The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  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 die, 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 into each other. The lines jumped with impulses, releasing memory, exchanging recognition and yearned 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 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 bold 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.