Geoff Ryman - Child Garden

Milena began to shake. ‘Oh Marx and Lenin,’ she said. ‘Oh Marx and Lenin.’

She went to Canto after Canto. Music flowered. It was in gorgeous colours, as pungent as scent, combinations of sound that she would never have been able to imagine.

‘It’s wonderful,’ she said, and began to laugh, and shake her head. ‘It’s all wonderful!’

Something rose up in her, and she stood up and whooped for joy. She jumped up and down in her tiny room, and Moira began to beam with pleasure.

‘Moira! Oh, Moira!’ cried Milena, and hugged her, and Moira chuckled at her pleasure. She draped her hands on Milena’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. ‘It means,’ said Moira, ‘that the Consensus wants us to put it on. We’re going to put it on, Milena.’

Milena covered one eye, as if to protect herself from too much good news. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said simply.

The world changed about her. She felt her place in it change in that moment. The opera was going to exist, it was going to be real, and Milena somewhere had a place in that. She had done something with her life.

‘We’re all fair stunned too,’ said Moira. ‘The Consensus has never intervened so directly in the arts. We’re having a meeting later today, about three. I can leave the score with you, if you want to read it, and think about it.’

All Milena could do was nod yes, yes, yes of course. Could she bring it with her? It was a lot to carry. Milena kept nodding yes. She had been carrying a load for so long, what difference could it make. Yes, yes. The word of acquiesence, which is not the same thing as freedom.

There was an orange on Milena’s windowsill, as round and perfect as the world. As she read through all the Comedy, as all its streams and tributaries of music flowed towards one immense ocean, Milena ate the orange, smelled its zest, felt the spray of its skin. And she looked out of her narrow window at the sky, and saw the clouds.

The clouds were wispy and white, moving as if blown by the music of the Comedy. Beyond them, the sky was blue, and Milena could see that the sky was infinitely deep, masked by a haze of light.

Time pulled. Milena was hauled up through the sky, leaving the orange, the manuscript, her room behind.

And Milena was looking down through the sky, backwards, from above.

The sky was a thin film of blue haze that looked as if it could be peeled back, like the skin of an orange. Earth would be left exposed and defenceless.

Below there was a forest. The forest was like a carpet made of thousands of green needles. Milena could almost see each tree. They were floating above the Amazon. In the west, rising up above the blue haze of the horizon were the Andes, the snow on their peaks pink with sunrise.

On the walls of the Bulge, there were plants growing. They were small mountain flowers, tiny, pale blooms amid spines. They were the flowers of Czechoslovakia. The Bulge remembered the code that grew them. The same helix that coded life coded information. It grew both flesh and thought. Life was a pun.

The vessel was alive and linked to Milena. It knew what she desired and could consult her viruses for genetic codes. Then, by thinking, it altered the genetic code of its own cells. It grew flowers out of itself, mixing memory and desire.

As Milena was about to do.

She was smiling, no longer giddy with weightlessness, but expectant and nervous. There was to be a test of the Reformation equipment. A single image was to be cast. Milena was going to imagine a rose. It was to be a rose that would fill the sky below.

‘What happens next?’ Mike Stone asked. He stood stock-still behind her, his mind maintaining the position of the Bulge in orbit.

‘Well,’ said Milena. ‘The area of focus is huge. So the Consensus is going to help map it out for me.’

‘How?’ said Mike Stone.

‘With an Angel,’ said Milena.

Suddenly there was a tingling underneath her scalp, where she had been made Terminal. ‘It’s about to happen,’ she said.

Information was presented to her, not in words. The information was like an iron weight, very delicately placed in her frail flesh. It was as if the weight of the universe was whispering to her. All the bones of her cheeks and temple seemed to crackle and ache.

The Consensus had spoken.

As if it had breathed out a bubble, something was released. It was small like an orange pip, and Milena felt relief. The great voice had been withdrawn. Milena had the impression of somersaulting, of something rolling towards her. ‘It’s here,’ she whispered. ‘The Angel.’

Something seemed to open up in her head.

It was like a curtain going back. The suede walls of the Bulge, the lens of its window, the stars and the Earth all seemed to part, and she was in another existence.

There was no light, no sound, only sensation. The sensation was something like touch. But the touch ran in lines, taut lines between things. Consciousness was extended along them, and whenever thought moved, the lines were strummed, like the strings of a musical instrument.

The Earth was a carefully wound ball of lines which led out from the Earth in all directions. The lines of touch went out to the stars and curved inwards towards the heart of the sun, a nexus of them eight minutes away. The lines pierced Milena’s body and the body of the Bulge and held them both, falling, falling always towards the Earth, as the Earth fell away.

The lines were gravity. In the fifth dimension, the mathematical description of gravity and electromagnetic phenomena are identical. Infra-red, and ultra-violet, weight and thought. They were all the same thing. The universe was a pun as well.

A web, thought Milena. The universe is a web, like a spider’s.

‘Hello! Hello!’ cried a voice. There was no sound, but words had resonated like music out of the lines. Rising out of the lines, part of the lines, was another consciousness, a personality, imprinted on gravity, where thought and gravity are the same thing.

The Angel rolled towards her, across the lines, making them throb. The Angel laughed, and the laughter thrilled its way through the lines. The laughter felt like the strings of a cello being struck by a deaf child.

‘Light waves, the Angel said. ‘X-rays, radio waves. They’re all here. So what do you think? Isn’t it lovely?’

‘You were human,’ said Milena aloud.

‘Well ta,’ said the Angel. ‘Better than being called a spider, I expect.’

Milena saw a face in memory. The Angel was showing her a memory. Milena saw the face of a cheerful man with red hair and a creased face, an ageing face. He was wrapping a blue tie around itself, one hundred years ago.

‘Your name was Bob,’ said Milena.

‘Got it in one,’ said the Angel. ‘Bob the Angel. It’s an honour and a privilege, Milena, an honour and a privilege. Ugly-looking geezer, wasn’t I? Mind you the wife was no oil painting either.’

Another memory was spun out of gravity. Milena saw a cheerful, pink-faced woman with a double chin and clean false teeth.

‘But you enjoy it,’ said Milena, with relief. He enjoyed being an Angel.

‘Ah wouldn’t change it for the world. One thing though. I wish my kids could have known how their old man ended up.’ He strummed the lines of gravity.

He had wanted to be a musician. He played in bars after work. He had had three children and had kept their photographs on his desk as the world collapsed. Milena saw the photographs as well. Three cheerful, blonde children, with pre-Rhodopsin faces the colour of a photographic flash.

Milena sensed something else. Behind all the memories, between the words, something else swam like a fish in dark water.

‘You’re a composite,’ Milena realised. They had given Bob part of someone else’s personality as well.