by Geoff Ryman
‘The tapestry sure is pretty,’ said Mike Stone.
The tapestry hung in the air, for those who were Snide to see it. Mike Stone was not Snide.
‘Was Heather helping you? Was Heather there?’ Mike asked.
Milena settled back. ‘Heather’s always there.’ From time to time Heather would emerge, to help drive down the visions that came with Terminal empathy. Milena let her emerge sometimes, to talk to Al. Heather would die too, when Milena did.
‘She’s a big help,’ said Mike. Something in the way he said it was as if he understood.
Milena had grown imperious, on her cushions, under blankets. ‘How would you know?’ She drew the blankets about her, nestling down so that she was looking straight up at the sky. She was cold. ‘I spent the rest of the afternoon wondering what to do about all of this.’ She let a bird-like hand drop towards the things on the floor. ‘Most of that is Rolfa’s. I want the papers to go in trust for her to her sister, Zoe. But not to anyone else in her family, just Zoe. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ murmured Mike Stone, leaning against the balcony doorway. He preferred to stand rather than sit. He preferred to spend most of the day in another room, away from Milena. He knew he annoyed her.
‘The paper with the music written on it—not the score, you stupid man, the notes, there, those! That should go to Cilla and no one else. It was Jacob who remembered the music, and Cilla who gave me the paper, and it was very precious. This cross was Jacob’s and I want you to have that.’
‘Thank you,’ whispered Mike Stone.
‘Don’t get morbid,’ said Milena. ‘I’d like a drink. A whisky. Neat. Hard.’ It seemed to Milena that she had spent her life doing things for other people. Now she wanted to be served.
Shuffling his feet, Mike Stone worked his swollen buttocks around and waddled into the kitchen. The sound of his feet enraged Milena. Couldn’t he pick them up? The burgeoning growth in her stomach was not and as noticeable now as a late pregnancy. She had dreams in which she gave birth to monsters. ‘Quick!’ said Milena, suddenly fierce. She wanted that drink.
Then there was a voice, like a virus, hot in her inner ear. God, it whispered, must be a distiller.
‘Did you say something?’ Milena demanded.
‘No,’ came Mike’s voice, and the sound of waddling.
‘It’s going to start any minute!’ Milena was impatient. Canto Thirty Three. Dante and his goddamned numbers and star charts. You couldn’t change a thing without making a mistake.
Shuffle, shuffle, waddle, waddle. Where was he with that drink?
‘You sound like a duck,’ she said, bitterly. Her face was stringy, sour; she could feel it, pulling in on itself like shoe leather that had been salted by wet pavements in winter. She wanted to say and think beautiful things, but there wasn’t time. She wanted to step back and view her life as a whole but a thousand tiny things, blankets and pain and boredom, nibbled at her like Mice. It was as if Mice were swallowing up the last crumbs of her life.
‘Thank you,’ she said, taking the drink, pursing her lips, and sniffing. The whisky was harsh on her tongue.
‘Are you comfortable, darling?’ Mike asked. He moved so slowly these days, like a boulder rumbling, rolling.
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine, sit down before you hurt yourself.’
What did it add up to, a life? An accumulation of memories, scattered, discordant, buried so deeply most of them never surfaced again. We don’t leave much of a dent behind, she thought. A few things to be given away and some ash scattered on a favourite place. Milena’s ash was going to be thrown to the River. She belted down two more mouthfuls of the drink, and immediately felt queasy. She put the glass down.
And you only used to drink tea, said the voice.
‘I’ll drink what I like,’ insisted Milena, aloud.
‘Something else, darling?’ Mike Stone asked.
‘No,’ she replied exasperated. ‘I’ve got my drink haven’t I? What else would I need? It tastes like shit. Was it the good whisky?’ Mike rocked in his chair trying to get up. ‘No,’ said Milena, suddenly savage, angered by her own unfairness to Mike. ‘Just sit there!’
I shouldn’t have had that drink, she thought and felt a kind of weight descend. It was as if something were pushing her deeper into the chair. It was as if the chair were spinning. There really was something terribly wrong. She knew it as soon as she felt it, and then denied it.
She pursed her lips and sat up again, as far as she could.
‘Why doesn’t it start!’ she exclaimed.
Below, the Bees began to stir. It was most strange. They were not talking in unison.
Mike Stone remembered something. He leaned forward and picked up the dirty lump of felt. He put Piglet in Milena’s lap. Milena stroked his ears. Milena and Piglet watched the Comedy together every evening, as if part of Rolfa were still there.
A trumpet sounded in the sky. Every other night since June it had announced a Canto of the Comedy.
Light, like aurora borealis, played on the horizon.
Then the Comedy arose, like a new planet. Each night the end of the previous Canto was played again.
Dante himself seemed to climb up over the edge of the world. In the last Canto he passed through the uppermost level of Purgatory through the fire that purified those whose only sin had been to love. The homosexuals walked the circle in the opposite direction from the others. The sin of Caesar, Dante called it. The sin of love was the highest sin, the last that needed expiation. Love was burned away, and then came elevation to the Earthly Paradis, Eden.
There, in Eden, Dante had drunk the waters of Lethe and his memory had been cleansed of sin. The destruction of memory set him free.
‘I really shouldn’t have had that whisky,’ said Milena. The Bees were talking more loudly. They were disagreeing. ‘She wants to see it!’ one of them, a woman, was saying quite plainly in the darkness.
Dante climbed, bringing Eden with him. The sky overhead was full of trees. Eden was Archbishop’s Park, by Lambeth Bridge.
It was the Park as Milena remembered it on her birthday. Light flowed in and out of the trees, as Rolfa’s music flowed. But there was one new tree.
It was superimposed, slightly floating, on the memory of the Park. It was a huge tree, with graceful dangling branches delicately supporting leaves like those of a maple. Its bark was in sections like a puzzle. In the Comedy and in reality, the tree was called the Tree of Heaven. The sight of it made tears start in Milena’s eyes, though she did not know why. She did not remember where she had ever seen a Tree of Heaven before.
A costermonger’s cart had been chained to the Tree of Heaven. It represented truth. In Dante, it represented the real Church, to be borne away by the dragon, the old serpent. This Comedy was two allegories, one old, one new, both intelligible to an audience of viruses.
The old cart was taken over by the Vampires of History and the Beast that Was and Is Not. The old snake’s skin glistened with light and in the light of its scales were glimpsed old scenes, ghostly faces. The snake was history. The snake was memory. It stole the truth, to a clashing and banging of Rolfa’s music. The end of the previous Canto had been recapped. The new and final Canto was to begin.
There was a moment of silence, of darkness.
Out of the silence, and into the silence said the voice in Milena’s ear.
‘Will you stop talking!’ she said, turning on Mike Stone. He stared at her blankly. It wasn’t him, thought Milena. So who is talking? She pressed a hand across her forehead.
Voices began to sing in Dog Latin. They were the Naiads. The viruses knew they represented the seven cardinal and three theological virtues. Milena made them real people. We are all virtues, now.
There was Billy the King, and Berowne. There was Hortensia. There was Jacob, and Moira Almasy. There was Peterpaul, and Al, and Heather. There was the Zookeeper. And there was Chao Li Song.
Deus venerunt gentes, they sang.
I don�
�t want to hear this now, thought Milena. Her head swam. The very walls and air sang at her, and the light seemed to dazzle, as if she had a migraine. I’m too ill. She could go inside, but there would be no escape from the light, from the sound.
And she saw all the faults. There was a slight jerk of transition here. Unlike the text of the Comedy, a complete Psalm was sung.
The Naiads were singing Psalm 78. There was no clue in Dante or the opera as to how much of it should be sung. There had been a note from Rolfa in the great grey book. See setting of Psalm, the note had said.
Where? What setting? Milena had always wondered. When the orchestration by the Consensus arrived there was a setting of the complete Psalm. From nowhere.
Milena fondled Piglet. She stroked his ears. He was wearing out.
Suddenly his zipper burst, as the virtues sang.
Piglet split open and a tiny black book slipped out of him.
Something silent, something hidden, something dark. The flickering light in the sky reflected on gold lettering on the binding. HOLY BIBLE said the words.
Milena’s hand fluoresced to make light to read by. She opened the book. The Old and New Testament said the words.
And in writing, underneath it—For an audience of viruses.
‘Oh my God,’ said Milena.
She flicked through the pages. There, almost infinitesimally small, there were staves and notes. How small could Rolfa’s writing get? How small and hidden in the dark. It was as if Rolfa wrote fractally, each part leading to a smaller part.
‘Mike! Mike!’ Milena cried out. She held out the book to him, open, her hand shaking. ‘Mike! She did it again! She set the whole ficken Bible to music!’
Mike took it from and looked at it, stunned. Each word of the King James version had been given a note.
And Milena knew then. There would be other books.
‘Mike,’ she said. ‘Have them search. Have them look all through her house. There will be more. There will be others.’ Milena made a guess.
‘Have them look,’ she said, ‘for a complete Shakespeare. Have them look for Don Quixote.’
Have them look for A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Milena lay back, suddenly queasy.
It wasn’t meant to be performed. It was all more original than that. For an audience of viruses the notes said, and I didn’t understand. It’s lazy just to listen to music—Rolfa had said that and I didn’t understand. It wasn’t written to be performed! She said that, too, the last time I ever saw her.
The Comedy wasn’t a new kind of opera. It was a new kind of book.
A book you read and while you read, your viruses turned it into music. Like the words Satie added to his piano pieces—there only for the pleasure of the pianist, and not to be recited to an audience.
The performance was all my idea.
Milena was giddy, giddy again, as if weightless. The fire water in her stomach burned. ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ she said. Mike tried to rock to his feet, to get a bowl or a towel. He was too late.
Milena, to her surprise, was too weak to swing her legs off the chair. Vomit spewed all down her chin and over her blankets and dress. Piglet would now smell of adulthood sick as well.
‘Oh, Milena,’ said Mike, in sympathy.
‘Ficken Naiads,’ said Milena, as he fought his way to his feet.
Milena lay helpless on her bed, and looked at Lucy. Lucy was Beatrice. Beatrice was Wisdom. She looked on calmly, with a faint smile and sang in an aged voice:
Modicum et non videbitis me;
Et iterum…
A little while, and you shall not see me, my beloved sisters,
And again, a little while, and you shall see me…
Lucy, who had disappeared, had somehow recorded all of her part in the Comedy. Another strangeness.
Milena lay still, as Mike folded away the sick-covered blanket. Things like that did not matter any longer. Beatrice’s face mattered now. This Beatrice had gone on ageing. She was no longer beautiful except in the ways her face had crinkled, in its ruggedness like the rocks. She looked immortal, as if she had gone sailing on, resolving human weakness, discarding as unnecessary the human beauty of youth. The Queen of Dante’s soul, his love, his reminder of goodness. More stern than the rocks, a love as deep as the Earth, whispered in memory, and now restored on top of a mountain in a forest.
People don’t love like that, thought Milena. Not for a lifetime with just a memory.
And on that hill the voice in her ears said, a small boy and his bear will always be playing.
‘That’s the wrong opera!’ shouted Milena.
Then the helicopters came. There was a great shuddering in the air, and a shadow fell as if materialising out of the darkness and moonlight itself, blue-black and gleaming. It turned around over the pavement, over the heads of the Bees, scattering dust, lifting up their human foliage and rattling it, making a sound like the ocean.
‘Leave them alone!’ begged Milena, too weak to move on her long chair. The Bees hurt no one: they left after each night’s performance; this was the last night; why come now?
Two helicopters. They landed, springing on their sled-like feet, the Bees retreating to the walkways and the walls. The blades kept spinning. Milena felt the air rush past her face. It was as if she were moving at a hundred miles an hour.
‘Mike?’ she asked, but the words were drowned in the sound of the rotors.
Mike was standing, looking out over the balcony.
‘No!’ a sea of voices seemed to sigh all together.
‘They’re fighting!’ shouted Mike Stone. ‘They’re fighting the Garda.’ Outside their front door, Piper began to howl, ya-roo like a dog singing at church bells.
‘What?’ asked Milena, and a bubble of something seemed to burst out of her mouth.
‘Lie back, Milena. Don’t worry. I’m here.’
Mike Stone, astronaut, thought Milena. What can you do against the Consensus?
‘They’re coming inside,’ said Mike, pointing, voice raised.
Piper wailed. His voice broke. It became a human shout. Toddling on his knees, Piper came into the room, stammering, howling. Then he stood up, like a man. Piper ran on two legs, spinning in circles towards her. ‘Milena!’ he shouted quite plainly. ‘Milena.’ Piper had remembered how to talk.
‘Piper,’ she whispered, and he came, weeping. He knelt beside her, doglike again and she had time to touch him behind the ears.
Then, looming through the door came men covered in white plastic with clear plastic facemasks. They shone torches about the darkened room and then strode with great nimbleness towards Milena. It was so nimble, it looked like a comedy double-take, a piece of elegant, exaggerated performance. With beautiful, dancelike weaving, their arms laced her up in tubes. Tubes were inserted into her nostrils. A wafer, thin, small, translucent was placed on her tongue. Milena could no longer talk.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Mike Stone with a kind of numb helplessness.
A litter was unfolded as from nowhere. Milena, limp and heavy as clay, felt herself hoisted, helpless to resist. Lifted up, lowered, in a swoop that was delicately timed to avoid making her sick again.
‘Taking her to be Read,’ said one of the men in white, answering Mike finally, kneeling down with his back to him. ‘We’ve only just caught her in time.’
As if all of the Earth was falling away Milena felt herself lifted up. One of the men in white snapped white resin fingers and pointed. ‘The chair,’ he said. Milena turned her head. Her head was heavy, and hung unsupported by her neck over the edge of the litter. She looked behind her to see Mike helped back into his chair. The men in white kneeled around that too.
Piper was held back by his collar. He strained against it, gasping. ‘Don’t go!’ he called. ‘Don’t go!’ A gloved hand gently lifted up Milena’s head, as she shifted further onto the litter.
In the sky Lucy was singing, looking back over her shoulder. ‘Brother,’ she san
g in Dante’s Italian, ‘why don’t you dare to question me, now you are coming with me?’ Then Milena was borne away.
She heard Piper howling as she was carried down the hospital staircase. With a bustle she was carried along the hospital corridors. Light blazed from the hands of the Garda sweeping over the glinting, flowing surface of the Coral, making it yellow, making it flutter. The Coral sang: the Comedy embedded in it, ringing with human voices in some kind of extremity. The walls thumped like an angry neighbour. The monstrous egotism, she thought. The monstrous egotism to put this on, to flood every space in the world with it, to drive out the silence, to hammer the heads of the children, of the fragile, of the ill. Who wants this? Who cared about Naiads and medieval allegory?
The white men carried her into pandemonium.
Bees were pasted, writhing, against the walls of the hospital, held by the tubes. The tubes worked their way blindly along the ground, whiplashing around ankles and arms, hauling Bees up and away in the light from Lucy’s face. Lucy shook her head with a sad smile.
‘Milena!’ the Bees wailed with loss, holding out their arms to her. ‘Don’t go!’
Around the helicopters the Bees had linked arms. Two white men stepped forward. They had things in their hands that looked like frozen lizards. Light leapt from them. The Bees made a sound like falling rain. A passage had been cleared. Briskly, the white men ran, the litter jostling. Deft hands kept tubes in place, deft feet stepped over fallen bodies.
Then a wave of Bees broke around them, hands raised. They struck the Garda full in their clear plastic masks. Both the Garda and the Bees reeled backwards. Any pain the Bees inflicted they also felt themselves. ‘Take the pain. Take the pain,’ they told each other, and broke again against the Garda. A Bee woman was trying to wrest the litter from the grasp of the Garda. She quivered, cowering, hands fluttering, eyes screwed shut.
‘They are taking you! The Consensus wants you. Swallow you!’
All Milena could do was stare, weakly. No, she thought, I don’t want this, no. The cancer in her, hot and heavy and victorious, blazed out at the Bees with terrible life. As Milena came near them, they doubled up or dropped to their knees, as surely as if they had been struck. The woman fell away.