The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  Then Milena heard Rose Ella whisper: Not well. Poor thing, she’s taken it badly. Better if she stays with us.

  That night, on the mattress they shared, Milena clung to her tightly, as if to drifting wreckage at sea.

  ‘Milena love, I can’t breathe! Please!’ said Rose Ella.

  ‘Svoboda,’ said Milena. Czech? She was speaking Czech? She had forgotten Czech, surely! Rose Ella rolled over, away from her, and Milena was left alone with terror. The stars were terror, the dark was terror, but most especially the past, the unremembered past was terror. She fell asleep in fear, her hand resting lightly against the back of Rose Ella’s soft, smooth neck.

  She woke up some time before dawn. She thought she was seeing a dream. She woke up in a fallen ruin, with strewn familiar objects. There were the four small cannons, too heavy for the wind to take. It seemed to her that she was looking at the ruin of her life. The ruin of her life had always been there, unrealised, since Milena had lost a father, lost a mother, lost a language, lost her very self, lost it forever behind layers of growing up, layers of loss, layers of scorn, self-hatred, ceaseless work, unfulfilled hopes. Lost it where there was no childhood, nothing simple or safe or sweet or whole.

  Except that next to her was Rose Ella. Rose Ella was there as in a dream, kissed by the faintest light of early sunrise, the first clear dawn since the hurricane. Milena looked down at Rose Ella, beautiful, asleep, hair fallen from her face, nightrobe fallen open, and there was her beautiful breast. It was young and small, with a dark nipple. Stranded somewhere between sleep and dream, suspended in a kind of stillness in the light, and in the light mist, thinking how much the breast looked like a mother, Milena kissed the nipple. She took the nipple in her mouth.

  Rose Ella’s eyes opened with a snap.

  She looked round at Milena.

  Milena looked at her, dazed loving.

  Rose Ella sat up. She pulled the duvet up over herself. She sat there staring, ice cold. Milena began to sense at last that something was horribly wrong.

  ‘Milena! What are you doing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Milena truthfully.

  It was said of the orphans that they were sexually advanced. Some of them, after all, were engaged to be married even before Reading. It was said darkly, that some strange things went on in the Gardens, before the orphans were safely Read, safely Placed, safely cured by viruses. Orphans were admired, held up as ideals, the children who became adults first and most completely. They were made ideals in order to help people be less afraid of them.

  Orphans reminded people that they would die. Orphans meant their own sudden extinction. Orphans revealed too clearly the forced growth of everyone’s children. People thought the darkness in their own minds was caused by something dark in the minds of the orphans. People feared that orphans would contaminate their own children with precocious thoughts, or sexual adventures. Milena did not know that she had been a test of tolerance.

  Rose Ella stood up, still holding the blanket. She jerked it away from Milena’s grasp. She turned and stalked away. She looked back over her shoulder at Milena. She was crying. She put her hands to her face, and began to walk more quickly. She gave her head a shake. She began to run, over the rubble, hobbling in bare feet.

  Milena lay back on the mattress. She let herself realise what had happened. They would say it had happened because she was an orphan. She was an orphan; maybe they were right. They would send her away.

  Mala came with her steady smile. Only the smile was strained now, slightly glazed like the grins on the lost porcelain statues.

  ‘Milena. Hello,’ she said, crouching. ‘You’re very upset by all of this aren’t you?’

  Milena was frozen, like some trapped animal. She felt fallen like her tree. She looked at Mala’s knees. She couldn’t bear to look up at her face.

  ‘You’ve got a lot of problems, Milena. It’s understandable. You’ve lost your parents. And you do have certain disabilities. And we’ve tried to help you with those, for your sake, and to help Rose Ella with her work. And I like to think we’ve done some good. But it’s up to you now, dear. You’re going to have to do some development yourself. You’re going to be Read, and cured of all sorts of things. That’s going to happen very soon now. And, maybe after that, when everything’s settled. Well.’ She paused and touched Milena’s arm, or rather, her sleeve. ‘Well, maybe you would like to come back to see us then.’

  ‘Where will I go now?’ Milena asked, her voice thin, choked, forlorn.

  ‘The other orphans are moving into the Medicine. It’s quite a sturdy building. Sturdier than the Row.’ Milena could see the knees twist around to look at the rubble and to regret. Memory of her own grief made Mala more firm.

  ‘I think you better go now, eh, Milena? Before everyone else starts getting up and wonders why. Here. Here are your boots dear.’

  Milena lay still as the boots were forced on her feet.

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ she whispered.

  Mala sighed. ‘I know, dear. But it’s for the best.’

  Milena stumbled back through the ruins, as dazed as the last time she was injected with virus, hard virus that had been shoved directly into her veins with a needle. The dosage had nearly killed her. She had thrown up blood. She had tossed on her bed for days, and wandered befuddled for weeks, the genetics of knowledge churning in her head. But even then the viruses did not take hold. The mighty Doctors had examined her, held her flesh in their cold hands and peered at her. They took samples. The mighty Doctors must know why the viruses didn’t work. They had stopped even trying after that final dose: they had stopped making her ill. They left her alone to be unwell in her own way.

  And they had sent Rose Ella.

  ‘And we’ve tried,’ said the child bitterly. ‘To help Rose Ella with her work.’

  Milena found herself in the lobby of the Medicine.

  There were Nurses sitting at a desk. Everything had been swept up or replaced by the children. Everything seemed so smooth and clear. The eyes of the Nurse flitted briefly over Milena. They saw her charcoal hands, the dirty face, the clothes white as if in mourning from the dust of rubble.

  ‘Ah, good morning, Ms Shibush. Back with us after the storm. That’s good, we have a new work group arranged for you. To prepare you for your Placement. And a nice new room.’

  Milena stared at them. Does the room have teeth, she wondered, like a shark. Does it bite off fingers as you wander through the ruin of your life, chewing them? Does it grind you with great white molars of rubble? Does your blood ooze underneath the door of this nice, new white room, with the walls that have straps to bolt you down to the bed? ‘I want you to burn me,’ said Milena. ‘I want you to burn everything out of me. I want this burned clear!’ She pressed a finger to her own head. ‘Make me sick,’ she said. ‘Make me ill. Make me as sick with the virus, as much as you can. All of it, all at once, I don’t care if it kills me, just get it inside me.’

  And I will be controlled. And I will be neat and clean, and I will keep everything neat and clean, and I will never speak, and I will never show myself again, not to you nor to anyone else.

  ‘Cure me,’ she demanded.

  And she went up to her new room. There was a new bed, as anonymous as her last, and bare walls, and the smell of other room mates. Milena stared at the wall. I hate childhood, she thought. I wish I had never been a child. I want to be old, as old as I can be. Roll on, viruses, roll over me. Come on mathematics, come on Marx and Chao Li Song. Come on logarithms, come all you operas as fixed as the North Star. Come and dance on my head and break it up into rubble. I want to forget.

  Milena the would-be adult turned feral. She turned into a hunter. She hunted memory.

  No! whispered the adult who was remembering. No! but the voice from the future was too faint.

  Milena turned on her self as if with fangs and claws. She pursued her child self through all its hated years in England. She felt the small cool coils and remembere
d. She had touched such things before and destroyed them. Small cool coils of DNA, DNA that encoded sight and sound, that preserved pain and loneliness and work and waiting.

  She sprung memory, as if it were virus. She savaged the coils, rended them apart and let their elements scatter. The memory of her landing in Newhaven on the boat; the death of her mother; the steady learning of the English tongue and the kindly man who had taught it to her; she pounced on them, and ripped them apart in a rage.

  She came to the memories of Rose Ella, of home, of the music and the dancing and the book of theatre that Rose Ella’s father had given to her. She held the memories as if in pincers; she felt their weight. She felt them flower in her mind; the sound of the clattering clogs, the lounging in the sun of Russell Square; the row of tiny cannons for firing salutes. She remembered the music of home.

  All right, all right, she would let that be. Everything else would be obliterated. The young Restorers on her first day in the Child Gardens; they had gathered around her, calling her Russian out of contempt, damning her with Chao Li Song’s words as she howled for her mother, her mother who was dead. Ah! fond memories of childhood, she thought as she slashed them. Ah my golden years! My bouquet of early life. The years of eating alone; the years of Nurses’ shaking heads. The years of feeling stupid, the years of feeling foreign, the years of silence and dust and the years of her reading as well, all those books, all that work. Milena tore apart her work as well, consigning it to darkness.

  No! whispered the future.

  The Child Garden was destroyed.

  So they made Milena ill again, and this time the viruses won. Milena had no memory of that, either. She remembered how she emerged smaller, neater, pale and wan and very quiet, with a continent of knowledge crammed into her head, along with several useful calculating facilities.

  ‘Well, you were scheduled for your Reading,’ said the Senior Nurse. ‘But we couldn’t send you because you were so ill. We only gave you educational viruses of course. Personality defects can only be cured by Doctors, and they do that after your Reading. I’m sure there will be a Reading arranged for you soon.’ The Senior Nurse smiled, as if to an equal. Milena was now an adult. ‘We’re very glad that the information finally took. It must be paradise for you.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Milena, her voice dull.

  ‘And the lack of your Reading seems not to have affected your Placing. Jack Horner, that’s what we’ll have to call you. You’ve pulled a Plum, Ms Shibush. You’ve been Placed as an apprentice at the Zoo—the National Theatre. That’s one of the highest Placings we’ve ever had at the Medicine.’

  The Nurse reached forward and shook Milena’s hand. ‘We are all so proud of you, Ms Shibush.’ The fact that Milena did not respond, that the flesh on her face hung dead, and that her mouth was pinched and withdrawn did not surprise the Nurse. She had seen Milena during her illness. She was surprised that Ms Shibush had survived at all.

  Like the Tree of Heaven, Rose Ella had done Milena one last great favour before being torn out of her life. Rose Ella had testified on Milena’s Placement board. Moira Almasy had sat on the board as well, as a representative of the Zoo. Milena had been Rose Ella’s special assignment. Years later, Moira Almasy told Milena what Rose Ella had said.

  ‘It is difficult to see,’ Rose Ella had told the board (she spoke clinically, professionally), ‘in what way someone as crippled as Ms Shibush could usefully be employed, if it is not to work in the theatre.’

  So Milena walked out of the Medicine forever, into the newly swept streets, all the old rubble now removed, like her memory. Czechoslovakia lay too far behind her, encoded in a different tongue. Her English years simply no longer existed for her. Her self had been destroyed. It would take six years, until she met Rolfa, before she could rebuild it. She felt dirty. She thought she could feel viruses crawling on her. She wanted to wash.

  The sun and the clouds, the new paving stones, and the cabbages squashed on them were all flat and heavy and slow. The viruses whispered like ghosts. They threatened to tell Milena the name of the street, and when it had been built, the names of its architects and statesmen who had slept somewhere along it. Milena walked out of the Medicine, into this unmoving world. She was free, unRead but safely Placed. She had escaped. There was no joy. Now she was an adult, and the world itself had become old.

  It was some months later that she learned that Rose Ella’s father, bringing back stone from Cumbria, had been killed by the great storm as well.

  A tree had fallen on him.

  Years later, amid the trees and flowers of Hyde Park, the Crab Monsters danced.

  They pricked their way on the points of their claws and held aloft their huge front pincers. They danced in front of the Forbidden City. The Crab Monsters ruled the world. They were huge and orange and had tiny eyes.

  The Monsters were orange because they had been boiled. Thrawn had not been able to imagine crabs, so Milena had bought crabs at the market, cooked them, and scooped them out for puppets. Cooking had changed their colour. The Monsters were dead and empty shells.

  Across the grass, the Chinese princesses came crawling on their knees in red and blue silk. They were played by Chinese children, but the hologramming had made them huge as well, so they could be seen. They were giant children, wailing an ancient song, pleading for the world. The pageant was performed for an audience of children who had been allowed to stay up late and for those who had children hidden inside them, who had a world hidden inside them.

  The children fell silent. They waited. Stars wavered overhead, screened by the rising air.

  Then came Bugs Bunny.

  He was huge as well, but flat, a drawing. Bugs came dancing, a kind of Chinese wobble. He gave his audience a knowing, narrow-eyed look. With the voice of an American gangster, he began to warble a Chinese song.

  The audience of children roared with disbelief and delight. Bugs paused to bite off the tip of a carrot, and continued to sing with his mouth full. He danced in a circle round the Crab Monsters and crammed a carrot into each of their maws. They went cross-eyed.

  Next to Milena, in the darkness, Moira Almasy had covered her eyes and was shaking her head. But she was also smiling. Milena looked around. Embarrassed pleasure was on all the faces; they were pleased but confused.

  Bugs lit all the carrots as if they were cigars. The carrots sizzled for a moment and then exploded in the faces of the Crabs. They were stunned, black-faced. Bugs kissed them hovering in mid-air, fluttering his feet like wings. Then with a whoosh he was gone. The Crabs gave chase.

  Thrawn McCartney was leaning around Moira, smiling. It was a smile that demanded collusion. It demanded that she and Milena give a performance of seamless agreement, and of professional triumph.

  It was a performance that Thrawn had been giving all night. It had been one of her best. ‘We’ she kept saying of herself and Milena, ‘we’ all the time, to indicate a partnership of equals. She had been the spokeswoman for the team, direct, bright, interceding. She had made Milena feel small, tight, and dull. As they had sat down, amid all the keepers of the Zoo, Thrawn had given Milena a wink and a hearty thumbs-up sigh.

  But there was something more in Thrawn’s smile, now.

  It was relaxed. The tendons and muscles of her neck, and the rope of tissue around her mouth seemed to have cleared, like some kind of disease. The smile was bright and young and full of affection. The affection was for Milena.

  Milena smiled back, with relief: relieved for once not to have to pretend, relieved for once to have a real smile warmed out of her by Thrawn. For just a moment, there was a hint of what might have been.

  Bugs was drawing a gate in the ancient stone walls of the City. He filled it in black, and ran through it. The Crab Monsters tried to follow, and bashed their heads on stone. For them, the gate was always closed.

  Bugs trotted behind them, holding up a box. Fireworks, said a sign on it, in Chinese. Bugs stuck in one of his sizzling carrots and walked away.<
br />
  The sky was full of pink and green flowers of fire, blossoming outward, amid the clatter of gunpowder and the echoing boom of explosions. White smoke rose up.

  And through the blazing light and drifting smoke, the Dragon Ship descended.

  It was a tightly curled ball of scaled cord. That was all that Thrawn had been able to imagine.

  But now, slithering, the knot unfurled, scales moving against scales, light glinting yellow on them. Talons emerged, great chicken feet with claws of steel. Very suddenly, the head was free. The Dragon had a face like a Pekinese dog, and long silver hair. She tossed her head and roared, showing shark teeth, and her hair lashed like giant whips, crackling at the tip. Milena stared into her huge, unblinking, yellow eye and she knew the Dragon was alive, as if she had been born crawling out of Milena’s skin.

  It was not Thrawn’s Dragon. The Dragon had come to Milena, demanding to be born, and at the last minute, Milena had overlaid the image onto the recording. Milena had meant to tell Thrawn, but somehow the time was never right. Thrawn was staring at her now, icy with fury, the smile gone, black circles restored around her eyes. Here we go again, thought Milena.

  The Dragon gathered up the Crabs. They were her wayward children. The Crabs, it turned out, were children too. The Dragon hissed, and vapour rose from her scales. She blasted fire from out of her mouth, and was driven backwards into the sky. She carried off the Monsters with her, to justice.