Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

‘How can I open a door by letting go of the handle?’ Rolfa asked. There was a thump as she threw her full weight against it. ‘The door is jammed. I shall have to break it down.’

‘Rolfa, Rolfa please. Just push the handle down.’

‘The handle,’ announced Rolfa, ‘has just come off.’

Then there was a silence. ‘Rolfa?’ Milena asked. The handle of the door was as limp as a dead fish. When Milena pushed the door open, she saw Rolfa, half crouching, with an expression of mingled delight and horror fixed like glaze on her face.

She was looking at her sister Zoe.

Although capitalist and worker confront each other in the marketplace…

‘Oh, Rolfa,’ said Zoe, looking at the shaved arms and face. She glanced miserably at Milena.

…only as buyer with money on the one hand and seller, a commodity, on the other….

Heather, shut up!

‘Do you want to come in?’ Milena asked Zoe, stepping aside.

Zoe shouldered her way through the doorway as if past an obstacle, and stopped, distraught, and stared about the tiny room.

Rolfa followed, swinging a whisky bottle in one hand. The two GEs filled the room like air bladders. Zoe looked for a chair to sit on. There wasn’t one.

‘Do you know,’ said Rolfa, holding up the bottle towards the window and what was beyond it. ‘There are people out there. The whole place. Full of people. Like a string of pearls.’

‘Do you know what the Family would do if they saw you like this?’ Zoe said, enraged. ‘They’d tie a mask soaked in ether over your face and ship you south in a box.’ She turned away, arms folded in front of her stomach.

‘If you break the string,’ Rolfa continued, ‘the pearls all go rolling down down the steps.’ She sank to the floor. ‘Oh God, my bloody beads.’

‘This is the first time she’s been drunk,’ said Milena.

‘We wondered how you were keeping her quiet,’ said Zoe.

Zoe is the one I can talk to, Milena remembered. ‘Would you like something to drink, Zoe? A cup of tea? It’s about all we have.’

Zoe shook her head, and turned towards Milena. ‘How can you live like this?’ she asked. It was an honest, if unguarded question.

‘By limiting our expectations,’ said Milena. An honest answer.

… both sides appear constantly, repeatedly, in the marketplace playing the same opposed roles.

Zoe looked about the bare and tiny room, and did a kind of shrug with her eyebrows. She was wearing a white toga, and her braided hair was piled on her head. ‘I was going to ask you to come home, Rolfa, but you can’t, looking like that. Do you really hate us so much?’

‘Yes,’ replied Rolfa, grinning. ‘Oooops.’ She covered her mouth.

‘The Family doesn’t know yet. Papa hasn’t told them. We managed to get him to call off the Snide. The sneak wasn’t any good anyway, he got all lovesick over some female called Heather.’

‘I suppose he cost too much,’ said Rolfa, and took a swig.

‘Angie and I wanted to give you time!’

‘How does it feel to be an economy measure?’

‘If you came back by yourself, Papa would be more forgiving. He’s nearly given up on you, Rolfa.’ There was a swollen silence between them. Zoe’s face looked limp and puffy, and flesh showed through, as if the fur were patchy. ‘I have.’

That’s good, thought Milena, without quite knowing why. She seemed to feel a way.

… in the course of time everyone assumes all the roles in the sphere of circulation.

‘Zoe,’ Milena said. ‘Would it make any difference if something happened to Rolfa’s music?’

Zoe glumly watched her white sandals as they scuffed the resin-tiled floor. ‘I’d be grateful for anything,’ she murmured.

‘And if it were done in such a way that no one knew it was Rolfa, no one knew it was a GE, not even the Family, would that help?’

Zoe looked at the floor without responding.

‘Look, I don’t understand how the Family works. But I do know that Rolfa is an embarrassment to your father.’

Zoe’s eyes were full of warning.

Tuh.’ Rolfa’s shudder. ‘Pocket Caesar. Wants to be Consul.’

Zoe’s head turned so sharply, the tendons of her neck showed through the fur. ‘He wants to be accepted by his own People, and he never has been!’

Milena intervened. ‘If… if Rolfa’s music came to something and we all stopped the Family finding out…’ Milena sighed with the difficulty and delicacy of what she had to say. ‘Would that be enough?’

‘Enough for what?’

‘Suppose… suppose you simply tell the Family that Rolfa has disappeared. You don’t know where, or why, but she’s always been odd, and she’s gone, somewhere. Now that would have nothing to do with the legal position of the Family in relation to the Consensus. It might not even have anything to do with… oh, I don’t know what to call it… genetic drift back towards the average, or whatever. Which is all they care about.’

‘You are a cold little fish, aren’t you?’ said Zoe.

‘Look, having Rolfa with you is not going to do your father any good either. If she’s a black mark against him now, she always will be. You’re the only one who cares about Rolfa. This is what she wants.’

Something in Zoe relented. ‘It’s not so easy, Ms Shibush, to watch a sister Slide away.’ She said it quietly. ‘Especially when you’re wondering why someone wants to give her such a good push.’

‘Don’t let her go! Just give her time.’

‘Give you time, you mean.’

‘Give her music time. The music is good.’

‘How long?’ Zoe asked abruptly.

Milena felt a prickling. ‘A year,’ she said. She thought she was overestimating.

Zoe leaned against the wall and chewed the inside of her cheek, looking out the window.

‘All right, Ms Shibush. All right.’ She rocked herself away from the wall. She looked at Rolfa, considered, and found that she had nothing to say. The broken door was still open. She walked to it and turned to Milena.

‘Why don’t I hate you?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Milena.

‘A year,’ said Zoe, warning her, and left.

Milena closed the door and started to shake. What had she done? How had she done it? Rolfa sat drinking quietly, staring at the bottle with a faraway smile, as if all of it had nothing to do with her. In a sense, it didn’t.

The next morning, Milena bundled up what music she had and took it to the Minister who ran the National Theatre. He was popularly known as the Zookeeper. Even he called himself that at times.

Walking through the upper floor of the Zoo, Milena felt as small and as hard as a nut. There was a groomed young man whose job it was to stop people seeing the Minister. Milena could not afford the luxury of disliking him.

She did not say that she had found an undiscovered genius. She said that she was harbouring a fugitive and that she felt the Minister should know. She explained why. The reason was that the creature was talented. She left the evidence of that talent, the music, as if it were part of a briefing for a policy decision. The young man took a stern line. Why had she not come earlier? He would make sure the Minister saw the papers and attended to her case. He patted them at the corners to make a neat package of them on his otherwise empty table.

Milena devoted the rest of the day to Rolfa. She bought a pack lunch with the last of their money. Roast beef sandwiches and oranges and sticks of celery — things they both could eat. She took Rolfa, who was content and distant, on a ride in an omnibus to Regents Park. The bus stop called it Chao Li Gardens.

It was getting cooler, and there were high, racing clouds in the sky. The leaves were beginning to change colour already, going yellow at the edges, with brown spots. In the centre of the park, there was a rose garden with ornamental ponds. Milena and Rolfa walked beside the artificial waterways. There was a smell of still, dark water. Ducks landed in it, sliding to a halt.