‘I must run my messages,’ said Jacob. Their handclasp became more firm for a moment, and then he left. She watched him as he walked back into the Shell, and the sunset was reflected like fire on the rows of windows. That is how it is for him, she thought. Each room is alive with light. Each room has one of us in it.
Milena went for a short and gentle walk and found herself standing on Hungerford Footbridge, where she had once stood before, and she was shaking, as if the bridge, the river, the city and the sky were all shaking with her. Seagulls were festooned about her, calling, not needing to move their wings in the wind, dropping parcels of waste into the river.
Life was a disease, thriving, and it was given breath by love. That was what it seemed to Milena. Water, clouds, wind, they came at her in a rush. What am I feeling? she thought. It was as if something had pulled her up with it, snatched her up, made her its own.
She looked at the Thames, with its heavy-bodied barges and their thick, waxy sails hanging in crisp folds as if carved out of wood; and at the rowing boats painted in bright colours; and at the brown autumn leaves being gathered up for storage by organised parties from the Child Gardens; and the press of bicycles and horses on the South Bank; and the sun panels on the roofs of the ancient white buildings. Father around the sweep of the river just behind St Paul’s were the Coral Reefs, the new houses looking like giant cauliflowers. They sparkled in the last of the light, as if it had snowed.
How much work had made it? How many billions of hours, to build the roads, the carts, the boats, the embankments? How many billions more to learn how to do it, and to store the information? To write the songs in people’s heads, to tame the horses, to grow the food? Her viral clock began to count.
On the opposite bank, a great green drum was being hauled by dray horses.
It was laying cable. The power would soon be on again. There would be metal, sent back along the Slide. The world was going to be rich again, and hung with light. There would be stages big enough for Paradiso. There would be no need for mines in the Antarctic.
Four billion hours and counting.
And all of this will go, sometime. Here it was, in front of her, history, if only for someone else.
Everything goes, everything is lost, eventually. But if something is good, it doesn’t matter what happens. The ending is still happy.
We might have lived in the Antarctic, my love. We would have visited your mother, and you would still have sung, if only to sled dogs. We might have run away to Scotland and been sheep farmers in smelly old jumpers. Or we could have stayed as we were until we hated each other.
Or there could have been this. You will be great, and I will stand in the wings and hear your music, and the applause will rise up.
Endings don’t mean anything. Meanings lie where the world takes its breath, and that is always now. And suddenly, over Waterloo Bridge, the black balloon rose up again, in sunlight this time. Light was reflected from its full black cheeks. It was blowing itself backwards, as it rose into the sky. It blew itself, and was blown. It had been made by others, but it was also entirely itself. That’s me, thought Milena. From the gondola that hung underneath it, people waved. There were coloured streamers. Was there a wedding? Milena waved back, and saw herself, as if she were the balloon. She was tiny, standing on the bridge, but the gesture, the wave of greeting, was clear.
Ten billion and counting.
There was a lot to do. Seventeen years old, Milena thought. She only had another seventeen, maybe eighteen years left to live. Time to get busy. She began to walk, as if counting her steps as well. Time was the problem. She thought she could control it. Instead, time swept her up, blew her on her way, through her life, without Rolfa for all her life. But whatever work she did could not be negated, not even by the death of the sun. That would only be an ending.
Twelve billion and counting.
Milena walked backwards to keep her face toward the sunlight, unaware that she was humming to herself.
Just a Dog of a Song. But…
Jump.
Somewhere else, the voices of the Consensus were falling like rain, calling
Rolfa
Rolfa
Rolfa
Rolfa
Rolfa.
They were the voices of children, wounded and anxious and eager for love. And they said:
It wants to hear your music. The Crown of the World wants you to sing.
And a pattern gathered itself into thought, and seemed to say, in mild surprise. Oh, really? Very well then. It was a pattern that was used to singing in the dark and imagining music out of silence.
There was a blast of imagined light.
It was engulfing, blinding, and the voices scattered like cherubim. With the light, there was the striking of a great chord, made of many voices and instruments, a sound like the beginning of the world, or the end. The sound was sustained. Very faintly at first, like a ringing in the ear, came a voice.
In the end is my beginning.
A hidden thought followed the words like a dart: and this the end of the Comedy, and the music at the end is the same as at the beginning.
The one who had come awake could orchestrate thought and sensation. The blinding light seemed to fade; eyes were adjusting to it. There were clouds, mountainous, rumpled, going off into many layers of distance, with shafts of light and lakes of shadow and cloud-valleys full of icy mist. There was an infinity of light and air, a world without end.
The audience felt wind in its face and a throbbing of blood in its temples and cold air being pulled into its lungs — it felt nostalgia for flesh. And out of the mists, Angels came streaming in black, their round and innocent faces painted white. Their robes and lips and eyesockets were black.
The Angels were the Vampires. They had been a chorus all along. There was T. S. Eliot, his face painted green to make him look ill. There was Madame Curie, glowing with her discovery. T. E. Lawrence had the marks of the lash, and the Brontes coughed, their arms about each other. The Vampires of History held each other back. They bore each other up. The signs of health were indistinguishable from the signs of disease.
The song they sung was this:
Then everything dropped out. The audience fell into night, into a sky dark and blue and full of stars. The darkness, the sky, had been below the light.
The Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.
Drums beat. The imagined music drew to a firm and conclusive end. The thought came that this was a prediction: we will all live in the spirit. Rolfa was free.
Then, silence.
BOOK TWO
For Milena Who Makes the Flowers
or
A Change of Climate