Authors: Geoff Ryman
Tags: #Romance, #Science Fiction, #SciFi-Masterwork, #Fantasy
Child Garden (2 page)
A couple more things are needed to complete our picture of Milena’s life in this future London: Milena is an actress in a Shakespearean company. Again, there is plenty of irony here. Milena actually is an artist: she is full of theatrical visions which, as the novel, progresses come to remarkable and spectacular fruition in Milena’s holographic production of an operatic version of Dante’s
Commedia
. But Milena’s artistic talents are of no use to the Consensus. In Milena’s world, there is only one authorized performance of any Shakespearean play, just as there is only one authorized interpretation of it. The Tykes before whom Milena and her troupe perform are bored out of their minds: after all, they were infected with this performance and this interpretation when they were only weeks old. As Milena points out, when the novel takes us back to her own childhood, the teachers only ever tell the children to remember. They never need to learn and, more importantly, they are never asked to think. Indeed, they are never asked to make ethical decisions, because behaviour, like knowledge, is caught from the viruses. The children, by and large, are cheerful and honest and helpful, not out of some sort of native virtue, but because viruses make them so.
In other words, though I began by saying that
The Child Garden
is a more complex mixture of the utopian and the dystopian than
Brave New World
, it has much in common with that novel in relation to the misfit protagonist and the world in which everyone is pre-programmed to be what their society needs. The Consensus is, in all sorts of ways, both better and worse at it than Huxley’s England. The possibilities of hope are both within the system, which has degrees of built-in tolerance of which Milena is unaware (and she is correct in her suspicion that such tolerance would not extend to her same-sex desires), and outside of it, as anything so dependent on the use of viruses for genetic engineering is also deeply vulnerable to random mutation. The Bees who appear late in the novel are an example of this: humans who have caught the mental patterns of others through mutated viruses and who now exist in a kind of hive mentality.
The Child Garden
is thus also a novel as viruses. As such, it is very much a product of its time and place, a world in which gay men were caught up in an HIV epidemic that, today, is more associated with heterosexual women and Africa. The AIDS epidemic is not directly part of
The Child Garden
but it is, in part, what the novel is about. It is about how systems, viruses, languages, social orders, mutate, change, die and are re-born. Indeed, the virus is central to the story, just as it is to the theoretical work of Jacques Derrida. And this is made clear when Ryman cites one of Derrida’s works, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” at almost the exact centre of this novel. Again, Milena, who actually reads books and thinks about their content, is posed against the other Tykes, who already know the content of each work and its supposed meaning.
Their argument is about both writing and reading—something that can scarcely be peripheral to any novel, but most particularly to a novel about a future in which citizens are Read. It is also about the dual meaning of the word ‘pharmakon,’ which denotes both cure and poison. For Plato, the development of writing was a pharmakon because, on the one hand, it provided a cure for failing memory, but, on the other hand, poisoned the need for memory in the first place. The idea of the pharmakon recognizes the fact that so many things function both as medicines and poisons—a little foxglove (digitalis) can be very helpful in cases of atrial fibrillation, particularly with congestive heart failure, but even a very little bit more foxglove can equally be toxic, specifically to the heart. Derrida takes up Plato’s argument, among others, as a way of pointing out that writing, like the virus, is an undecideable—both poison and cure and often both at once.
If a science fiction novel has at its heart the idea that writing—and reading—can be an undecideable, as easily harmful as helpful, what does that tell us about the potential of science fiction to affect readers, particularly about its potential to nudge us toward ‘real world’ change? Is Ryman, as my epigraph seems to indicate, hopeful that his book will help to heal the world? Because it is clear that Ryman sees stories themselves as a pharmakon—both capable of causing great harm and of healing the harm that other stories have caused. In
The Child Garden,
Milena is both a symbol of that harm and the hope of its healing.
In the face of a universal prohibition on lesbianism in her society, Milena still finds someone to love, the ‘polar bear’ Rolfa, a young woman from a genetically engineered race of Antarctic miners. And Rolfa, too, is more than she seems, because Rolfa, despite all of her genetic heritage and family conditioning, is not only a lesbian, but an artist. Rolfa is an opera singer and composer. After Rolfa and Milena’s affair ends badly, as it can only end in a society as closed towards alternative expressions of desire as this London is, Milena discovers that Rolfa has translated a number of works of literature into operas, among them the three books of Dante’s
Divine Comedy.
With much effort, Milena stages Rolfa’s opera as a holographic spectacle in the world’s skies.
But this act of translation, of bringing Rolfa’s translations of literary texts to the world’s biggest stage, also underscores the way in which translation itself works as a pharmakon. In choosing between one translation and the next, we inevitably alter the meaning. Rolfa, indeed, does this when she creates the original operatic scores. But Milena does it even more drastically when, out of love, she translates the written score to performance, ignoring Rolfa’s hand-written note on the top of the Comedy: “For an audience of viruses.” Milena’s opera goes out to the world as performance, but Rolfa, it seems, had expected it to speak directly to the viruses of the Consensus—to work, perhaps, as a pharmakon against the idea of a single authorized interpretation, a singular way of knowing and reading a text.
In this sense,
The Child Garden
is, as its subtitle suggests, a “low comedy.” It is broadly funny and its jokes, while not always obvious, are often ‘low.’ As a comedy about (perhaps for?) viruses, it reminds us also how prevalent the virus is in our own universe. Viruses are vectors of disease, from the common cold to HIV/AIDS, but they are also a vector of genetic material, a way of introducing genes from one organism into another or of bearing engineered genes into a specific species. As such, they too are a type of pharmakon, particularly in a world where genetic engineering is beginning to be commonplace, despite how little knowledge we have of its potential long-term effects and consequences. At the same time, viruses also infect our computers; these are not the biological viruses of disease mechanism, but they can function in remarkably similar ways, spreading mis-information and disrupting communication. Both of these uses of the ‘virus’ in contemporary society are reasons why Derrida takes the virus as a particularly significant model of undecideability:
If we follow the intersection between AIDS and the computer virus as we now know it, we have the means to comprehend, not only from a theoretical point of view but also from the sociohistorical point of view, what amounts to a disruption of absolutely everything on the planet, including police agencies, commerce, the army, questions of strategy . . . It is as if all that I have been suggesting for the past twenty-five years is prescribed by the idea of destinerrance . . . the supplement, the pharmakon, all the undecidables—it’s the same thing.
(Brunette and Wills 12)
The Child Garden
is at once an allegory about AIDS—the virus that brought incoherence and death to gay male culture in the West throughout the ’80s and into the ’90s and which remains a massive scourge throughout much of Africa, in particular—and a novel about the potential for “disruption of absolutely everything on the planet” not only through transnational corporatism, unbridled capitalism, and the greed of the ‘haves’ transposed against the tragedies of the ‘have nots,’ but also through attempts to do good. Curing cancer should be a good thing. Government by consensus should be a good thing. Creating a happy, honest populace should be a good thing.
If our good intentions can make so much go wrong, Ryman asks us, what happens when our intentions are not so good? And what can defenses can we muster against well-intentioned mistakes? The answer resides in Milena and her capacity for sheer resistance: her spirit resists incorporation into the singular readings of the Consensus just as her body resists the un-raveling and re-integration of her DNA by the Consensus’s viruses. Because of this, and because of Milena’s extraordinary capacity for love (and Ryman, indeed, suggest that love and resistance to manipulation are one and the same), Milena is able to give the Consensus the gift it desires above all: the cure for the cure for cancer.
And, having said all of that, I have scarcely touched on so many of the wonders that await readers of this brilliant and complex novel. There is so much more that awaits you, dear reader.
Enjoy!
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
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.
