Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

The Child Garden

or

A Low Comedy

by

GEOFF RYMAN

Version 1.0

That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray Of wistful

regret for those who are not yet here to regret...

T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Introduction

Advances in Medicine (A Culture of Viruses)

Milena boiled things. She was frightened of disease. She would boil other

people's knives and forks before using them. Other people sometimes found this

insulting. The cutlery would be made of solidified resin, and it often melted

from the heat, curling into unusable shapes. The prongs of the forks would be

splayed like scarecrow's fingers, stiffened like dried old gloves.

Milena wore gloves whenever she went out, and when she got back, she boiled

those too. She never used her fingers to clean her ears or pick her nose. In

the smelly, crowded omnibuses, Milena sometimes held her breath until she was

giddy. Whenever someone coughed or sneezed, Milena would cover her face.

People continually sneezed, summer or winter. They were always ill, with

virus.

Belief was a disease. Because of advances in medicine, acceptable patterns of

behaviour could be caught or administered.

Viruses made people cheerful and helpful and honest. Their manners were

impeccable, their conversation well-informed, their work speedy and accurate.

They believed the same things.

Some of the viruses had been derived from herpes and implanted DNA directly

into nerve cells. Others were retroviruses and took over the DNA of the brain,

importing information and imagery. Candy, they were called, because the

nucleic acids of their genes were coated in sugar and phosphates. They were

protected against genetic damage, mutation. People said that Candy was

perfectly safe.

Milena did not believe them. Candy had nearly killed her. All through her

childhood, she had been resistant to the viruses. There was something in her

which fought them. Then, at ten years old, she had been given one final

massive dose, and was so seared by fever that she had nearly died. She emerged

with encyclopaedic knowledge and several useful calculating facilities. What

other damage had the viruses done?

Milena tested herself. Once, she tried to steal an apple from a market stall.

It was run, as so many things were in those days, by a child. When Milena's

hand touched the apple's dappled skin, she had thought of what it cost the boy

to grow the apples and haul them to market and how he had to do all this in

his spare time. She could not do it, she could not make herself steal. Was

that because of the virus? Was it part of herself? She could not be sure.

There was one virus to which Milena knew she had been immune. There was one

thing at least that she was sure was part of herself. There was no ignoring

the yearning in her heart for love, the love of another woman.

This was a semiological product of late period capitalism. So the Party said.

Milena suffered, apparently, from Bad Grammar. Bad deep grammar, but grammar

nonetheless. This made Milena angry. What late period capitalism? Where? It

had been nearly one hundred years since the Revolution!

She was angry and that frightened her. Anger was dangerous. Anger had killed

her father. He had been given so many viruses to cure him of it that he had

died of fever. Milena was certain that one day soon, the Party would try to

cure her, too, of anger, of being herself. Milena lived in fear.

Everyone was Read at ten years old, by the Party. It was part of their

democratic rights. Because of advances in medicine, representative democracy

had been replaced by something more direct. People were Read, and models were

made of their personalities. These models joined the government, to be

consulted. The government was called the Consensus. It was a product of late

period socialism. Everyone was a part of the Consensus, except Milena.

Milena had not been Read. She had been too ill with viruses at ten years old

to be Read. Her personality was still in flux; a Reading would have been

meaningless. She had not been Read, but she had been Placed as an adult. Would

they remember, soon? When she was Read, her Bad Grammar and her petty crimes

would be discovered. And then, as a matter of social hygiene, she would be

made ill, in order to cure her.

Milena was frightened of dying when it happened, like her father. Had he been

resistant as well? Her father had died, in Eastern Europe, and her mother had

fled with Milena to England, where the diseases were milder. Then she too had

died, and Milena had grown up as an orphan in a foreign land.

She had grown up with a head full of theatrical visions. She loved the

mechanics of rotating stages, of puppets, of painted flats being raised and

lowered. She loved the cumbersome, stinking alcohol lights that blazed with

brightness found only in theatre. She thought about such things as the effect

of alternating bands of white and yellow light cast over a white, white stage.

She loved light. She toyed with hazy ideas of productions that consisted only

of light. No people.

At ten years old, Milena had been Placed for work in the theatre, as an

actress. This was a mistake. Milena was a terrible actress. There was

something unbending in her that refused to mimic other people: she was always

herself. She was doomed always to fight to stay herself.

Most mornings, a bus would take Milena to her next performance. She would sit,

arms folded, like a flower that had not yet bloomed, and look at London as it

creaked past her window.

People called London the Pit, with rueful fondness for its crumbling buildings

propped up by scaffoldings of bamboo, for its overcrowding, for its smells.

The Pit, they called it, because it lay in a depression, a river valley

between hills protected by a Great Barrier of Coral that kept back the rising

sea and estuary.

Outside her window, Milena saw women in straw hats smoking pipes and selling

dried fish. She saw children dancing to toy drums for cash or pushing trolleys

full of dusty green vegetables. Men in shorts bellowed to each other like

cheerful bullfrogs, rolling barrels of beer down ramps into basements under

the street. Giant white horses stood calmly before the wagons.

People were purple. Their skins were flooded with a protein called Rhodopsin.

It had once been found only in the eye. In light, Rhodopsin broke down into

sodium, and combined carbon and water.

People photosynthesised. It was a way of feeding them all. There were

twenty-three million of them in the Pit. In summer they baked in tropical

heat, stretching out in the parks in early morning, to breakfast on light. In

the raw and bitter winters, they would lean against sheltered walls and open

up their clothing in gratitude. Milena would see them from her bus. Their

rippled flesh would be exposed; their swaddlings of black winter clothing

would be thrown back. They would look like carvings in baroque churches.

Milena would then be made restless with semiological error, desperate with Bad

Grammar.

People died in the street. Most mornings, the bus would pass one of them. A

man would be stretched out on the pavement, looking back over his shoulder as

if in surprise, as if someone had called him. A bell would be ringing

dolefully, calling for a Doctor.

And the actors on the bus would go on talking. An actress might laugh too

loudly, a finger hooked under her nose, talking to a director; a young man

might continue looking at his feet, disgruntled by a lack of success. Does no

one care? Milena would think. Does no one care for the dead?

There were no old people in the streets. Young mothers worked the stalls.

Their children stirred the food in the sizzling woks, or slammed new heels

onto old shoes. The dead were young as well.

The span of human life had been halved. This was not considered to be an

advance in medicine. It was considered to be a mistake.

In the days before the Revolution, a cure had been found for cancer. It coated

the proto-oncogenes in sugar, so that cancer could not be triggered. In the

old world of great wealth and great poverty, the cure had been bought by the

rich before being tested. It was contagious, and it escaped. Cancer

disappeared.

It had once been normal for the human body to produce a cancer cell every ten

minutes. Cancer, it turned out, had been rather important. Cancer cells did

not age. They secreted proteins that prevented senescence. They had allowed

people to get old. Without cancer, people died in or around their 35th year.

After that, there had been a Revolution.

Milena sat on the bus in her boiled gloves and saw a nervous light in the eyes

of the actors, a fervour for accomplishments completed in youth. She saw the

unfailing smiles of people in the markets, and the smiles seemed to be

symptoms of disease. It seemed to Milena that nearly everything she saw was

wrong.

She saw the children. They had been given viruses to educate them. From three

weeks old they could speak and do basic arithmetic. By ten, they had been made

adults, forced like flowers to bloom early. But they were not flowers of love.

They were flowers of work, to be put to work. There was no time.

Book One

Love Sickness

or

Living in the Pit

Midway in the journey of our life

I found myself in a dark wood

For the straight way was lost

chapter one

Everyday Life in Future

Times (Windows in a Bridge)

It was an audience of children.

They sat on mattresses on the floor of a darkened room in a Child Garden. The

children all wore the same grey, quilted dungarees, but they had been allowed

to embroider them with colourful patterns. The children were allowed to drift

in and out of the room as they pleased. There was no need for externally

imposed discipline. On a makeshift stage, actors were trading convoluted

Shakespearian wit.

Thou pretty because little!

Little pretty because little. Wherefore apt?

And therefore apt because quick!

It was a production of Love's Labour's Lost. The children were bored: they

could follow the play with such ease.

Milena Shibush waited in plain sight of the children to make her entrance.

There was no proscenium arch to hide behind. She could hear what the children

said. She did not expect flattery.

'Another one of these New History things,' sighed a little girl in the front.

Her cheeks were purple from the sun. Her voice was sulky, light, breathy. She

was about three years old. 'If they're going to try to do the originals, why

can't they get it right?'

'I don't know why they bother to send us these plays,' said her little friend.

Her voice already had the crackle of adult precision. 'We know them by heart

already. And who is that idiot in the floppy boots?'

The idiot was Milena Shibush. Tykes, she thought; it was expected that younger

children would be obnoxious. They got everything without effort from the

viruses; they had no idea that anything would require effort.

I don't like the boots either, Milena thought, but these are the boots I have

to wear.

Milena was playing a constable called Dull.

She had a total of thirteen lines. I am sixteen years old, Milena thought,

halfway through my life, and I have thirteen lines in a production that is

touring Child Gardens.

Child Gardens were where orphans were raised. There were so many orphans.

Milena had been an orphan herself. She had become an actress to escape orphans

and Child Gardens. Here she was.

Milena looked at the faces of her colleagues. The boy who played Berowne

waited dull-eyed in his make-up and the beard he had grown for the part. He

had to have a beard, for no other reason than that Berowne in the original

production had had a beard. This recreation only served to preserve history.

Milena lived in a culture that replicated itself endlessly, but which never

gave birth to anything new.

The actors are bored, thought Milena, the children are bored, why, why, why

are we doing this?

She muttered one of her thirteen lines. 'Me, an't shall please you.' It

plainly didn't.

At least, she thought, I can change my boots.

It was nearly dark by the time Milena got back home. She walked beside the

river on the pavements of the South Bank, which was feebly lit by alcohol

lamps. There was still a smoky pinkness in the west.

The National Theatre of Southern Britain loomed out of the darkness and slight

haze. Great sweeping buttresses of Land Coral and a cage of bamboo kept the

old building on its feet.

The Zoo, it was called affectionately or otherwise. Milena was a registered

member of the Theatrical Estate, but she was yet to work on any of the Zoo's

main stages. It had a restaurant that was always open, called the Zoo Cafe.

Actors could not sun themselves to feed. It made their skins too purple, too

dark, and ruined them for Shakespeare and the classics. Actors had to be pale,

for the sake of historical accuracy. They had to eat food and were nearly

always hungry.

Milena went to the Zoo Cafe when she was lonely or could not face cooking on

her one-ring alcohol stove. It was something of a homeopathic cure for

loneliness. Other people sat talking at tables, leaning back to laugh,

brilliant young actors or the well-dressed, imperturbable children of Party

Members. Milena watched them hungrily as she moved forward one step at a time

in the queue for hot water.

The fashion in everything was for history. People's minds were choked with it.

Young people wore black and pretended to be the risen corpses of famous

people. The Vampires of History they called themselves. Their virus-stuffed

brains gave them the information they needed to avoid anachronisms. It was a

kind of craze.

The Vampires only came out at night, when there was no sun to sweeten their

blood. They had to eat too, but they could afford meals of historic

proportions. Milena could only afford a seafood pasta, cloned squid tissue on

cooling noodles. The great, heaped plates of the Vampires turned her

shrivelled stomach. She looked away.

Milena saw Cilia, an actress with whom she had achieved a chilly kind of

acquaintance, sitting at a freshly vacated table. Cilia had just finished

kissing a number of cheeks goodbye. Cilia knew everybody, even Milena.

'Who are you this evening?' Milena asked her, putting down her tray.

Cilia was in black, with white pancake makeup and dark vampire shadows around

her eyes. 'Just me,' answered Cilia. 'This is supposed to be me when I rise

from my grave.'

'Someone is playing themselves for a change,' said Milena.

'At least you know you're not being cast against type,' said Cilia, lightly.

She was well on her way to becoming an Animal - a well known performer.

'You know I'm in this boring play,' said Milena. She began to wash her cutlery

in a mug of hot water. 'Do you know any way I can change my costume? I hate my

boots.'

'You can't change your costume if it's part of the original production. You'd

be violating history.'

'The boots squelch. It's supposed to be funny.'

Cilia shrugged. 'You could go to the Graveyard.'

A Vampire joke? Milena looked at Cilia, narrow-eyed. Life had taught Milena to

be wary of humour.

'The Graveyard,' repeated Cilia, in a voice that indicated that Milena knew

very little indeed. 'It's where they dump the old costumes no one wants.

They're not even on record.'

'You mean I can just take them out? No director's approval?'

'Yup. It's in an old warehouse under a bridge.' Cilia was telling Milena how

to get there, when two Vampires swept up to the table in twentieth century

clothes: a black tuxedo, and a black-beaded dress.

Party Members - Tarries. The boy wore spectacles, another affectation, and had

something in his nose to make his nostrils flare. His hair was combed back and

his make-up was green, to make him look ill.

'Good evening,' he said, looking sour, his accent American. 'We've managed to

escape Virginia. She is busying herself listing all the ways in which Joyce is

a bad writer. Her jealousy is so nakedly evident, I was embarrassed.'

The woman with him was trying to smile, under a low cloche hat. The smile

wavered pathetically. 'Tom?' she said. His back was turned towards her. 'Speak

to me. Can't you speak? Speak?'

'T S Eliot and Vivien!' exclaimed Cilia, and complimented them. 'Instant.

Complete.' The couple did not relax out of their roles. Is there so little of

yourselves left? thought Milena.

'I don't believe I've had the pleasure,' the boy said, holding out his hand

towards Milena. It was Vampire sociability. He wanted to know who Milena was

playing.

'Who am I?' Milena responded with deadpan hostility. She did not take his

hand. 'Oh. In life, I was a textile factory worker in nineteenth century

Sheffield. I died at twelve years old. I'm a rather bad vampire because I have

no teeth. But I do have eczema and rickets.'

The Vampires made excuses and left. 'Well. That sent them packing,' said

Cilia.

'I know,' sighed Milena. Why did she find so many things unacceptable? 'Is

there something wrong with me, Cilia?'

'Yup.' said Cilia. 'You're prissy.' She mused for a moment. 'And...

obsessive.' She nodded with decision. Then, to make it sweeter, she said, 'La,

la la.' It was a nonsense expression. It meant that everything was the same,

everything was a song.

'Obsessive?' questioned Milena. It was a new arrow to her bow of

self-recrimination.

'You're still washing that fork,' said Cilia. 'You melted all of mine. When

you visited, remember?'

'And prissy?'

'Severe,' added Cilia, nodding again in agreement with herself.

Milena had gone through a phase of dunking she was in love with Cilia. Oh,

woman, if only you knew what was on my mind!

'I suppose that does sum it up,' sighed Milena. It was bad enough to suffer

from Bad Grammar, but to be called prissy with it! She contemplated her cold

squid, and decided that she preferred hunger. 'Excuse me.' She stood up and

walked rather unsteadily into the night.

'You did ask me. Milena? You did ask!' Cilia called after her. Cilia always

spoke without thinking. She only acted on stage.

Milena walked out on the Hungerford Footbridge and looked at the river. It

churned in the moonlight, muddy and smelling of drains. The eddies made by the

pylons of the bridge swirled with garbage and foam. Milena yearned for some

leap away from herself, away from the world.

And then over Waterloo Bridge a great black balloon rose up from its mooring

by the river. It made no sound except for a whispering of air, like wind

blowing over the moors. Its cheeks were puffed out, and it propelled itself

gently, by blowing. It was borne up in silence, moving with the grace of a

cloud towards - where? China? Bordeaux? Milena wanted to go with it. She

wanted to be like it, huge and unthinking with nothing to do but be itself,

carried by the wind.

She was young. She thought she was old. On the South Bank, the windows of the

Zoo Cafe were full of candlelight and Vampire silhouettes and the sound of

laughter. They were all young and soft, and they had no time, and so they

hated the silence, the silence in themselves that had yet to be filled by

experience.

Some of them were driven to make noise, were kept jumping by something that

was alive inside them. Others like Milena, cleared the decks and waited for

something to happen, something worthwhile to do or to say. They loathed the

silence in themselves, not knowing that out of that silence would come all the

things that were individual to them.

Something, something has got to happen soon, Milena thought. I need something

new to do. I'm tired of the plays, I'm tired of the Child Gardens, I'm tired

of being me. I'm tired of sitting bolt upright on the edge of my bed all

night, alone. I need someone. I need a woman, and there isn't going to be one.

They've all been cured. The viruses cure them. Bad Grammar. I love you is Bad

Grammar?

Milena suffered from resistance. She thought that in many different ways she

was the last of her kind in the world.

The next day she went to the Graveyard, hugging the unwanted boots. Trains to

the Continent left from Waterloo. The wooden cars creaked and groaned on

rubber wheels that no longer ran on rails, chuffing with steam over the old

city on old bridges made of ancient brick.

Through those brick bridges, tunnels ran. One of the tunnels was called Leake

Street, and leak it did. Water dripped from the roof. The place smelled of

trains, a dry oily itch in Milena's nostrils. The walls were covered with

splattered white tiles and all along them was a series of large green doors.

The green doors were locked. Milena tried each one and not one of them would

open. To Milena, this was mysterious. What was the point of a door that would

not open?

Finally she came to a huge gate that had been left ajar. It was covered with

many different layers of flaking paint, out of which emerged the words in old

alphabetic script 'White Horse'. From beyond the gates there came the sound of

a full orchestra.

It was playing in the dark. Milena peered through the gate. There must be a

light, she thought. What kind of orchestra is it that plays in the dark?

She swung the gate open and stepped inside. She had time to see disordered

racks of clothing, bamboo rods on bamboo uprights and little rollers. She saw

them in a narrow band of dim light from the doorway. The band of light

suddenly narrowed. The gate swung shut behind her with a clunk.

It would not open again. This Milena did not believe. She knew nothing of

locks. Her culture did not need them. No one ever stole. The old gates did

lock however, and Milena pushed them, and slammed them, and shouted 'Hello?'

at them. They didn't move.

Fine, she thought in anger. I'll starve to death in here and they'll find me

fifty years from now, my fingers clawing at the wood. Why the hell have a door

like that? Why the hell can't they light this place? And how the hell am I

going to get out of here? Milena felt a sting of frustration in her eyes. She

spun around and kicked the door and listened to it shudder. She listened to

the music. Her viruses knew it note for note.

Some woman was warbling away to Das Lied von der Erde. Another piece by Mahler

about death. All I need right now. Couldn't the miserable little turncoat

write about anything else?

Still, some Animal or another was singing in the dark. Some Animal or another

would know the way out. The music was coming from a corner of the warehouse

that was diagonally opposite. Milena simply had to find her way there.

This meant fighting her way through racks of old costumes. There were no

orderly aisles between them. The capes, the false chain mail, the nun's habits

swung rottenly on their hangers, dry and stiff and booby-trapped with pins.

Milena felt a sudden jab of pain.

Good, right, fine, she thought, sucking her finger, and growing savage. I've

just injected myself with virus.

Then she dropped the boots. She heard a splash. Oh God, she thought, I've

dropped them in a puddle of something. Her hand plashed in stale water. She

found them, dripping wet, and held them out, well away from her body. She

stood up and hit her head on a rack, pushed it over in a rage, got her feet

tangled up in dead clothing, dropped the boots again, paddled in the dark to

find them, stood up, snarled and took a deep breath.

More than anything else, Milena hated losing her dignity. She forced herself

to be calm, and trembling very slightly, began to swing the racks towards her,

juddering on their little wheels. She made a more orderly progress.

Milena went on in the darkness until she was lost. Under her hands, she felt

the cheap burlap, the frail seams, the loose threads like cobwebs. She felt

the scratchiness of dusty sequins in clumps. It was as if all theatre had died

around her, leaving only husks behind. What if there isn't an orchestra? she

wondered. Oh come on, Milena, who do you think is making the music, ghosts?

She began to imagine some very strange things. The music was too loud. Music

was never that loud. You could stand in the middle of the orchestra next to

the kettle drums and it wouldn't be that loud. And there was a shrill,

unnatural tone to it that hurt Milena's ears.

Distracted, she scraped her head on brick. She crouched blindly under an arch

and saw light. Light! Like in a forest just at dawn, grey daylight.

But the music! The music was louder than before, and she could see the rough

texture of the bricks in the wall; she was yards away from it. There was no

orchestra. There was no room for an orchestra.

But an orchestra screeched at her. The flutes were like knives, slicing into

her head, the walls were being beaten like drums. Milena covered an ear with

one hand, and moved back a rack of clothing with the other. She ducked down,

in a kind of terror, and drew back a velvet dress, like a curtain.

There was a window to the outside world. A window in a bridge? Milena had

never seen that. In the light, there were mounds of paper, heaps of it,

stacked up in columns or fallen sideways across the floor. Paper was wealth,

and Milena's eyes boggled in her head.

Sitting slumped in front of it was a Polar Bear.

Effendim, excuse me, you're not supposed to call them that, Milena reminded

herself. They are GEs, genetically engineered people.

GEs had been human once. Effendim, are human, now. They had recoded their

genes for work in the Antarctic, before the Revolution. It was a sickness, to

be pitied. This GE was huge and shaggy, covered in fur of varying chestnut

colours, staring ahead, mouth hanging open. The eyes did not blink, but seemed

to ripple and glisten with a life of their own, wide and black and unseeing.

The music was coming from nowhere.

The monstrous voice was singing in German, with a voice like a steam whistle.

ewig blauen licht die Fernen

everywhere and eternally, the distance shines bright and blue

The viruses knew all the words, knew all the notes. The effect was to make the

music wearisome to Milena, like a thrice-told joke. The mystery of where it

was coming from simply made her feel very creepy. She looked instead at the

posters of beautiful paintings curling on the wall. There were books as well,

books turned face downwards on the desk. There was a scattering of what looked

like wafers, something to eat. Books, paper, Milena had never seen such wealth

or such waste.

Milena knew about the wealth of Bears, GEs. Bears, GEs, lived outside the

Consensus. They were deliberate outlaws, selling Antarctic nickel. This one

was massive, burly. What a gorilla, thought Milena. This one's trouble, she

decided.

The music settled into silence.

Ewig… ewig…

Forever… forever…

The giant voice throbbed. Earwigs yourself, thought Milena. The GE looked

stunned as if the music were a blow to the head. Finally the song fell silent

and it was as if the entire building sighed with relief.

The GE moved. It fumbled behind itself without turning, sending a cascade of

paper pouring out over the edge of the desk. Out from under it emerged a

small, metal box with switches. The GE felt for one of them.

An electronic device.

Milena lived in a world without much electricity. Pulse weapons and poverty,

sheer numbers, and a shortage of metal had made domestic electronics a part of

history.

'Where did you get that?' Milena asked, stepping forward, forgetting herself

for once.

Milena had a clock in her mind, a viral calculator. It added up the cost of

the metal, and the cost of manufacture, all in terms of labour-hours. The

electronic device was the most expensive thing she had ever seen.

The GE squinted at her, as if across the Grand Canyon. Its mouth hung open.

Finally it spoke.

'China, I believe,' the GE said. The voice was high and rasping. The GE was a

woman.

Milena had heard stories of Polar women. They gave birth on the ice, and stood

up, and went straight back to work, blasting rocks. Milena's prejudices lined

up in place. The creature spoke again, with a delicious, rambling delicacy.

'You wouldn't happen to have any alcoholic beverages about your person, would

you?'

'Milena was by now out of step with the conversation. She had forgotten the

question she had asked and was trying to work out what the answer, 'China, I

believe,' could possibly mean. Distracted, she gave her head a little shake.

'No,' Milena said. 'I don't like poisoning myself.'

'Tuh!' said the GE. It was a chuckle that became a shudder. She stood up. She

was nearly twice the height of Milena, and had to shuffle to turn around in

the enclosed space. With slow Weariness, she began to ransack her desk. She

pushed over more piles of paper, and swept a resin tray of wafers onto the

floor.

It occurred to Milena that she was being ignored.

'Effendim?' she said, crisply, meaning excuse me, sorry to trouble you. 'I've

come to change these boots.'

As she said it, Milena thought: GEs aren't part of the Consensus. This person

does not work here. It's not her job to find me boots.

The GE lurched around to look at her. 'You,' she said, 'are a ponce.' The

consonant sounds were incised with a laboured precision. Milena was mortified

into silence.

I know who this is, thought Milena.

She had heard of the Bear who Loves Opera. GEs were wealthy. This one was

wealthy enough to buy a ticket for the first night of each production. She sat

in the same seat each time, and left without talking to anyone. Milena never

went to the opera herself. Though she did not admit it, Milena did not respond

deeply to music. She had never seen the Bear who Loves. It was rather like

meeting a legend. Milena watched as the GE began to empty the drawers of her

desk, shaking out the contents over the floor. The GE found something.

'Bastard,' the GE murmured.

Milena was unaccustomed to harsh language. She herself might have committed an

error of social judgement, but enough was enough.

'Are you talking to me?' Milena demanded.

'Oh, no,' said the GE in blank surprise. 'I was talking to this empty whisky

bottle.'

The GE held up the bottle for Milena to see, and then tossed it aside. It

clinked against glass as it shattered. Somewhere in the darkness, there was a

mound of broken whisky bottles.

'Did you know?' said the GE. 'This used to be a distillery warehouse? I've

made the most exciting discoveries.'

She was tugging at a drawer that was stuck. It suddenly came free, sowing its

contents about the floor like seed - pens, earrings, more wafers, used

handkerchiefs, spools of thread, a shower of loose and rusty needles, and a

Georgian silver ear-pick.

Lodged in one corner of the drawer was a full bottle. The GE held it up.

'God,' she said, 'is a distiller.' She grinned, and her teeth were black and

green rotting stumps.

Where did they dig her up? thought Milena.

The Bear was covered in dandruff. Silver flakes of it clung to the tips of her

fur all over her body, and she was panting like a dog. A long pink tongue hung

out of her mouth, curled and quivering, to cool. She took a great swig of

alcohol. 'Gaaah!' she exclaimed, as if breathing fire, and wiped her mouth on

her arm.

Milena felt a sudden wrench of amusement. She had a vision of the GE leading a

troglodyte existence in this nest of paper and music.

'Do you live here?' Milena asked.

'It would be better if I did,' said the GE. Her fur dangled into her eyes,

making her blink continually. 'This is where I hide instead.' She hugged the

bottle. 'Since you don't like poisoning yourself, perhaps you'd like to look

at this.'

She passed a thick, broad, bound wad of paper from the desk. Milena needed

both hands to accept it from her. The paper was beautiful to touch, heavy and

creamy, ochre around the edges. On the cover, printed in large Gothic

lettering was its title. Das Lied von der Erde. Song of the Earth.

Milena had never seen a musical score. They were a waste of paper, and

cellulose was needed to feed the yeasts and hybridomas that were the cultures

of the Party. She flicked through it and found it disappointing. Yes, yes, the

notes were all there.

'I take it,' the Polar Bear said, 'that the reading of music presents you with

no difficulties.'

'No,' said Milena, innocently. Who couldn't read music?

The Bear smiled wistfully. 'Of course not,' she whispered. She reached

forward. It was alarming how far she could reach. Gently she coaxed the score

out of Milena's hands. 'But you haven't learned how to read music. If you

haven't learned it, it isn't yours.' She took a mouthful of whisky and sloshed

it around her teeth like mouthwash. She put the bottle down, and seemed to

forget that Milena was there. She turned to the end of the score, all its vast

bulk over to one side, threatening to tear the ancient binding in half. The GE

spat the whisky onto the floor. Then she began to sing.

She sang the end. '...ewig blauen licht die Fernen...'

She's forgotten I'm here, thought Milena.

'Ewig... Ewig...'

The GE sang better than the electronic device. Her voice was warm and strong,

a fine mezzo, clear but weighty as if pushed from behind by something vast.

Milena blinked. The GE was singing very well indeed.

There were long periods of silence, when unheard music played. Then Ewig

again, each time softer than before, the voice throbbing without going harsh.

A technique. Ewig. Unlike the recording, it was not too loud. The GE stared in

silence for some moments and then looked up.

'Oh, sorry,' she said. 'There's a pile of boots over there.' She jerked a

thumb over her shoulder. Milena peered helplessly into the darkness.

'Golly,' said the Polar Bear. 'I keep forgetting you people can't see in the

dark. Shall I find a pair for you?' Her voice seemed to float, airily.

'That would be very kind,' said Milena. 'Size six. Something less floppy?'

The GE took the pirate boots and shuffled off into the racks. Her feet were

bare. The fur on top of them swept across dust and whisky, making streaks on

the floor to mark her passage.

Milena didn't know what to think. She felt she had been humbled in some way,

and that made her annoyed. She suspected that she deserved it, and that made

her worried.

The GE was gone for some time. 'Who's been pushing over all the racks?' her

small voice wondered out of the darkness.

Milena looked at the phantasmagorical waste on the desk and the floor. Books,

more books, papers with pawprints across them, old coins. These were real

things, the real things that Milena had never seen. She began to feel an ache

of jealousy, an ache of nostalgia. This is history, she thought, let the

Vampires see this. She picked up a thick black book and opened up its crinkly

pages, and realised that it had not been printed. The lettering, in fantastic

sweeps and swirls of black ink, had been written by hand.

Penetrating Wagner's Ring, the lettering said with an excess of eloquent

strokes.

'Not a fortunate title,' murmured Milena, a smile creeping sideways across her

face.

It was an exposition of the Ring cycle. There were drawings of all the

characters, slightly amateurish in execution. Each one was identified, not by

name, but by a series of notes. The last page said only 'Conclusion: the Ring

cycle is a symphony.' It was written in gold.

'That's not right,' said Milena. It was not what her viruses told her.

But the clock in her mind told her the labour-hours it must have taken.

'Bugger,' said a voice, and a rack of dresses collapsed somewhere in the

darkness. Milena hurriedly dropped the book. The GE emerged carrying boots.

'Typical of me, somehow, that title,' the GE said.

She's seen me reading her book, Milena thought, and went rigid with

embarrassment.

'I console myself,' the GE continued, 'with the thought that there was a book

of piano exercises that really did call itself Fingering for Your Students.

Here are your boots. Try them for size.'

Milena pulled one of them on, feeling awkward. She hopped up and down on one

foot and thought she was going to fall over. Her cheeks felt full and flushed.

'Fit?'

'Yes, yes, I think they do,' Milena replied. She really couldn't tell. She

pulled the boot off again. The GE belched roughly. 'Excuse me,' she said,

covering her mouth.

Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden

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