by Geoff Ryman
The boat moved up another channel, into a wide expanse of water. It was as blue as the sky and looked like a lake, wind skittering over its surface. There were rows of paddle steamers, a hazy blue in the distance. They lined up in the main channel between the groaning buoys. Milena could clearly hear people talking on them and the steady whoosh whoosh whoosh of their great twin wheels. Between the wheels, each boat had a chorus of black funnels rising up like church organs. The nearest steamer was laden with Slump, all of it in layers like peat cut out of the earth.
Across the lake, near the reeds on the other side were flamingoes. They moved in fits and starts, in pink and while currents. The people of the Slump loved and protected them. It was storks and herons they hated. Milena narrowed her eyes and could just barely see the tubby pink bodies perched on long legs, and the elephant-trunk necks reaching down, lifting up.
'This is L'Etoile,' said the boy. 'Different water roads spread out from here to all the different Estates. We got the hard farming, the cabbages and the like, we got the soft farming, the small birds and animals, we got the Slump itself. We go past the Slump, past the Soft Farmers.' He smiled, a gap in his teeth, his vividly Rhodopsin-purple face lumpy with acne.
'What Estate will I be near?' Milena asked him. She already knew, but she wanted to see his response.
'Oh, Lady,' he said embarrassed. He was still smiling but he looked down. 'You are Tarty.'
'But that is not an Estate. Will I be near the Slump?
He shook his head. 'No. You will be near the Estate of Remembrance.'
He was wincing. He looked away. Remembrance was a euphemism for Death.
The new Tarty flats had a social purpose. They were there to plant Party Members out in the Slump. They were also there to raise the social standing of a necessary but shunned Estate.
The punt moved on, round the edge of L'Etoile.
On the horizon there were now blue hills, striped by paddies. The border of reeds beside the channel grew narrower. Milena could see banks of earth, their edges white with dried salt. There was a sudden thundering of hooves.
White horses galloped alongside the lake, silver manes tossed, great heavy feet pounding the sandy earth and the thick salty grasses.
'Oh!' said Milena, in admiration. It was here that the huge but nimble carthorses were bred, it was here that they ran free when young, and they came back here twice a year to run free again. On their backs the Horseboys and Horsegirls rode, in thick leather chaps that were carved in tattoo shapes.
'Ai-ai-ai-ai-AIIII!' shouted Milena's punter, to them, all excited. The Horseboys ignored him. 'Ach,' he said in envy, and clicked his tongue. 'They are the ones. They are the ones.'
A young girl ran beside the leading horse. She caught hold of the mane, and seemed to bounce twice before suddenly launching herself up onto its back. She leaned forward, her mouth in the horse's ear. The stallion turned, and the whole herd turned with it, dipping suddenly down and out of sight behind the sandy rise.
'Oh!' sighed the boy. 'That is where I want to be Placed. I want to ride horses, not boats.' He smiled, but with sadness.
They moved out of L'Etoile into a narrow channel. From somewhere ahead of them came a clinking sound, like coins. The sound deepened as they approached, and as they came round a bend, Milena saw a long bamboo arm, trawling over the surface of the water. Buckets were hoisted out of the water, wobbling with weight and trailing black sludge. The buckets were then hoisted by a tiny, noisy engine onto the shore. Men snatched the buckets and emptied them, pouring slurry into pits. Their legs were glossy with mud; their cotton shorts and shirts clung to them.
A row of beehive-shaped kilns gradually came into view, smoking, adding to the haze of the air. There was a delicious scent of burning wood.
It was a temporary camp of brickmakers. Rows of young children squatted, cotton over their faces. They patted paste into brick moulds. The paste was Thames mud, a mixture of earth and clay and ash and the chewed up rubble of flooded buildings. Skinny people, the colour of the dried dust, carried shovels of brick to the kilns. Milena could feel the heat of the kilns on her face. 'Tarty! Tarty woman!' they all called and waved to her, with perfect, white smiles. Milena waved back.
The narrow channel led to a vast, flat area of rice as far as Milena could see. It basked in water and sunlight. There were flags marking fish-farms. There were houses at regular intervals, standing high over the rice and the water on pillars of bound bamboo. Lines of laundry hung from the porches. Children scrubbed clothes on pans on their laps. There were walkways, rope bridges slung between the houses. A man lay flat on his roof, swiping at a stork with a cane. The bird lifted its wings in anger, and would not be moved. Women and Tykes looked up at him smiling, teasing him. Milena clapped her hands once, sharply, and suddenly the bird took off. There was cheering and applause. The man waved sheepishly, still clinging in fear to his roof.
The punt glided past fields of giant lotus, the huge blossoms closed against the sun. The flat round leaves were large enough for the child-farmers to walk on quite safely. Coots walked beside them without fear.
There were mud ponds, full of children and adults running, knee-deep calling to each other and laughing with glee. They were chasing eels. Trout sweltered in ponds behind cages of water wood. There were salt-rimmed ponds in the banks where frogs were farmed. Shepherd children watched them, protecting them against marauding herons. Wet dogs, black and white collies, barked and chased the livestock. Milena saw one scoop up a frog in its jaws and trot back to the pond. The dog splashed far out in the middle of the pond, before gently letting the frog go free. Out to the horizon there were houses high on stakes, and walkways, and floating artificial islands, rising and falling as if with breath. There were boats everywhere, people everywhere, inspecting the plants, parching the reeds, drying translucent panels of rice paste.
Finally they came to the Slump itself.
Great mounds of it rose above the waterline in perfect domes. Deer grazed on the roofs, boats were pulled up onto its banks. Smoke drifted out of it.
The Slump was a kind of fungus, rich in protein, that was farmed on the saltier reaches of the estuary. The Slump Bobbers lived inside it. They shovelled out courtyards and chambers, cooking and sleeping inside their crop until it began to go soft and ripe.
On the top of the nearest dome, someone was bobbing. Not in a hurry, the man walked with a lazy, sauntering bounce. He carried something in a basket on his head. Rising up over the edge of the dome came eager children. They bounded across the Slump, as if on the surface of a trampoline. The man turned, annoyed, and perhaps said something. The Bobber children trembled to a halt, their knees suddenly absorbing all the bounce, their shoulders staying level.
The punt moved on, and Milena saw that a small paddle steamer was anchored beside the Slump. The Bobbers were out with their sharp-bladed shovels, cutting the Slump, peeling it up in layers, and loading it into barrows. They ran up the ramps on the boat, and tipped the barrows up and sent the fungus cascading onto the steamer.
Ahead of them there was thick black smoke streaming up in rows from many, many kilns, all along the horizon, as if the sky were on fire.
The boy reached into the top of his wrappings and pulled out a cloth. He tied it over his face. Milena began to hear an almost tuneful, hollow, clattering sound. There was wailing.
'Remembrance,' said the boy. He passed her a mask.
The kilns were irregular towers of red, baked soil, surrounded by bundles of reed for fuel. People in black scuttled up and down them, carrying reeds on their backs. The kilns seemed to stand on an island of pink and white. As they drew closer, Milena began to think it must be flowers, lotus blossoms or lilies. Is it a flower farm? she wondered.
Then she saw that the flowers were festooned on canoes. She began to hear a formless chorus of singing, a low, deep mournful sound of many different songs being sung at once. Up the sides of the fifty kilns, up each of them, stood hooded people in white.
Between them they carried hammocks on long poles. The hammocks sagged with a dead weight.
One a minute, her viruses told her, they are disposing of one every minute. Two hundred, three hundred boats full of mourners, the viruses told her at a glance. The boats seemed to rise and fall with the sound of dirges.
Their boat had to pass between them.
Women sat in boats rocking quietly. Young men craned their necks to see how many boats were still ahead of them. Everyone wore white, including those who seemed to be asleep, their faces collapsed into themselves, their lips blue and prim. Shadows from the smoke drifted over them. Smut settled on the white shirts and jackets.
'Oh did those feet in ancient times...'
'Swing low...'
'Silence, silence from which we all come...'
The many songs of mourning seemed to compete. Children stood with their hands raised towards heaven, keening, warbling, tears smeared over their faces. Men stared as if stunned, glancing back behind them at the burdens in the bottom of the boats.
From out of the Estate of Remembrance, women covered in white waded out into the water. They wore white masks to hide their faces. They held out their arms and with a start, the orphaned children shifted themselves and tried to lift up the hammocks. The women in white took them on their shoulders, and bore the loads on their shoulders. As the hammocks were taken from them, the mourners threw flowers into the air. They called goodbye, they shouted out names, every name it seemed that it was possible to call, as if all the world were dying at once. The women in white stepped up onto the salty banks, their legs glossy with mud. They walked with quick jabbing steps up the slopes of the kilns.
'Go around! Go around!' they shouted, almost as if in panic, to Milena's boatboy. They made circular motions with wet purple hands. The boatboy shook his head, and pointed between the kilns, and thrust the boat forward in that direction, gliding between masses of rotting flowers. The white petals had gone slimy and brown. It was the flowers that stank of death, rank and gaseous. Milena coughed. Smoke drifted low over the water, pitch black and sharp in the nostrils. The boat surged into it: it stung Milena's eyes and made her weep. Then the boat was through it, there was a freshening breeze in her face, and Milena looked up and saw her new home.
It rose, like a hangar over the water, huge and arched, with four buttressing towers of bamboo at each corner. All the light about it was golden, filtered through smoke. It was made of reed and was a kind of Ark, floating on the surface of the estuary. A wide deck of reed surrounded it, with floating moorings extending out into the water.
The punt sighed up onto the artificial bank of reed, and the boy slipped over the side of the boat, and pulled it up closer to a small, dry platform. He helped Milena up onto it. He carried her one bamboo suitcase.
'I have never seen inside such a place,' he whispered.
'Neither have I,' confided Milena.
A tiny but rotund woman came down the sloping reed bank towards them.
'Are you the theatre person?' the woman asked, voice quailing as she walked towards them. Her face seemed settled in gloom.
'Yes. I am. My name is Milena Shibush.' Milena held out her hand, but the woman stopped where she was on the bank and would come no closer.
'I am Ms Will. There was no one else to do it, so they left me here to show you around.' She glanced at the boatboy. 'I suppose he will have to come in too. Isn't it awful about that horrible smoke? And the singing!'
Without a handshake, Ms Will turned around and led Milena towards the Tarty house.
The sliding-panel doors had been left open. The walls were a series of sliding panels that could be shifted according to the weather. Ms Will led Milena through them into a large, covered courtyard.
Inside, there was a cathedral hush. Arches of reed rose up and over them. Sunlight leaked through the walls, as if through a sieve. Sunlight burned in brilliant pinpricks, and spilled in rays on the floor. The floor was made of woven reed. Ahead of them was a tumble of bamboo boxes coated in plaster, and corridors and steps. There was a smell of cooking.
'All the quarters are separated from each other. There's some kind of resin between the walls. Dead Space, they call it, to absorb noise. At least we have some privacy. You are up here.'
They climbed a bamboo staircase up a scaffolding of stilts. Milena's rooms clustered over a water tank. Milena's door was a series of sliding screens. Ms Will pulled them back, one after another.
Milena's rooms were like a series of lacquered bamboo boxes. The winter screens had been folded back, the windows were open, there was a gentle breeze. There were reed carpets as soft as sweaters over the thick reed floors. There were summer shutters that had been woven into illustrative shapes of flamingoes and herons and wading farmers. There were beanbags on the floor, there was a desk with a chair, there was a kitchen with a charcoal stove and a hibachi, there were charcoal stoves in every room. Behind a screen, there was a bathroom, a bathroom all of her own with a huge resin tub, and a trough of warm water and a pan for scooping it out and pouring over herself in great gushing plashes. There was a throne toilet, a bamboo box.
As Milena walked from room to room she cried aloud. 'Oh look at this! Oh look at this!' overwhelmed with gratitude at each new revelation. The boatboy walked hushed behind her.
'I have never imagined a house like this,' he said in awe.
Milena ran to one of her windows, and looked out. There was a patchwork quilt of green squares, brown pools, ridgeways, stiltways, a crowd of canoes where there was a floating market. There was a great stretch of water. There were flamingoes. There was the sound of wind in reeds, of birds perched on fenceposts.
'I can't believe I will live in such a place,' said Milena. Here, she thought, I can rest. Here I can be safe.
There was the massed singing of Remembrance, and the drifting shadows of smoke.
It only took one week for Thrawn McCartney to find her.
A week later, Milena lifted up the lid of her new bamboo box toilet and there was Thrawn's face inside it.
Here it begins, thought the Milena who was remembering. This is the July, this is the August, before I went into space. I'm going to have to remember this, too. All part of the story. And the Consensus wants a story.
Thrawn giggled. 'Just a head in the head,' she said. 'If you're going to use it, Milena, you're going to have to use it with me in it. I think that's a pretty good picture of what our relationship's been all along, don't you?'
Milena stared in horror. The full horror took some time to sink in.
'Pretty new flats courtesy of the Party are no defence, Milena. No defence against a bad conscience.'
'You're the one who dumped on me,' said Milena.
'It's funny,' said the head. 'How people who commit injustice always have to fry up one that's been done to them. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to do what they do.'
Milena closed the lid. She walked through her beautiful lacquered boxes, surrounded by the Dead Space. There was a blaze of sunlight on the floor. It was the Summer of Song, the Summer of Light. It hadn't rained in two months.
A hologram of a squat toilet was in the centre of the front room. It was the old kind, that most people had to use, a hole in the floor with footrests. 'Yoo hoo. Milena!' called a hollow voice from inside it.
There was also the carcass of a water buffalo on the floor. It had been skinned and gutted. There were pink and white ribbons of fat and flesh. The carcass stood up and limped, on stumps, headless, towards Milena.
'Here I am,' the carcass sang and whooped. 'A new Milena Shibush production.' It spun around on stumps, and then fell. 'Holograms courtesy of some female or other we can safely chew up into Coral.'
The carcase sprouted flowers from the stump of its neck. They were generic flowers, blearily imagined. But the flowers were bleeding.
'Poor, poor Milena. Such a hard time she's having.' There was a chorus of sentimental sympathy in the air all around her. 'Ahhhhhhhhhh.'
&n
bsp; Milena saw something out of the corner of her eye, and turned around, and there was Thrawn, holding out a knife towards her.
'Go on, Milena. Why leave the job undone? I am what's inside your head. You'd like to kill me. Well. Now you can. Without doing me any real harm. Isn't that what you tell yourself? That you haven't done me any real harm? Here, slice me into ribbons. There'll be lots of blood, and I'll the, right in the middle of your nice Tarty flat.'
'Where are you cubing from?' Milena demanded.
The image laughed. 'Maybe I'm here for real and you really can kill me. Or maybe you're making all of this up.'
'If the Party finds out you're doing this you'll be scrubbed so clean even the viruses won't know you,'
'Will they?' asked Thrawn with a smile and a confidence that Milena found unnerving.
Then the hologram of Thrawn McCartney transformed itself into a hologram of Milena Shibush.
'Milton,' said Milena Shibush. 'Thrawn McCartney is persecuting me. She puts headless singing cows in my room. She waits for me inside my toilet. I wake up in the middle of the night and her face is smiling at me just in front of my nose. Milton, she's driving me crazy!'
The image of Milena Shibush turned and smiled. 'Now what is Milton going to think?'
The image of Milena Shibush turned and walked up to a bleary smudge of light that somewhat resembled Cilia.
'Cilia,' said Milena, her face sour. 'Get away from me, will you? Your constant social climbing is just too unbearable for someone as talented as me.'
The image of Milena Shibush turned and batted her eyelids at Milena.
There was no edge of crackling light where the image joined reality. It cast shadows on the floor in the right direction. I'd believe it was really here, thought Milena, with a sinking heart. She thought very quickly of things she could and could not do, things like cutting the electricity supply. What electricity supply, where? She didn't know where Thrawn was cubing from.