In anticipation, horns began to blow, and whistles to screech. There was a dull roar of noise, barely intelligible.
‘ZERO!’
Nothing happened. There was a wave of laughter and ironic cheering as darkness deepened.
‘ZERO!’ the people called again. ‘MINUS ONE! MINUS TWO!’
At ‘minus two,’ there was a leaping of light. Bam! Suddenly light flooded the face of the Savoy hostel for the homeless. A chain of lights hanging from lamp posts came alive with light.
Bam! Spotlights were suddenly shining upwards on the face of the Shell Mex. It gleamed, newly washed against the navy blue of the sky. Lights came on in succession all along the North Bank, in the boat-houses and along the docks at the foot of the stone embankments. Light glinted on the granite length of Cleopatra’s Needle. Lights came on all along Waterloo Bridge. Bam, bam, bam, in quick time, pools of light, golden as if in sunset, spread in contrast to the darkness of the sky.
Oh! the people sighed. Oh! it was even more beautiful than they had thought it would be. They had all tried to imagine what it had once been like, the electric cities spangled with light, light in windows shining like eyes, and here it was, as if they had been transported in time. The electric city was reborn. This was to be called the Restoration.
The Bees leapt to their feet, shivering with other people’s delight, and they jittered up and down in place, wailing, warbling in tongues.
And on the face of the Shell-Mex, giant shadows slowly crept. The hands of the clock had begun to turn again, as if time had begun once more. It was as if the clockwork of change itself had started up once again.
Milena felt the artificial light prickling on her Rhodopsin skin. Everything is going to change, she thought. There would be power now, light and holograms. It would be possible to perform the Comedy.
All around her people whistled and stamped and cheered. Bam, bam, bam, the lights came on in succession, like memories.
And Milena remembered being in a vehicle that could orbit the Earth. It was alive, and it floated, swollen with gases like the throat of a frog. It rocked in the wind as it drifted upwards. Below her, Milena the director saw England swing in and out of view.
Milena saw huge autumn fields, golden brown with harvest. She saw lines of motion trailing through prairies of grain, blown by wind. It was as if the grain were the legs of the Earth. By waving them, the Earth turned. Between the fields, there were tiny copses of sycamore and beech. There was a river moving in a straight line, held by banks of coral. The shadow of the vehicle floated across the river, sending up a flock of ducks that flew in panic, the mass of their wings scintillating brown/white/brown as they flapped.
England was a revelation to Milena the director. She had not been outside Greater London since early infancy, and she remembered almost nothing of her childhood. This was an unknown country, huge and full of life and forgotten, like childhood itself.
There were villages below, with houses shaped like bee hives, next to ancient churches or barns made of stones. Giant pear-trees were stretched out on the ground beside them, pinioned to catch the sun and occupying whole fields. Children carried food on their heads out into the fields. Flocks of them ran in the Child Gardens, running and gathering and breaking apart like starlings in the air. Giant horses pulled machinery through the fields, churning up a golden haze of dust. Milena saw through the glass roof of a laboratory. Inside there were vats and tanks and rows of glinting dishes like sequins. She saw groves of bamboo, and people sitting in the sun, having their lunch.
Milena saw many lives held in one pattern, the events in different fields, neighbouring villages. It was as if she could suddenly see the shape of Now, the simultaneity of life. She could see the shadows of clouds and an advancing front of weather. It was as if she could see the future of the children below.
Elevated, she thought, in every sense of the word I have been elevated.
Milena Shibush was going to produce and direct The Divine Comedy. She was going to produce it as she had always wanted to, filling the heavens with light and music, Rolfa’s music.
Rolfa’s music filled her life. She heard it everywhere she went, in her mind. Even without the viruses to help her, she would by now have known it all by heart. The music had become a way for her to talk to herself. If she were alone, unhappy, perplexed, triumphant, she would find herself humming the music, and the music she had chosen would tell her what she was really feeling.
Now she was humming the mountain theme, the music of climbing, that followed Dante’s footsteps up the mountain of Purgatory.
In a flurry of cottonwool white, the landscape below was snatched away, with the suddenness of a viral illness. Milena was inside a cloud! She leaned forward to see, to remember. Everything was grey, like fog. Of course, of course a cloud would be like that! Soft and grey and full of dampness. Between the panes of cellulose that was the window, there was a pimpling of condensation. Milena had time to think: I want to see. Then the vehicle blinked. A fold of flesh slipped down between the panes, to wipe them.
Milena was Terminal now. She could feel the vehicle all around her. She could sense the miles of its nervous system. She could feel her own position within that system, a concentrated knot at its very centre. The vehicle was alive, but it had no self. Milena was its self. The vehicle did whatever she wanted. Milena could feel it crowd all around her, needing direction, needing a centre. The need was desperate and she withdrew from it.
All down the centre of her head, there was a weight in a line. It felt like scar tissue, dead but somehow tingling at the same time. It was a wound, a disease. It was where Milena was Terminal, attached to the machine.
The pressure on its gasbag was translated for her into altitude in kilometres. Wind velocity and direction, temperature and estimated time to ignition were all ticking through her mind like her own thoughts. She could feel the opening and closing of the creature’s valves, the seeping of its glands, its eagerness for a command.
The vehicle had a scientific name, in muddled Latin and Greek: nubiformis astronautica. Most people called it the Bulge. The Bulge electrolysised water into oxygen and hydrogen. It inflated itself. Lighter than air, it drifted up to the border of the stratosphere. Then it mixed and electrochemically ignited the gases, to blast itself free from the Earth.
‘Fart-propelled,’ old Lucy of the Spread had called it once. Milena the director saw her in memory, her grubby fingers lifting up a pint in a salute.
Outside the window, the mist began to glow a pearly-white. There was suddenly dim light and shadow on Milena’s arm. Then as suddenly as someone gasping, the Bulge swept out over a landscape of white.
And Milena heard the music of Heaven in her head, Rolfa’s music, the mounting bass line, the crying of the Angel voices. She was swept up between mountains of cloud, with highways of light and blue-shadowed valleys between. Remember, remember, she told herself.
She rose higher with Rolfa’s music. There were plains of cloud below that looked crisp enough to walk on. There was a coastline, with bays and inlets and an ocean of air, with floating icebergs and islands of white. Outside the window, sunlight glinted on ice crystals. Something bobbed jiggling between them. There in the air, between the particles of ice, there were cobwebs, great nets of them, and there were aerial spiders dancing, legs akimbo. The spiders looked like Bulges, in their net of nerves, as if the universe were a series of Russian dolls, a smaller likeness contained in the larger.
Overhead the sky was mauve. It was time for the Bulge to blow.
Yes, Milena told it, and the Bulge began its internal dance, its heart pounding, closing its hiatuses, opening others. Milena felt its shell, a latticework of bone, begin to close around them. As its eyes closed, Rolfa’s music reached the peak of Purgatory, about to leave the Earth altogether. Rolfa wasn’t with her, and would not be with her, except in the music. Always present by her very absence.