Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

Thrawn broke apart, refracted. Part of her face was in droplets, upside down in the air.

‘My God,’ said Toll Barrett.

Milena began to weep. ‘Whenever I’m alone,’ she said, and flung more water at her. The water was full of hate, as bitter as gall. With each lashing, part of Thrawn was pulled onto the wall and spattered against it. ‘Whenever I want to sleep.’ Another lashing of water, like a whip. ‘She puts holograms into my eyes! She puts pieces of herself onto the floor! She makes me see things! Hear things!’

Thrawn stood still, hands clasped in front of her, as if pious, silent and weeping herself.

Toll put his arms around Milena and Milena shuddered. She dropped the cup and the water spilled over her hot thick trousers.

‘Oh thank God,’ she said, breathing out with relief. They had all seen it, all of them. They all knew. And she wasn’t crazy, she wasn’t crazy at all. Cilia was stroking her hair. Thrawn looked on for a moment longer, and then the hologram wasn’t there.

Cilia stayed with Milena, while Toll and Peterpaul went to Milton, and told him what had happened. Milena never saw what followed. A delegation visited Thrawn’s rooms and took all the equipment back. There was one portable machine which had vanished, along with Thrawn. She would never work for the Zoo again, and when she was finally found, she would be Read, and wiped clean.

Sometime during the confusion, the Snide slipped away, to a new disguise.

And finally as Cilia and Milena sat talking there came a familiar drumming on the roof. They both looked up.

‘That’s rain,’ said Cilia. ‘Milena, that’s rain!’

They ran out onto the concrete walkways, under blue-black skies and the rain drove down in droplets the size of sparrow’s eggs, and everyone ran out of the buildings, holding up their hands towards the skies, looking up at the clouds, letting themselves be pelted with the hot raw eggs of rain. They danced in circles, in each other’s arms. From all over the city, came the sound of singing: Handel’s ‘Water Music’, ‘Singing in the Rain’. Milena and Cilia and Peterpaul and Toll all danced together round and round as the surface of the Thames was made rough with rain, and tiny rivers ran down the slopes of its cracked dry river bed.

And as they danced, a ghost appeared briefly, a dim image under grey skies, starved of light, scattered by raindrops. It sang, too, in a thin, unsteady wheedling voice.

Thrawn was still trying to join in.

A spindle-thread of gravity reached out all the way to Alpha Centauri. Milena could feel it in her head, and she could feel the forces of attraction tugging at her and at the Earth.

You could do worse than marry him said Bob the Angel. He felt like a thought in her own head. You need protection, Milena.

Milena was going to say, from what? But then she remembered Thrawn.

An image of exposure of loss, a sense of emptiness came to her from Bob. You are Bad Grammar. That was the implication.

‘They know about me,’ said Milena. ‘Why haven’t they Read me?’

They need you, said Bob.

Isn’t it strange, how the stars are still beautiful? In the concentration camps of the twentieth century, they must have looked up and thought how strange it was that there could still be stars and beauty.

Why do they need me?

Oh, said Bob, they have a project, wilder than this. They need someone for it. They need someone who can mould the light. The Consensus is tired of being alone. It wants to reach out.

Instead of explaining, Bob the Angel gave her the idea whole, the image, its size, its function. He gave her the diagram again. He showed her the Angels, moving out in lines, radiated from a tiny Earth, from a tiny sun. No matter how many of them were sent out, they radiated away, into infinity. They did not move in parallel lines. The lines spread apart from each other. Trajectories of exploration that had appeared to be almost side by side when they left Earth were eventually spread so far apart that whole stars, whole galaxies were lost between them.

The universe was too big to fill, no matter how many Angels streamed up the lines between the stars. The Consensus wanted to do more than explore.

It wanted to call.

Somewhere else in the universe, there must be another consciousness also reaching out. If they reached out for each other along the forces of attraction, and they met, they could give each other the universe they had explored.

The Consensus was going to call for the Other.

So it isn’t for Dante that they’ve done this, thought Milena, or for the music, or for anything else. They need to rehearse the techniques. They need to rehearse me.

Milena let it settle over her, the reality of the power by which she was held. I’ve always known that. I have always known they have me dancing, to pull me in when they want me. Why am I surprised? Did I think I was blessed, surrounded by some sort of sacred light? Did I really think the Consensus would love the music that much for its own sake?

Don’t take it hard, murmured the mind of Bob the Angel. They love the music. They want to do the Comedy. They want to do this, too.

Milena had the concept, whole in her head. The Consensus wants to find a mate. It wants to meet another like itself. It is so sure that somewhere in the spangle of stars there is intelligence. It is so sure that intelligence will take the same form as itself.

So it wants to call across space. The call will go no faster than the Angels, but it will take the form of light, radiating evenly, spreading evenly, out through the universe.

The Consensus wants to make an artificial astronomical artefact.

It will be a hologram four light years high.

It will be an image of the human face. Milena saw it, four-sided, four sides of four different human faces: Chao Li Song, Marx, Lenin, and Mao. And the faces will mouth in silence:

Over and over, the movements of the mouth would mimic the movements of the numbers, building up a code of mathematics, to be repeated, for intelligence to perceive and say: this is not natural. This is something calling.

Hubris anyone? Thousand Year Reich? They thought they would be judged by the size of their buildings, too, by the size of the ruins they would leave behind. Madness, monumentalism, Ozymandius, King of Kings.

It is a bit on the grand side, thought Bob, in her head. The Mount Rushmore idea is just a suggestion. They’d be dead chuffed if you had another idea, girl, dead chuffed.

Oh would they, now? Like they are dead chuffed by the Comedy? And the Comedy is just a way to test the gravitational lenses, and the Reforming, and all the techniques of sight and sound. They should have used Thrawn after all.

Oh no, lovey, oh no, don’t be hard and bitter, thought Bob the Angel. Thrawn cannot be trusted. She has the wild humours and will not do as she is asked. We needed someone who would do what she was asked. We had to wait until you were trained by her, until you learned most of what she knew.

Milena’s thoughts went small and quiet. Oh dear merciful heaven, she said to the stars. Thrawn was right.

That’s your job isn’t it? To find out what I’m doing and see if the Consensus can use it?

Yes, Thrawn, it was, but I didn’t know it. I let them use me, Thrawn. I let them use me to destroy you.

Milena rose up, in rage.

So why did you leave me like this? she demanded. You don’t need me independent, why not destroy me too, like you’ve destroyed everyone else. Why not Read me, wipe me, make me so much of a puppet that I can’t realise it? Why not just make Thrawn over, why bring me into it at all?