The Child Garden

by Geoff Ryman

  ‘Let’s just stop,’ said Toll.

  Milena opened her eyes again. She opened her eyes again, and that meant she had to start rocking again, back and forth, from side to side, like an autistic child.

  Cilla looked stricken. She walked forward, playing with the rings on her fingers. She leaned over the counter and looked into Milena’s eyes, or rather tried to. The exchange was cut off by the mirror.

  ‘Milena. Is all of this too much for you?’

  ‘No,’ said Milena, hard, determined.

  ‘It’s a huge project and needs professional imaging. There’s no shame in admitting that.’

  ‘You’ve done your best and it hasn’t worked.’ Toll Barrett was less sympathetic. Peterpaul was a Singer and refused to speak if it meant a choice between stammering and sounding absurd. He said nothing, but his eyes were heavy on her.

  Milena went very still and quiet, closing her eyes. ‘We’re going to try again,’ she said, her face taut. She would not give in. The others sighed.

  ‘Hello everyone,’ said a familiar voice, ‘Having a good time I hope.’

  The voice was strained, like a violin string tuned too tightly. Milena felt everything in her pull tight. There was a kind of ache, all along her scalp. She opened her eyes and looked around.

  Thrawn was in the room. Thrawn was wearing a bright autumnal print, but it couldn’t disguise the depredations that had been made in her face. The mouth was sagging to one side. The mouth tried to smile, and failed, as if pulled down by weights hung from wires on her face. Her hair had not been combed for weeks. It was in clumps, lumpy uneven strands that fell into her eyes, or stood up at angles. This is how Thrawn is really looking. This is what this is doing to her. Milena found she could not speak.

  ‘Anyone mind if I watch?’ Thrawn asked. ‘I just thought I’d pop in and see how it’s going. You must be nearly finished by now. How long has it been since you started? Over two months, isn’t it?’

  Milena still said nothing. Silence.

  ‘Right,’ said Toll Barrett. ‘See what you think of this.’

  He replayed what had just been recorded.

  The mountain, the pass, the leopard, the lion, the music again, gone over so often it had become almost nauseatingly dull, Rolfa’s beautiful music made unpalatable by long hours of failure. And there it was again, the unreal, mottled flare of light around the lion’s feet. The stars were bleary overhead.

  ‘Don’t look at the composite,’ said Milena, to Toll. ‘Look at Thrawn. Just keep looking at Thrawn.’

  Toll turned. Milena reached down into her bag for the flask.

  ‘If you’re having trouble,’ said Thrawn, in a wary voice, offering genuine help. ‘I could come in, brush these up for you.’ Her eyes were round and sad.

  ‘Just watch her, Toll.’ Milena unscrewed the cup from the top of the flask. She filled the cup full of water.

  I fling the water at the light of the image and it is distorted, and she is shown to be a hologram. What a waste of water. Milena sipped it thirstily and looked at Thrawn. Milena saw the worn face and the wild hair. Each hair was visible, individual, out of place, and the wrinkles about the mouth did not float about the face but were embedded in its flesh.

  Is that a hologram? Could that possibly be a hologram? What if Thrawn is really here? If I throw water over her and she is really here, that will simply convince everyone that I’m the one who has gone crazy.

  Milena scanned Thrawn, looking at her for some flaw, some line of light. It was perfect. There was even a depression in the seat cushion. That’s real, Milena decided. You’re actually here. Who is doing the cubing, then? Is anyone doing any cubing?

  Or maybe, she thought, maybe it’s me. Maybe I am mad.

  Her arms seemed to be made out of stone. They weighted her down and wouldn’t move. Maybe my mind has turned on me. Maybe it is my mind that is making those horrible images. If that is so, then the first step to being cured is to admit it. Admit that my mind has gone.

  ‘Those flaws have been added,’ said a voice. ‘That’s sabotage.’

  Milena looked around, and there, by the door, was Al the Snide. He looked nervous but grim, thin and vulnerable in his farmer’s robes.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ demanded Cilla, enraged. She still had not forgiven Al. ‘This is a private recording. You can just Slide, Snide, out of here!’

  ‘Yah, I’m Snide. I can read thought,’ said Al. ‘Reformation is thought. I can read it too. You ought to know that someone has cubed in those flaws. I can read thought and it’s Thrawn McCartney.’

  All of them went still. Thrawn went still, unmoving, smiling slightly.

  ‘She’s been hounding Milena, following her around with holograms, very nasty ones. And, she’s also hologrammed things right inside the eyes. So Milena can’t see. That’s why the mirrors.’

  ‘What?’ said Cilla, something rising in her voice. ‘Milena, is this true?’

  Milena nodded her head, up and down.

  ‘If she’s doing all that, what’s she doing sitting there?’ asked Toll Barrett.

  ‘That’s not a human being,’ said the Snide. ‘There’s nothing there. That’s an image, a mirror image. She’s looking into a mirror, and sending the image to us.’

  ‘Could anybody else do this?’ Thrawn asked, standing up. She twirled around, in place. Her feet touched the carpet. They left depressions in the carpet behind them. The image of a depressed carpet was absolutely opaque, in focus, properly shaded, no flares or edges of light.

  ‘Is this or is this not the best hologram you’ve ever seen?’ Thrawn began to weep. Cilla, the Soundman, Toll, Peterpaul all looked on in shock.

  ‘So why are you all cutting me out?’ the image asked. ‘Why does everyone always have to cut me out?’

  Milena picked up her cup of water.

  Thrawn was pleading. ‘You don’t know what I could do for the Comedy. I could give you angels, and heaven, I could give you the music so clear, I could put you down on the ground so firmly, people would think that the sky had grown rocks.’

  ‘You could take us to hell, too,’ said Milena. And she flung the water at her.

  Thrawn broke apart, refracted. Part of her face was in droplets, upside down in the air.

  ‘My God,’ said Toll Barrett.

  Milena began to weep. ‘Whenever I’m alone,’ she said, and flung more water at her. The water was full of hate, as bitter as gall. With each lashing, part of Thrawn was pulled onto the wall and spattered against it. ‘Whenever I want to sleep.’ Another lashing of water, like a whip. ‘She puts holograms in my eyes! She puts pieces of herself onto the floor! She makes me see things! Hear things!’

  Thrawn stood still, hands clasped in front of her, as if pious, silent and weeping herself.

  Toll put his arms around Milena and Milena shuddered. She dropped the cup and the water spilled over her hot thick trousers.

  ‘Oh thank God,’ she said, breathing out with relief. They had all seen it, all of them. They all knew. And she wasn’t crazy, she wasn’t crazy at all. Cilla was stroking her hair. Thrawn looked on for a moment longer, and then the hologram wasn’t there.

  Cilla stayed with Milena, while Toll and Peterpaul went to Milton, and told him what had happened. Milena never saw what followed. A delegation visited Thrawn’s rooms and took all the equipment back. There was one portable machine which had vanished, along with Thrawn. She would never work for the Zoo again, and when she was finally found, she would be Read, and wiped clean.

  Sometime during the confusion, the Snide slipped away, to a new disguise.

  And finally as Cilla and Milena sat talking there came a familiar drumming on the roof. They both looked up.

  ‘That’s rain,’ said Cilla. ‘Milena, that’s rain!’

  They ran out onto the concrete walkways, under blue-black skies and the rain drove down in droplets the size of sparrow’s eggs, and everyone ran out of the buildings, holding up their hands towards the skies, looking u
p at the clouds, letting themselves be pelted with the hot raw eggs of rain. They danced in circles, in each other’s arms. From all over the city, came the sound of singing: Handel’s ‘Water Music,’ ‘Singing in the Rain.’ Milena and Cilla and Peterpaul and Toll all danced together round and round as the surface of the Thames was made rough with rain, and tiny rivers ran down the slopes of its cracked dry river bed.

  And as they danced, a ghost appeared briefly, a dim image under grey skies, starved of light, scattered by raindrops. It sang, too, in a thin, unsteady wheedling voice.

  Thrawn was still trying to join in.

  A spindle-thread of gravity reached out all the way to Alpha Centauri. Milena could feel it in her head, and she could feel the forces of attraction tugging at her and at the Earth.

  You could do worse than marry him said Bob the Angel. He felt like a thought in her own head. You need protection, Milena.

  Milena was going to say, from what? But then she remembered Thrawn.

  An image of exposure of loss, a sense of emptiness came to her from Bob. You are Bad Grammar. That was the implication.

  ‘They know about me,’ said Milena. ‘Why haven’t they Read me?’

  They need you, said Bob.

  Isn’t it strange, how the stars are still beautiful? In the concentration camps of the twentieth century, they must have looked up and thought how strange it was that there could still be stars and beauty.

  Why do they need me?

  Oh, said Bob, they have a project, wilder than this. They need someone for it. They need someone who can mould the light. The Consensus is tired of being alone. It wants to reach out.

  Instead of explaining, Bob the Angel gave her the idea whole, the image, its size, its function. He gave her the diagram again. He showed her the Angels, moving out in lines, radiated from a tiny Earth, from a tiny sun. No matter how many of them were sent out, they radiated away, into infinity. They did not move in parallel lines. The lines spread apart from each other. Trajectories of exploration that had appeared to be almost side by side when they left Earth were eventually spread so far apart that whole stars, whole galaxies were lost between them.

  The universe was too big to fill, no matter how many Angels streamed up the lines between the stars. The Consensus wanted to do more than explore.

  It wanted to call.

  Somewhere else in the universe, there must be another consciousness also reaching out. If they reached out for each other along the forces of attraction, and they met, they could give each other the universe they had explored.

  The Consensus was going to call for the Other.

  So it isn’t for Dante that they’ve done this, thought Milena, or for the music, or for anything else. They need to rehearse the techniques. They need to rehearse me.

  Milena let it settle over her, the reality of the power by which she was held. I’ve always known that. I have always know 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 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, Ozymandias, 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 the 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.