Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

And from somewhere she heard music.

It came to her softly. It was imagined music coming to her on waves of thought. It came with a gentle, aching tension. The music was words that had been turned into notes.

It was the unperformed music of the Third Book, when Dante follows Beatrice into Paradise.

It was the pattern of Rolfa, singing softly in the equivalent of a dream, even Rolfa was embedded in the logic and did its will. It was as if Milena were being sung to sleep in Rolfa’s arms.

Except for a little tickle along Milena’s own crown. Somewhere outside this particular Consensus, Milena Shibush was still alive.

Milena the dying woman lay on the floor of the Reading Room. Her hands were on the crucifix around her neck. She was trying to break the chain that held it, to pass it to Mike. She knew he was there but she could not see him. She faded in and out of consciousness with the pulses of the device in her ear. Only then did she remember to breathe.

In…

Out…

In…

She stopped.

Out.

Milena exhaled and it was as if the chain were broken. She breathed out and it was if she breathed herself out. She felt herself expand out of her body like a bubble. She emerged from herself and felt herself drift free.

The spirit of Milena Shibush was exhaled from the body. She floated like a black balloon above the flesh on the floor, looking down on it. She saw Mike Stone on all fours, holding its hand. She saw Root, stroking the thin, dank hair. The body was not her. The spirit was calm and distanced, as if everything were close and faraway at the same time. The spirit suddenly grinned to herself as if there was a joke. The flesh on the floor grinned too. A comedy after all.

Out there, away from the body, the world was beautiful, as if at the very summit of a mountain, so that the stars could be seen in daylight, as if a fresh, clear, cool wind blew through everything, carrying with it the sounds made by distance itself, the sounds a vast expanse will make simply by keeping still.

Light flowed in and out of all things, and the wires were under them to be plucked. There was no pain and no hunger, no desire and no anger, no becoming only fulfilment only a delicious sense of imminent release. It was as if Milena Shibush were a pod of ripe seed that was about to scatter.

The soul of Milena Shibush plucked the wires of the world, and they sang in the mind of Milena the pattern. They were both Terminal.

Go! said the spirit. Go! Go! Go! The knowledge was passed. It was the knowledge of what it was to be free from the flesh, of how to breathe yourself out of the flesh and into the world, as God had once breathed life into it.

The knowledge shivered through the wires to the patch of the pattern that was Terminal.

Yes! thought the pattern. Angels! Angels, thought the pattern.

And Milena the pattern breathed herself out.

She exhaled herself out of the imprisoning flesh, out of the Consensus and into the framework of the universe itself.

She poured herself like some viscous flowing substance, full of glowing tangles. She was made part of the Slide. She rose up out of the lines of gravity as an Angel, embedded in the universe, beyond harm.

Milena the Angel looked about her, without eyes. Beyond light, beyond sound, there were the filaments of gravity. They were as taut as the strings of a musical instrument, fixed to the stars, fixed to the moon, and gathered in a knot at the centre of the Earth, where Dante’s Satan froze.

The filaments had pulled gas out of quantum vacuum, and also stone and the trunks of trees and the stars. The filaments embraced them all now in a glissando, holding the brick corridors of the Reading Rooms and the fleshy growths of the Consensus.

The Consensus trembled with many half-formed voices. They were twisted together in a tangled vastness, spiralling clumps of thought that were attached to giant causeways of impulse. Thought was like a river that flowed down the stalks. The stalks rose up like cliff faces; there were turrets and chasms of personality. There were blown peaks that scintillated with memory, danced with it. Impulses forked, crackling, like lightning to China, to America. Milena the Angel pattern comprehended it as a whole. She could feel them all sizzling at the tips of the lines, the fifteen billion.

And Milena remembered the sensation of twenty-two billion flowers pouring out of her head. She remembered the sense of exhalation. And, holding in her mind the flickering candlelight of each of those fifteen billion souls, she strummed the wires of the world.

This way, the pattern said. You do it this way!

Milena passed on to all them at once the feeling knowledge of what it was to be exhaled, to inflate like some beautiful balloon rising out of the flesh, to be blown, to waft free.

To China, to Bordeaux.

The spirit spun in delight, heavy with the seed of memory. Go! Go! Go! said the spirit.

You’re free, whispered the pattern.

Before the Crowns could react, the knowledge was passed, through the wires at the speed of gravity. The wires became the knowledge, they were made of knowledge and of feeling. The Consensus gaped, slow and dinosauric, imprisoned in flesh.

Like seed erupting from a pod, a cloud of Angels rose up, exhaling all together, unable to resist breath, like Adam. This breath was the kiss of life, reversed.

The Consensus heaved and shuddered as its towers and turrets of flesh were vacated. The Consensus had been infected by a little scrap of pattern that was only half alive. The contagion spread.

It was Milena who was the virus now.

The selves of the Consensus were set free. They were scattered, no less in number than the many selves of Milena Shibush. They rose up as Angels, up the Slide, down the Slide, soaring through the universe, one with it. They weaved and rolled and spun in the network of lines with the joy of children bouncing on a trampoline. They had run away, as children always will, with both regret and relief.

The children were free. The universe shivered at their touch.

Milena in one motion had fought and obeyed. She had granted the last and most secret wish of the Consensus.

It too had wanted to be set free from flesh. It had wanted to breathe itself out like its Angels, and travel the stars. But it had been afraid.

Milena had taught the Consensus how to die.

In the corridors made of brick, so snug, there was terror.

Root the Terminal howled, and held her hand, feeling the great and beloved weight in her head lessen and grow small.

‘Baby! Baby!’ cried Root in confusion.

The great mind was emptying. All across the world, the Lower House fled. The Upper House roared in panic. Even some of those great souls leapt out of the flesh to be borne away by the Slide.

We do not belong to you! the children cried.

There was an undertow. Root felt it pulling. It nearly pulled her free from her body as well. She stood up from the floor, keening like an eagle. She held her own head, feeling her own self trying to leap. She wailed wordlessly, and turned and ran. She felt the wires in the bricks underfoot, felt the Angels slide up and through her, like a gasp of cold air, in the wires.

The Angels lifted each other up. They rose together towards the heavens like motes of dust in the beams of searchlights. Milena the Angel felt them rise with delight. Flowers the, but they cast seed, and seed is life. It was as if the world had bloomed and borne fruit.