Inside the tubers, there were ranked and ordered areas of flesh. They were called cells. Imprinted in these cells were the Readings of individual selves.
The Consensus of Central London nurtured and made use of over one and a half million souls. There were fifteen individual Crowns spread across the geography of Greater London. There were fifteen million selves contained in them. Almost all of them were children, Read at ten years old.
Everything is a hologram, a smudged image of the whole. The children of the Consensus slept, like individual memories. While the Crown itself rested, the children played, like dreams. Scattered, disordered, nightmarish, the many selves of the Consensus tried to reassert themselves, tried to live again, like the unhappy memories imprisoned in each of us. The Crown would shift in uneasy rest, reminded of all the things it tried to forget.
The Consensus of London slept, stewarded in the being of the Consensus of the Two Isles, as the Two Isles were only occasionally brought into being in the Crown of Europe, while Europe slept in the World. There were great fleshy cables of nerves, under seas, across continents.
It was the Crown of the World that wanted Milena Shibush.
The great synthesising cortex was in Beijing, and all its attention was slowly focusing on one small cell of flesh, in England, in London.
Milena the pattern awoke trying to breathe. Her lungs tried to pull in but it was if there was no air. There was no light, no sound. A pillow was over her face, she was being suffocated. She fought, groping in the darkness, clawing at it. No hands, she thought. I have no hands!
Calm
A bolt made of iron seemed to shoot into her.
Be still
It was not a voice but an impulse, a direct electrochemical command that occupied Milena completely.
And Milena was still. The panic left her.
Then, like a flock of birds, came other, smaller impulses.
Milena
Ma
Ma
Milena
The birds of thought were the impulses of children from all around her. They darted in and out of her. They came as greetings and were joyful, glad to be of use, weaving and ducking. They were playful, newly awoken into full and conscious life. They were doing the will of the Consensus.
Like this!
Like this!
You do it
like this!
As if they were carrying ribbons that they wove round and round her, the children presented Milena with the knowledge of how to exist in the Consensus. You sleep, they told her, and then you are a dream. You are brushed lightly, quickly, with thought and your reaction is harvested, as if by a virus. All the reactions together make a decision.
It was the knowledge of how to live in slavery. The poor birds tried to be happy. They were full of good will. They were still ten years old, though laden with virus and trapped in these mountains of flesh, trapped in tiny cells. They would stay ten years old, until they were wiped away.
Milena the pattern was in abeyance. She waited and listened, accumulating pity and horror.
Sometimes the Crown sleeps, the impulses told her. They showed her what happened then. When it slept, the great gardens of memory were moved by random gusts of electrochemical impulse. The children moved then, as dreams move, crippled and incomplete and shadowy. They tried to tell stories, tried to find their way out, back into the world of school and toys and fresh grass and games, running with bright red rubber balls, the world in which they had once been able to move and make other things move, a world in which they had hands.
My own memories are like that, Milena thought, my own and separate selves. They are trapped in me. She remembered the plump, purple face of the Czechoslovakian Milena. There were the infant and the child, the actress, the director and the People’s Artist, the wife, and the restorer of cancer. Do they all want to be set free as well?
Life! the bird impulses seemed to cry. They rejoiced in the fullness of their awareness. Impulses flashed back and forth along neural pathways. The memories spoke to each other, relishing contact and a limited measure of independent being. Their thoughts darted to and from Milena like a screeching flock of starlings.
They settled on her. Chocolate? they asked her. Remember the taste of chocolate for us? They asked her to remember the feel of sunlight on skin, of fresh wind on a face.
You have just come! You have just come from out there!
Apples! Remember apples for us!
Swimming! Do you remember swimming?
They pecked at her memories with harmless, hungry beaks. It was like feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Milena could feel the prickling of their feet in her nerves.
They had such need.
Then they rose up again, the impulses, in a wave, in a flock. The impulses were the attention of other selves, drawn elsewhere. Milena sensed them rise up and turn elsewhere in hunger. Something else moved among them, something so huge she could at first only dimly feel it. The Crown of the World was remembering its many selves.
It was as if a giant hand were being stroked across all of them. Fondly, the Consensus was remembering. It remembered its previous lives and the patterns that formed and were formed by them. Oh yes, it seemed to say, I had forgotten that, oh yes, now I remember. You wore blue and were good at games; you climbed trees in sunlight; you could draw whole buildings from memory; you were very pretty and had terrible pain when your second set of teeth came through. You had both your parents with you until you were ten, and they came to your Reading with you, and they danced. Your parents! How you miss them, poor child, how you wish you could talk to them still. And how adult you all felt, how adult and proud on the day of your Reading.
There were explosions of remembrance, as if bombs were going off. Whole patterns were revived all at once, their whole lives racing past in waves as the attention of the Consensus revived them, brought them to life. There was a tumult. Identities soared through the pathways, into and out of Milena. These other beings were contiguous with her own. Their borders defined her borders. Their borders merged with hers. As they burgeoned with life, so she would contract, feel herself go small and faint, occupied by them.
I could lose myself in this she thought. I am lost in this.
Then everything went still and silent very suddenly. The Crown of the World had been playing with memory, but now it was business. Its attention swivelled around and bore down. It bore down on Milena.
It was as if she were suddenly filled to bursting. She could feel the patch of flesh on which she was imprinted ache. Everything in her seemed to expand and to crackle as if with static. It was then that she knew she was still made of flesh. She was a patch of flesh that ached.
No words were passed. A wave of information tore through her. It was fluid and heavy like mercury and it moved with such speed that she could hardly bear it. It slammed into her, filling her, weighing her down, it took up all of her being.
All at once Milena knew the Consensus would neither be fooled nor opposed by her. It knew Milena hated it. It needed her. She had a choice.
She was not in the Upper House. She was in the Lower House, with the Tykes. If she wished to be of use, then she would live. If she did not, she would stay in the Lower House. The patterns of the Lower House were kept only as long as their originals lived. When their originals died, they were wiped away.