Milena was about to die.
The diagram was passed again. Milena saw again the pattern of the giant calling head, an artificial astronomical feature. She saw it spreading light evenly in all directions, and she saw again a tiny mote moving out when there was an answer. She knew she has to be the messenger, bearing an imprint of the whole to the Other. Angel, said the Consensus, you could be an Angel. Milena had her answer ready. She could not speak.
With no hands, Milena groped, as if to feel the walls of a room about her. With no eyes, she tried to see, with no ears, she strained to hear her own voice speaking. She had no voice with which to speak. She was trying to find the limits of her own being, to find some sense of self. She was trying to find a way to say no. No is the word of independence. Milena had none.
She made the Consensus slightly weary. It was as if it had found some small particle of itself suddenly unwilling to do a dull but necessary task.
Again, no words came. Only undeniable will, unquenchable alien thought.
Then Milena would have to be a Composite.
She remembered Bob the Angel. He had a shadow self, a scientist called George. She remembered this silent shadow, a part of someone else who provided spare capacity, but who could never speak, never act. She would be a shadow, like Heather had been to her, like George the scientist was to Bob. She would be like the viruses, half-alive, a facility in someone else’s mind.
No! she managed, a sudden writhing of rebellion.
The great being had all the time and little time. If Milena meant no, then Milena would stay down. She would stay in the Lower House and be wiped, except for the part of her that the Consensus wanted.
The Consensus wanted her capacity to imagine. They wanted her capacity to imagine twenty-two billion flowers, one for each of the souls it held — and one for each of the children it had not yet read. Milena would imagine the Consensus, its great and complicated self, and carry that self out to the stars. She would be a bearer of messages, like Jacob, a blank to be filled, a tool. She would be less than Jacob, for Jacob could walk and talk. She would be reduced to a framework for memory as if she were a skeleton picked bare.
Then like a great whale moving through muddy, sluggish waters, the attention of the Consensus was withdrawn. Milena felt power withdrawn from the circuitry of thought. She felt herself shrink, like a forgotten memory stored so far back in the mind that it is never recalled.
As the whale swam, great schools of tiny beings were stirred up by its presence, as if out of the mud. There were Shockwaves of sudden awakenings as whole selves were briefly recalled, flaring up with all the yearning and joy and daily being of their distanced lives. The impulses rose up like fireworks whistling, scattering fire. Then they fell back into the silence.
As the Crown of the World withdrew its gargantuan bulk, Milena saw its outline. She sensed the framework that held fifteen billion souls in half life. She sensed all the Crowns scattered across the world like the root system of mushrooms. And Milena sensed that it was afraid. The Consensus was made of flesh; and flesh was afraid of dying.
Fear was what impelled it. Fear meant it needed her for its interstellar purposes. Fear made it want Milena to love it. Fear made it dangerous.
Milena the pattern felt her new mind go drugged and dull. I have made a choice, she thought. I fought back as I could. I was not afraid. She felt the forest around her. It was a forest of children, held and trapped. A Child Garden indeed, each flower with a forgotten face, blooming briefly and then closing again.
The Consensus was a framework as Milena was a framework. It was a logic, like time or money or storytelling, like birth, like death, like capitalism or socialism.
There always is a Consensus. We always do what it wants us to do because we are part of it and it is part of us. We are embedded in it, and so we obey the logic. We are born, we have to eat, we are left alone and we have to survive in the ways that are open to us. We obey the logic of love and sex and of health and disease of ageing and infancy and death. If we escape one framework, we move into another. If we make a new framework, we imprison our children in it. We have always fought to escape the Consensus and have always done its will. We fight and obey with one motion.
Milena listened to the fading cries of the children. I tried to help them she thought, as sleep overcame her.
I am going to die. I have been expecting to die for months. Death comes as no shock. I am not free and never have been, but death is no surprise.
And from somewhere she heard music.
It came to her softly. It was imagined music coming to her on waves of thought. It came with a gentle, aching tension. The music was words that had been turned into notes.
It was the unperformed music of the Third Book, when Dante follows Beatrice into Paradise.
It was the pattern of Rolfa, singing softly in the equivalent of a dream, even Rolfa was embedded in the logic and did its will. It was as if Milena were being sung to sleep in Rolfa’s arms.
Except for a little tickle along Milena’s own crown. Somewhere outside this particular Consensus, Milena Shibush was still alive.
Milena the dying woman lay on the floor of the Reading Room. Her hands were on the crucifix around her neck. She was trying to break the chain that held it, to pass it to Mike. She knew he was there but she could not see him. She faded in and out of consciousness with the pulses of the device in her ear. Only then did she remember to breathe.
In…
Out…
In…
She stopped.
Out.
Milena exhaled and it was as if the chain were broken. She breathed out and it was if she breathed herself out. She felt herself expand out of her body like a bubble. She emerged from herself and felt herself drift free.
The spirit of Milena Shibush was exhaled from the body. She floated like a black balloon above the flesh on the floor, looking down on it. She saw Mike Stone on all fours, holding its hand. She saw Root, stroking the thin, dank hair. The body was not her. The spirit was calm and distanced, as if everything were close and faraway at the same time. The spirit suddenly grinned to herself as if there was a joke. The flesh on the floor grinned too. A comedy after all.
Out there, away from the body, the world was beautiful, as if at the very summit of a mountain, so that the stars could be seen in daylight, as if a fresh, clear, cool wind blew through everything, carrying with it the sounds made by distance itself, the sounds a vast expanse will make simply by keeping still.
Light flowed in and out of all things, and the wires were under them to be plucked. There was no pain and no hunger, no desire and no anger, no becoming only fulfilment only a delicious sense of imminent release. It was as if Milena Shibush were a pod of ripe seed that was about to scatter.
The soul of Milena Shibush plucked the wires of the world, and they sang in the mind of Milena the pattern. They were both Terminal.
Go! said the spirit. Go! Go! Go! The knowledge was passed. It was the knowledge of what it was to be free from the flesh, of how to breathe yourself out of the flesh and into the world, as God had once breathed life into it.