by Geoff Ryman
In this sense, The Child Garden is, as its subtitle suggests, a “low comedy.” It is broadly funny and its jokes, while not always obvious, are often ‘low.’ As a comedy about (perhaps for?) viruses, it reminds us also how prevalent the virus is in our own universe. Viruses are vectors of disease, from the common cold to HIV/AIDS, but they are also a vector of genetic material, a way of introducing genes from one organism into another or of bearing engineered genes into a specific species. As such, they too are a type of pharmakon, particularly in a world where genetic engineering is beginning to be commonplace, despite how little knowledge we have of its potential long-term effects and consequences. At the same time, viruses also infect our computers; these are not the biological viruses of disease mechanism, but they can function in remarkably similar ways, spreading mis-information and disrupting communication. Both of these uses of the ‘virus’ in contemporary society are reasons why Derrida takes the virus as a particularly significant model of undecideability:
If we follow the intersection between AIDS and the computer virus as we now know it, we have the means to comprehend, not only from a theoretical point of view but also from the sociohistorical point of view, what amounts to a disruption of absolutely everything on the planet, including police agencies, commerce, the army, questions of strategy . . . It is as if all that I have been suggesting for the past twenty-five years is prescribed by the idea of destinerrance . . . the supplement, the pharmakon, all the undecidables—it’s the same thing.
(Brunette and Wills 12)
The Child Garden is at once an allegory about AIDS—the virus that brought incoherence and death to gay male culture in the West throughout the ’80s and into the ’90s and which remains a massive scourge throughout much of Africa, in particular—and a novel about the potential for “disruption of absolutely everything on the planet” not only through transnational corporatism, unbridled capitalism, and the greed of the ‘haves’ transposed against the tragedies of the ‘have nots,’ but also through attempts to do good. Curing cancer should be a good thing. Government by consensus should be a good thing. Creating a happy, honest populace should be a good thing.
If our good intentions can make so much go wrong, Ryman asks us, what happens when our intentions are not so good? And what can defenses can we muster against well-intentioned mistakes? The answer resides in Milena and her capacity for sheer resistance: her spirit resists incorporation into the singular readings of the Consensus just as her body resists the un-raveling and re-integration of her DNA by the Consensus’s viruses. Because of this, and because of Milena’s extraordinary capacity for love (and Ryman, indeed, suggest that love and resistance to manipulation are one and the same), Milena is able to give the Consensus the gift it desires above all: the cure for the cure for cancer.
And, having said all of that, I have scarcely touched on so many of the wonders that await readers of this brilliant and complex novel. There is so much more that awaits you, dear reader.
Enjoy!
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret . . .
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Introduction
ADVANCES IN MEDICINE
(A CULTURE OF VIRUSES)
Milena boiled things. She was frightened of disease. She would boil other people's knives and forks before using them. Other people sometimes found this insulting. The cutlery would be made of solidified resin, and it often melted from the heat, curling into unusable shapes. The prongs of the forks would be splayed like scarecrow's fingers, stiffened like dried old gloves.
Milena wore gloves whenever she went out, and when she got back, she boiled those too. She never used her fingers to clean her ears or pick her nose. In the smelly, crowded omnibuses, Milena sometimes held her breath until she was giddy. Whenever someone coughed or sneezed, Milena would cover her face. People continually sneezed, summer or winter. They were always ill, with virus.
Belief was a disease. Because of advances in medicine, acceptable patterns of behaviour could be caught or administered.
Viruses made people cheerful and helpful and honest. Their manners were impeccable, their conversation well-informed, their work speedy and accurate. They believed the same things.
Some of the viruses had been derived from herpes and implanted DNA directly into nerve cells. Others were retroviruses and took over the DNA of the brain, importing information and imagery. Candy, they were called, because the nucleic acids of their genes were coated in sugar and phosphates. They were protected against genetic damage, mutation. People said that Candy was perfectly safe.
Milena did not believe them. Candy had nearly killed her. All through her childhood, she had been resistant to the viruses. There was something in her which fought them. Then, at ten years old, she had been given one final massive dose, and was so seared by fever that she had nearly died. She emerged with encyclopaedic knowledge and several useful calculating facilities. What other damage had the viruses done?
Milena tested herself. Once, she tried to steal an apple from a market stall. It was run, as so many things were in those days, by a child. When Milena's hand touched the apple's dappled skin, she had thought of what it cost the boy to grow the apples and haul them to market and how he had to do all this in his spare time. She could not do it, she could not make herself steal. Was that because of the virus? Was it part of herself? She could not be sure.
There was one virus to which Milena knew she had been immune. There was one thing at least that she was sure was part of herself. There was no ignoring the yearning in her heart for love, the love of another woman.
This was a semiological product of late period capitalism. So the Party said. Milena suffered, apparently, from Bad Grammar. Bad deep grammar, but grammar nonetheless. This made Milena angry. What late period capitalism? Where? It had been nearly one hundred years since the Revolution!
She was angry and that frightened her. Anger was dangerous. Anger had killed her father. He had been given so many viruses to cure him of it that he had died of fever. Milena was certain that one day soon, the Party would try to cure her, too, of anger, of being herself. Milena lived in fear.
Everyone was Read at ten years old, by the Party. It was part of their democratic rights. Because of advances in medicine, representative democracy had been replaced by something more direct. People were Read, and models were made of their personalities. These models joined the government, to be consulted. The government was called the Consensus. It was a product of late period socialism. Everyone was a part of the Consensus, except Milena.
Milena had not been Read. She had been too ill with viruses at ten years old to be Read. Her personality was still in flux; a Reading would have been meaningless. She had not been Read, but she had been Placed as an adult. Would they remember, soon? When she was Read, her Bad Grammar and her petty crimes would be discovered. And then, as a matter of social hygiene, she would be made ill, in order to cure her.
Milena was frightened of dying when it happened, like her father. Had he been resistant as well? Her father had died, in Eastern Europe, and her mother had fled with Milena to England, where the diseases were milder. Then she too had died, and Milena had grown up as an orphan in a foreign land.
She had grown up with a head full of theatrical visions. She loved the mechanics of rotating stages, of puppets, of painted flats being raised and lowered. She loved the cumbersome, stinking alcohol lights that blazed with brightness found only in theatre. She thought about such things as the effect of alternating bands of white and yellow light cast over a white, white stage. She loved light. She toyed with hazy ideas of productions that consisted only of light. No people.
At ten years old, Milena had been Placed for work in the theatre, as an actress. This was a mistake. Milena was a terrible actress. There was something unbending in her that refused to mimic other people: she was always herself. She was doomed always t
o fight to stay herself.
Most mornings, a bus would take Milena to her next performance. She would sit, arms folded, like a flower that had not yet bloomed, and look at London as it creaked past her window.
People called London the Pit, with rueful fondness for its crumbling buildings propped up by scaffoldings of bamboo, for its overcrowding, for its smells. The Pit, they called it, because it lay in a depression, a river valley between hills protected by a Great Barrier of Coral that kept back the rising sea and estuary.
Outside her window, Milena saw women in straw hats smoking pipes and selling dried fish. She saw children dancing to toy drums for cash or pushing trolleys full of dusty green vegetables. Men in shorts bellowed to each other like cheerful bullfrogs, rolling barrels of beer down ramps into basements under the street. Giant white horses stood calmly before the wagons.
People were purple. Their skins were flooded with a protein called Rhodopsin. It had once been found only in the eye. In light, Rhodopsin broke down into sodium, and combined carbon and water.
People photosynthesised. It was a way of feeding them all. There were twenty-three million of them in the Pit. In summer they baked in tropical heat, stretching out in the parks in early morning, to breakfast on light. In the raw and bitter winters, they would lean against sheltered walls and open up their clothing in gratitude. Milena would see them from her bus. Their rippled flesh would be exposed; their swaddlings of black winter clothing would be thrown back. They would look like carvings in baroque churches. Milena would then be made restless with semiological error, desperate with Bad Grammar.
People died in the street. Most mornings, the bus would pass one of them. A man would be stretched out on the pavement, looking back over his shoulder as if in surprise, as if someone had called him. A bell would be ringing dolefully, calling for a Doctor.
And the actors on the bus would go on talking. An actress might laugh too loudly, a finger hooked under her nose, talking to a director; a young man might continue looking at his feet, disgruntled by a lack of success. Does no one care? Milena would think. Does no one care for the dead?
There were no old people in the streets. Young mothers worked the stalls. Their children stirred the food in the sizzling woks, or slammed new heels onto old shoes. The dead were young as well.
The span of human life had been halved. This was not considered to be an advance in medicine. It was considered to be a mistake.
In the days before the Revolution, a cure had been found for cancer. It coated the proto-oncogenes in sugar, so that cancer could not be triggered. In the old world of great wealth and great poverty, the cure had been bought by the rich before being tested. It was contagious, and it escaped. Cancer disappeared.
It had once been normal for the human body to produce a cancer cell every ten minutes. Cancer, it turned out, had been rather important. Cancer cells did not age. They secreted proteins that prevented senescence. They had allowed people to get old. Without cancer, people died in or around their 35th year.
After that, there had been a Revolution.
Milena sat on the bus in her boiled gloves and saw a nervous light in the eyes of the actors, a fervour for accomplishments completed in youth. She saw the unfailing smiles of people in the markets, and the smiles seemed to be symptoms of disease. It seemed to Milena that nearly everything she saw was wrong.
She saw the children. They had been given viruses to educate them. From three weeks old they could speak and do basic arithmetic. By ten, they had been made adults, forced like flowers to bloom early. But they were not flowers of love. They were flowers of work, to be put to work. There was no time.
book one
LOVE SICKNESS
or
Living in the Pit
Midway in the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood
For the straight way was lost
chapter one
EVERYDAY LIFE IN FUTURE TIMES
(WINDOWS IN A BRIDGE)
It was an audience of children.
They sat on mattresses on the floor of a darkened room in a Child Garden. The children all wore the same grey, quilted dungarees, but they had been allowed to embroider them with colourful patterns. The children were allowed to drift in and out of the room as they pleased. There was no need for externally imposed discipline. On a makeshift stage, actors were trading convoluted Shakespearian wit.
Thou pretty because little!
Little pretty because little. Wherefore apt?
And therefore apt because quick!
It was a production of Love's Labour's Lost. The children were bored: they could follow the play with such ease.
Milena Shibush waited in plain sight of the children to make her entrance. There was no proscenium arch to hide behind. She could hear what the children said. She did not expect flattery.
'Another one of these New History things,' sighed a little girl in the front. Her cheeks were purple from the sun. Her voice was sulky, light, breathy. She was about three years old. 'If they're going to try to do the originals, why can't they get it right?'
'I don't know why they bother to send us these plays,' said her little friend. Her voice already had the crackle of adult precision. 'We know them by heart already. And who is that idiot in the floppy boots?'
The idiot was Milena Shibush. Tykes, she thought; it was expected that younger children would be obnoxious. They got everything without effort from the viruses; they had no idea that anything would require effort.
I don't like the boots either, Milena thought, but these are the boots I have to wear.
Milena was playing a constable called Dull.
She had a total of thirteen lines. I am sixteen years old, Milena thought, halfway through my life, and I have thirteen lines in a production that is touring Child Gardens.
Child Gardens were where orphans were raised. There were so many orphans. Milena had been an orphan herself. She had become an actress to escape orphans and Child Gardens. Here she was.
Milena looked at the faces of her colleagues. The boy who played Berowne waited dull-eyed in his make-up and the beard he had grown for the part. He had to have a beard, for no other reason than that Berowne in the original production had had a beard. This recreation only served to preserve history. Milena lived in a culture that replicated itself endlessly, but which never gave birth to anything new.
The actors are bored, thought Milena, the children are bored, why, why, why are we doing this?
She muttered one of her thirteen lines. 'Me, an't shall please you.' It plainly didn't.
At least, she thought, I can change my boots.
It was nearly dark by the time Milena got back home. She walked beside the river on the pavements of the South Bank, which was feebly lit by alcohol lamps. There was still a smoky pinkness in the west.
The National Theatre of Southern Britain loomed out of the darkness and slight haze. Great sweeping buttresses of Land Coral and a cage of bamboo kept the old building on its feet.
The Zoo, it was called affectionately or otherwise. Milena was a registered member of the Theatrical Estate, but she was yet to work on any of the Zoo's main stages. It had a restaurant that was always open, called the Zoo Cafe. Actors could not sun themselves to feed. It made their skins too purple, too dark, and ruined them for Shakespeare and the classics. Actors had to be pale, for the sake of historical accuracy. They had to eat food and were nearly always hungry.
Milena went to the Zoo Cafe when she was lonely or could not face cooking on her one-ring alcohol stove. It was something of a homeopathic cure for loneliness. Other people sat talking at tables, leaning back to laugh, brilliant young actors or the well-dressed, imperturbable children of Party Members. Milena watched them hungrily as she moved forward one step at a time in the queue for hot water.
The fashion in everything was for history. People's minds were choked with it. Young people wore black and pretended to be the risen corpses of famous people. The V
ampires of History they called themselves. Their virus-stuffed brains gave them the information they needed to avoid anachronisms. It was a kind of craze.
The Vampires only came out at night, when there was no sun to sweeten their blood. They had to eat too, but they could afford meals of historic proportions. Milena could only afford a seafood pasta, cloned squid tissue on cooling noodles. The great, heaped plates of the Vampires turned her shrivelled stomach. She looked away.
Milena saw Cilia, an actress with whom she had achieved a chilly kind of acquaintance, sitting at a freshly vacated table. Cilia had just finished kissing a number of cheeks goodbye. Cilia knew everybody, even Milena.
'Who are you this evening?' Milena asked her, putting down her tray.
Cilia was in black, with white pancake makeup and dark vampire shadows around her eyes. 'Just me,' answered Cilia. 'This is supposed to be me when I rise from my grave.'
'Someone is playing themselves for a change,' said Milena.