Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

Milena fondled Piglet. She stroked his ears. He was wearing out.

Suddenly his zipper burst, as the virtues sang.

Piglet split open and a tiny black book slipped out of him.

Something silent, something hidden, something dark. The flickering light in the sky reflected on gold lettering on the binding. HOLY BIBLE said the words.

Milena’s hand fluoresced to make light to read by. She opened the book. The Old and New Testament said the words.

And in writing, underneath it — For an audience of viruses.

‘Oh my God,’ said Milena.

She flicked through the pages. There, almost infinitesimally small there were staves and notes. How small could Rolfa’s writing get? How small and hidden in the dark. It was as if Rolfa wrote fractally, each part leading to a smaller part.

‘Mike! Mike!’ Milena cried out. She held out the book to him, open, her hand shaking. ‘Mike! She did it again! She set the whole ficken Bible to music!’

Mike took it from and looked at it, stunned. Each word of the King James version had been given a note.

And Milena knew then. There would be other books.

‘Mike,’ she said. ‘Have them search. Have them look all through her house. There will be more. There will be others.’ Milena made a guess.

‘Have them look,’ she said, ‘for a complete Shakespeare. Have them look for Don Quixote.’’

Have them look for A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Milena lay back, suddenly queasy.

It wasn’t meant to be performed. It was all more original than that. For an audience of viruses the notes said, and I didn’t understand. It’s lazy just to listen to music — Rolfa had said that and I didn’t understand. It wasn’t written to be performed! She said that, too, the last time I ever saw her.

The Comedy wasn’t a new kind of opera. It was a new kind of book.

A book you read and while you read, your viruses turned it into music. Like the words Satie added to his piano pieces — there only for the pleasure of the pianist, and not be recited to an audience.

The performance was all my idea.

Milena was giddy, giddy again, as if weightless. The fire water in her stomach burned. ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ she said. Mike tried to rock to his feet, to get a bowl or a towel. He was too late.

Milena, to her surprise, was too weak to swing her legs off the chair. Vomit spewed all down her chin and over her blankets and dress. Piglet would now smell of adulthood sick as well.

‘Oh, Milena,’ said Mike, in sympathy.

‘Ficken Naiads,’ said Milena, as he fought his way to his feet.

Milena lay helpless on her bed, and looked at Lucy. Lucy was Beatrice. Beatrice was Wisdom. She looked on calmly, with a faint smile and sang in an aged voice:

Lucy, who had disappeared, had somehow recorded all of her part in the Comedy. Another strangeness.

Milena lay still, as Mike folded away the sick-covered blanket. Things like that did not matter any longer. Beatrice’s face mattered now. This Beatrice had gone on ageing. She was no longer beautiful except in the ways her face had crinkled, in its ruggedness like the rocks. She looked immortal, as if she had gone sailing on, resolving human weakness, discarding as unnecessary the human beauty of youth. The Queen of Dante’s soul, his love, his reminder of goodness. More stern than the rocks, a love as deep as the Earth, whispered in memory, and now restored on top of a mountain in a forest.

People don’t love like that, thought Milena. Not for a lifetime with just a memory.

And on that hill the voice in her ears said, a small boy and his bear will always be playing.

‘That’s the wrong opera!’ shouted Milena.

Then the helicopters came. There was a great shuddering in the air, and a shadow fell as if materialising out of the darkness and moonlight itself, blue-black and gleaming. It turned around over the pavement, over the heads of the Bees, scattering dust, lifting up their human foliage and rattling it, making a sound like the ocean.

‘Leave them alone!’ begged Milena, too weak to move on her long chair. The Bees hurt no one: they left after each night’s performance; this was the last night; why come now?

Two helicopters. They landed, springing on their sled-like feet, the Bees retreating to the walkways and the walls. The blades kept spinning. Milena felt the air rush past her face. It was as if she were moving at a hundred miles an hour.

‘Mike?’ she asked, but the words were drowned in the sound of the rotors.

Mike was standing, looking out over the balcony.

‘No!’ a sea of voices seemed to sigh all together.

‘They’re fighting!’ shouted Mike Stone. ‘They’re fighting the Garda.’ Outside their front door, Piper began to howl, ya-roo like a dog singing at church bells.

‘What?’ asked Milena, and a bubble of something seemed to burst out of her mouth.

‘Lie back, Milena. Don’t worry. I’m here.’

Mike Stone, astronaut, thought Milena. What can you do against the Consensus?

‘They’re coming inside,’ said Mike, pointing, voice raised.

Piper wailed. His voice broke. It became a human shout. Toddling on his knees, Piper came into the room, stammering, howling. Then he stood up, like a man. Piper ran on two legs, spinning in circles towards her. ‘Milena!’ he shouted quite plainly. ‘Milena.’ Piper had remembered how to talk.

‘Piper,’ she whispered, and he came, weeping. He knelt beside her, doglike again and she had time to touch him behind the ears.

Then, looming through the door came men covered in white plastic with clear plastic facemasks. They shone torches about the darkened room and then strode with great nimbleness towards Milena. It was so nimble, it looked like a comedy double-take, a piece of elegant, exaggerated performance. With beautiful, dancelike weaving, their arms laced her up in tubes. Tubes were inserted into her nostrils. A wafer, thin, small, translucent was placed on her tongue. Milena could no longer talk.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Mike Stone with a kind of numb helplessness.

A litter was unfolded as from nowhere. Milena, limp and heavy as clay, felt herself hoisted, helpless to resist. Lifted up, lowered, in a swoop that was delicately timed to avoid making her sick again.

‘Taking her to be Read,’ said one of the men in white, answering Mike finally, kneeling down with his back to him. ‘We’ve only just caught her in time.’

As if all of the Earth was falling away Milena felt herself lifted up. One of the men in white snapped white resin fingers and pointed. ‘The chair,’ he said. Milena turned her head. Her head was heavy, and hung unsupported by her neck over the edge of the litter. She looked behind her to see Mike helped back into his chair. The men in white kneeled around that too.

Piper was held back by his collar. He strained against it, gasping. ‘Don’t go!’ he called. ‘Don’t go!’ A gloved hand gently lifted up Milena’s head, as she was shifted further onto the litter.

In the sky Lucy was singing, looking back over her shoulder. ‘ Brother,’ she sang in Dante’s Italian, ‘ why don’t you dare to question me, now you are coming with me?’ Then Milena was borne away.

She heard Piper howling as she was carried down the hospital staircase. With a bustle she was carried along the hospital corridors. Light blazed from the hands of the Garda sweeping over the glinting, flowing surface of the Coral, making it yellow, making it flutter. The Coral sang: the Comedy embedded in it, ringing with human voices in some kind of extremity. The walls thumped like an angry neighbour. The monstrous egotism, she thought. The monstrous egotism to put this on, to flood every space in the world with it, to drive out the silence, to hammer the heads of the children, of the fragile, of the ill. Who wants this? Who cares about Naiads and medieval allegory?