Geoff Ryman - Child Garden

It’s a different world, thought Milena. Spaceships sing and there are Angels sliding between the stars and astronauts grow animals out of memory. The Comedy will have to be new as well.

Mike Stone’s brow was furrowed with concentration. His giant legs were splayed apart; his elbows flailed. Milena found that she forgave him. Whatever mere was to forgive, except awkwardness and a touch of insanity. Milena smiled on him.

Mike Stone finished, and looked up at Milena as a little boy would, eyes full of expectant trust.

‘Clown,’ she pronounced him.

The birds of the garden whooped and whistled. Outside, the sun was rising over the Earth, a sudden diamond-burst of light. Christian Soldier lowered a blue-tinged cornea over the window as a filter. A crescent of blue appeared along the rim of the Earth. The sun seemed to have been laid by the Earth. The sun was a round, white, cold blue egg nestling in mist.

Milena found that she wished she could stay there, with the Earth and the birds and the music. The stars looked like a fall of snow, suspended.

Then, down to Earth.

Stars seemed to be falling out of a slate-blue sky. It was snowing. Milena remembered walking along the Cut some time during the week of her return. Snow was filling in the tracks made by the stalls, hissing gently as it landed.

The stalls had been pulled to one side, and folded shut. Only the coffee vendor was still open. He stood in the light of the Cut’s one street lamp, stomping his feet to keep warm, and shouting: ‘Coffee! Coffee for health!’

Everything smelled of coffee. The snow on the ground smelled of coffee. It was splattered with it and stained. A man bustled past Milena, his fawn-coloured coat mottled with coffee. He wore a facemask that was soaked with it.

There was a curious, raucous wail from an upstairs window: the Baby Woman. Everyone knew about her. She and her infant had both become ill with a sudden fever. The baby died in the night, and the mother awoke in the morning with the mind of her child. She lay in bed all day in diapers and howled. Her husband was often seen about the Cut. His stare was hollow and uncomprehending.

The apothecary viruses had mutated. They collected complete mental patterns and transferred them. They were contagious. One personality could obliterate another. It had not been obvious at first. Even the summer before, Milena had heard of an ageing actor of the Zoo who had woken up convinced he was a young and handsome Animal. He had howled, sobbing, when he saw himself in a mirror. The sickness became more noticeable when people began to bark or meow. Someone had tried to fly, leaping off the Hungerford Bridge. The viruses transferred information between species. People thought they were birds, or cats.

The old concrete arcade along one side of the Cut had been demolished. A rhinocerous hump of Coral was growing out of it, amid the stalks of dead nettles. Milena saw a sheet of black resin. There were Bees huddled under it, kneeling as if in prayer. They had lifted up a paving stone and were looking at the earth underneath it, and jittering in place with the cold.

‘Oyster trails,’ one of them whispered, scooping sand and snow aside with his hands..

‘Old cigarettes,’ said a woman’s voice.

‘Cold earthworms!’ they all suddenly yelped together and laughed.

One of them was wearing a sequined jacket, and other Bees licked his ears and murmured to his soft blonde hair. He was the King, the King from Love’s Labour’s Lost.

The Bees flinched as Milena approached. They ducked and almost but not quite looked at her out of the corners of their eyes.

‘Hello, Billy,’ said Milena, gently. ‘Billy, remember me? I’m Milena. Constable Dull, an’t shall please you?’

‘Lo, Ma,’ he said, smiling vaguely, not looking at her. The others clustered more closely about him.

The Bees protected themselves by staying in groups and focusing their attention all together on the same things. They protected themselves from life, too much life all at once. If a horse, a huge and muscled, sweating and snorting beast, passed the Bees and they were unprepared, they could faint. Milena had once seen that happen, a nest of Bees collapsing in unison. She had seen Bees kissing the cobbles where a pigeon had been crushed by the wheels of a cart.

‘What’s it like, Billy?’ Milena asked him.

‘It’s in lines,’ he said, still without looking at her. ‘All in lines.’ He looked up, as if at the stars, snow-flakes on his eyelashes.

An empathy virus had mutated. It stimulated sympathetic imagination. Nurses, Health Visitors, Social Hygienists and, most particularly, actors — they had all bought the virus from apothecaries. The new 2B strain created an almost unbearable oneness with anything that was alive — or had been alive. The Bees could Read the living. They could Read whatever reaction patterns that were in the remains of living things, in the soil, in the stone, in the air.

‘And the lines,’ said Milena. ‘They touch the stars, don’t they?’ They go down into the Earth. They shiver when someone thinks.’

Billy turned to her, looked at her, and gave her a bleary smile. ‘Are you Bee?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Milena. ‘But I know about the lines.’

Gravity was thought. Gravity was life. Gravity twisted nothingness into a leaf that had been alive. The skeleton of the leaf still sang, wistfully, silently, of its life on the tree. It had been blown by gusts of wind until it sighed down from the tree to the earth. The earth sang of the leaves it once had been. It sang of peanut shells and orange peel, dog shit and leather shoes, old clothes and the sweat of the people who had worn them. The dead sang to the Bees, out of gravity.

‘The food weeps,’ said the King. ‘Torn away. Burnt. Boiled.’

Much of the food in this new age had been cut from hybridomas. It was still alive when sold, still alive when cooked or eaten raw. The Bees would scream as people ate. They could not bear to wear most clothing, the strands of cotton or spider web or silkworm threads. Clothes sung to them. The sun sang to them, and they tried to sing back.

Live on Rhodopsin, they told people, when they could bear being near people, for the blasts of thought from living people were too harsh for them to bear alone. They could bear it only groups, for a short time, before scampering off like timid monkeys.

It’s stopped snowing, Milena realised. Everything went still and cold.

‘Coffee!’ cried the vendor. ‘Coffee for health!’ Steam from his boiler caught the light and hovered golden in the air.

‘The coffee screams,’ said the King. The apothecary viruses had been derived from herpes, and like herpes, they ruptured when bathed in coffee.

‘And the viruses,’ the King said in pity. ‘The viruses break apart.’ Most hateful of all to this new age, the Bees loved the viruses, too.

A woman staggered towards the coffee vendor with a jug to fill. She shook like a rickety old cart on a bumpy road, juddering with cold and caffeine overdose. Her eyes were evil. She glared at Milena. The hatred in the look stilled Milena’s heart. It was like a beam that passed through her. It struck the Bees, and they folded up into a tight knot around each other.

‘Billy?’ Milena said. He didn’t answer. She knelt down and lightly stroked his disordered hair. You were the most beautiful man, she thought, and all the girls wanted to hold you and love you because you were beautiful but not aware of it. And you had a voice like honey and on stage you took command lightly, as if by right, and you made me believe that people could speak as Shakespeare wrote.

‘Billy, you’re cold,’ she said. ‘Where do you live?’

‘The Graveyard,’ he whispered.