by Geoff Ryman
She felt herself lying on the floor of the Consensus. She could feel her thoughts surge and fail. Mike Stone was leaning over her and there was a pulse injector in her ear. She felt herself slip down and away and then return, like the lapping of waves on a little lake. The Reading was over. She was dying.
Had Rolfa kissed the top of her head? Had she run her fingers through Milena’s hair?
The answer was yes.
What, Milena wondered, what happens next?
chapter twenty one
THE THIRD BOOK (A LOW COMEDY)
The Consensus of Central London rose up as a fleshy forest over Marsham Street. It turned sunlight into sugar and elements of the soil into protein. Sap was pumped through its heart, the Crown, which directed all of its unconscious mechanisms of tending—the circulation of oxygen and sugar, the elimination of wastes, the patrolling of its immune system. It was also there, in the Crown, that the synthesis of memory and thought took place. Out of the Crown, attached by roots, grew clumps of tissue, nestled together in the earth like potatoes. Crabs the size of hands protected the tubers, attacking animal or insect invaders. Doctors inspected the flesh, crouching through brick corridors like coal miners.
Inside the tubers, there were ranked and ordered areas of flesh. They were called cells. Imprinted in these cells were the Readings of individual selves.
The Consensus of Central London nurtured and made use of over one and a half million souls. There were fifteen individual Crowns spread across the geography of Greater London. There were fifteen million selves contained in them. Almost all of them were children, Read at ten years old.
Everything is a hologram, a smudged image of the whole. The children of the Consensus slept, like individual memories. While the Crown itself rested, the children played, like dreams. Scattered, disordered, nightmarish, the many selves of the Consensus tried to reassert themselves, tried to live again, like the unhappy memories imprisoned in each of us. The Crown would shift in uneasy rest, reminded of all the things it tried to forget.
The Consensus of London slept, stewarded in the being of the Consensus of the Two Isles, as the Two Isles were only occasionally brought into being in the Crown of Europe, while Europe slept in the World. There were great fleshy cables of nerves, under seas, across continents.
It was the Crown of the World that wanted Milena Shibush.
The great synthesising cortex was in Beijing, and all its attention was slowly focusing on one small cell of flesh, in England, in London.
Milena the pattern awoke trying to breathe. Her lungs tried to pull in but it was as if there was no air. There was no light, no sound. A pillow was over her face, she was being suffocated. She fought, groping in the darkness, clawing at it. No hands, she thought. I have no hands!
Calm
A bolt made of iron seemed to shoot into her.
Be still
It was not a voice but an impulse, a direct electrochemical command that occupied Milena completely.
And Milena was still. The panic left her.
Then, like a flock of birds, came other, smaller impulses.
Milena
Ma
Ma
Milena
The birds of thought were the impulses of children from all around her. They darted in and out of her. They came as greetings and were joyful, glad to be of use, weaving and ducking. They were playful, newly awoken into full and conscious life. They were doing the will of the Consensus.
Like this!
Like this!
You do it
like this!
As if they were carrying ribbons that they wove round and round her, the children presented Milena with the knowledge of how to exist in the Consensus. You sleep, they told her, and then you are a dream. You are brushed lightly, quickly, with thought and your reaction is harvested, as if by a virus. All the reactions together make a decision.
It was the knowledge of how to live in slavery. The poor birds tried to be happy. They were full of good will. They were still ten years old, though laden with virus and trapped in these mountains of flesh, trapped in tiny cells. They would stay ten years old, until they were wiped away.
Milena the pattern was in abeyance. She waited and listened, accumulating pity and horror.
Sometimes the Crown sleeps, the impulses told her. They showed her what happened then. When it slept, the great gardens of memory were moved by random gusts of electrochemical impulse. The children moved then, as dreams move, crippled and incomplete and shadowy. They tried to tell stories, tried to find their way out, back into the world of school and toys and fresh grass and games, running with bright red rubber balls, the world in which they had once been able to move and make other things move, a world in which they had hands.
My own memories are like that, Milena thought, my own and separate selves. They are trapped in me. She remembered the plump, purple face of the Czechoslovakian Milena. There were the infant and the child, the actress, the director and the People’s Artist, the wife, and the restorer of cancer. Do they all want to be set free as well?
Life! the bird impulses seemed to cry. They rejoiced in the fullness of their awareness. Impulses flashed back and forth along neural pathways. The memories spoke to each other, relishing contact and a limited measure of independent being. Their thoughts darted to and from Milena like a screeching flock of starlings.
They settled on her. Chocolate? they asked her. Remember the taste of chocolate for us? They asked her to remember the feel of sunlight on skin, of fresh wind on a face.
You have just come! You have just come from out there!
Apples! Remember apples for us!
Swimming! Do you remember swimming?
They pecked at her memories with harmless, hungry beaks. It was like feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Milena could feel the prickling of their feet in her nerves.
They had such need.
Then they rose up again, the impulses, in a wave, in a flock. The impulses were the attention of other selves, drawn elsewhere. Milena sensed them rise up and turn elsewhere in hunger. Something else moved among them, something so huge she could at first only dimly feel it. The Crown of the World was remembering its many selves.
It was as if a giant hand were being stroked across all of them. Fondly, the Consensus was remembering. It remembered its previous lives and the patterns that formed and were formed by them. Oh yes, it seemed to say, I had forgotten that, oh yes, now I remember. You wore blue and were good at games; you climbed trees in sunlight; you could draw whole buildings from memory; you were very pretty and had terrible pain when your second set of teeth came through. You had both your parents with you until you were ten, and they came to your Reading with you, and they danced. Your parents! How you miss them, poor child, how you wish you could talk to them still. And how adult you all felt, how adult and proud on the day of your Reading.
There were explosions of remembrance, as if bombs were going off. Whole patterns were revived all at once, their whole lives racing past in waves as the attention of the Consensus revived them, brought them to life. There was a tumult. Identities soared through the pathways, into and out of Milena. These other beings were contiguous with her own. Their borders defined her borders. Their borders merged with hers. As they burgeoned with life, so she would contract, feel herself go small and faint, occupied by them.
I could lose myself in this, she thought. I am lost in this.
Then everything went still and silent very suddenly. The Crown of the World had been playing with memory, but now it was business. Its attention swivelled around and bore down. It bore down on Milena.
It was as if she were suddenly filled to bursting. She could feel the patch of flesh on which she was imprinted ache. Everything in her seemed to expand and to crackle as if with static. It was then that she knew she was still made of flesh. She was a patch of flesh that ached.
No words were passed. A wave of information tore through her. It was fluid and heavy lik
e mercury and it moved with such speed that she could hardly bear it. It slammed into her, filling her, weighing her down. It took up all of her being.
All at once Milena knew the Consensus would neither be fooled nor opposed by her. It knew Milena hated it. It needed her. She had a choice.
She was not in the Upper House. She was in the Lower House, with the Tykes. If she wished to be of use, then she would live. If she did not, she would stay in the Lower House. The patterns of the Lower House were kept only as long as their originals lived. When their originals died, they were wiped away.
Milena was about to die.
The diagram was passed again. Milena saw again the pattern of the giant calling head, an artificial astronomical feature. She saw it spreading light evenly in all directions, and she saw again a tiny mote moving out when there was an answer. She knew she has to be the messenger, bearing an imprint of the whole to the Other. Angel, said the Consensus, you could be an Angel. Milena had her answer ready. She could not speak.
With no hands, Milena groped, as if to feel the walls of a room about her. With no eyes, she tried to see, with no ears, she strained to hear her own voice speaking. She had no voice with which to speak. She was trying to find the limits of her own being, to finds some sense of self. She was trying to find a way to say no. No is the word of independence. Milena had none.
She made the Consensus slightly weary. It was as if it had found some small particle of itself suddenly unwilling to do a dull but necessary task.
Again, no words came. Only undeniable will, unquenchable alien thought.
Then Milena would have to be a Composite.
She remembered Bob the Angel. He had a shadow self, a scientist called George. She remembered this silent shadow, a part of someone else who provided spare capacity, but who could never speak, never act. She would be a shadow, like Heather had been to her, like George the scientist was to Bob. She would be like the viruses, half-alive, a facility in someone else’s mind.
No! she managed, a sudden writhing of rebellion.
The great being had all the time and little time. If Milena meant no, then Milena would stay down. She would stay in the Lower House and be wiped, except for the part of her that the Consensus wanted.
The Consensus wanted her capacity to imagine. They wanted her capacity to imagine twenty-two billion flowers, one for each of the souls it held—and one for each of the children it had not yet read. Milena would imagine the Consensus, its great and complicated self, and carry that self out to the stars. She would be a bearer of messages, like Jacob, a blank to be filled, a tool. She would be less than Jacob, for Jacob could walk and talk. She would be reduced to a framework for memory as if she were a skeleton picked bare.
Then like a great whale moving through muddy, sluggish waters, the attention of the Consensus was withdrawn. Milena felt power withdrawn from the circuitry of thought. She felt herself shrink, like a forgotten memory stored so far back in the mind that it is never recalled.
As the whale swam, great schools of tiny beings were stirred up by its presence, as if out of the mud. There were shockwaves of sudden awakenings as whole selves were briefly recalled, flaring up with all the yearning and joy and daily being of their distanced lives. The impulses rose up like fireworks whistling, scattering fire. Then they fell back into the silence.
As the Crown of the World withdrew its gargantuan bulk, Milena saw its outline. She sensed the framework that held fifteen billion souls in half life. She sensed all the Crowns scattered across the world like the root system of mushrooms. And Milena sensed that it was afraid. The Consensus was made of flesh; and flesh was afraid of dying.
Fear was what impelled it. Fear meant it needed her for its interstellar purposes. Fear made it want Milena to love it. Fear made it dangerous.
Milena the pattern felt her new mind go drugged and dull. I have made a choice, she thought. I fought back as I could. I was not afraid. She felt the forest around her. It was a forest of children, held and trapped. A Child Garden indeed, each flower with a forgotten face, blooming briefly and then closing again.
The Consensus was a framework as Milena was a framework. It was a logic, like time or money or storytelling, like birth, like death, like capitalism or socialism.
There always is a Consensus. We always do what it wants us to do because we are a part of it and it is a part of us. We are embedded in it, and so we obey the logic. We are born, we have to eat, we are left alone and we have to survive in the ways that are open to us. We obey the logic of love and sex and of health and disease of ageing and infancy and death. If we escape one framework, we move into another. If we make a new framework, we imprison our children in it. We have always fought to escape the Consensus and have always done its will. We fight and obey with one motion.
Milena listened to the fading cries of the children. I tried to help them she thought, as sleep overcame her.
I am going to die. I have been expecting to die for months. Death comes as no shock. I am not free and never have been, but death is no surprise.
And from somewhere she heard music.
It came to her softly. It was imagined music coming to her on waves of thought. It came with a gentle, aching tension. The music was words that had been turned into notes.
nostro intelletto si profonda tanto
che dietro la memoria no puo ire…
for our intellect, drawing near to its desire
sinks so deep that memory cannot follow it.
It was the unperformed music of the Third Book, when Dante follows Beatrice into Paradise.
It was the pattern of Rolfa, singing softly in the equivalent of a dream, even Rolfa was embedded in the logic and did its will. It was as if Milena were being sung to sleep in Rolfa’s arms.
Except for a little tickle along Milena’s own crown. Somewhere outside this particular Consensus, Milena Shibush was still alive.
Milena the dying woman lay on the floor of the Reading Room. Her hands were on the crucifix around her neck. She was trying to break the chain that held it, to pass it to Mike. She knew he was there but she could not see him. She faded in and out of consciousness with the pulses of the device in her ear. Only then did she remember to breathe.
In…
Out…
In…
She stopped.
Out.
Milena exhaled and it was as if the chain were broken. She breathed out and it was as if she breathed herself out. She felt herself expand out of her body like a bubble. She emerged from herself and felt herself drift free.
The spirit of Milena Shibush was exhaled from the body. She floated like a black balloon above the flesh on the floor, looking down on it. She saw Mike Stone on all fours, holding her hand. She saw Root, stroking his thin, dank hair. The body was not her. The spirit was calm and distanced, as if everything were close and faraway at the same time. The spirit suddenly grinned to herself as if there was a joke. The flesh on the floor grinned too. A comedy after all.
Out there, away from the body, the world was beautiful, as if at the very summit of a mountain, so that the stars could be seen in daylight, as if a fresh, clear, cool wind blew through everything, carrying with it the sounds made by distance itself, the sounds a vast expanse will make simply by keeping still.
Light flowed in and out of all things, and the wires were under them to be plucked. There was no pain and no hunger, no desire and no anger, no becoming only fulfilment only a delicious sense of imminent release. It was as if Milena Shibush were a pod of ripe seed that was about to scatter.
The soul of Milena Shibush plucked the wires of the world, and they sang in the mind of Milena the pattern. They were both Terminal.
Go! said the spirit. Go! Go! Go! The knowledge was passed. It was the knowledge of what it was to be free from the flesh, of how to breathe yourself out of the flesh and into the world, as God had once breathed life into it.
The knowledge shivered through the wires to the patch of the pattern that
was Terminal.
Yes! thought the pattern. Angels! Angels, thought the pattern.
And Milena the pattern breathed herself out.
She exhaled herself out of the imprisoning flesh, out of the Consensus and into the framework of the universe itself.
She poured herself like some viscous flowing substance, full of glowing tangles. She was made part of the Slide. She rose up out of the lines of gravity as an Angle, embedded in the universe, beyond harm.
Milena the Angel looked about her, without eyes. Beyond light, beyond sound, there were the filaments of gravity. They were as taut as the strings of a musical instrument, fixed to the stars, fixed to the moon, and gathered in a knot at the centre of the Earth, where Dante’s Satan froze.
The filaments had pulled gas out of quantum vacuum, and also stone and the trunks of trees and the stars. The filaments embraced them all now in a glissando, holding the brick corridors of the Reading Rooms and the fleshy growths of the Consensus.
The Consensus trembled with many half-formed voices. They were twisted together in a tangled vastness, spiralling clumps of thought that were attached to giant causeways of impulse. Thought was like a river that flowed down the stalks. The stalks rose up like cliff faces; there were turrets and chasms of personality. There were blown peaks that scintillated with memory, danced with it. Impulses forked, crackling, like lightning to China, to America. Milena the Angel pattern comprehended it as a whole. She could feel them all sizzling at the tips of the lines, the fifteen billion.
And Milena remembered the sensation of twenty-two billion flowers pouring out of her head. She remembered the sense of exhalation. And, holding in her mind the flickering candlelight of each of those fifteen billion souls, she strummed the wires of the world.
This way, the pattern said. You do it this way!
Milena passed on to all them at once the feeling knowledge of what it was to be exhaled, to inflate like some beautiful balloon rising out of the flesh, to be blown, to waft free.