Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

Fire danced on her skin. Milena screamed. The sound of the scream was lost in the chorus.

‘What? What love?’ she could hear the Games Seller wailing.

‘The light burns!’ Milena wailed. ‘I need the lenses!’

Milena rammed her hands into her armpits, to hide them from the light.

The beefy hands of the Games Seller seized Milena’s arms. The Games Seller led her. Milena tripped up; she fell forward. The woman caught her up. Blisters ruptured against her cotton shirt. Her hands wept. The woman led her into Leake Street.

Everything went dark and cool, and Milena could suddenly hear.

‘Put them in please,’ wept Milena.

The woman was over her huge and sheltering. ‘Yes, you are, yes you are, yes you are in a bad way,’ the Gameswoman sang soothingly. It was a lullaby. She kept on singing, soothing, as she forced Milena to open her eyes away from the light.

Thrawn made the worms crawl inside them, but in Leake Street, the light was dull.

First one in. Then the other. Now there really was something in her eyes. Tears welled up to expel them. I will get used to them, Milena told herself. I will have to get used to them. She turned and looked up at the end of Leake Street. Thrawn tried to focus the light. It concentrated into a dull blue circle. Milena moved her head. It took some seconds for Thrawn to find the focus. That would have to be good enough.

The Seller of Games was inspecting Milena’s blistered fingers. ‘Your poor little hand…’ she began. La Boheme. Then she tried to speak. ‘Buh! Buh!’ she stammered, and sighed, and sang again.

‘Bloody viruses! What will they do to us next?’

Milena said she didn’t know. She thanked the Seller, paid for the lenses and stepped out again into the light and the roar of the songs. She rocked her head, very slightly, from side to side. She bought a pair of gloves and some ear plugs.

‘Go and die,’ said Thrawn in Milena’s ear, just before the plugs were inserted.

The game we are playing now, thought Milena, is called Sticks and Stones. Words can never hurt me.

All around her, everywhere around her, people sang.

Slightly less than a year later, Milena married.

She remembered the wedding party, in the forest of the Consensus. That year the summer was clouded and cool. A blustery wind rocked back and forth between the fleshy trunks of the purple trees. The guests were as chilled as the wine. They clutched their glasses with one hand, and warmed the back of their arms with the other and did their best to make conversation. Mike Stone tried to make conversation. Milena had forgotten how stiff he could be. He bent forward from the waist and shook people’s hands and could think of nothing to say except ‘Thank you very much for coming,’ or ‘I suppose you’re all famous,’ or ‘I’ve always wanted to act.’

He had worn his astronaut suit to the wedding. He liked his astronaut suit and saw no reason ever to wear anything else. The pockets were full of astronaut gear — microscopes and multipurpose DNA capsules. He explained them at great length to Cilia, who used every particle of her acting ability in looking rapt with fascination.

Halfway through the party, Milton the Minister died.

‘The two of you alone together up there in space,’ Milton was saying. It was his way of congratulating them. ‘It must have been a real Battle of the Bulge.’ His eyes closed and his smile spread, as if he had finally made the perfect Milton joke. An expression of peace settled onto his face. Then he fell forward into the calamari salad and overturned the table of refreshments.

Mike had a first-aid kit in the pouches of his overalls. He slipped a pulse injector into Milton’s ear to keep his breath and heartbeat going while Milena, Moira Almasy, all the Terminals, called for the Consensus. It came in the form of the new police, the men in white, the Garda.

They came with a chopping, juddering sound as if something were cutting the air into slices. Something predatory descended from the sky onto the pavements of Marsham Street. It was the first time Milena had ever seen a helicopter. It was made entirely of metal and resin, and it gleamed like some hungry insect. Mike swept Milton up and carried him past the Garda, his wiry limbs moving with a robotic smoothness. He lowered Milton into the bubble of the beast and the Garda trooped back inside it, and with a whirlwind of air, the thing lifted off, and was gone.

The death and the helicopter shook Milena. Many things had happened over the last year to shake her. She found her teeth were involuntarily tap dancing and the cold seemed to rise out of her own bone-marrow. Milena was cold inside. Milena asked to be taken home. The party was over.

It was a cold, cold boat ride back to the Slump, through little, lapping, grey waves. Milena curled up against Mike Stone to be warmed, and she still shook. She didn’t know it was fear. She only knew that soon her husband might want to make love, and that she did not. She only knew that she had never told him she could not accept sex from a man. Paradoxically, the fear made her turn to him for comfort.

She was still afraid walking back into her little lacquered boxes. She showed him each of the rooms, puffing up pillows, folding in shutters, lighting the alcohol lamps. In the darkness in the corners, the truth still waited, unsaid. Whenever I get into this kind of trouble she thought, it is because I have been dishonest. What happens next? What happens now?

‘Play some music, Mike, if you’d like to,’ said Milena. Her back was to him.

Mike Stone said nothing. He stood in the centre of the bamboo box, his back rigid, his hands clasped behind him, uncertain what was to come next.

‘You don’t feel like it?’ Milena asked him, gently. She often found herself thinking of him with kindness.

Still smiling his engineer’s smile, he shook his head. He went and sat very tidily on a Pear, hands folded in his lap.

‘Do you want to do anything special?’ she asked him. Now what could you possibly do that was special on your marriage night?

‘Doesn’t seem that there’s too much to do. Your friends are very nice. They tried very hard.’ He looked down at his hands, and his smile broadened ruefully. ‘I don’t think Cilia’s terribly interested in self-directed mutation mechanisms.’

‘Just say that it means the Bulge can grow chicken meat out of itself,’ she told him, sitting next to him. ‘That’s all they want to hear. They just want the excitement.’

‘I don’t find outer space exciting,’ he said, simply.

‘You must be the only one who doesn’t,’ she said.

Come on, Milena, she told herself. Begin, Milena, begin, say it quickly, the dishonesty can be killed, the knot can be cut with single word of truth. She sat with him on the Pear. ‘This is going to be a… ah… a strange kind of marriage,’ she began, and was stopped, as if by a virus.

He nodded, tamely, in agreement. ‘I can’t get an erection,’ he said. Milena wasn’t too sure that she heard correctly.

‘Sorry, Mike?’

‘I’m impotent,’ he said, quite directly, without, now, a trace of embarrassment. ‘I’m afraid that our conjugal relations are not going to be entirely existent.’

Milena could hardly believe her luck. She hoped she could keep the relief out of her voice. ‘Mike. I want you to know how much I appreciate this. Your telling me, I mean. The important thing is the marriage. Physical satisfaction is not the main thing.’

After all these years of doing without it anyway.

‘I didn’t think you liked sex either,’ he said. ‘I had a pretty good idea that you were the sort of girl I was looking for.’

Milena was less sure she was pleased by this.