‘Now, love, you have any experiences with the paranormal?’
Instantly, Rolfa’s face looked withdrawn.
‘Have you ever levitated, or had an out-of-body experience? Any poltergeists in your home? Anything of that sort?’
Rolfa shook her head and gave a shy smile. Who me?
‘It’s very important. You’re sure? OK, then, we go in.’
This woman is too used to talking to Tykes, thought Milena. Then Root turned to her. The smile was like a beam of light. ‘You, too, love. You’ve never seen this, and we want you to see how happy it is.’
Milena felt ice in her chest. They know, she thought. They know that they’ve never Read me. It’s been deliberate. They’ve decided not to.
Quiet, she thought, and followed Root.
I thought I was free, Milena thought. Instead, I was being tolerated. Or used. They wouldn’t leave me alone, if there was no reason for it.
Of course they must know they haven’t Read me.
Another mystery, lost in Milena’s history.
Root was holding open a door, and waving to her, come in, come in. Milena followed, in anger, and in fear.
They went down a corridor to a sealed hatch, that hissed when it was opened. Beyond it was a loose and flabby concertina corridor, made of soft resin. It shifted underfoot, floating in flesh. It was wet and smelled of disinfectant and was lit by an ultraviolet light.
‘Got to avoid disease,’ explained Root.
They stepped into a room made of flesh.
The walls were slightly phosphorescent, and they seemed to pull back as they entered.
‘Hello, Baby,’ said Root. ‘Time to go for a walk.’
She’s Terminal, realised Milena. She talks to the Consensus, with her mind. It can talk to her. She can see for it, hear for it. This is the Consensus, here.
‘What’s it like?’ asked Milena, all in one breath.
‘Big,’ said Root the Terminal, warmly. ‘And alive. Come on, now Rolfa love, you sit over here, on the floor, anywhere will do.’
This is what holds me, Milena thought. This is what rules. This is Charlie. This is the Slider, maker of Angels. The beating heart of her culture, and she had never seen it. Machines had imitated life, and now life had returned the compliment. Patterns were repeated. A computer made of flesh, growing new capacity when it needed it, sending mycelia through the earth, sprouting elsewhere like mushrooms, fed by purple gardens.
Milena remembered again.
She had never seen a film, but other people had with viruses in their heads, and she had their memories. They were the memories the Party wished her to have. She remembered a film now, of Chao Li Song.
Milena saw a wry, smiling face, an old gentleman full of good news he could not contain. ‘We will have to accept that we have been superseded,’ he said in a voice like a rusty hinge. ‘We are like parents who have produced a giant baby. It deals in things we cannot conceive of.’
Thought was chemistry moving into electricity, and electricity was unified with the other forces. In the fifth dimension, the master of the eleven dimensions, gravity and electromagnetic phenomena were the same thing. The Consensus could think in gravity. It could imprint personalities in gravity. Angels, they were called. The Angels could slide through gravity. They could slide across space at the speed of light. As predicted, they travelled backwards in time. They travelled backwards in time to other stars.
The highways of gravity were called by the English the Charlie Slide.
‘How will it help?’ asked Chao Li Song, ‘to send thought to the stars, long ago? The answer is that it will mine for wealth. Thought and gravity are one. Gravity pulled the universe into existence, by inflation. It pulled against nothingness, and as it pulled energy was released. There was a flash of heat.’ Chao Li Song smiled, in the past, as if he had travelled at the speed of light. ‘The Angels will unleash blasts of heat. They will smelt the rocks of other worlds. They will lift them, like toffee, and hurl them towards us, out of the past. They will guide them to us, through the long light years back, very slowly.’ He paused to smile privately. ‘We know they will do this, because it has already happened in the past. The blocks of metal. We have seen them coming towards us. We have heard the Angels, in the lines of gravity.’
The universe had been made by inflation, gravity pulling energy out of nothing. The Consensus was mining the vacuum as well. It was plucking it gently, to release floods of heat. The Consensus would soon be making energy by making tiny, pocket universes.
‘You comfy, love?’ Root asked, giving Rolfa a drink of water.
Chao Li Song had other things in store to say. ‘For so long now, we have known the universe was not material. Everything calls up its opposites and achieves a new synthesis. Hegel told us, Marx told us. The time has come now. We had Dialectical Materialism. Now we must have Dialectical Immaterialism. Idea precedes reality.’
He had to flee for his life. The viruses did not tell Milena this. Her mother had, in the name of her father who had died. Because of Chao Li Song, socialism forged an alliance with resurgent religion. Because of him, socialism won. It required only a few compromises, with prudery and common sense. Milena lived in a theological state.
Charlie, the English called him. Charlie Song.
‘Sing a song of Charlie, take you for a ride,’ Root the Terminal was singing, wobbling backwards like a jelly towards Milena. ‘Sing a song of Charlie, down the Charlie Slide.’
We rose out of Africa, thought Milena. We rose out of a drought and survived, not with a bigger jaw, but with a smaller jaw because we had the beginnings of speech. We survived because we worked together. We are designed to survive changes in climate by working in concert. Like music.
Root gripped her hand and shook it. ‘You stay here with me, love, or we get two readings all mixed up, and that’s very weird. You never seen this. You never seen this, you in for a real treat, I can tell you that.’ She chuckled. She was like a balloon full of chuckles.
We survive, thought Milena, because after everything else, we are good. We survive to the extent that we are good.
The thing that was the room chuckled with them. It chuckled and space chuckled, the space containing Rolfa. There was a wave through it, and her.
Rolfa’s head was flung back like a cannonball, and it split into a grin. ‘Yeee-haaa!’ she cried. She roared with laughter. ‘Whooo-eeee!’
‘That’s it, that’s it!’ shouted Root and she jumped up and down with her vast bulk. ‘Oh, yeah. Ride it love, ride it!’
I had heard, thought Milena. I had heard it was wonderful, and I never believed.
Every synapse is engaged at once, every neural pathway, every cell in the brain works together, all at once for the first and only time. Like a national grid, all lit up. Each person a nation, a universe.
The Consensus pulled energy up out of nothing, from quantum vacuum, and it could roar back in time by travelling faster than light. It had been known for a century and a half that gravity in the form of inflation had helped spark the beginning. But how was there a viewpoint, a reference, for gravity to work in before space and time? The answer was that gravity had been imported back to the beginning, thought in the form of gravity.
Humankind, working as the Consensus, was going to make the universe. So loved the world that we made God in our own image.
‘Oh!’ cried Rolfa, in fondness for everything. ‘Oh!’ and her voice broke into a whine of loss and regret and she looked at Milena, smiling and sad.
‘That’s it,’ said Root. ‘Darling, you just been Read.’ She walked to Rolfa, leaned over her, inspected her, stroked her head. ‘So what did you see, love?’ she asked, speaking gently.