Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

And Milena said to herself, to the trees in the wind: Rolfa, I love you. I want to live with you and sleep with you. And I can’t. I don’t tell them that. To do that would be to try to tell them the whole truth. And who can tell the whole truth? You’d never stop talking.

She said that aloud. ‘Maybe that isn’t the whole truth. But if I tried to tell the whole truth, I’d never stop talking.’

Another small chuckle. Some of them were still working it out.

‘We’re all people. We’re all artists.’ She shrugged with helplessness. ‘Thank you.’

There was a settled warmth to the applause that followed. Cilia, the Princess, Peterpaul, Moira Almasy, they all stood up. Moira’s jaw was thrust out as she smiled. Cilia was grinning and grinning as if her face could not spread wide enough. Peterpaul was applauding, looking serious, looking straight into her eyes. Toll Barrett was nodding ‘yes’. Even Charles Sheer was applauding.

And a Crab-like voice in Milena’s head said, You’re good at making speeches, Milena. That could be useful.

And another voice, lowering, slow, said It made you look better than you are. They’ll never guess.

Milena stood, still and quiet, embarrassed, battling to keep her modesty. Perhaps she was wrong to think that arrogance and pride would destroy talent, but it was what she believed, so she tried to preserve her humility. It was a tactical decision. She exploited herself and had to protect herself from her self.

And how many selves, how many voices?

Be easy on yourself, Milena. Here is the sun, here is the applause, and the light, and the silence.

Milena remembered walking towards St Thomas’s hospital. A nurse led her. He was a big man, about seventeen years old, calm and smiling. She remembered his sun-bruised skin, dark purple cheeks and clear eyes. The picture of health. He sauntered, at ease with his body and the world.

‘We’ll go round this way,’ he said, as they crossed the road. His teeth were perfect and white, and he had golden-green curly hair.

‘How did you know to ask for me?’ asked Milena. ‘Did she tell you?’

‘The Terminals said she was part of the Centennial and to find you out in the Slump.’ He held open a door, and they entered the Coral Reef.

The hospital was full of tunnels and dens, like natural caverns. The Coral Reef walls glowed softly, fluorescent, so that there would always be light, so that the dying did not awake in the dark, afraid that they had already gone. The Cancer Ward, it was called. People were dying for the lack of it.

In each of the dens three or four people lay in beds, young people, thirty or thirty-five years old, suddenly stricken, suddenly dying. Very suddenly they lost weight, fell ill with a variety of diseases as their immune system failed. Their bodies wore out, their hearts, their lungs, their livers, all expiring in concert.

‘It’s an epidemic, really, isn’t it?’ Milena said, keeping her voice low.

‘There really isn’t a word for what it is,’ said the picture of health. He held a door open for her. Milena smelled, very faintly, the stifled odour of illnesses and drugs and damp bandages and disinfectant.

The Doctors were still trying to break the Candy that shielded the genes of growth and maturing. The Doctors were still trying to find a way to synthesise the proteins that cancer had made, that had prolonged life. We all forget, thought Milena, we all have to forget that half of our lives has been lost.

Except for the Tumours, except for Lucy; they can’t the at all.

‘What’s wrong with Lucy?’ Milena asked. Lucy had been missing for several months. It seemed likely that she was very ill indeed.

The nurse stopped and shook his head. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he said. ‘She’s getting better.’

‘Yes, but from what?’ Milena asked.

The nurse shrugged. ‘Old age?’ He beamed. ‘The human condition? She also is in — ah — another condition. But maybe that isn’t quite so miraculous.’

Miraculous?

The nurse led Milena on down the corridor, and indicated a doorway, and bowed slightly as if presenting Lucy to her.

Picture of health, thought Milena, looking at his puce and smiling cheeks, even you will be cut off.

Then she went into Lucy’s room.

Lucy had a room to herself. She sat up in bed and Milena could see in that instant that she had changed utterly.

Lucy looked very calm and dignified, perhaps even stern. Her hair was no longer orange. It was the colour of friable, dry soil, a muted grey. It was going darker in a line, along the parting near the scalp. Her leathery old skin looked thicker, smoother. It was a different kind of skin.

Lucy looked at Milena, with a hint of a smile, and something in that look made Milena’s breath catch. ‘I know you,’ she said.

‘Hello, Lucy,’ said Milena as if caught off-guard. ‘How are you?’

‘You don’t have the time,’ said Lucy, with the same stern smile. She turned away, and looked out of her window, at the river. ‘You don’t have the time that I have.’

Lucy was rubbing the palms of her hands, and the skin was coming off in thick rolls, as if it were a coating of dried glue. The new skin underneath was brown and thick and spongy, without any lines or creases. No future there, for a fortune teller to read. Milena saw Lucy’s profile.

She looks, thought Milena, like a head on a Roman coin. Misshapen somehow, but fierce. She looks like something that might have grown up out of the earth, a sort of root vegetable. And she smells, smells delicious, like freshly baked bread.

‘One day,’ said Lucy, still watching the river outside, ‘it all comes back, and you’re somewhere else. Now. I can draw any map, right here in my hand. I can light a cigarette with my fingers. I’m not saying that everything will work out by itself, by what we want, mind you. I’m just saying that the eyes are hollow… that the light spreads out inside our eyes and not outside. One day it just added up.’

Her mind has gone, thought Milena.

‘One day, it just all added up. Added up, all the little bits and pieces, and you blank out. No memory. Feels wonderful. Like a warm bath. You don’t need it any more.’

Or has gone into another state, thought Milena. Lucy. What are you trying to tell me?

‘I am five hundred feet tall,’ said the ancient. ‘You could all shelter in my shade — if my leaves was seen by you.’

She sighed and leaned forward and picked up a tray from the bed. On a plate was a huge lump of meat, its fat all crisp, golden, raised up in crunchy blisters. It was covered in minty sauce, and mere was a mound of — what — ice cream?

No. Mashed potatoes. Lamb and mashed potatoes with a pool of meat juice in a hollow in the middle. And mere was a pile of hard, green brussels sprouts.

It wasn’t there before, thought Milena. I’m sure it wasn’t there before.

Lucy chewed and swallowed. ‘These little tracks go everywhere,’ she said. She very neatly sculpted a mouthful of mashed potato onto the back of her fork. ‘You can’t see them at first, you’ve got to go blind for fifty or sixty years first. I couldn’t see anything for at least that long, and then one day, there’s an ache from the front to the back of your head, and your eyes are better. They get better and you see different. Everything different. They don’t teach you to see, and it takes time to heal. You have to go blind in order to heal.’

She raised the forkful of mash in salute.

‘What I’d like to do,’ she said, food pushed over to one side in her mouth. ‘Is plant myself for a hundred years or so. I’d just like to settle in like a tree. Feed like a tree on sunlight and rain. Get all those wrinkles in my brain to unravel. I think my bones would heal, then, too. Did they tell you? My bones are getting bigger, stronger. And all the nodules are flaking off, too.’