The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  As she accelerated towards the stars, Bugs saluted. He had the power to charm, and the power to fool. He was the defender of children, whose only power is to love, and forgive, or to wail until they are heard.

  And there was Milena, that same night. After the show, after Thrawn had turned her back on her, after the long walk back home. She was lighting the candle again, and placing it on her windowsill. It was the candle of work, which she had lit in childhood. She confused work with love. And she confused love, or the speaking of love, with the loss of home.

  She had money to buy a chair now, but still did not have a desk. She opened the great grey book on the windowsill and sat down. Canto Sixteen. She had been working for a year and a half.

  Milena lay her head down on the open book as if it were the lap of a lover. She wanted to work; she had to work, but she felt the world closing down, folding into darkness. Helpless, she slipped away into sleep, pulled by time from where she wanted to be.

  Outside in the streets, the children were still singing with joy.

  chapter eleven

  FORCES OF ATTRACTION (BOUQUETS OF CONFUSION)

  The candle of work had burned out. It was late, so late that the sun had risen over the roof of the Shell, and sunlight flooded Milena’s room. Milena had been awoken by a light touch on her sleeve. She looked up from the Comedy, and turned around.

  Moira Almasy was in the room. Milena’s vision was bleary from sleep and dust in her eyes. It seemed to her that Moira Almasy glowed with light so brilliantly that her features were blanched away, with all their lines and creases. Her hair was almost white.

  ‘Milena,’ Moira Almasy said. There was a hushed quality to her voice. ‘Milena, something’s happened.’

  Milena sat up, feeling her hair. As always it hung straight and tidy in its ponytail. Moira was holding out a wad of paper towards her. There was a stack of paper on the floor. Milena took what was offered her, and stared.

  It was paper in staves, and on it were written the words:

  Divina Commedia

  Canticche Uno

  Inferno

  Canto I

  Piccolo

  2 Flauti

  2 Oboi

  Corno inglese

  Clarinetto piccolo (Es)

  For a moment it meant nothing.

  ‘After the show, last night,’ said Moira. ‘There was a call to all of the Terminals. They were told to find paper. Stores were opened, withdrawals recorded.’

  2 Clarinetti (B)

  Clarinetto Basso

  2 Fagotti

  Contrafagotto

  4 Corni (F)

  3 Trombe (B)

  ‘Who did this?’ asked Milena, still not fully understanding. It was not her music.

  ‘The Consensus,’ said Moira. ‘Milena. The Consensus has scored the Comedy. The Terminals, all of them. Last night. They wrote it down. Two Cantos each.’

  ‘All one hundred?’ Milena felt dazed, hanging between many emotions. ‘The whole thing?’ She thought of all of her own work. ‘All of it?’

  Moira nodded yes, her smile muted by awe.

  Milena knelt on the floor beside the heap of paper. It rose at least as high as her forearm was long. She fanned through the pages and found Canto Eight. She wanted to see how horns could be both sombre and hopeful.

  ‘There’s no vocal line,’ she said.

  It was instruments only, until Dante asked Virgil the question: ‘Questo che dice?’

  None of the narration was sung.

  ‘Those were the red notes!’ exclaimed Milena. Most of the poetry was made mute, turned into music.

  Milena’s viruses played the notes on the page. She heard it, the swirling horns, deep, dark, water smelling of filth and of corpses. But light glinted on the surface of the water, and over the surface of the music. Even here, crossing the river of death, to the marshes of the Styx, there was purpose, there was justice.

  Milena began to shake. ‘Oh Marx and Lenin,’ she said. ‘Oh Marx and Lenin.’

  She went to Canto after Canto. Music flowered. It was in gorgeous colours, as pungent as scent, combinations of sound that she would never have been able to imagine.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ she said, and began to laugh, and shake her head. ‘It’s all wonderful!’

  Something rose up in her, and she stood up and whooped for joy. She jumped up and down in her tiny room, and Moira began to beam with pleasure.

  ‘Moira! Oh, Moira!’ cried Milena, and hugged her, and Moira chuckled at her pleasure. She draped her hands on Milena’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. ‘It means,’ said Moira, ‘that the Consensus wants us to put it on. We’re going to put it on, Milena.’

  Milena covered one eye, as if to protect herself from too much good news. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said simply.

  The world changed about her. She felt her place in it change in that moment. The opera was going to exist, it was going to be real, and Milena somewhere had a place in that. She had done something with her life.

  ‘We’re all fair stunned too,’ said Moira. ‘The Consensus has never intervened so directly in the arts. We’re having a meeting later today, about three. I can leave the score with you, if you want to read it, and think about it.’

  All Milena could do was nod yes, yes, yes of course. Could she bring it with her? It was a lot to carry. Milena kept nodding yes. She had been carrying a load for so long, what difference could it make. Yes, yes. The word of acquiescence, which is not the same thing as freedom.

  There was an orange on Milena’s windowsill, as round and perfect as the world. As she read through all the Comedy, as all its streams and tributaries of music flowered towards one immense ocean, Milena ate the orange, smelled its zest, felt the spray of its skin. And she looked out of her narrow window at the sky, and saw the clouds.

  The clouds were wispy and white, moving as if blown by the music of the Comedy. Beyond them, the sky was blue, and Milena could see that the sky was infinitely deep, masked by a haze of light.

  Time pulled. Milena was hauled up through the sky, leaving the orange, the manuscript, her room behind.

  And Milena was looking down through the sky, backwards, from above.

  The sky was a thin film of blue haze that looked as if it could be peeled back, like the skin of an orange. Earth would be left exposed and defenceless.

  Below there was a forest. The forest was like a carpet made of thousands of green needles. Milena could almost see each tree. They were floating above the Amazon. In the west, rising up above the blue haze of the horizon were the Andes, the snow on their peaks pink with sunrise.

  On the walls of the Bulge, there were plants growing. They were small mountain flowers, tiny, pale blooms amid spines. They were the flowers of Czechoslovakia. The Bulge remembered the code that grew them. The same helix that coded life coded information. It grew both flesh and thought. Life was a pun.

  The vessel was alive and linked to Milena. It knew what she desired and could consult her viruses for genetic codes. Then, by thinking, it altered the genetic code of its own cells. It grew flowers out of itself, mixing memory and desire.

  As Milena was about to do.

  She was smiling, no longer giddy with weightlessness, but expectant and nervous. There was to be a test of the Reformation equipment. A single image was to be cast. Milena was going to imagine a rose. It was to be a rose that would fill the sky below.

  ‘What happens next?’ Mike Stone asked. He stood stock-still behind her, his mind maintaining the position of the Bulge in orbit.

  ‘Well,’ said Milena. ‘The area of focus is huge. So the Consensus is going to help map it out for me.’

  ‘How?’ said Mike Stone.

  ‘With an Angel,’ said Milena.

  Suddenly there was a tingling underneath her scalp, where she had been made Terminal. ‘It’s about to happen,’ she said.

  Information was presented to her, not in words. The information was like an iron weight, very delicately plac
ed in her frail flesh. It was as if the weight of the universe was whispering to her. All the bones of her cheeks and temple seemed to crackle and ache.

  The Consensus had spoken.

  As if it had breathed out a bubble, something was released. It was small like an orange pip, and Milena felt relief. The great voice had been withdrawn. Milena had the impression of somersaulting, of something rolling towards her. ‘It’s here,’ she whispered. ‘The Angel.’

  Something seemed to open up in her head.

  It was like a curtain going back. The suede walls of the Bulge, the lens of its window, the stars and the Earth all seemed to part, and she was in another existence.

  There was no light, no sound, only sensation. The sensation was something like touch. But the touch ran in lines, taut lines between things. Consciousness was extended along them, and whenever thought moved, the lines were strummed, like the strings of a musical instrument.

  The Earth was a carefully wound ball of lines which led out from the Earth in all directions. The lines of touch went out to the stars and curved inwards towards the heart of the sun, a nexus of them eight minutes away. The lines pierced Milena’s body and the body of the Bulge and held them both, falling, falling always towards the Earth, as the Earth fell away.

  The lines were gravity. In the fifth dimension, the mathematical description of gravity and electromagnetic phenomena are identical. Infra-red, and ultra-violet, weight and thought. They were all the same thing. The universe was a pun as well.

  A web, thought Milena. The universe is a web, like a spider’s.

  ‘Hello! Hello!’ cried a voice. There was no sound, but words had resonated like music out of the lines. Rising out of the lines, part of the lines, was another consciousness, a personality, imprinted on gravity, where thought and gravity are the same thing.

  The Angel rolled towards her, across the lines, making them throb. The Angel laughed, and the laughter thrilled its way through the lines. The laughter felt like the strings of a cello being struck by a deaf child.

  ‘Light waves,’ the Angel said. ‘X-rays, radio waves. They’re all here. So what do you think? Isn’t it lovely?’

  ‘You were human,’ said Milena aloud.

  ‘Well ta,’ said the Angel. ‘Better than being called a spider, I expect.’

  Milena saw a face in memory. The Angel was showing her a memory. Milena saw the face of a cheerful man with red hair and a creased face, an ageing face. He was wrapping a blue tie around itself, one hundred years ago.

  ‘Your name was Bob,’ said Milena.

  ‘Got it in one,’ said the Angel. ‘Bob the Angel. It’s an honour and a privilege, Milena, an honour and a privilege. Ugly-looking geezer, wasn’t I? Mind you the wife was no oil painting either.’

  Another memory was spun out of gravity. Milena saw a cheerful, pink-faced woman with a double chin and clean false teeth.

  ‘But you enjoy it,’ said Milena, with relief. He enjoyed being an Angel.

  ‘Ah wouldn’t change it for the world. One thing though. I wish my kids could have known how their old man ended up.’ He strummed the lines of gravity.

  He had wanted to be a musician. He played in bars after work. He had had three children and had kept their photographs on his desk as the world collapsed. Milena saw the photographs as well. Three cheerful, blonde children, with pre-Rhodopsin faces the colour of a photographic flesh.

  Milena sensed something else. Behind all the memories, between the words, something else swam like a fish in dark water.

  ‘You’re a composite,’ Milena realised. They had given Bob part of someone else’s personality as well.

  ‘That’s my mate George. Strong silent type. He was a nuclear astrophysicist.’ Bob the Angel imitated a popping sound.

  He keeps talking to reassure me, thought Milena.

  ‘That’s right. You’re sure this isn’t all too much for you?’

  Milena shook her head.

  ‘Say hello, George. See? Silent. I do all the talking. George never says anything. So it’s not too strange, having him all tangled up inside here with me. It’s just that from time to time I start talking in parsecs. You ready to go on, Milena?’

  She nodded. She felt his pleasure.

  ‘Just look at this. I want you to see this.’

  And the Angel flung himself out again, into the lines.

  He passed along them, like a wave through rope, accelerating. He hurtled himself along the lines a disturbance in them. Milena could feel that there was a traffic in Angels. They were all sighing up and down the lines, speeding away towards the stars. Bob shot past them, through them. They tingled in greeting.

  There was a traffic in light as well. Milena didn’t recognize it at first. She simply became aware of something in the lines, sizzling its way out of the sun. They struck the earth and reeled shimmying away from its surface, scattered back out into space, like tiny wriggling arrows. Milena could feel those too. She felt them sputtering into space. Light was part of the lines.

  And Bob was swinging from line to line, slipping, somersaulting, shaking himself with the silent laughter of Angels. He spun, as if on tiptoe, and suddenly, made of gravity, he gathered the lines of gravity tightly towards himself. The lines snagged the light, pulling them inward as well.

  ‘Open your eyes, love,’ said the Angel.

  Milena had not realised that her eyes had been closed. She opened them and saw, with human eyes, the Earth.

  She saw the Earth through a gravitational lens. It was as if she looked at it through the bottom of a wine glass. Its blue seas and white clouds, its thin and flimsy cloak of air, were seen as a series of halos, rings of light.

  And the Angel let all the lines go, and the universe seemed to boom.

  Milena’s mouth was hanging open, and she was laughing as if drunk. Her eyes she knew were sparkling, giddy with delight.

  The Angel spoke. ‘Not bad, I’d say.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Milena, shaking her head.

  ‘That’s the spirit. I love it out here, really, I do. Can you imagine if everyone down there could see this? There wouldn’t be any meanness would there? None of this grubbing, get your number 92 and stay in line. None of this, “Here you” if they knock your coat off the hanger.’

  The thought was the lines, and the lines were pulling the stars and the sun, the Earth and the Bulge, holding them together through the forces of attraction.

  ‘We’re concepting it,’ said the Angel. ‘By which I mean…oh here,’ He passed her a kind of telepathic diagram. It showed Angels rising up from the Earth and travelling the vastness between the stars. There were caravans of Angels, like drops of water sliding on a cobweb. Those in front passed the sensation of where they were to those in the back, one to the other, all the way back to the Consensus. They were making a mental map of the lines.

  The map was on scale of one to one, and overlay reality. For all intents and purposes, it was reality. The fact that the lines had been conceived so far out meant anyone in the net could feel that far out. Milena was touching the stars. She felt them flicker, as if against her fingertips.

  The map had an end. There was a boundary beyond which the Angels had not travelled, though the map was spreading at the speed of light, like a wobbling jelly.

  ‘We just hit Sirius. Eight point seven years out. Sorry, George. Bloody parsecs. Stickler for parsecs is old George. So we got the Serious Dog and we got Alfie Century as well. Not too bad. Not too good either.’

  The Angels travelled at the speed of light and so went back in time. They passed the map back more slowly, into their future. They twisted gravity to break the asteroids, and compress them, heating them, melting them, hauling out the metal into space where it twisted like putty, cooling to be sent back to Earth.

  ‘So how long before we get back to the beginning? Tuh. Long enough. Well before the sun goes Nova. And what will we take with us? Just ourselves. Just gravity and time. I’ll tell you something, Milena. I used to think
I was made out of meat. Then I got up here and I thought. Oh no, I’m not. I’m really rather rarefied. I’m made out of gravity and time. Gravity makes the meat, gravity makes the thought. Time makes events. We’re strung out along gravity and time like lines of laundry. Back at the beginning, when we get there, the only event left is going to be us. Gravity in quantum vacuum, with just enough time for something to happen in. Then—whoosh. We start the universe. Now look at this!’

  The Angel divided. He peeled himself away in sections, like an orange. There was even a zest, a spray of personality that freshened. He spread, breaking apart into smaller and smaller selves, going up, down, sideways, all of him shivering in the wires.

  He was defining a cube. He laid himself like eggs at regular intervals, and each at point cried aloud a number.

  ‘Plus one! Plus one!’

  ‘Minus two! Minus two!’

  ‘Fifty five! Fifty five!’

  Then Bob spoke, in three great voices along three axes of height and width and depth. He was a graph. ‘I call them,’ the three voices of graph said, ‘my Cherubim.’

  The Cherubim called like seagulls, eager to be heard, to be useful. They were limited creatures, reduced in size and information. A fragment of the whole, that retained the rough pattern of the whole. The area that was defined neatly bounded one half of the Earth which swelled into it, like a great dome. The poles, and two points of the equator touched the outer limits of the cube.

  ‘There you go, Milena,’ said the three voices.

  The Cherubim still called. ‘Plus seven. Plus seven. Four nineteen. Four nineteen.’

  ‘All for you, Milena.’

  ‘Minus one oh two two! Minus one oh two two!’

  ‘That’s your stage.’

  Milena looked at the Earth, turning slowly through the area that she could not control. Oh! she thought. The thought was too wistful and dim to be dismay. It saw the beauty, it saw the innocence below, it saw the opportunity. The thought was like regret.

  ‘It’s called a Comedy,’ said the graph. ‘Will it be funny?’

  ‘Not funny,’ Milena said. ‘Just happy. Not the same thing.’