Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

No, thought Milena.

‘It has to be done today,’ said Milena. She began to feel fear. She began to be unsteady. It was like waking up. The Minister’s eyes were sombre.

‘Please,’ said Milena, suddenly shorn of her bigger self. ‘She’s hungry. She’s not Rhodopsin, she can’t just go out into the sun. We’ve got no money. If she joins the Consensus, she can have a position here, she can eat!’ Milena found that she had gone tremulous. ‘Otherwise she will leave. Please. Can you arrange it for today?’

The Minister seemed to have a question rise in his mind. He was looking at Milena now, not considering what she said. He was considering her.

‘I will see if it can be done,’ he said, no longer smiling. Milena began to quake. It was a rattling in the bottom of her belly. ‘But what you must do is check with your friend and prepare her. We must make sure that this is acceptable to her.’

I’ve won, thought Milena. I’ve won. She stood up to go. She did not want to speak. She did not trust herself. She nodded yes to whatever he said.

‘Can you come back in an hour?’

Yes, yes. He shook her hand. She walked out of the rooms into the corridors, and began to run. The shaking continued. Her knees wobbled, her hands flapped. There was a sense of fear, of being in a bigger world. She was not who she had thought she was. I may not be a good actress, she thought, but I am good at this. I can arrange things. She had learned in the cushioned silence that every artist is perforce a politician.

The Public Reading Rooms — the rooms in which the public were Read — were underground in bunkers. The bunkers were under what had once been the Department of the Environment. The Department of the Environment had been torn down to plant a forest.

The forest was the Consensus. The Consensus was a garden of purple, fleshy trees that reached up and fed on sunlight. The mind of the Consensus was below. A buttressing marble wall ran around the garden. In the wall, there was an old stone plaque that had been preserved. ‘This is Marsham Street,’ the plaque said, ‘1688.’

Underneath there were corridors of brick. They wound their way through fleshy roots and a gathering of synapses called the Crown. Below, like tubers, there grew mindflesh, on which memories were imprinted, memories and the patterns of response. They were models made of children, Read at ten years of age.

This was the Consensus for the Pit, the central heart of London. In the corridors of brick, painted white, there were air vents and electric lights. Milena stared in wonder at the glowing bulbs and their golden, dazzling filaments. She had always loved light.

The rooms were full of classrooms of children, about to be Read. Their Nurses led them in song, playing on guitars or hand pianos. The children wore their best clothes. The little girls wore printed saris translucent with colour. The boys wore jewellery through their nostrils. They danced in a line, waving their hands like the branches of trees. The lucky ones had parents, who sat on benches and watched with quiet pride.

People in white uniforms danced with them. A huge woman in white saw Rolfa and beamed and worked her way, still dancing, towards them.

‘You’re Rolfa. I’m Root,’ she said. ‘You’re our special case. You’re going to have special treatment from us, I promise you that.’ She led Rolfa to one side. ‘Just a few questions to ask first,’ said Root.

Health. Medical record. Any intoxicating substances lately?

There was a cheer from a class of children. They were praising their own Estate school. Root turned and pressed her hands together. ‘Oh, the little darlings, oh the little flowers. I tell you, this is the happiest place. They come here dancing. They leave here dancing too.’ Root’s grin was wide.

‘Now, love, you have any experiences with the paranormal?’

Instantly, Rolfa’s face looked withdrawn.

‘Have you ever levitated, or had an out-of-body experience? Any poltergeists in your home? Anything of that sort?’

Rolfa shook her head and gave a shy smile. Who me?

‘It’s very important. You’re sure? OK, then, we go in.’

This woman is too used to talking to Tykes, thought Milena. Then Root turned to her. The smile was like a beam of light. ‘You, too, love. You’ve never seen this, and we want you to see how happy it is.’

Milena felt ice in her chest. They know, she thought. They know that they’ve never Read me. It’s been deliberate. They’ve decided not to.

Quiet, she thought, and followed Root.

I thought I was free, Milena thought. Instead, I was being tolerated. Or used. They wouldn’t leave me alone, if there was no reason for it.

Of course they must know they haven’t Read me.

Another mystery, lost in Milena’s history.

Root was holding open a door, and waving to her, come in, come in. Milena followed, in anger, and in fear.

They went down a corridor to a sealed hatch, that hissed when it was opened. Beyond it was a loose and flabby concertina corridor, made of soft resin. It shifted underfoot, floating in flesh. It was wet and smelled of disinfectant and was lit by an ultraviolet light.

‘Got to avoid disease,’ explained Root.

They stepped into a room made of flesh.

The walls were slightly phosphorescent, and they seemed to pull back as they entered.

‘Hello, Baby,’ said Root. ‘Time to go for a walk.’

She’s Terminal, realised Milena. She talks to the Consensus, with her mind. It can talk to her. She can see for it, hear for it. This is the Consensus, here.

‘What’s it like?’ asked Milena, all in one breath.

‘Big,’ said Root the Terminal, warmly. ‘And alive. Come on, now Rolfa love, you sit over here, on the floor, anywhere will do.’

This is what holds me, Milena thought. This is what rules. This is Charlie. This is the Slider, maker of Angels. The beating heart of her culture, and she had never seen it. Machines had imitated life, and now life had returned the compliment. Patterns were repeated. A computer made of flesh, growing new capacity when it needed it, sending mycelia through the earth, sprouting elsewhere like mushrooms, fed by purple gardens.

Milena remembered again.

She had never seen a film, but other people had with viruses in their heads, and she had their memories. They were the memories the Party wished her to have. She remembered a film now, of Chao Li Song.

Milena saw a wry, smiling face, an old gentleman full of good news he could not contain. ‘We will have to accept that we have been superseded,’ he said in a voice like a rusty hinge. ‘We are like parents who have produced a giant baby. It deals in things we cannot conceive of.’

Thought was chemistry moving into electricity, and electricity was unified with the other forces. In the fifth dimension, the master of the eleven dimensions, gravity and electromagnetic phenomena were the same thing. The Consensus could think in gravity. It could imprint personalities in gravity. Angels, they were called. The Angels could slide through gravity. They could slide across space at the speed of light. As predicted, they travelled backwards in time. They travelled backwards in time to other stars.

The highways of gravity were called by the English the Charlie Slide.

‘How will it help?’ asked Chao Li Song, ‘to send thought to the stars, long ago? The answer is that it will mine for wealth. Thought and gravity are one. Gravity pulled the universe into existence, by inflation. It pulled against nothingness, and as it pulled energy was released. There was a flash of heat.’ Chao Li Song smiled, in the past, as if he had travelled at the speed of light. ‘The Angels will unleash blasts of heat. They will smelt the rocks of other worlds. They will lift them, like toffee, and hurl them towards us, out of the past. They will guide them to us, through the long light years back, very slowly.’ He paused to smile privately. ‘We know they will do this, because it has already happened in the past. The blocks of metal. We have seen them coming towards us. We have heard the Angels, in the lines of gravity.’