Geoff Ryman - Child Garden

Song washed up and down the street, as formless as the chorus of Remembrance, as if it were a funeral for things already gone. There were occasional quiet moments and occasional contagions when a particular chorus caught everyone’s fancy. The new viruses then trumpeted their triumph.

The entire street roared in unison, and then laughed.

And Milena, stumbling, confused, peered half blind at each wagon-stall. There was the seller of paints and brushes, there was the Tacky with his hot, smelly little press, there was the birdman with his cages. Somewhere she heard someone singing:

‘Turn around, you’re going back,’ said Thrawn in her ear.

‘Can’t hear,’ said Milena, though she could.

The voice in her ear was then pitched to the level of pain.

‘Now it’s too loud!’ said Milena. It was as if she were wading through glue, through the noise, through the people, through the glare, through increasingly panicked voice in her ear, the voice of Thrawn who now had guessed that Milena was playing a brand new game.

Then Milena saw her, the Seller of Games, big boned, hearty, with virulently purple cheeks.

All light was sucked from her eyes.

She groped her way blindly forward. Her hands crawled up and over people’s shoulders.

‘I’m blind,’ she said, ‘Take me to the Seller of Games.’

For some reason, Symphonie Fantastique was taken up by everyone. It was a half-serious prayer for rain. Everyone sang it, the song for a Sabbath, praying for the waters to fall. ‘Oh God, please God, make it rain God.’

The person, a man, murmured something and took hold of Milena’s shoulder to lead her.

‘Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!’ Thrawn was howling like a gale in her ears. Milena could hear nothing else. Her hands were clamped over her eyes shielding them. Blindness was replaced by fire all along her arms and hands. Thrawn was burning her skin with light.

She felt the edge of a stall. ‘Am I here? Am I here?’ she shouted.

‘Yes!’ she could barely hear the man howling at her.

‘Sorry, sorry. I’m ill,’ said Milena, unable to see the Seller, unable to hear her. ‘I need your lenses. Your contact lenses, with the mirrors.’

Fire danced on her skin. Milena screamed. The sound of the scream was lost in the chorus.

‘What? What love?’ she could hear the Games Seller wailing.

‘The light burns!’ Milena wailed. ‘I need the lenses!’

Milena rammed her hands into her armpits, to hide them from the light.

The beefy hands of the Games Seller seized Milena’s arms. The Games Seller led her. Milena tripped up; she fell forward. The woman caught her up. Blisters ruptured against her cotton shirt. Her hands wept. The woman led her into Leake Street.

Everything went dark and cool, and Milena could suddenly hear.

‘Put them in please,’ wept Milena.

The woman was over her huge and sheltering. ‘Yes, you are, yes you are, yes you are in a bad way,’ the Gameswoman sang soothingly. It was a lullaby. She kept on singing, soothing, as she forced Milena to open her eyes away from the light.

Thrawn made the worms crawl inside them, but in Leake Street, the light was dull.

First one in. Then the other. Now there really was something in her eyes. Tears welled up to expel them. I will get used to them, Milena told herself. I will have to get used to them. She turned and looked up at the end of Leake Street. Thrawn tried to focus the light. It concentrated into a dull blue circle. Milena moved her head. It took some seconds for Thrawn to find the focus. That would have to be good enough.

The Seller of Games was inspecting Milena’s blistered fingers. ‘Your poor little hand…’ she began. La Boheme. Then she tried to speak. ‘Buh! Buh!’ she stammered, and sighed, and sang again.

‘Bloody viruses! What will they do to us next?’

Milena said she didn’t know. She thanked the Seller, paid for the lenses and stepped out again into the light and the roar of the songs. She rocked her head, very slightly, from side to side. She bought a pair of gloves and some ear plugs.

‘Go and die,’ said Thrawn in Milena’s ear, just before the plugs were inserted.

The game we are playing now, thought Milena, is called Sticks and Stones. Words can never hurt me.

All around her, everywhere around her, people sang.

Slightly less than a year later, Milena married.

She remembered the wedding party, in the forest of the Consensus. That year the summer was clouded and cool. A blustery wind rocked back and forth between the fleshy trunks of the purple trees. The guests were as chilled as the wine. They clutched their glasses with one hand, and warmed the back of their arms with the other and did their best to make conversation. Mike Stone tried to make conversation. Milena had forgotten how stiff he could be. He bent forward from the waist and shook people’s hands and could think of nothing to say except ‘Thank you very much for coming,’ or ‘I suppose you’re all famous,’ or ‘I’ve always wanted to act.’

He had worn his astronaut suit to the wedding. He liked his astronaut suit and saw no reason ever to wear anything else. The pockets were full of astronaut gear — microscopes and multipurpose DNA capsules. He explained them at great length to Cilia, who used every particle of her acting ability in looking rapt with fascination.

Halfway through the party, Milton the Minister died.

‘The two of you alone together up there in space,’ Milton was saying. It was his way of congratulating them. ‘It must have been a real Battle of the Bulge.’ His eyes closed and his smile spread, as if he had finally made the perfect Milton joke. An expression of peace settled onto his face. Then he fell forward into the calamari salad and overturned the table of refreshments.

Mike had a first-aid kit in the pouches of his overalls. He slipped a pulse injector into Milton’s ear to keep his breath and heartbeat going while Milena, Moira Almasy, all the Terminals, called for the Consensus. It came in the form of the new police, the men in white, the Garda.

They came with a chopping, juddering sound as if something were cutting the air into slices. Something predatory descended from the sky onto the pavements of Marsham Street. It was the first time Milena had ever seen a helicopter. It was made entirely of metal and resin, and it gleamed like some hungry insect. Mike swept Milton up and carried him past the Garda, his wiry limbs moving with a robotic smoothness. He lowered Milton into the bubble of the beast and the Garda trooped back inside it, and with a whirlwind of air, the thing lifted off, and was gone.

The death and the helicopter shook Milena. Many things had happened over the last year to shake her. She found her teeth were involuntarily tap dancing and the cold seemed to rise out of her own bone-marrow. Milena was cold inside. Milena asked to be taken home. The party was over.

It was a cold, cold boat ride back to the Slump, through little, lapping, grey waves. Milena curled up against Mike Stone to be warmed, and she still shook. She didn’t know it was fear. She only knew that soon her husband might want to make love, and that she did not. She only knew that she had never told him she could not accept sex from a man. Paradoxically, the fear made her turn to him for comfort.

She was still afraid walking back into her little lacquered boxes. She showed him each of the rooms, puffing up pillows, folding in shutters, lighting the alcohol lamps. In the darkness in the corners, the truth still waited, unsaid. Whenever I get into this kind of trouble she thought, it is because I have been dishonest. What happens next? What happens now?