Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

Milena expended her strength by walking up to the boys. They saw her and fell silent, then shared embarrassed smiles. They knew they were going to be told off but they were nice enough to accept it as their due. They also knew who she was.

Milena was bald, and her head leaned forward insecurely on a thin neck, tendons straining. She had started to wear make-up, like an actress. Cilia put it on for her, giving her skin a lightly tanned, purple colour with a smear of silver around the eyes. The silver suited the purple but could not hide how deep the flesh had sunk into the sockets of her skull. Milena smiled with rose-coloured lips, knowing that she showed too much gum and that the grin made her look like a death’s head.

‘Don’t laugh,’ she told the boys gently, through the cane screen around the pitch.

The boys shuffled, looking at their feet. One of them had a nasty graze on his knee that trickled brown-black down his leg.

‘Someone had to carry you, before you were born,’ she told them. ‘Who knows, maybe you’ll be pregnant one day.’

The boys chuckled, shook their heads. ‘Oh, ta. Don’t think so.’

‘Maybe your wife will insist.’

‘She’ll be lucky,’ murmured one of the boys.

‘Are you sorry, lads?’ she asked them.

They nodded. Milena blew them a collective kiss. The Princess came up behind her, little Berry pulling in another direction. ‘Come with us, Milena,’ she sang, to the beginning of Faure’s Requiem. Requiem eterna. I know, thought Milena, I know she’s a Singer and cannot help her choice of music, but I wish she would sing something other than a requiem. It’s so mournful.

Little Berry lived with his mother now, and had done since the Princess had met Peterpaul. They were all Singers. Berry never talked. Sometimes now, especially when he was alone with Peterpaul and the Princess, he would not use words at all. When he was eating, he sang. Different foods had different themes. He sang them over and over, even with his mouth full, celebrating.

He wore a cowboy hat. Milena had worn one for a time, when her hair had started falling out, so he had wanted one too. The hat was black and red, and had a thong and a toggle that was pulled up tightly under his chin. There was circle of white cotton bobbles all around the underside of the brim. Berry loved his cowboy hat. For him, it was alive and there were particular songs devoted to it.

The Princess was trying to help Milena, supporting her by one arm, while pulling Berry, who was leaning with all his weight and all his being towards something he wanted. He sang about it to himself, but the adults couldn’t think what the song was about. The trees? The football pitch?

‘It’s Piper,’ said Milena. Terminals were also empaths with people as well, slightly Snide. As Milena weakened, her ability to Read people improved. ‘He wants to ride Piper.’

The Princess paused and looked up at Milena with a kind of helpless concern. Is she trying to find a song? Milena wondered. There are no songs that ask if a man who thinks he’s a dog can give the virus to your child.

‘It’s all right, Anna. I’ve checked. Piper is not infectious, not contagious, nothing.’

A Speaker could have lied and said that was not a worry. Singers couldn’t lie. Trying to lie clogged the music just as speech clogged the words. The Princess went silent until she could sing something else. ‘What would you do if someone found him, someone who knew who he used to be?’

‘Give him back?’ smiled Milena, and shrugged.

‘What if it was his wife who found him?’

‘That would be sad,’ said Milena, smiling dreamily. ‘Especially as he thinks he’s a female dog.’

Milena felt calm today, she always felt better with people around her. It was at night the terror came, the cold, clinging sweats, the pacing around the room, the life-devouring fear of death. Mike, poor Mike, would wake and hold her as she quivered next to him, teeth chattering.

Milena was immune to the cures. She had unstitched the suppressor genes they tried to give her. So they gave her immune suppressants, so she could catch the cure, and the cancers raced ahead. The cancers ached at night with growing pains. She felt them in her mind, and tried to find the spirals, the spirals that could change with thought. But she had never had so many cells to change before. She had never been so tired or confused before. She sometimes thought, that at night while she slept another part of her, obeying the old program, made the cells cancerous again.

At times, she could find the idea amusing. I can fight off any illness, and so I’m dying, because all the cures are diseases. Haven’t things become just the slightest bit confused?

The only other cures they had were the ancient ones, and they were illnesses too. They killed cells in your body. They made you queasy or sleepy or confused. They parched your throat and made you so nauseous you couldn’t hold down a glass of water. Your hair fell out.

Other things were happening. The patch of fluorescent skin on her palm had spread up and over her arms onto part of her face. Parts of her glowed in the dark. She could feel other things happening in her genes, strange attempts at mutation, trying to grow new things altogether.

All of that was better than the euphoria. When the terror got too bad, happy drugs were given to her. Then she would talk in a loud, swaggering voice of what she would do when she got better. How she would quit the theatre and become a space pilot. She would believe it. The memory of Mike’s face, all its muscles strained, his encircled eyes wincing, told her that he would rather not sleep at night man see her wheeling with joy and mad relief.

But today was a good day. Today everything was in the most perfect balance.

‘Milena. The chairs are up,’ called Mike, already sitting, balanced in a criss-cross bamboo framework. It was Mike who called and not Peterpaul. Peterpaul did not like to call in public, in song. The days of persecution had been brief, but Peterpaul was still wary.

Milena suddenly felt a nose bump against her hand. She never had to call Piper. He knew when to come. He was more intelligent than most dogs. Perhaps he had been given an empathy virus. When he was human. He had been trained now to wear shorts in public, and slept in a wicker basket in the hall.

‘Pi-per!’ sang Berry, and chuckled hoarsely, clambering up on to his back. Milena and the Princess began to walk across the grass, hand in hand. Piper crawled beside them on hands and knees, panting with his tongue hanging out, a wide doggy grin of contentment.

Oh, it was a beautiful day! Trees and clouds and sky. In one corner of the park, well away from her was a cluster of moving shrubbery. It was Bees, three or four of them. The Bees always followed Milena, keeping their distance, respectful and silent, like mourners. The Bees bored and oppressed and sometimes frightened Milena. Milena could sense how they saw the virus as something golden, in islands in her body. The cancer sang to them of life even as it was killing her.

But today was so beautiful that Milena felt strong enough to give them a smile and a wave. And they smiled and waved back, looking for a moment like normal people, white teeth in purple faces, quick smiles for a friend on a sunny day. Then Milena saw that one of them was the King. She smiled and waved again, to him.

Milena had not planned to come out. The friends had planned to stay inside, in the Coral Reef room at the hospital. It was comfortable there and warm. There was a kitchen and a bedsitting room and even a small balcony, with a view over the river. The friends had all crowded onto it, and felt the air like a bath all around them. It did not seem likely that Milena would get too weary or too cold. They must get so tired, Milena thought, of me being ill all the time.