Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

A hump of dried algae appeared to rise up. Something human struggled out from underneath it, a bare arm, a blistered face. The face was bruised and torn, and the hump of algae rocked back and forth on top of it, smiling with white false teeth and glass eyes, sputtering as it breathed. Thrawn was being raped by it. ‘Stop her,’ the face pleaded, looking at Milena. ‘Stop her, please.’

Milena’s knees wobbled and her feet seemed to turn sideways on the stones; she walked like someone with a neural disturbance. She staggered through the image. She walked through the pumping mound of algae; her feet walked through the pleading face. You are not there, she told herself. You do not exist. Her fists were clenched. She was being worn down.

Milena had to walk around the edge of a long-dry fish-farm. There had been too many trout to save. Their corpses lay stinking in the bleached, baked mud. There were flies. They tickled the corners of Milena’s mouth. Milena waved them away.

Suddenly a pile of dead fish heaved back and there was Thrawn McCartney. She had been opened up too, her softer portions eaten away. She opened her mouth to speak and flies ascended from it in a cloud.

‘Milena!’ said the swirling cloud of flies. The flies swarmed around her, buzzing. ‘Milena! Milena!’

Milena steeled herself, hunching her shoulders and walked on. She was confronted with the scattered bodies of fish, almost to the horizon. She decided they were not real. She walked on and her feet slipped in the slime of rotten fish. That upset her more than anything else that morning. There was a sharp stab of anger, and then despair. My new shoes, she thought. My beautiful new shoes. I knew I ought to carry them! Now they’ll stink of rotten fish all day. People will see the crazy lady rock and shiver and then they’ll smell her. She tried to wipe the shoes on dried clumps of grass. The grass was as white and as brittle as china.

She walked to the main channel of the River Thames. At low tide, the river was now no more than roughly four or five metres across. It wound its way through a stinking softness of mud and drying salt, up to the white gates of the Great Barrier Reef.

The Barrier rose up like a range of snow-peaked, rolling hills in the distance. Even through the filter of the lenses, the Great Reef glistened in the fierce sun, as if mirror dust had been thrown over it. Milena could feel the light reflected from it on her skin. The Reef stretched away towards the South Downs, and north towards Tottenham. Its foundations were a stained and mottled brown from lichen and the mud and the waters that had retreated. Its gates, the locks, were left hanging open. There was no need to keep back the waters now.

On the banks a crowd of people waited for taxis. The docks of the taxi station, with its walkways and awnings were now stranded far up the shore, away from the dying river. The people waited disconsolately under broad-brimmed hats. They wore shorts and airy shirts and sandals. Some of them stood sinking into mud, staring away from the world. Baskets full of their goods waited untended on the shore. There were dried and shrivelled onions, a last few nurtured radishes, whole herds of frogs killed for sale before they died of drought and disease. Downstream, the banks were white with birds gathering by the water that was left.

As Milena approached, spiders scuttled backwards ahead of her. They had leering cartoon faces. Their grins were mad and mocking, the eyes bright with violence. Sticks and stones. You think that can hurt me? Milena felt her jaw jut out with determination under its sweaty woollen mask. Do you? Hurt? Hah? Even without thinking, her head wobbled from side to side, to escape the disruption in her eyes.

She joined the line for the water taxis and the images ceased. Her nostrils were plugged to keep out light, her ears were plugged. It was a little while before she realised that someone had been calling her by name.

‘Milena? Milena!’ he was saying.

She turned around to see a farmer burned black-purple from the sun, under a broad hat. He wore shorts and an oatmeal coloured toga. Mud was going dry and grey on his ankles and rough resin sandals. Then she focused on the face.

It was Al, Al the Snide. He carried a basket of shrivelled, slimy coriander leaves.

‘My God, what’s happened to you?’ he asked her. He took hold of Milena’s arm, and pulled her to one side, away from all the people, from the babble of their thoughts.

Milena knew what he saw. He saw a woman with mirror contact lenses, who never stopped rocking, very slightly, and whose ears and nostrils were stuffed with cotton wool, and whose mind seemed to be full of images of madness. A woman who believed she was being persecuted, that someone was beaming images into her head, or into the air all around her.

Milena tried to think at him, very clearly, in the silence.

I’ve got someone angry at me, she told him, without words. She is the best hologrammer in the world. She tried to burn out my eyes. Thus the mirrors. Now, everywhere I go, when I am alone, she hounds me with very unpleasant imagery.

She kept backing away, drawing him up the bank, away from the others. Away from other people, he could Read her more clearly.

I’m telling you this because you’re Snide, and you can see what I see.

He began to look anxious, and with a tug on her arm, brought her to a stop. Then she pushed it all at him, the carcass in the living-room, the flies, the sun in her retina, and the things she had just seen.

‘Do you believe me?’ she asked him out loud, so he would remember to answer her in words.

The Snide’s mouth hung open for a moment, and then he answered, choosing his words very carefully. ‘I believe… that you believe it.’

Milena knew what that meant. How could she expect anything else? It sounded like madness even to her.

‘Right. Fine,’ she said, in a flat voice and began to walk back to the taxi station. She looked at her feet as she walked. Her shoes that now stank of fish grinned up at her with the faces of fish. The blubbery fish mouths were painted red with lipstick, and the eyes were ringed with blue make-up and mascara.

See that? She jabbed the thought towards the Snide, and spun around to show him the shoes. My shoes, she cubed faces onto my shoes. Did you see it? Just then? It was in the light! It was real! It was real!

Al the Snide watched her warily. No, he had not see it. Milena turned away in a fury of disappointment and walked back into the crowd. The crowd was stirring. Dimly, Milena began to hear the sound of a taxi’s engine. People were climbing up the slope of the bank for their baskets. Milena stood in line. Al rejoined her.

There’s no way for you to tell, is there? she asked him in her mind. All you can Read is my memories, and they may or may not be mad. All you can tell is that I believe them. So now you tell me, Milena thought, distinctly, what has happened to you? Al looked confused and shook his head and held up his hands in helplessness. Too many people. He couldn’t Read her clearly.

‘How long have you been farming coriander?’ she asked Al aloud.

The water-taxi was drawing near, a round, heavy black tug with a tiny steam engine. ‘No moorings, no moorings,’ a boy on the deck was shouting. ‘You’ll have to wade to us!’

People rolled up the bottom of their shorts, or plunged into the brown water that was infested with bilharzia. The Snide answered, warily, looking about him. ‘They’re after me,’ Al said, murmuring, thin-lipped.

Milena couldn’t quite hear. She pulled out an earplug, and leaned towards him.

‘Since all this Singing, they’re after anyone who plays with the viruses,’ he said, standing up straight and looking away from her as if they were not talking. ‘They’ve got Snides out after all of us now. I’ve got to stay with people all the time too, to hide. Like you had to, from me.’