’
Mike Stone sat down and tucked the violin under his chin.
Cilla was playing Virgil. Her high, pure, female voice answered, ‘I am not a man, though I was born one.’
Oh dear, thought Milena. I keep crashing it to the ground. I need to find a different way to
do this. She let the Comedy fall into silence.
Mike Stone played. He sawed and scraped his way through Bruch’s only masterpiece. The bow kept skidding off the violin strings with an earnest squeal. Somehow it helped, like someone slipping on a banana in a production of Rossini. Christian Soldier sang all around them, deep and resonating, like a fat man in a bath.
It’s a different world, thought Milena. Spaceships sing and there are Angels sliding between the stars and astronauts grow animals out of memory. The Comedy will have to be new as well.
Mike Stone’s brow was furrowed with concentration. His giant legs were splayed apart; his elbows flanked. Milena found that she forgave him. Whatever there was to forgive, except awkwardness and a touch of insanity. Milena smiled on him.
Mike Stone finished, and looked up at Milena as a little boy would, eyes full of expectant trust.
‘Clown,’ she pronounced him.
The birds of the garden whooped and whistled. Outside, the sun was rising over the Earth, a sudden diamond-burst of light. Christian Soldier lowered a blue-tinged cornea over the window as a filter. A crescent of blue appeared along the rim of the Earth. The sun seemed to have been laid by the Earth. The sun was a round, white, cold blue egg nestling in mist.
Milena found that she wished she could stay there, with the Earth and the birds and the music. The stars looked like a fall of snow, suspended.
Then, down to Earth.
Stars seemed to be falling out of a slate-blue sky. It was snowing. Milena remembered walking along the Cut some time during the week of her return. Snow was filling in the tracks made by the stalls, hissing gently as it landed.
The stalls had been pulled to one side, and folded shut. Only the coffee vendor was still open. He stood in the light of the Cut’s one street lamp, stomping his feet to keep warm, and shouting: ‘Coffee! Coffee for health!’
Everything smelled of coffee. The snow on the ground smelled of coffee. It was splattered with it and stained. A man bustled past Milena, his fawn-coloured coat mottled with coffee. He wore a facemask that was soaked in it.
There was a curious, raucous wail from an upstairs window: the Baby Woman. Everyone knew about her. She and her infant had both become ill with a sudden fever. The baby died in the night, and the mother awoke in the morning with the mind of her child. She lay in bed all day in diapers and howled. Her husband was often seen about the Cut. His stare was hollow and uncomprehending.
The apothecary viruses had mutated. They collected complete mental patterns and transferred them. They were contagious. One personality could obliterate another. It had not been obvious at first. Even the summer before, Milena had heard of an ageing actor of the Zoo, who had woken up convinced he was a young and handsome Animal. He had howled, sobbing, when he saw himself in a mirror. The sickness became more noticeable when people began to bark or meow. Someone had tried to fly, leaping off the Hungerford Bridge. The viruses transferred information between species. People thought they were birds, or cats.
The old concrete arcade along one side of the Cut had been demolished. A rhinocerous hump of Coral was growing out of it, amid the stalks of dead nettles. Milena saw a sheet of black resin. There were Bees huddled under it, kneeling as if in prayer. They had lifted up a paving stone and were looking at the earth underneath it, and jittering in place with the cold.
‘Oyster trails,’ one of them whispered, scooping sand and snow aside with his hands.
‘Old cigarettes,’ said a woman’s voice.
‘Cold earthworms!’ they all suddenly yelped together and laughed.
One of them was wearing a sequined jacket, and other Bees licked his ears and murmured to his soft blonde hair. He was the King, the King from Love’s Labour’s Lost.
The Bees flinched as Milena approached. They ducked and almost but not quite looked at her out of the corners of their eyes.
‘Hello, Billy,’ said Milena, gently. ‘Billy, remember me? I’m Milena. Constable Dull, an’t shall please you?’
‘Lo, Ma,’ he said, smiling vaguely, not looking at her. The others clustered more closely about him.
The Bees protected themselves by staying in groups and focusing their attention all together on the same things. They protected themselves from life, too much life all at once. If a horse, a huge and muscled, sweating and snorting beast, passed the Bees and they were unprepared, they could faint. Milena had once seen that happen, a nest of Bees collapsing in unison. She had seen Bees kissing the cobbles where a pigeon had been crushed by the wheels of a cart.
‘What’s it like, Billy?’ Milena asked him.
‘It’s in lines,’ he said, still without looking at her. ‘All in lines.’ He looked up, as if at the stars, snowflakes on his eyelashes.
An empathy virus had mutated. It stimulated sympathetic imagination. Nurses, Health Visitors, Social Hygienists and, most particularly, actors—they had all bought the virus from apothecaries. The new 2B strain created an almost unbearable oneness with anything that was alive—or had been alive. The Bees could Read the living. They could Read whatever reaction patterns that were in the remains of living things, in the soil, in the stone, in the air.
‘And the lines,’ said Milena. ‘They touch the stars, don’t they? They go down into the Earth. They shiver when someone thinks.’
Billy turned to her, looked at her, and gave her a bleary smile. ‘Are you Bee?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Milena. ‘But I know about the lines.’
Gravity was thought. Gravity was life. Gravity twisted nothingness into a leaf that had been alive. The skeleton of the leaf still sang, wistfully, silently, of its life on the tree. It had been blown by gusts of wind until it sighed down from the tree to the earth. The earth sang of the leaves it once had been. It sang of peanut shells and orange peel, dog shit and leather shoes, old clothes and the sweat of the people who had worn them. The dead sang to the Bees, out of gravity.
‘The food weeps,’ said the King. ‘Torn away. Burnt. Boiled.’
Much of the food in this new age had been cut from hybridomas. It was still alive when sold, still alive when cooked or eaten raw. The Bees would scream as people ate. They could not bear to wear most clothing, the strands of cotton or spider web or silkworm threads. Clothes sung to them. The sun sang to them, and they tried to sing back.
Live on Rhodopsin, they told people, when they could bear being near people, for the blasts of thought from living people were too harsh for them to bear alone. They could bear it only in groups, for a short time, before scampering off like timid monkeys.
It’s stopped snowing, Milena realised. Everything went still and cold.
‘Coffee!’ cried the vendor. ‘Coffee for health!’ Steam from his boiler caught the light and hovered golden in the air.
‘The coffee screams,’ said the King. The apothecary viruses had been derived from herpes, and like herpes, they ruptured when bathed in coffee.
‘And the viruses,’ the King said in pity. ‘The viruses break apart.’ Most hateful of all to this new age, the Bees loved the viruses, too.
A woman staggered towards the coffee vendor with a jug to fill. She shook like a rickety old cart on a bumpy road, juddering with cold and caffeine overdose. Her eyes were evil. She glared at Milena. The hatred in the look stilled Milena’s heart. It was like a beam that passed through her. It struck the Bees, and they folded up into a tight knot around each other.
‘Billy?’ Milena said. He didn’t answer. She knelt down and lightly stroked his disordered hair. You were the most beautiful man, she thought, and all the girls wanted to hold you and love you because you were beautiful but not aware of it. And you had a voice like honey and on stage you took command lightly, as if by right, and you made me believe that people could speak as Shakespeare wrote.
‘Billy, you’re cold,’ she said. ‘Where do you live?’
‘The Graveyard,’ he whispered.
Milena paused. That place again. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘Let’s get you
back inside.’ She stood up, and all the Bees stood with her, as if pulled by wires. They shuffled behind her, up the Cut wearing shaggy, artificial furs or plastic boots.
While all of this was happening, Milena thought, I was sending down flowers from space. It’s as if there are many Earths and I came back down to the wrong one.
‘Those are Bees you’re talking to!’ shouted the woman who was buying coffee.
Milena held up a hand for the Bees to be still, and walked towards her.
As Milena approached both the woman and the coffee vendor slipped back behind the metal tureen. They think it’s a magic charm that will protect them, thought Milena. She saw herself reflected in the orange light on its misty metal surface. She saw the future there. The future was metal once more. The future was machinery.
‘I know one of them. He is a friend of mine,’ Milena tried to explain. ‘They’re human too,’ she said.
The woman shuddered, and pulled up her face mask. ‘Used to be human, you mean. Look at them.’ Her shaking hands struggled with gloves. The gloves were soaked in coffee, too. Steam rose up from her. ‘They’re deliberately spreading these diseases, don’t you know that? Where have you been?’
‘In orbit,’ replied Milena, in innocence. ‘I’m an astronaut.’
Without another word, the woman flung a cup of coffee across Milena’s face. Like disoriented beetles, her scampering hands fought to seize her jug of coffee, give money to the vendor, and leave, all at the same time. She was evidently holding her breath. She turned and tried to run, taking long, low, sloping strides.
Milena stood appalled as the coffee chilled on her face. She felt like someone in a comedy, to whom absurd things happen. ‘Why did she do that?’ Milena asked. She looked down at her coat. It was ruined by coffee.
‘Perhaps she thought you were sick,’ said the vendor. He threw the coins the woman had given him into a resin tray full of coffee. Coins spread infection too.
‘You’re the ones who are sick!’ said Milena and walked angrily back to the Bees. ‘Come on,’ she told them. ‘Keep walking. They’re frightened of you, too.’ She led the Bees past the coffee vendor.
