Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

‘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 Cilia and no one else. It was Jacob who remembered the music, and Cilia 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 hot 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 had 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 men came elevation to the Earthly Paradise, 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.