Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

But in the quiet on the river it seemed to Milena that she saw something else moving among and through the people on the bridge. Something seemed to impel them forward, sweeping them along with it. It seemed to push behind them, and force its way out of them, pouring out of their eyes and mouths, making their hands leap and their feet spring. It was as if she were seeing the force of life, moving through them.

Milena looked at the people, looked at life, as if she were being borne away from it. What have I done? she asked herself, amid the sound of helicopters and church bells. Life had forced its way through her like a bush through soil. Life has a will. It needs things. It needs us to grow wings, or larger brains, or pads on our elbows, and we do. That’s how it was done, she thought, remembering the foliage growing out of Bees. Life had a need, and need hammered on the door of our genes until the genes were changed by will. That’s how we grew, up from the slime. We needed hands, and made them. Only now, Lord, now we know we can do it. It will all happen faster.

Milena saw the clouds over Lambeth Bridge. That’s how there are spiders in the sky. They thought themselves into that shape. She smiled. Give the Bees time, she told the helicopters. Give them time, and they will live up there, suspended between ice crystals on the tubes. Will you drive them from there too?

That’s what we are becoming. The Bees are our future. Life wants us to be more like plants, there’s not enough room on the planet now for hunters. We’re growing new shoots in so many directions at once, the Consensus will never be able to hold us. The Bees and Lucy and the GEs and the Singers. We’re a new forest growing out of the old. We’re pushing it back.

A big Thames barge slipped past them, making waves, making them rock. Root looked around the sail.

‘You comfortable now?’ Root asked.

Yes, yes in a way I am.

Milena fell asleep.

She woke up with a familiar, acrid tingling in her nostrils. It was the smell of home. It was the smoke of cremation from the Estate of Remembrance. There was the singing too, the undertakers warbling with their tongues, the mourners passing over their dead, singing old hymns. Milena saw flowers from the boats and biers bob past their boat. She did not look up.

Bees had been dumped in the Slump, and they had adapted so quickly that they were now a nuisance. They had grown huge flat pads like the giant lilies. They floated on them and fed on them. Milena saw that they had gathered around the graceful hangar of the Party Estate. She groaned and closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep.

She heard the Slump boys shouting at the Bees and felt the boat turn to the side and the boys push against the rooted human lilypads. ‘Shoo! Shoo!’ she heard Root shout. She felt a scraping of woven reed underneath the boat as it was pulled ashore.

‘Here, Lady,’ said one of the Boys.

The slopes of the tiny artificial island were covered in Bees.

Milena, Milena, Milena, said all the Bees all together, and there was a rustling of their many branches. Milena saw the faces of her neighbours, pinched and unhappy, staring out of their upper windows. The What Does stood guarding the door, a cloth wrapped around her face against disease. A charcoal stove was burning wet reeds to make smoke, to clear away the sickness.

There was a smell of coffee. The What Does husband was scrubbing the lintels with coffee from a bucket. He turned and looked up, and flung the rest of the coffee on the ground to make a path for walking on.

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said Root.

Overhead there was the sound of helicopters.

Milena stepped out of the boat onto the woven shore. She began to walk towards the Bees.

‘Where are you going?’ called Root in dismay. As Milena approached them, the Bees made a sound like many doves and arched their arms over their heads, to cut out some of her thought. Those on the shore waded backwards into the brown water. Milena stood on the shoreline, facing the water, which looked as heavy and golden as oil, a reflection of sunset heaving sluggishly on its surface.

‘You’ll have to go,’ Milena told the Bees. ‘If you stay, the Garda will come again, people will be angry. I am not going to be staying here anyway. I will be in hospital and I won’t be well. Try to stay away from me. Try to find places where you are safe and I will try to come to see you when I can.’

From out of the water two men came wading, one on all fours, carrying roses in his mouth. The other had lost all his teeth, and his golden hair had thinned to nothing on top. Uncombed coils of it hung matted down the side of his head. ‘Hello, Ma,’ he said, in a perfectly ordinary way. He was the King. ‘Remember Piper?’ He stroked the head of the dog-man.

‘Yes,’ said Milena, in a whisper.

‘He remembers you. He remembers that you saved him. He’s a good dog.’

Piper dropped the flowers at her feet, and stretched down low, looking up at her, tongue out of his mouth. There was eagerness and love in his eyes.

‘Good Piper. Good boy,’ whispered Milena and began to scratch him behind the ears.

Piper gave a yelp of pleasure and shook his bottom from side to side, trying to wag a tail he did not have.

‘He thinks you are his mistress,’ said the King.

You had to understand Bees to know that it was a sacrifice for them to give up Piper. They loved him. You had to understand Bees to know what a tribute it was for them to give Piper to her.

Milena sighed with weariness. Here I go again. She knew what she was going to do. ‘Come on men, Piper,’ she said, ruefully. ‘Come on boy. Or girl. Whichever.’

‘Home,’ said the Bees, all together, in chorus. ‘She takes him home!’ They were smiling.

‘What did I say?’ shouted Root. ‘I said you had to be the one who gets taken care of!’

‘You had all better go,’ Milena said to them. She stumbled as she walked up the coffee-washed pathway. Piper tried to caper about her ankles, but his knees were not sprung like a dog’s ankles.

‘You’re not taking that tiling!’ exclaimed Root.

‘He’s not a thing,’ said Milena, and her voice suddenly thickened and she found she was weeping. ‘He’s alive.’ To her that was suddenly the most precious thing.

The Bees began to withdraw, bowing and stepping onto the lilypads of their brethren. There was commotion in the water as roots pulled themselves free and pushed the lilypads away from the shore. As the helicopters turned back, as Piper nittered and wriggled and tried to pant, and as Root shook her head with misgiving, Milena began to climb the stairs that led to her home. She felt something sluggish in her loins, the ebbing of the life that still washed all about her in waves.

She opened her door, and Mike Stone came rushing forwards from the balcony, his face full of alarm, full of questions.

Milena tottered towards him, fell against him. ‘Mike,’ she said. ‘I’ve got cancer.’ It was not until Mike held her that she realised. She had made herself ill, out of love. But Love of what?

On Milena’s twenty-first birthday, she and her friends went for a picnic in Archbishop’s Park, near St Thomas’s Hospital.

Al the Snide carried the wine and the fruit juice. Cilia carried the basket of food and Peterpaul carried Mike’s chair. Mike had designed and built it for himself. It supported him from the shoulders and thighs, leaving his swollen buttocks to hang free. Mike had developed a waddle. He walked by shifting his hips from side to side and letting his feet follow. There was a football pitch in the park, covered in vividly red grit. Some boys who were playing on it stopped to laugh at him.