Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden.pdf - Geoff Ryman - margozap

The Child Garden

A Low Comedy

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

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.

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