Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

Her arms were blazing. They fluoresced with generated light.

‘Let’s go back and eat,’ said Cilia. ‘You don’t eat.’ Her voice was clogged.

‘Have you ever wanted to be fucked by a tree?’ Milena asked, and giggled.

‘Milena!’ hissed Cilia and gave her hand an admonitory shake. The boy was near.

‘Trees are so big and beautiful and strong.’

‘Peterpaul,’ said Cilia, turning, pleading.

‘Listen, listen,’ said Milena, lolling her head. ‘I don’t want to the, but I don’t want their virus either. I don’t want to live forever. I don’t want it, here.’ She formed a cone with her fingers that glowed liked embers and tapped her heart. She had not understood before why her body had fought off the cure. ‘This is enough,’ she said, and pointed to the light all around her, and what lay beyond the light, beyond life.

‘She’s all bones,’ said Cilia miserably. Together, she and Peterpaul lifted Milena up.

Let me stay in the garden, thought Milena whose head hung down, looking back at the grass, confused, confounded. The light that shone out of her arms and her face began to ebb.

Don’t take her! begged the Milena who was remembering, to Peterpaul and Cilia. Don’t let them! she told Milena the director. It’s yours. It’s something you did yourself. You got back! It’s real! They will take it away again! Keep it!

They helped her back to the chair. They lowered her onto it. To their surprise, little Berry climbed onto her lap, and hugged her and Milena lifted up weak arms, and put them around him.

Everything was going flat again.

‘I think she’s just confused from waking up,’ Cilia said hopefully to Mike. A quick warning gaze to Peterpaul said: don’t tell him anything different.

It was just a virus, thought Milena. A beautiful virus. But it’s going now. It wasn’t real. Why are the viruses beautiful? She held Berry up to look at him, Berowne’s son, his babe, the son of a friend. She looked into huge round eyes that were in a different proportion to his face than the eyes in an adult’s were. They looked blue-grey, huge and pale against the purple roundness of his face. It was Berry she wanted to defend. But I cannot help you, and I cannot protect you. I will not be with you.

A cloud passed in front of the sun, and the light was gone. Everything was grey again. So it was sunlight and fever, that was all. And yet it had seemed so real, when I saw it. Another euphoria.

Berry suddenly frowned, and sat up. He tightened the toggle of his cowboy hat and then turned and stumbled down from her lap.

‘I think,’ said Milena, ‘I want to go back inside.’

It was on the way back, when Milena and Al were talking alone together that the Snide suddenly said: ‘It wasn’t a virus, you know, Milena. What you saw. It was you. It came from you.’ His eyes were red, as if he had been dazzled.

Milena stopped and looked back at the garden, at the trees and tried to see the light again. The trees were beautiful, but they were adult trees, and it was an adult sky. ‘Come on,’ she called smiling, to Mike Stone. ‘Catch up.’

Later, the Princess came singing music from Madam Butterfly. She told Milena that she wouldn’t be bringing Berry to see her for a time. Did she understand? ‘It frightens him,’ the Princess sang with shame. ‘You frighten him.’

But there still was the memory of the welcoming grass; of the turning, curious, tender trees as strong and silent and gentle as fishermen in unvisited villages; of the bouncing, happy clouds; and of the birds that flew without hesitation. Rising up on the breath of the world. There and then, but not now. Only in memory could she see it.

And the Milena who remembered understood. The silence and the light were one.

‘Life is history,’ said the philosophers. They imagined that life worked as they did, by preserving decisions. Thereby they took the life out of history altogether.

‘The brain works like a computer,’ said the writers of popular science, as if in unison, when computers seemed to be changing the world. They meant that nerve impulses take one branch of a ganglion as opposed to another. A yes or no, a one or zero code that they could describe if they wished, and they did, as binary. They did not know what made living memory, or how sound or light or even silence could be recalled.

‘The brain works like a collection of viruses,’ the Consensus said one hundred and fifty years later, when viruses were difficult to avoid.

The need to simplify and to put things in a sequence, their devotion to history, made them slaves to whatever was current.

‘Time is money,’ said Rolfa’s father, on the last night of the Comedy. He meant the younger members of the Family had become slack, and did not see the connection between how hard they worked and Family wealth. Zoe had just asked him if he wouldn’t come outside to see the end of Rolfa’s opera. She stood at the door of the starkly tidy room he called his office. Zoe was scowling slightly. Becoming Consul had not been good for her father. It had made him pompous and insecure.

Rolfa’s father was thinking that it was strange, that of all his children it should be Rolfa who ended up the most like him. Rolfa would have known the opera was there just to glorify the Squidges. She would have known it was more important to get on with work. It had been Rolfa who had invented the time sheets. Every hour a member of the Family worked was supposed to earn forty francs — four marks. This meant that every hour they did not work also cost four marks.

Rolfa’s father had become Consul of the Family after the Restoration. The Family called it the Emergency. The Squidges had metal of their own now.

Time is not money. Money is money. Money is a promise, nothing more, an agreement not to doubt. Money is, for example, an exchange of iron ore for promises. The Family were receiving fewer promises for their Antarctic iron, but the time sheets still said they were rich. That kept them happy. And money being nothing more than a promise, an abstract notion, the Family somehow managed to stay wealthy. Rolfa’s father sat with his whizzing machinery, looking at figures that were pure superstition. Like all superstitions, money was real. It was as real as the gods of ancient Sumer. The gods of Sumer were media of exchange as well — they presided over storehouses for goods. They also were agreements not to doubt. Gods collapse.

Zoe shook her head. ‘One of us ought to see it,’ she said. She was thinking of Rolfa, who could not see the Comedy, under the clear unshielded skies of Antarctica. She was thinking of Milena and the strangeness of life. ‘The little fish,’ Zoe murmured to herself.

Her father was busy with an account. Any system of accounting, whether it uses words or numbers, achieves meaning by what it leaves out. Her father’s account left out almost everything that interested Zoe. She and her father spoke in different tongues.

As Zoe turned away, a cat on the roof over her head slunk down the roof slates. A thin coating of cats moved all over London, some in mid-air leaping, others licking their feet in doorways, others hunched over bowls, eating. Some of them lay on their sides, cold, on the pavements.

Under the roof of the Family house, seven women and two men were cooking in various kitchens, chopping vegetables or staring at boiling pots without really seeing them. Downstairs, eight Polar teenagers watched their video, each costing the Family a notional two marks an hour. The time of teenagers was given half value.

In the houses on the other side of the street, a Party Woman was filing her toenails. Another was repairing seat covers. One couple made love, another fought, someone else was washing the leaves of her rubber tree. Outside in the street, two coffee vendors passed each other, pulling their wagons and tureens. One was on his way to Knightsbridge, the other was going home. They smiled and nodded to each other in good fellowship. There was good fellowship among those who plied the new trade, now that the public were safely addicted to caffeine. At the bottom of Rolfa’s street, where the terrace ended, there was a noisy main street full of traffic. A smelly omnibus dragged its low-hanging rear end past the corner, alcohol exhaust billowing up behind it. On the pavement, a woman covered her face with a scarf, to filter the fumes. A sun-blasted drunk was slumped in a doorway and he held up a bottle, saluting the woman in the twilight.