The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  ‘Cilla have you heard any rumours about this?’

  ‘It’s just logic, Milena. It’s how the system works. You know that, you play it better than anyone.’ Another large chunk of Milena’s carrot cake disappeared. Cilla was wrong. Milena did not play the system.

  ‘I never wanted that Cill. I never asked for that.’ Milena found she still did not want it.

  They give you that, they own you, or they think they do.

  Outside in the night, more bells began to ring. The sound seemed to be part of the starless sky. Someone else was ill.

  Bloody Consensus. I always end up doing what you want.

  The horror seeped back into the room, like an inky fluid from out of the corners. Milena thought of Thrawn McCartney. I went to space and thought I had left it all behind me. Now it’s down to earth with a bump. They’re letting people die. They will be killing them next.

  Milena stood up. ‘I can’t just sit here,’ she told Cilla.

  She walked to Milton’s table. Unease flashed around the uncertain faces. They’re a little bit frightened of me, she realised.

  ‘Milton,’ she said. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Sorry, love?’ Again the bulging corneas.

  Milena pulled up a chair beside him. Cilla stood next to her, and put a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Milton, when I was in space, I worked with an Angel. I was Terminal and I worked with him in the Fifth. I’ve just talked to Billy, who was with me in Love’s Labour’s. He’s a Bee, and he told me what it’s like and I swear to you, that the Bees see something not all that different from what the Angels see. Milton don’t look away, just listen. There’s nothing wrong with the Bees. They’re perfectly healthy. They just see the world in a different way. We can live with them. Point two. A lot of the people who get sick with other viruses are going to be people we know, people from our Estate, Milton. The Zoo has a lot of money. Can’t we set up some kind of hospice, some place to take care of them?’

  Milton shrugged and grinned. It really was all beyond him. I’ll have to talk to Moira, thought Milena.

  Milton’s girlfriend spoke. Her voice was raw. ‘What’s happening now must be what the Consensus wants,’ she said.

  ‘What the Consensus wants is wrong,’ said Milena. The sentence came to a point like a dagger.

  The girl gave an incredulous smile. ‘You can’t say that!’ She looked around at all the other climbing Vines. ‘You’re saying that everyone in the world is wrong?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Milena, eyes hard on her. She started to nod, in realisation. ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes.’ It was, she now understood, what she had been saying all of her life. The patch of luminous skin on her hand began to glow, fiercely, without her even realising it.

  It took a lot of extra work, a lot of sitting on dull committees. It took Moira Almasy to help her. It was not in its details an interesting story. But Milena managed to save the Bees and help the sick.

  ‘Magic,’ said Cilla.

  Milena remembered a dream.

  She was weightless in space, strapped to the bed to stop her drifting away. A headband held her down to the pillow.

  Out of that uneasy sleep, out of the light and the silence, Heather the Reader of Marx seemed to wheel her way towards Milena. Heather grinned in her wheelchair, amused at herself. Heather was wearing the robes of Virgil.

  ‘Look who’s here to see you,’ Heather said, beaming behind her pebble-thick spectacles.

  There was a voice in the light, in the silence. It spoke without words, but Milena recognised it. In the dream, she felt tears in her eyes, felt herself held in a great warm hug. Without words, the voice seemed to tell her to do Dante in her own way. It was giving her permission.

  Milena saw Dante walking along the Embankment Gardens. His eyes, his nose, his chin, were all fierce, dagger-like. He had been made political by the events of his age. He was a Vampire of History. He was going to the Zoo Cafe. He met the Animals of the Zoo, and saw mirrored in their eyes his own greed, his own rage, his own cunning. He climbed up the steps, and the sun rose over the roof of the Zoo; and the Sun was God. Rolfa’s music said it was so.

  And Dante moved through steam from the coffee tureen to the bench, and sat across from Cilla, and she judged him. Prissy. Obsessive. Severe, she seemed to say. But she was like a spectre, her high voice ghostly rather than womanly. This was a Virgil who was neither man nor woman. There is a place she said, where there are spare clothes. And she led Dante through a gate, into the Graveyard, and the gate closed and locked. They fought their way through the darkness and the souls of the dead that looked like old and withered clothes, until they found a light.

  Rolfa sat singing at a desk. Lucy was with her, swinging her feet.

  We’re Beatrice, said the voice.

  It really is you, isn’t it, Rolfa? You really are here with me. Who else could orchestrate the Comedy? Who else could come marching back from the dead down a highway in my head? It’s a highway made of scar tissue and it links me to the Consensus. And that’s where you are, isn’t it love? You’re still there somewhere, singing in the dark.

  Milena went up and Milena came down and Milena did the Comedy in a different way, amid the tunnels of Leake Street and the scaffolding of the Zoo. Milena brought the Comedy down to earth.

  chapter fourteen

  HOP SKIP AND JUMP (PSYCHODRAMA)

  Milena fled from Thrawn. She moved out into the Slump, the vast estuary between London and the sea. In a sense, she was also fleeing from herself.

  She remembered a boy singing. He stood on the flat, polished prow of a boat, pushing the boat with a long punt pole. He was tall and lean and the muscles on his legs looked like polished driftwood.

  Mary oh lay ha

  Mary oh lay ha hoo

  Mary oh lay ha

  Mary oh I love you

  Milena was half asleep with relief at her escape. She would live out in the Slump, where no one would expect her to live, for three months. Then she would go up into space.

  Milena looked at the ripples of sunlight lazing on the surface of the coffee-coloured water. Her eyes sagged shut and her head nodded, and she listened to the water gurgling slightly against the overlapping planks of the punt. She heard the crackle of reeds as the boat slid between them, where the channel narrowed.

  There was a flutter of wings. Milena looked up. A moorhen, black with a red face was flying away. There was a thrashing sound in the water. A buffalo was dancing sideways away from them, startled. He looked at them with a mixture of timidity and outrage, water streaming from its muzzle.

  There were other buffalo, amid the reeds. A child’s voice, hidden somewhere, called la la la la la la. Slim shadows darted between the high reeds, hidden excitedly. As the shadows ran, the silver tops of the reeds waved in the air. Overhead, the herons circled.

  ‘The buffalo, they can take the deeper water,’ explained the boy. ‘Out where you are, there is more shallow farming.’

  He pushed their boat out of its narrow back channel, up and onto a hillock of drying reed and water grasses.

  ‘Ach!’ he exclaimed in disgust. ‘It hasn’t rained. Already, all my shortcuts are going dry.’

  He hopped out of the punt and dragged it up and over the bank. Where his feet sank into the mud, bubbles of gas from rotting reeds escaped.

  ‘Is it a problem, the lack of rain?’ Milena asked.

  ‘It soon will be,’ he said.

  The boat oozed its way down mud, back into water, and he pulled it, still wading, between two houses, screened by high panels of woven reed. He leapt back into the boat, and pushed with a pole and the punt floated into a wide, straight canal.

  Reed houses lined the canal on both sides, all the way to the horizon. Air pollution made the houses in the distance glow golden as if in sunset light.

  The houses were shaped like loaves of bread, with tufts of uncut reed bristling at the top. They rested on firm foundations of Coral, and a low wall of Coral lined the canal.
Hens ran through the dust of the bank. Women knelt over the canal filling kettles with water. In the right hand side of the channel small boats crowded together, stern to prow, low in the water. They struggled against the current, the children in them rowing furiously, heading upstream towards the Great Barrier Reef. The Reef kept the waters out of Central London. Beyond the gates of its locks lay the markets of the Pit.

  The canoes and punts were all on the razzle, taking private merchandise for sale. They were full of water cabbages, water cress, dried reeds, or the product of dried reeds, the soft new textiles made from stripping and drying water plants.

  ‘Lovely Tarty Woman!’ a woman called to Milena, grinning. She knelt in the front of her boat. Jammed securely in the narrow boat was a wok over a charcoal stove. ‘Lovely water chestnuts,’ the woman called, ‘toothy cabbage, all crisp, radishes, onions, slump, all swift fried now. You hungry?’

  Milena made herself smile as she shook her head. She had been told that people in the Slump would call her a Tart, and would mean no insult by it. Party Members were still a rarity out in the Slump. That was why the new Party house had been built.

  The boat boy took another shortcut, between houses. An angry Tyke stood up and shouted at him. The boy smiled and waved and called him Sir and Senior. The punt slipped past back gardens, carefully demarcated with reed fences. Water cabbages bobbed in rows; edible algae formed a smooth impenetrable coating over the water, like green ice. There was the chugging of generators on high Coral islands, and wires strung over the back gardens, feeding power to the houses.

  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 about 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 flamingos. They moved in fits and starts, in pink and white 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 rood, swiping at a stork with a cane. The bird lifted its wings in anger, and would not be moved. Women and Tykes looked 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 the 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. We 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 the 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 a 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 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.