Geoff Ryman - Child Garden

‘That’s my mate George. Strong silent type. He was a nuclear astrophysicist.’ Bob the Angel imitated a popping sound.

He keeps talking to reassure me, thought Milena.

‘That’s right. You’re sure this isn’t all too much for you?’

Milena shook her head.

‘Say hello, George. See? Silent. I do all the talking. George never says anything. So it’s not too strange, having him all tangled up inside here with me. It’s just that from time to time I start talking in parsecs. You ready to go on, Milena?’

She nodded. She felt his pleasure.

‘Just look at this. I want you to see this.’

And the Angel flung himself out again, into the lines.

He passed along them, like a wave through rope, accelerating. He hurtled himself along the lines, a disturbance in them. Milena could feel that there was a traffic in Angels. They were all sighing up and down the lines, speeding away towards the stars. Bob shot past them, through them. They tingled in greeting.

There was a traffic in light as well. Milena didn’t recognise it at first. She simply became aware of something in the lines, sizzling its way out of the sun. They struck the earth and reeled shimmying away from its surface, scattered back out into space, like tiny wriggling arrows. Milena could feel those too. She felt them sputtering into space. Light was part of the lines.

And Bob was swinging from line to line, slipping, somersaulting, shaking himself with the silent laughter of Angels. He spun, as if on tiptoe, and suddenly, made of gravity, he gathered the lines of gravity tightly in towards himself. The lines snagged the light, pulling them inward as well.

‘Open your eyes, love,’ said the Angel.

Milena had not realised that her eyes had been closed. She opened them and saw, with human eyes, the Earth.

She saw the Earth through a gravitational lens. It was as if she looked at it through the bottom of a wine glass. Its blue seas and white clouds, its thin and flimsy cloak of air, were seen as a series of halos, rings of light.

And the Angel let all the lines go, and the universe seemed to boom.

Milena’s mouth was hanging open, and she was laughing as if drunk. Her eyes she knew were sparkling, giddy with delight.

The Angel spoke. ‘Not bad, I’d say.’

‘Wonderful,’ said Milena, shaking her head.

‘That’s the spirit. I love it out here, really, I do. Can you imagine if everyone down there could see this? There wouldn’t be any meanness would there? None of this grubbing, get your number 92 and stay in line. None of this, "Here you" if they knock your coat off the hanger.’

The thought was the lines, and the lines were pulling the stars and the sun, the Earth and the Bulge, holding them together through the forces of attraction.

‘We’re concepting it,’ said the Angel. ‘By which I mean… oh here,’ He passed her a kind of telepathic diagram. It showed Angels rising up from the Earth and travelling the vastness between the stars. There were caravans of Angels, like drops of water sliding on a cobweb. Those in front passed the sensation of where they were to those in the back, one to the other, all the way back to the Consensus. They were making a mental map of the lines.

The map was on a scale of one to one, and overlay reality. For all intents and purposes, it was reality. The fact that the lines had been conceived so far out meant anyone in the net could feel that far out. Milena was touching the stars. She felt them flicker, as if against her fingertips.

The map had an end. There was a boundary beyond which the Angels had not travelled, though the map was spreading at the speed of light, like a wobbling jelly.

‘We just hit Sirius. Thirty four years out. Sorry, George. Bloody parsecs. Stickler for parsecs is old George. So we got the Serious Dog and we got Alfie Century as well. Not too bad. Not too good either.’

The Angels travelled at the speed of light and so went back in time. They passed the map back more slowly, into their future. They twisted gravity to break the asteroids, and compress them, heating them, melting them, hauling out the metal into space where it twisted like putty, cooling to be sent back to Earth.

‘So how long before we get back to the beginning? Tuh. Long enough. Well before the sun goes Nova. And what will we take with us? Just ourselves. Just gravity and time. I’ll tell you something, Milena. I used to think I was made of meat. Then I got up here and I thought. Oh no, I’m not. I’m really rather rarefied. I’m made out of gravity and time. Gravity makes the meat, gravity makes the thought. Time makes events. We’re strung out along gravity and time like lines of laundry. Back at the beginning, when we get there, the only event left is going to be us. Gravity in quantum vacuum, with just enough time for something to happen in. Then — whoosh. We start the universe. Now look at this!’

The Angel divided. He peeled himself away in sections, like an orange. There was even a zest, a spray of personality that freshened. He spread, breaking apart into smaller and smaller selves, going up, down, sideways, all of him shivering in the wires.

He was defining a cube. He lay himself like eggs at regular intervals, and each point cried aloud a number.

‘Plus one! Plus one!’

‘Minus two! Minus two!’

‘Fifty five! Fifty five!’

Then Bob spoke, in three great voices along three axes of height and width and depth. He was a graph. ‘I call them,’ the graph said, ‘my Cherubim.’

The Cherubim called like seagulls, eager to be heard, to be useful. They were limited creatures, reduced in size and information. A fragment of the whole, that retained the rough pattern of the whole. The area that was defined neatly bounded one half of the Earth which swelled into it, like a great dome. The poles, and two points of the equator touched the outer limits of the cube.

‘There you go, Milena,’ said the three voices.

The Cherubim still called. ‘Plus seven. Plus seven. Four nineteen. Four nineteen.’

‘All for you, Milena.’

‘Minus one oh two two! Minus one oh two two!’

‘That’s your stage.’

Milena looked at the Earth, turning slowing through the area that she could now control. Oh! she thought. The thought was too wistful and dim to be dismay. It saw the beauty, it saw the innocence below, it saw the opportunity. The thought was like regret.

‘It’s called a Comedy,’ said the graph. ‘Will it be funny?’

‘Not funny,’ Milena said. ‘Just happy. Not the same thing.’

Milena paused. Milena hung back.

She looked at the blue world with human eyes. She felt it through the strings, its surface crumpled, like some old woman’s face.

‘It’s too big,’ she said, scowling.

‘What you mean, love?’

‘It’s… sinful.’

There was space, empty and pure, and she was to fill it, with a show. Is there a flower called Hubris?

My name is Milena Shibush. It is a Lebanese name, but my family were from Eastern Europe. My father died. My mother died. They were killed by the virus.

The only virus is us.’

The Cherubim fell silent. The three axes spoke together. ‘It isn’t just you, you know, Milena. It’s all of us. The Consensus. The Consensus is all of us. It wants this. It’s the one that’s doing it really.’

The stars and the black spaces between them seemed to say that it would be a violation. To make an image the size of heaven, for half of Earth to see.

‘Suppose God…’ she began to whisper and found she had no conclusion.

‘That’s a great, big, lonely word,’ said Bob the Angel. ‘Don’t know. He speaks too big. Too many connections. How could you speak to all the stars at once?’

‘I’m afraid,’ said Milena.