by Geoff Ryman
‘You’ll just have to let me see!’ whispered Milena.
There was a wrench of light. Milena doubled under its impact. She covered her eyes. She refused to move. She heard the stallowner answer, to the final, demonic theme from Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique. Each word was separate and heavy as if made of lead.
I can sell them by the kilo
I can’t sell them separately!
All around her, people sang. It was easy to do, easier almost than speaking. As long as you told the truth.
What is the price please? a woman asked, in the theme ‘Povera donna’ from Falstaff. The effect was inappropriately tragic, as if everything in the woman’s life were inappropriately tragic. The music revealed her.
Five francs and two yen
The answer came in a lively, happy voice to ‘Alle due al la tre’—also from Falstaff. That would be the dress seller, the happy young wife. The song revealed her too.
The song whirled around Milena. It drifted out of the open windows above, women humming as they sizzled sausages. It came from the roofs, where people would be lying down and photosynthesizing. From the bar by the butcher’s shop came a steady, frog-like croaking:
Slup, slup, slup, drink it all up, up, up and we won’t go to bed until the morn-ning!
‘All right!’ said the voice in her ears.
Milena removed her hands. Her vision was still slightly blurred but she could see to walk. She could see if the Seller of Games was still there. And if she wasn’t, what then? Go to the Zoo? Crawl into the Graveyard and hide there? Milena found it difficult to think, with all the noise.
The world seemed to spin with song. Old street cries had been revived. ‘Ripe cherries, ripe!’ Insinuating love songs were given like gifts to female customers. ‘Someone as beautiful as you…should buy two.’
Children ran on the ledges of the crumbling old buildings overhead. A woman admonished them, out of a half-open window. ‘Watch out, you be careful! Watch out, you be careful!’ she squawked to a dance tune, her mature authority undermined by the rollicking of her hips.
Song washed up and down the street, as formless as the chorus of Remembrance, as if it were a funeral for things already gone. There were occasional quiet moments and occasional contagions when a particular chorus caught everyone’s fancy. The new viruses then trumpeted their triumph.
We all fall down!
The entire street roared in unison, and then laughed.
And Milena, stumbling, confused, peered half blind at each wagon-stall. There was the seller of paints and brushes, there was the Tacky with his hot, smelly little press, there was the birdman with his cages. She hears someone singing:
Have you a chum who’s bum?
‘Turn around, you’re going back,’ said Thrawn in her ear.
‘Can’t hear,’ said Milena, though she could.
The voice in her ear was then pitched to the level of pain.
‘Now it’s too loud!’ said Milena. It was as if she were wading through glue, through the noise, through the people, through the glare, through increasingly panicked voice in her ear, the voice of Thrawn who now had guessed that Milena was playing a brand new game.
Then Milena saw her, the Seller of Games, big boned, hearty, with virulently purple cheeks.
All light was sucked from her eyes.
She groped her way blindly forward. Her hands crawled up and over people’s shoulders.
‘I’m blind,’ she said, ‘Take me to the Seller of Games.’
For some reason, Symphonie Fantastique was taken up by everyone. It was a half-serious prayer for rain. Everyone sang it, the song for a Sabbath, praying for the waters to fall. ‘Oh God, please God, make it rain God.’
The person, a man, murmured something and took told of Milena’s shoulder to lead her.
Oh God, please God, make it rain!
‘Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!’ Thrawn was howling like a gale in her ears. Milena could hear nothing else. Her hands were clamped over her eyes shielding them. Blindness was replaced by fire all along her arms and hands. Thrawn was burning her skin with light.
She felt the edge of a stall. ‘Am I here? Am I here?’ she shouted.
‘Yes!’ she could barely hear the man howling at her.
‘Sorry, sorry. I’m ill,’ said Milena, unable to see the Seller, unable to hear her. ‘I need your lenses. Your contact lenses, with the mirrors.’
Fire danced on her skin. Milena screamed. The sound of the scream was lost in the chorus.
‘What? What love?’ she could hear the Games Seller wailing.
‘The light burns!’ Milena wailed. ‘I need the lenses!’
Milena rammed her hands into her armpits, to hide them from the light.
The beefy hands of the Games Seller seized Milena’s arms. The Games Seller led her. Milena tripped; she fell forward. The woman caught her up. Blisters ruptured against her cotton shirt. Her hands wept. The woman led her into Leake Street.
Everything went dark and cool, and Milena could suddenly hear.
‘Put them in please,’ wept Milena.
The woman was over her huge and sheltering. ‘Yes, you are, yes you are, yes you are in a bad way,’ the Gameswoman sang soothingly. It was a lullaby. She kept on singing, soothing, as she forced Milena to open her eyes away from the light.
Thrawn made the worms crawl inside them, but in Leake Street, the light was dull.
First one in. Then the other. Now there really was something in her eyes. Tears welled up to expel them. I will get used to them, Milena told herself. I will have to get used to them. She turned and looked up at the end of Leake Street. Thrawn tried to focus the light. It concentrated into a dull blue circle. Milena moved her head. It took some seconds for Thrawn to find the focus. That would have to be good enough.
The Seller of Games was inspecting Milena’s blistered fingers. ‘Your poor little hand…’ she began. La Boheme. Then she tried to speak. ‘Buh! Buh!’ she stammered, and sighed, and sang again.
‘Bloody viruses! What will they do to us next?’
Milena said she didn’t know. She thanked the Seller, paid for the lenses and stepped out again into the light and the roar of the songs. She rocked her head, very slightly, from side to side. She bought a pair of gloves and some ear plugs.
‘Go and die,’ said Thrawn in Milena’s ear, just before the plugs were inserted.
The game we are playing now, thought Milena, is called Sticks and Stones. Words can never hurt me.
All around her, everywhere around her, people sang.
Slightly less than a year later, Milena married.
She remembered the wedding party, in the forest of the Consensus. That year the summer was clouded and cool. A blustery wind rocked back and forth between the fleshy trunks of the purple trees. The guests were as chilled as the wine. They clutched their glasses with one hand, and warmed the back of their arms with the other and did their best to make conversation. Mike Stone tried to make conversation. Milena had forgotten how stiff he could be. He bent forward from the waist and shook people’s hands and could think of nothing to say except ‘Thank you very much for coming,’ or ‘I suppose you’re all famous,’ or ‘I’ve always wanted to act.’
He had worn his astronaut suit to the wedding. He liked his astronaut suit and saw no reason ever to wear anything else. The pockets were full of astronaut gear—microscopes and multipurpose DNA capsules. He explained them at great length to Cilla, who used every particle of her acting ability in looking rapt with fascination.
Halfway through the party, Milton the Minister died.
‘The two of you alone together up there in space,’ Milton was saying. It was his way of congratulating them. ‘It must have been a real Battle of the Bulge.’ His eyes closed and his smile spread, as if he had finally made the perfect Milton joke. An expression of peace settled onto his face. Then he fell forward into the calamari salad and overturned the table of refreshments.
Mike had a first-aid kit in the
pouches of his overalls. He slipped a pulse injector into Milton’s ear to keep his breath and heartbeat going while Milena, Moira Almasy, all the Terminals, called for the Consensus. It came in the form of the new police, the men in white, the Garda.
They came with a chopping, juddering sound as if something were cutting the air into slices. Something predatory descended from the sky onto the pavements of Marsham Street. It was the first time Milena had ever seen a helicopter. It was made entirely of metal and resin, and it gleamed like some hungry insect. Mike swept Milton up and carried him past the Garda, his wiry limbs moving with a robotic smoothness. He lowered Milton into the bubble of the beast and the Garda trooped back inside it, and with a whirlwind of air, the thing lifted off, and was gone.
The death and the helicopter shook Milena. Many things had happened over the last year to shake her. She found her teeth were involuntarily tap dancing and the cold seemed to rise out of her own bone-marrow. Milena was cold inside. Milena asked to be taken home. The party was over.
It was a cold, cold boat ride back to the Slump, through little, lapping, grey waves. Milena curled up against Mike Stone to be warmed, and she still shook. She didn’t know it was fear. She only knew that soon her husband might want to make love, and that she did not. She only knew that she had never told him she could not accept sex from a man. Paradoxically, the fear made her turn to him for comfort.
She was still afraid walking back into her little lacquered boxes. She showed him each of the rooms, puffing up pillows, folding in shutters, lighting the alcohol lamps. In the darkness in the corners, the truth still waited, unsaid. Whenever I get into this kind of trouble she thought, it is because I have been dishonest. What happens next? What happens now?
‘Play some music, Mike, if you’d like to,’ said Milena. Her back was to him.
Mike Stone said nothing. He stood in the centre of the bamboo box, his back rigid, his hands clasped behind him, uncertain what was to come next.
‘You don’t feel like it?’ Milena asked him, gently. She often found herself thinking of him with kindness.
Still smiling his engineer’s smile, he shook his head. He went and sat very tidily on a Pear, hands folded in his lap.
‘Do you want to do anything special?’ she asked him. Now what could you possibly do that was special on your marriage night?
‘Doesn’t seem that there’s too much to do. Your friends are very nice. They tried very hard.’ He looked down at his hands, and his smile broadened ruefully. ‘I don’t think Cilla’s terribly interested in self-directed mutation mechanisms.’
‘Just say that it means the Bulge can grow chicken meat out of itself,’ she told him, sitting next to him. ‘That’s all they want to hear. They just want the excitement.’
‘I don’t find outer space exciting,’ he said, simply.
‘You must be the only one who doesn’t,’ she said.
Come on, Milena, she told herself. Begin, Milena, begin, say it quickly, the dishonesty can be killed, the knot can be cut with single word of truth. She sat with him on the Pear. ‘This is going to be a…ah…a strange kind of marriage,’ she began, and was stopped, as if by a virus.
He nodded, tamely, in agreement. ‘I can’t get an erection,’ he said. Milena wasn’t too sure that she heard correctly.
‘Sorry, Mike?’
‘I’m impotent,’ he said, quite directly, without, now, a trace of embarrassment. ‘I’m afraid that our conjugal relations are not going to be entirely existent.’
Milena could hardly believe her luck. She hoped she could keep the relief out of her voice. ‘Mike. I want you to know how much I appreciate this. Your telling me, I mean. The important thing is the marriage. Physical satisfaction is not the main thing.’
After all these years of doing without it anyway.
‘I didn’t think you liked sex either,’ he said. ‘I had a pretty good idea that you were the sort of girl I was looking for.’
Milena was less sure she was pleased by this.
‘You were obviously a very, very nice person who was not physically attracted to me, or to men in general.’ His expression really was rather tender. ‘I like cuddles.’
Milena could feel herself blushing furiously. She felt that she had been caught out in some way. She discovered that both hands were on her cheeks, feeling how plump and hot they had become.
‘I hope I didn’t mislead you,’ said Mike Stone. ‘I tried very hard not to play the tooch knave,’ he said.
The very idea of Mike Stone playing tooch knave restored some of Milena’s humour. Playing tooch? On what, Mike, the violin? ‘Mike. I never thought you were a knave.’ Her hands were lowered from her face. ‘Did I mislead you?’ she asked.
‘Not for a moment,’ he said, obviously thinking that this would reassure her.
‘I’m scared,’ she said. It was an explanation. She surprised herself by saying so.
‘Of what?’ he asked.
‘These days? Of the dark. I’m scared of the dark, since Thrawn. Isn’t that funny? Thrawn used light. I should love the dark. And I’m scared of…of the viruses and what they’re doing…and of…of you.’
‘That’s understandable, I am pretty weird,’ said Mike Stone. He meant it. ‘I can’t say for sure if I’m scared of anything at all.’ He meant that, too. He shook his head. ‘I can’t think of anything that scares me. There are just some things that I can do and some things that I can’t. I’m always amazed by the things you can do. You seem to get people to do things just by talking about what’s got to be done. You seem to be able to talk to pretty near anybody. That’s because you’re frightened. I think you can do all that because of the fear. I do the best I can without it.’
‘You’re not, are you? Frightened?’ She saw what he meant. She had thought it was fear that made him stiff and awkward. She was beginning to see now that it was instead a quality of precision, like a watch, exact and unselfconscious.
‘Only because I don’t feel there’s anything to lose. If I can’t do something, like talk to people, there’s no shame. I did my best.’
I’m going to like you, thought Milena. I’m going to like you more and more. I don’t think this was a mistake, after all.
‘I’d like to go to bed,’ he said. ‘I’d like to hold you. You always look cold these days. I’m very hot. I have very hot feet.’
‘I knew someone else who had very hot feet,’ said Milena. It had been so long since anyone had held her. She looked up at him. In fear.
We could of course spend time cooking a meal that neither of us wants to eat. He could get out his violin, and I could comment on his playing. But the tension would remain. There would still be this to face. To do anything else would be an evasion, a dishonesty. And so thus must be faced, even in fear, and I do feel fear. Prissy, obsessive, severe, that’s what Cilla said. Am I still those things? I don’t like this. It makes me feel estranged from myself, as if I have to give myself up. It makes me feel alone and exposed an orphan.
Mike Stone let Milena lay on the bed in most of her clothes, and then went to the bathroom to wash, knowing instinctively that she would not like smell of men. He came back, naked and neutral, and his body was more bizarre than she had imagined. In the midst of her fear, she saw that his body made her smile.
He was stretched upwards, very tall and thin, like something by Goya, with narrow sloping shoulders, and a washboard tummy, and arms and legs that were all knots and angles. His hips were very broad, almost feminine, with broad spaces between the thin legs. He was hairless except in unexpected places, on the shoulders, or in a ring around his nipples. His nipples were so pale and small as to be invisible.
Mike Stone had a useless dong. It flapped back and forth between his thighs, smelling of soap, like some hapless passenger on a bumpy train ride, and his testicles hung by such a slender thread of scrotum that Milena found she had sympathy pains in places she didn’t have. She was curious to see male genitalia, out of the mildest and most objective
sort of interest. He settled next to her in bed, and she wondered what she could do. She thought of stretching out her hand to touch him, to touch his penis. Something made of iron stopped her, as if a virus. She could never do that. She felt a stirring of distrust. What if he had lied, what if he would now come to life, and force her? Instead he put his arm under her head, and cradled her up, and lay her face on his chest, settling with a sigh.
Milena felt human flesh again, warm, against hers.
She was surprised by the body. She had thought that men would feel knotted and muscled and hard, all bone and sinew. His wiry flesh was still soft and smooth, warm and sheltering. She shivered in his grasp, still afraid. Experimentally, she put a trembling hand on his chest. He turned his face and looked into her eyes, with the preternatural trust, the animal simplicity, the brown eyes of a child. She smiled back, and found the fear began to melt.
He made a grunt of satisfaction. They lay still and quiet as dark descended. Milena had found a harbour, a place of refuge that was warm in the unseasonable chill.
During the Summer of Song, the summer of drought, each day began high and early with silver light filling an empty sky that looked like the inside of a bell. The floors would still be warm underfoot from the day before. There was no water to wash with; the water Milena drank was still hot in its wooden bucket from the previous day. Everything stank of rotting reed, and there were no more flowers at funerals: the flowers had all died.
By the middle of September, it had not rained for four months. The upper reaches of the Estuary were dry. Milena had to walk across the Slump to the main channel of the Thames, which was still navigable. In all that dreadful summer, those early walks were the thing she hated most.
The algae and the water plants had dried into something like papier mâché, a tough, leathery coating over the mud, over the stones. When it burst underfoot, dust and a dank smell like crypts escaped. There were a few shallow farming ponds left.
Milena remembered approaching a pond, and the ground ahead seethed. Hundreds of frogs lolloped into the brackish water. Overhead, marauding herons circled. It was seven o’clock and already the heat was like a hammer. Already Milena was drenched in sweat, her lips were cracked and her throat dry. Children sat, disconsolate on the banks, feeding on sunlight, no longer bothering to chase the herons away.
