Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

Milena felt no rage against her oppressors. The Consensus was to do such great and extraordinary things. How could she argue against those? She was the one who had got things wrong. On balance, she still believed that the Consensus was good and just.

Tyranny is a form of perversion. We come to love it. Every government is a tyranny to a degree, and the more evil it is, the more it is loved. The difficulty lies in judging the degree of tyranny under which you live.

Milena had relied on her tyranny. She had believed one day that it would Read her and cure her of her anger and fear and longing. She had hoped that she would catch the virus from Rolfa. But although she now felt just the slightest bit feverish and queasy, she was not ill. She was resistant to the viruses. She was doomed to be herself.

In the morning, and again in the afternoon, Jacob the Postperson called. ‘There is a new play. They want you to act in it,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to say that you are ill?’

‘Yes, Jacob, tell them that,’ Milena said.

The long day passed. She didn’t eat. Milena sat all night on the bed, leaning against the wall, drifting in and out of sleep. The next morning, there was a shy, apologetic rapping on her door. Cilia called in with bread and cheese. Milena told her that she wasn’t hungry. People often were not hungry; Cilia assumed that she had been photo-synthesising in the sun.

‘We’ve heard the news about Rolfa,’ Cilia said. ‘You must be very happy.’

‘Yes,’ said Milena. ‘Very happy.’

‘Listen,’ said Cilia, sitting next to her on the bed. ‘All of us from Love’s Labour’s, we want to set up our own little company of players. Just to do new theatre, you know. Our way.’

Cilia paused and smiled. ‘We want you to help us run it.’

Milena stared back at her. ‘Why me?’ she asked.

‘Why? With what you managed to do with Rolfa? Magic! Complete!’ Cilia waited for a response. ‘Everyone thinks you’ve been gutter top,’ she said, sensing sadness, wanting to make Milena smile.

It was Vampire slang: gutter top. Grate. Great.

‘You’re all gutter top, too,’ murmured Milena.

‘So I can tell everyone you’ll do it?’

‘Yah,’ nodded Milena, looking down at her hands. ‘Yah.’

Cilia leaned forward, her face crossed with a perplexed scowl, knowing there had been a loss and not understanding what it could be. Had the old, withdrawn Milena returned? Cilia took the food away.

In the middle of the afternoon, without knocking, the Snide walked in. He wore his sinister hat at a rakish angle.

‘Lo, Heather, I’m back,’ he said.

His face fell.

‘Heather?’ he asked in horror.

Milena looked at him and shook her head. No. Not Heather. Heather is dead. There’s just me.

He sank down beside her on the bed. ‘She was a virus?’ He covered his eyes. Masked by his hand, sheltered by it, he found again his edged and bitter, nervous smile.

‘And you are Milena,’ he said. ‘That was good. Good trick. You must have laughed.’

‘I was too scared,’ said Milena.

‘I sensed something, you know. It’s just that viruses aren’t usually that complete.’

‘They aren’t usually Heather,’ replied Milena.

‘I’ve stopped being a Snide,’ he said, looking down at the counterpane, beginning to pick at it. The smile had turned inwards. ‘I was going to tell her that.’

I don’t have the time or the energy for this, thought Milena. You must know what was between me and Rolfa, you must know what you tried to do to us and yet you want my help. My help. You’re not just a fool, you’re a shit. You’re a fool because you are a shit.

‘That’s why I needed Heather,’ he said, completing the thought for her. ‘Did… when she was with you… did she ever respond to you. Did… did she ever talk to you?’

Wearily, Milena shook her head. No, she just read. All she did was read. It was all she could do. She needed me to do anything else.

He stood up and went to the door. He turned and looked at her, searching her face, searching her mind. I was Heather, thought Milena. For him, I had Heather’s mind and face.

‘I’m glad you’re unhappy,’ he said.

But I’ll get over it. You won’t.

Reluctantly, pity stirred. Pity, that was Heather’s enemy. Milena showed him Heather’s face, its great freckled length, the pebble spectacles. She thought you were a fool, but I think she could have loved you. She needed someone to manage.

He started to put on his sinister hat, then thought better of it. ‘There’s a bit more to me than that,’ he told her.

‘Then go and find it,’ replied Milena. Like a shadow, he turned and was gone.

She tried to sleep and couldn’t. She picked up one of Rolfa’s books, brown and battered, and it fell open on the last page… at the top of the Forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing.

She would have immediately thrown down the book, except that under each word, or rather, each syllable, there was a tiny, pencilled note of music on a tiny, pencilled stave.

Quickly, she flipped through the other pages. It had all been set to music, the entire book, re-written to be sung.

She had left Rolfa reading all day.

Milena picked up the next book in the stack. It was huge, bound in dirty grey cloth, anonymous and slumped sideways on its over-used binding. The first page was an engraving of Dante. Divina Commedia said words printed in red. Underneath, in pencil, Rolfa had written, ‘FOR AN AUDIENCE OF VIRUSES’.

All three books of the Comedy — Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso — had been bound together in one volume. Underneath all the words, all the way through, there were musical notes. The handwriting was small and neat and crabbed, as if trying to hide. Some of it was in pencil, some of it was in red ink. Some of it was written on pieces of paper stitched into the book with white thread. Some of it was written in gold. There was one note for each word, but in places there were messages: ‘trumpets here’ or ‘Virgil descant’. Milena turned back to the first page.

Then Dante meets the beast. The words were set to the music that Rolfa had sung in the dark the first night Milena had heard her, hidden in the Graveyard.

‘Rolfa!’ said Milena, and shook the book. To do this and keep it hidden! While Jacob and I copied out the rags of what we had heard. You didn’t say anything, I didn’t say anything. Did we ever tell each other a word of truth?

Milena read The Divine Comedy buoyed up by music. Her viruses translated the notes into imagined sounds. Her viruses sang.

Milena began to imagine it, a great abstract opera that would last for weeks if it were ever performed. She saw it staged in the sky, amid stars, with bars of colour and symbolic angels, beasts with human faces, a hell in honeycombs, tunnels of light opening into the heavens.

Suddenly Cilia stepped forward in the robes of Virgil. The part was written for a soprano, to contrast with Dante. For no reason, Lucy, old Lucy of the Palace of Amusement, was Beatrice. She wore the crown of heaven askew, and gave a sideways wink. A comedy after all. Milena closed her eyes and smiled. All right, Rolfa, all right. It is funny. The whole thing is funny — my not speaking, your not speaking, it’s funny. We could have sat down together, and planned what we were going to do with this. You could have orchestrated it, if you’d wanted to. I could have taken it complete and shown it complete and told them, take it or leave it, only leave her alone. Now I’ll have to put it on. I’ll have to get it performed. Thanks a lot. Milena looked at the size of the book, her finger wedged between the pages to keep her place. I’ll have to get this sung, somehow. Not all at one sitting, you understand my love, or the audience would the of starvation or old age. But over several months. But on what kind of stage? What kind of stage could hold this? You knew, damn it, Rolfa, you knew I’d have to do something about this!