Geoff Ryman - Child Garden

‘Your previous what?’

‘Convictions,’ said Lucy, and waited.

Her previous beliefs and principles? Milena did not understand.

‘I don’t know why everyone made such a fuss really, it was just a little business on the side with credit cards. Quite innocent. It was how you survived in those days, black economy, payment in cash or kind, turning a few tricks…’

‘Lucy!’ exclaimed Milena in wonder. ‘You’re a criminal!’

Lucy looked offended. ‘I was a cabaret artiste. A bit of snide went with the job. I mean we was very Alternative. We used to do scathing political and social satire. Politicians, the Royal Family. I always played the Queen.’ Lucy drew herself up, smoothed her waist with her hands. ‘We had her in fishnet stockings and roller skates.’ She suddenly launched herself back into the previous subject. ‘I mean, these big companies was all insured. It was the voice-printing that got me. I thought I could imitate the voices, you see, on the phone.’

‘Did you go to prison?’

‘No!’ said Lucy scornfully. ‘They could see I wasn’t the criminal type. Six months suspended and a nosy Probation Officer was all I got.’

The Cow Toms arrived. Translucent bags full of rice and broth and bits of chicken. The waitress opened the bags up. Her face was full of hate. She cracked eggs as if they were heads into the broth, stirred them in, and threw in herbs.

‘Is that good enough for you?’ the waitress asked.

‘Porridge,’ sighed Lucy. ‘That’s all anyone eats. Fried veg and porridge.’ Then she remembered her manners. ‘It’s lovely,’ she told the waitress. ‘My niece takes such good care of me, she’s such a good girl.’ She patted Milena’s hand. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she assured Milena, her face twitching. ‘Raw egg.’

‘It will cook in the broth,’ Milena told her.

‘Thank you, darling,’ Lucy said to the waitress, who was already walking away, her shoulders slightly hunched.

The natives are restless, thought Milena. She suddenly missed the beautiful calm that been the very stuff of London life only two summers before.

‘I know you’re not my niece,’ confided Lucy. ‘But you’re so good to me. And I don’t know who you are.’

‘Neither do I,’ said Milena. ‘Let’s eat it while it’s hot, while we can, before it gets cold.’

The beautiful past, as glimmering and faraway as a star. By winter, everything was covered in snow.

Mike Stone was in love, and so therefore was Christian Soldier. The vessel was by now a real garden. The walls were covered with moss and fern and cedar and bay and baby palm and holly, all improbably mixed. The floor had sprouted grass and ivy had entwined itself around the column that supported Milena’s chair. Most wonderful of all, there were now birds. They rustled within the leaves, and sometimes sang, huge American robins and red-winged blackbirds and tiny English finches. There were other birds, too, that Milena did not know.

The birds of Czechoslovakia.

Milena was playing the first scene of the Comedy over and over in her mind. She didn’t see the flowers. She was trying to find some way of making the first scene work.

The first trial scenes had already been broadcast. Fifteen minutes of Dante in the wood had been seen over half the Earth below, between clouds, over mountains. The Terminals below reported that the broadcast was a success. Reformation worked, even on an astronomical scale. But Milena did not like what she saw. She had thought that Dante’s allegory would work best if the imagery was kept simple and clear and literal. She had loved imagining Dante’s wood. She imagined dead branches, with moonlight glinting on the sinuous, shiny patches where bark had come away. She imagined the soft, thin green coating of lichen on the nodules of broken twigs. There were scuttlings in the darkness, and tiny frightened eyes.

All sides of each object had to be imagined. Milena found that she could do this. All sides swam fragmented in her mind, suddenly focusing on one area of space. She built up an image focus by focus. The swimming fragments reminded her of a cubist painting. Cubism for cubing, she thought. Picasso was simply painting what he saw.

The wood she created was beautiful but it was not evil. Even in darkness it was a garden. Dante’s forest was supposed to be symbol for the corruption of the human soul. To Milena it seemed such a terrible thing to do to a beautiful forest.

And the symbolism was redundant. An audience of viruses would already know what the wood meant. Viruses would supply people with all the necessary references. They would whisper as Dante stumbled through the wood, halfway through his life. Remember, the viruses would say, remember Isaiah 38.10, ‘In the midst of my days, I shall go to the gate of hell.’ The viruses would remember the Aeneid and its forest scenes. It would know that the lake of the heart meant the ventricle in which fear was supposed to reside. Dante limped with sin, the left foot being appetite and will.

The whole problem was one of redundancy. Rolfa had known that. That’s why she decided to leave all the narrative words unsung. Otherwise the chorus could only keep on telling us what we were already seeing.

The character of Dante was wrong too. Milena had cast one of the Babes, Peterpaul, to play him. He was thick-wristed, beefy, and stomped on firm male legs. Milena had thought he would be a kind of Everyman. But Dante was no Everyman. In all the drawings she had seen, Dante was fierce, with eyes and nose and chin like daggers, a politician in a murderous age. That was the right image. Peterpaul, she realised with reluctance, would have to go.

Milena let the recording play on, in her mind.

Here came the animals. They were symbols too. Milena’s heart sank when she saw them. The lion, the leopard, the she-wolf and her heavy teats; they were wonderful beasts. Milena did not want them to mean human wickedness. A lion is not murderous, a she-wolf is not greedy. Milena stopped the recording, and tried to re-imagine them with human faces.

Unbidden by her conscious mind, each of the beasts grew the face of Thrawn McCartney. With a shiver in her heart, Milena’s mind leapt out of the focus, out of the Comedy. She let Rolfa’s music play on, softly. The music was the only part of the opera that worked.

Milena looked up. Mike Stone was standing over her, holding out his violin as if offering it to her. ‘Would you like some music, Milena?’ he asked.

‘Why not?’ said Milena. The Comedy, it seemed, was beyond help.

‘I’ve taught Chris how to play Bruch’s violin concerto. Would you like to hear that?’

Milena felt a smile creeping over her face again. She had to admit that Mike Stone had a certain kind of charm. ‘You’ve taught a spaceship to play Bruch?’

‘He takes the cello and drum parts. He grows strings and hums,’ said Mike Stone, gangling with enthusiasm.

From just outside the focus, Milena heard the first sung words of the Comedy. Dante had met the spirit of Virgil and was singing, ‘Have pity on me, whether you are ghost or definite man.’

Mike Stone sat down and tucked the violin under his chin.

Cilia was playing Virgil. Her high, pure, female voice answered, ‘I am not a man, though I was born one.’

Oh dear, thought Milena. I keep crashing it to the ground. I need to find a different way to do this. She let the Comedy fall into silence.

Mike Stone played. He sawed and scraped his way through Bruch’s only masterpiece. The bow kept skidding off the violin strings with an earnest squeal. Somehow it helped, like someone slipping on a banana in a production of Rossini. Christian Soldier sang all around them, deep and resonating, like a fat man in a bath.