Geoff Ryman - Child Garden

‘We don’t want to hurt him,’ said the Snide. ‘Not at all. We would just like a few moments alone with him.’ Al took Max’s hands, and began to coax the fists to uncurl. ‘I’d just like to go back onto the stage with him. Where the instruments were played. The beautiful violins, the harps. The oboes. The place will still be warm from the music. We’ll go there, and you can tell me all about the music you love. Eh, Max? Maybe that will help you remember.’

‘Will she be there?’ Max demanded, looking in terror at Milena. It was as if Milena were his mother, as if he were a naughty little boy.

‘No, Max,’ said the Snide. ‘Just you and me.’

‘If anything happens to him,’ said the violinist, and jabbed a finger towards Milena, ‘I’ll hold you responsible. Max. I’ll be waiting downstairs.’

‘And I’ll be waiting here,’ said Milena.

Max and the Snide went back down, into the theatre. And Milena waited. How long? What was time? She got to know her own fingernails better. They were bitten, right down to the quick. Please, she prayed, though she knew of nothing to pray to, please let him remember.

Finally the door opened, and Al came out, supporting Max. Max was sobbing, rubbing fat hands into his eyes. Milena looked into Al’s eyes.

‘We found it,’ said Al.

Max broke free and began to run. He ran for the stairs. ‘Alice! Alice!’ he cried, stumbling down the steps, covering his face.

Al looked at him as he ran. ‘He really didn’t know that he’d done it, Milena. It was buried deep, well below the Web.’

‘In the Fire,’ said Milena.

‘In his heart,’ said the Snide, and blew out again. ‘He was like a maze, a horrible twisted tangle, everything unsorted.’ Al was staring, looking now at what he had seen, eyes round with fear. ‘I nearly didn’t get out’

Milena touched his arm. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Do you want a drink?’

Al shook his head, no, no. ‘I know what drink does. Oh by all the stars! To be like that. To be trapped in that, forever.’ Al looked back at the stairs and the plush carpet, as if a ghost stood there. ‘At least he gets out. At least he gets out in music’

Milena found that her sympathy was somewhat limited. ‘What did he do with the book?’ she asked.

Al’s eyes turned around slowly to look at her. Al spoke very carefully. ‘He bundled it up with other old books he had borrowed, and returned them. They were books he had borrowed from the British Museum. You know where that is.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘I should know,’ said Milena. There were the merest whispers of memory. It was as if she heard footsteps overhead through a ceiling. ‘I grew up there. I was raised there. On the Estate of the Restorers.’

‘There’s a wall,’ said Al.

Milena looked up.

‘A wall in you. The Museum lies on the other side of it.’

‘I know,’ said Milena. Her childhood lay on the other side of it.

‘And you’re going to go there tonight, now?’ Al could read her thoughts.

‘I’ve got to get that book. The Museum won’t be locked,’ said Milena. ‘Do you know the titles of the other books? That will tell me where to start looking.’

Al touched the tip of Milena’s nose. ‘Careful, Milena,’ he said. ‘You keep thrusting, you could hurt yourself.’

Milena remembered meeting Thrawn. It was her own fault. She kept thrusting.

The Restoration had come. Milena was convinced that people would want holograms, and she wanted the Babes to have them first. She wanted someone who knew about hologramming, someone who came cheap. So she found herself in a hostel, off the Strand. What sort of person is it, she wondered, who lives so far away from her own Estate? Milena knocked on a purple door. What an awful colour, she thought.

‘Come ih-hnnnn!’ sang a woman’s voice beyond the door. It sounded like a caricature.

The room was deep blue inside, full of water. From out of the Coral Reef walls, seaweed sprouted. Schools of thin black fish moved among it with zig-zag precision. White light wriggled like worms over the surface of everything, even Milena’s arms. A clump of seaweed spun around, and smiled with a manic, slightly daffy grin. It looked something like an amused death’s head, all sinew and bone and pop-eyes. ‘We are in a Coral Reef, after all,’ it said.

A pink-scaled fish swam up and then into Milena’s hand. Her Rhodopsin skin tingled with the light. Milena held up her hand and saw light glowing inside her flesh, orange like a sunset. Milena looked up and the face now trailed long black feathery fins. Tiger fish, said her viruses. Touch it and you are paralysed.

‘I’m Thrawn McCartney,’ the tiger fish said. ‘Are you my saviour?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Milena. ‘Do you need one?’

‘Sure do. No one will give me a job. What did they tell you about me?’ Thrawn wanted to hear about herself.

‘They said you were the best hologram technician that the Zoo has,’ said Milena.

‘And that I’m a pain in the lymph nodes.’

‘Somewhere else mostly,’ admitted Milena.

‘Well I am,’ said Thrawn, her face fixed.

‘So am I,’ said Milena.

Thrawn gave a connoisseur’s shake of the head. ‘No,’ she said, and spun back around. The whole room seemed to blink, and the tiger fish was gone. A woman remained, her back towards Milena. ‘You’re one of those quiet, boring, determined little pains,’ she said. She wore a black leotard and looked small and slim. ‘I am a great, gushing volcano’s mouth of a pain.’

She tossed what seemed half a hundredweight of black hair over her shoulders and turned, arching her back. She was deliberately posing, offering herself. Milena felt a kind of jolt, but not necessarily one of attraction. The woman was dangerously thin. The neck was all tendons. They looked as if they could snap, as if the disproportionately large head could break the tendons and then roll off. The face was haggard. Milena felt something like desire and something queasy, at the same time.

‘I’m about to offer you a job,’ warned Milena. But she found she was smiling. ‘Do you want to talk about hologramming?’

‘No,’ sighed Thrawn. ‘Holograms are two hundred years old and about as exciting as dandruff. We could remake the world now, with light.’ She glanced about at her underwater world. ‘I bet all you want me for is some old opera. You want me to cube in some real places onto the stage. Right? Right?’

‘Yes,’ said Milena.

‘We’re all so bored with your old operas. We’re all so bored with your ficken high-toned quality.’ The room blinked again, and she dropped down onto a beanbag.

It was an ordinary room now. The Coral Reef walls had been plastered over and left unpainted. There was a mattress on the floor, and bags, and a bank of equipment — metal boxes, lights, and leads. A cable went out the window to the Restoration wires along the Strand. Thrawn stretched her legs out straight and looked at Milena. ‘I ought to warn you,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been Read. I’ve never been Placed or doctored. So you’ll never know what I’m going to do or say next.’

Milena was still smiling, at the aggression, at the foolishness of it. ‘I haven’t been Read either,’ she said, hoping she sounded unimpressed.

‘Then why are you so dull?’ asked Thrawn.

‘I guess some people just naturally are. Like some people are naturally obnoxious.’

Thrawn liked that. It made her grin. ‘Yup,’ she agreed. ‘So how did you get away?’ She rolled over onto her stomach, still stretching, like some starved cat.

‘I didn’t. They gave me one final load of viruses and I was so ill they couldn’t Read me. In the meantime I was Placed.’