Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

Milena looked at the park in the snow and knew it was the London of the future. This was the crescent outside Rolfa’s house, years after both of them were gone. This was the London in which Milena no longer lived, in which there was no Rolfa to hold her, in which Milena had no flesh to be held.

It was cold this future and she haunted it as a ghost. There were bootmarks in the snow, but no one walking. There were lights floating in the sky.

Did it matter that she no longer existed? Did this eternity stretching after her weigh any more heavily than the moments in the garden? The future was utterly without nostalgia or understanding, as cruel and new as a child.

I’m going to faint, thought Milena. She was cold, shivering. This is ridiculous: real people don’t faint. Neither do ghosts.

But she felt herself slip away anyway. The moon of the future swam in the sky and Milena let herself fall. She felt herself fall, and was lifted up. For a moment, she thought she was in Rolfa’s arms.

Time was a dream. The helicopters came again, roaring over the tops of the trees, tormenting them, tearing leaves from the branches, sending flurries through the snow. It was not Rolfa, but Mike Stone who was carrying her now, running with her as he had with Milton the Minister, as if this were her wedding again. People rushed to help him lower Milena to the floor, and from out of pouches in his trousers Mike took a pulse injector and clips. He put them into Milena’s ears and arms.

This is not the future or the past. This is my Now, she realised, and Now is always timeless.

She thought the Reading Room was the grass of the park in Rolfa’s street. She wished with all her heart it was that crescent of grass and trees and that she would wake up in the morning in her own room to find that Rolfa was going to live with her.

Milena felt the grass of her sixteenth summer press against her cheek. She wanted to put the very tips of her fingers in Rolfa’s hand. She couldn’t find it, any of it.

The grass was gone, and the park, and the infinitude of different Milenas for all her different Nows. The Milena who was remembering felt herself reunited with the Milena who was still alive.

She felt herself lying on the floor of the Consensus. She could feel her thoughts surge and fail. Mike Stone was leaning over her and there was a pulse injector in her ear. She felt herself slip down and away and then return, like the lapping of waves on a little lake. The Reading was over. She was dying.

Had Rolfa kissed the top of her head? Had she run her fingers through Milena’s hair?

The answer was yes.

What, Milena wondered, what happens next’

The Consensus of Central London rose up as a fleshy forest over Marsham Street. It turned sunlight into sugar and elements of the soil into protein. Sap was pumped through its heart, the Crown, which directed all of its unconscious mechanisms of tending — the circulation of oxygen and sugar, the elimination of wastes, the patrolling of its immune system. It was also there, in the Crown, that the synthesis of memory and thought took place. Out of the Crown, attached by roots, grew clumps of tissue, nestled together in the earth like potatoes. Crabs the size of hands protected the tubers, attacking animal or insect invaders. Doctors inspected the flesh, crouching through brick corridors like coal miners.

Inside the tubers, there were ranked and ordered areas of flesh. They were called cells. Imprinted in these cells were the Readings of individual selves.

The Consensus of Central London nurtured and made use of over one and a half million souls. There were fifteen individual Crowns spread across the geography of Greater London. There were fifteen million selves contained in them. Almost all of them were children, Read at ten years old.

Everything is a hologram, a smudged image of the whole. The children of the Consensus slept, like individual memories. While the Crown itself rested, the children played, like dreams. Scattered, disordered, nightmarish, the many selves of the Consensus tried to reassert themselves, tried to live again, like the unhappy memories imprisoned in each of us. The Crown would shift in uneasy rest, reminded of all the things it tried to forget.

The Consensus of London slept, stewarded in the being of the Consensus of the Two Isles, as the Two Isles were only occasionally brought into being in the Crown of Europe, while Europe slept in the World. There were great fleshy cables of nerves, under seas, across continents.

It was the Crown of the World that wanted Milena Shibush.

The great synthesising cortex was in Beijing, and all its attention was slowly focusing on one small cell of flesh, in England, in London.

Milena the pattern awoke trying to breathe. Her lungs tried to pull in but it was if there was no air. There was no light, no sound. A pillow was over her face, she was being suffocated. She fought, groping in the darkness, clawing at it. No hands, she thought. I have no hands!

Calm

A bolt made of iron seemed to shoot into her.

Be still

It was not a voice but an impulse, a direct electrochemical command that occupied Milena completely.

And Milena was still. The panic left her.

Then, like a flock of birds, came other, smaller impulses.

Milena

Ma

Ma

Milena

The birds of thought were the impulses of children from all around her. They darted in and out of her. They came as greetings and were joyful, glad to be of use, weaving and ducking. They were playful, newly awoken into full and conscious life. They were doing the will of the Consensus.

Like this!

Like this!

You do it

like this!

As if they were carrying ribbons that they wove round and round her, the children presented Milena with the knowledge of how to exist in the Consensus. You sleep, they told her, and then you are a dream. You are brushed lightly, quickly, with thought and your reaction is harvested, as if by a virus. All the reactions together make a decision.

It was the knowledge of how to live in slavery. The poor birds tried to be happy. They were full of good will. They were still ten years old, though laden with virus and trapped in these mountains of flesh, trapped in tiny cells. They would stay ten years old, until they were wiped away.

Milena the pattern was in abeyance. She waited and listened, accumulating pity and horror.

Sometimes the Crown sleeps, the impulses told her. They showed her what happened then. When it slept, the great gardens of memory were moved by random gusts of electrochemical impulse. The children moved then, as dreams move, crippled and incomplete and shadowy. They tried to tell stories, tried to find their way out, back into the world of school and toys and fresh grass and games, running with bright red rubber balls, the world in which they had once been able to move and make other things move, a world in which they had hands.

My own memories are like that, Milena thought, my own and separate selves. They are trapped in me. She remembered the plump, purple face of the Czechoslovakian Milena. There were the infant and the child, the actress, the director and the People’s Artist, the wife, and the restorer of cancer. Do they all want to be set free as well?

Life! the bird impulses seemed to cry. They rejoiced in the fullness of their awareness. Impulses flashed back and forth along neural pathways. The memories spoke to each other, relishing contact and a limited measure of independent being. Their thoughts darted to and from Milena like a screeching flock of starlings.

They settled on her. Chocolate? they asked her. Remember the taste of chocolate for us? They asked her to remember the feel of sunlight on skin, of fresh wind on a face.