Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  Milena let it settle over her, the reality of the power by which she was held. I've always known that. I have always known they have me dancing, to pull me in when they want me. Why am I surprised? Did I think I was blessed, surrounded by some sort of sacred light? Did I really think the Consensus would love the music that much for its own sake?

  Don't take it hard, murmured the mind of Bob the Angel. They love the music. They want to do the Comedy. They want to do this, too.

  Milena had the concept, whole in her head. The Consensus wants to find a mate. It wants to meet another like itself. It is so sure that somewhere in the spangle of stars there is intelligence. It is so sure that intelligence will take the same form as itself.

  So it wants to call across space. The call will go no faster than the Angels, but it will take the form of light, radiating evenly, spreading evenly, out through the universe.

  The Consensus wants to make an artificial astronomical artefact.

  It will be a hologram four light years high.

  It will be an image of the human face. Milena saw it, four-sided, four sides of four different human faces: Chao Li Song, Marx, Lenin, and Mao. And the faces will mouth in silence:

  One

  One

  Makes two.

  Two and

  then two

  That will make four.

  Over and over, the movements of the mouth would mimic the movements of the numbers, building up a code of mathematics, to be repeated, for intelligence to perceive and say: this is not natural. This is something calling.

  Hubris anyone? Thousand Year Reich? They thought they would be judged by the size of their buildings, too, by the size of the ruins they would leave behind. Madness, monumentalism, Ozymandius, King of Kings.

  It is a bit on the grand side, thought Bob, in her head. The Mount Rushmore idea is just a suggestion. They'd be dead chuffed if you had another idea, girl, dead chuffed.

  Oh would they, now? Like they are dead chuffed by the Comedy? And the Comedy is just a way to test the gravitational lenses, and the Reforming, and all the techniques of sight and sound. They should have used Thrawn after all.

  Oh no, lovey, oh no, don't be hard and bitter, thought Bob the Angel. Thrawn cannot be trusted. She has the wild humours and will not do as she is asked. We needed someone who would do what she was asked. We had to wait until you were trained by her, until you learned most of what she knew.

  Milena's thoughts went small and quiet. Oh dear merciful heaven, she said to the stars. Thrawn was right.

  That's your job isn't it? To find out what I'm doing and see if the

  Consensus can use it?

  Yes, Thrawn, it was, but I didn't know it. I let them use me, Thrawn. I let them use me to destroy you.

  Milena rose up, in rage.

  So why did you leave me like this? she demanded. You don't need me independent, why not destroy me too, like you've destroyed everyone else. Why not Read me, wipe me, make me so much of a puppet that I can't realise it? Why not just make Thrawn over, why bring me into it at all?

  Because, sighed Bob in the lines and in her mind, we have discovered that the viruses destroy talent.

  Take Rolfa, he said, now Rolfa, we couldn't let that happen again. We Read Rolfa and look at her. Rolfa, this marvellous talent. We destroyed Rolfa. And your love for Rolfa, it pulls you up love, it pulls you along and pulls things out of you no one could have known existed. We couldn't destroy that, could we?

  You need me to love Rolfa, because it makes me work?

  Not only that.

  Bob showed her the rainfall of the flowers, her twenty-two billion roses.

  The Consensus needs someone who can conceive of it. It wants to travel too. It will need you, to bear its image.

  Where?

  To the stars, said Bob. The Consensus wants you for an Angel. It wants you, Milena, to carry it out there, its image, to meet the Other when it comes. The viruses, you see, love. You didn't have them, but you had to keep up with them. So you forced yourself through all those years in the Child Garden. You forced yourself to do alone what the viruses do for everyone else. You forced yourself to grow a capacity for memory, for holding images, that no one else has.

  All my history. All my self. It's to be used by the Consensus.

  Bob. I've got nothing. You've left me with nothing. Why did you tell me this?

  Because someone with nothing needs to know that. She needs to get something. What she needs to do, said Bob the Angel, is marry Mike Stone.

  So Milena went up, and Milena went down and Milena married Mike Stone. Hop, skip, and jump.

  chapter fifteen

  PEOPLE'S ARTIST

  (THE WHOLE TRUTH)

  Milena remembered being on a platform in the gardens of the Embankment with her husband sitting beside her. On her other side there was some grand personage, whose name she had deliberately forgotten. It was July of the blustery summer, still plagued by high winds, but warm, warm at last.

  Milena stepped forward from her folding chair, into the area of the cube that would magnify her. It would magnify her voice and her features, turn her into an artefact. Behind her there was a flapping of banners, long red banners, with medallions of socialist heroes. In front of her were red banners hanging from lamp-posts, buffeted by the wind. The trees moved and the shadows of the clouds moved, as if everything were stirring, alert and alive.

  There were rows of faces in chairs. Milena knew many of them. Some of the faces were swollen with pride, proud of her, proud of themselves for knowing her. Others were slightly disgruntled with the boredom of doing a duty, forgivable under the circumstances. Others were sceptical and anticipatory at once. Would this tiny, drab-looking woman have anything interesting to say?

  I think I have, thought Milena, looking up at the sky.

  All around her was the silence. She could feel it. Silence and light being exchanged without human notice. She looked at the earth, still there under the buildings and the pavements. Besides performing a function, the buildings and pavements seemed to her to embody ideas and ideologies. Milena simply smiled, in the silence.

  Milena kept on smiling for many moments, looking at the red banners and trying to really understand why they were there and what they might mean for her. The audience began to shift. Then, as she kept smiling, calm and feeling no need yet to respond or to speak, the audience began to smile with her, to chuckle.

  'So,' she said finally. 'Here I am.'

  Another long pause as the wind flapped. The banners sounded like the wings of birds. Milena knew what she wanted to do then.

  There was a text that she had assiduously prepared, with a careful line of argument, discussing the need for a socialist artist to work for socially defined ends. She held the text in her hands. It was typed, on gold-embossed paper. Paper was still a way of making something important. It meant tradition. There had been copies of the speech waiting on people's chairs, weighted down by rocks to keep them there.

  Milena found she was impatient with the paper. She set it free. She threw it up into the wind. It danced, and spiralled, rose up in the updraft of the Shell, spun around dizzyingly in the air. 'Wheee!' said Milena. No order. The audience laughed.

  'I wonder,' she said, 'what this title People's Artist really means. I've always found that I have too little to do with people. My work has taken over my life. I wanted it to take over my life. It was as if I could fold myself up and keep myself safe in a drawer, very tidily, unseen. I wouldn't have to worry about it then. Or, to be honest, be worried by other people. In the end, I was. Worried by people. So here I am. Out.'

  A mild, concerned chuckle. Just how embarrassing and personal was this speech going to get?

  'I suppose the People part means that my work is used for political ends. It makes people feel and think in the ways they are supposed to feel and think. It's not much different from a virus.'

  An unexpected burst of laughter, then. It swelled.

  'Except that I alway
s think of the great socialist ends after everything else.'

  A warmer, but less certain, shorter laugh. Is this going to get dangerous?

  'I thought when we were doing the out-plays that they were a way to make people love themselves and the London they live in. It seems to me that London now is at least as interesting as London was when all those plays were written. I wanted all the Estates to be proud of each other: the Reefers, the Cordwainers, the Tugboys, the Slump Bobbers. They're part of London too. I did not, however, set out to make them love two hundred foot tall Crabs.'

  A grateful laugh now, of relief. This isn't going to veer off in any funny direction. This is going to work.

  'I think people should love giant Crabs, particularly if they sing well.'

  Pause.

  'Those of us who work at the Zoo often have to love giant singing Animals.'

  A larger laugh. But the trees whispered, that's enough.

  'You can get too high-minded. People should be easier on themselves. Life isn't high-minded. If it's got a mind at all, then it's out of it. Attack was just fun. It was an excuse to get in as many holograms as we could.'

  We, meaning you and Thrawn, the trees sighed in and out.

  'Sometimes fun can cost lives. The woman I worked with on Crabs is no longer with us. The woman who set all of Divina Commedia to music is no longer with us either. I used to think I destroyed them both. Now I think that to blame myself is just another way of making myself too important.

  'The most socialist thing I ever did, the best thing I ever did, was trying to get people to help the sick instead of shutting them away and burning the bodies. I had a lot of help, from Milton John, from Moira Almasy. And that was nothing to do with being an Artist.'

  Milena stopped, visibly wondering what she was going to say next, taking her time.

  'Am I an Artist at all? I don't know what the word means. I do what I can, in the way I can do it, when I have an idea. I don't know where the ideas come from, except that I don't have them. By that I mean the "I" that I know doesn't seem to have them. The "I" that I know keeps trying to think of ideas and they don't come. The ideas seem to come of their own accord, in their own time, without me. So I can't really claim any credit for them. Or responsibility, either. Life just gives them to me. You, my friends, the ones I can see in the front row. You gave them to me. And the city, and the history that made it and made me too. So who is the Artist, then? Is there an Artist at all?'

  Suddenly she grinned.

  'Maybe we should be giving this award to each other, just for being here. The only way to be a People's Artist is to be as private as you can. That's when you touch something that isn't just you.'

  And Milena said to herself, to the trees in the wind: Rolfa, I love you. I want to live with you and sleep with you. And I can't. I don't tell them that. To do that would be to try to tell them the whole truth. And who can tell the whole truth? You'd never stop talking.

  She said that aloud. 'Maybe that isn't the whole truth. But if I tried to tell the whole truth, I'd never stop talking.'

  Another small chuckle. Some of them were still working it out.

  'We're all people. We're all artists.' She shrugged with helplessness. 'Thank you.'

  There was a settled warmth to the applause that followed. Cilia, the Princess, Peterpaul, Moira Almasy, they all stood up. Moira's jaw was thrust out as she smiled. Cilia was grinning and grinning as if her face could not spread wide enough. Peterpaul was applauding, looking serious, looking straight into her eyes. Toll Barrett was nodding 'yes'. Even Charles Sheer was applauding.

  And a Crab-like voice in Milena's head said, You're good at making speeches, Milena. That could be useful.

  And another voice, lowering, slow, said It made you look better than you are. They'll never guess.

  Milena stood, still and quiet, embarrassed, battling to keep her modesty. Perhaps she was wrong to think that arrogance and pride would destroy talent, but it was what she believed, so she tried to preserve her humility. It was a tactical decision. She exploited herself and had to protect herself from her self.

  And how many selves, how many voices?

  Be easy on yourself, Milena. Here is the sun, here is the applause, and the light, and the silence.

  chapter sixteen

  AN ENDING UP OF FRIENDS

  (THE DEAD SPACES)

  Milena remembered walking towards St Thomas's hospital. A nurse led her. He was a big man, about seventeen years old, calm and smiling. She remembered his sun-bruised skin, dark purple cheeks and clear eyes. The picture of health. He sauntered, at ease with his body and the world.

  'We'll go round this way,' he said, as they crossed the road. His teeth were perfect and white, and he had golden-green curly hair.

  'How did you know to ask for me?' asked Milena. 'Did she tell you?'

  'The Terminals said she was part of the Centennial and to find you out in the Slump.' He held open a door, and they entered the Coral Reef.

  The hospital was full of tunnels and dens, like natural caverns. The Coral Reef walls glowed softly, fluorescent, so that there would always be light, so that the dying did not awake in the dark, afraid that they had already gone. The Cancer Ward, it was called. People were dying for the lack of it.

  In each of the dens three or four people lay in beds, young people, thirty or thirty-five years old, suddenly stricken, suddenly dying. Very suddenly they lost weight, fell ill with a variety of diseases as their immune system failed. Their bodies wore out, their hearts, their lungs, their livers, all expiring in concert.

  'It's an epidemic, really, isn't it?' Milena said, keeping her voice low.

  'There really isn't a word for what it is,' said the picture of health. He held a door open for her. Milena smelled, very faintly, the stifled odour of illnesses and drugs and damp bandages and disinfectant.

  The Doctors were still trying to break the Candy that shielded the genes of growth and maturing. The Doctors were still trying to find a way to synthesise the proteins that cancer had made, that had prolonged life. We all forget, thought Milena, we all have to forget that half of our lives has been lost.

  Except for the Tumours, except for Lucy; they can't the at all.

  'What's wrong with Lucy?' Milena asked. Lucy had been missing for several months. It seemed likely that she was very ill indeed.

  The nurse stopped and shook his head. 'Nothing's wrong,' he said. 'She's getting better.'

  'Yes, but from what?' Milena asked.

  The nurse shrugged. 'Old age?' He beamed. 'The human condition? She also is in — ah — another condition. But maybe that isn't quite so miraculous.'

  Miraculous?

  The nurse led Milena on down the corridor, and indicated a doorway, and bowed slightly as if presenting Lucy to her.

  Picture of health, thought Milena, looking at his puce and smiling cheeks, even you will be cut off.

  Then she went into Lucy's room.

  Lucy had a room to herself. She sat up in bed and Milena could see in that instant that she had changed utterly.

  Lucy looked very calm and dignified, perhaps even stern. Her hair was no longer orange. It was the colour of friable, dry soil, a muted grey. It was going darker in a line, along the parting near the scalp. Her leathery old skin looked thicker, smoother. It was a different kind of skin.

  Lucy looked at Milena, with a hint of a smile, and something in that look made Milena's breath catch. 'I know you,' she said.

  'Hello, Lucy,' said Milena as if caught off-guard. 'How are you?'

  'You don't have the time,' said Lucy, with the same stern smile. She turned away, and looked out of her window, at the river. 'You don't have the time that I have.'

  Lucy was rubbing the palms of her hands, and the skin was coming off in thick rolls, as if it were a coating of dried glue. The new skin underneath was brown and thick and spongy, without any lines or creases. No future there, for a fortune teller to read. Milena saw Lucy's profile.

  She looks
, thought Milena, like a head on a Roman coin. Misshapen somehow, but fierce. She looks like something that might have grown up out of the earth, a sort of root vegetable. And she smells, smells delicious, like freshly baked bread.

  'One day,' said Lucy, still watching the river outside, 'it all comes back, and you're somewhere else. Now. I can draw any map, right here in my hand. I can light a cigarette with my fingers. I'm not saying that everything will work out by itself, by what we want, mind you. I'm just saying that the eyes are hollow... that the light spreads out inside our eyes and not outside. One day it just added up.'

  Her mind has gone, thought Milena.

  'One day, it just all added up. Added up, all the little bits and pieces, and you blank out. No memory. Feels wonderful. Like a warm bath. You don't need it any more.'

  Or has gone into another state, thought Milena. Lucy. What are you trying to tell me?

  'I am five hundred feet tall,' said the ancient. 'You could all shelter in my shade — if my leaves was seen by you.'

  She sighed and leaned forward and picked up a tray from the bed. On a plate was a huge lump of meat, its fat all crisp, golden, raised up in crunchy blisters. It was covered in minty sauce, and mere was a mound of — what — ice cream?

  No. Mashed potatoes. Lamb and mashed potatoes with a pool of meat juice in a hollow in the middle. And mere was a pile of hard, green brussels sprouts.

  It wasn't there before, thought Milena. I'm sure it wasn't there before.

  Lucy chewed and swallowed. 'These little tracks go everywhere,' she said. She very neatly sculpted a mouthful of mashed potato onto the back of her fork. 'You can't see them at first, you've got to go blind for fifty or sixty years first. I couldn't see anything for at least that long, and then one day, there's an ache from the front to the back of your head, and your eyes are better. They get better and you see different. Everything different. They don't teach you to see, and it takes time to heal. You have to go blind in order to heal.'