‘Ms Shibush,’ said Charles Sheer. ‘I am stunned. You have surpassed yourself. This makes your efforts to stage all of Dante seem almost credible.’
That is the general idea, thought Milena to herself. We understand each other, Charlie. There is a bond between enemies too.
The Minister sat still, without movement, as if the whole universe turned around him. On the hessian screens there were slashes of green, cartoon reeds reduced to one dead message. The screens were covered in blackheads of dust.
For you keepers of the Zoo, everything must be worthy and have high purpose. For you everything must be part of the advancing social schedule.
Me, I’m doing it all for Rolfa. And the Consensus — what does it want?
‘It does tie in with what we were discussing earlier,’ said Moira Almasy in a low, quiet voice.
All around them, the cartoon reeds slowly rotted.
‘I’m going to make a garden,’ said Thrawn McCartney, in a voice that was supposed to be like a child’s.
There was a new machine. It took images from people’s heads and turned them into light. Reformation technology it was called. The Restoration had led to it.
All the light in the Thrawn McCartney’s room was muddled, in disorder. It heaved in currents like oil and water that would not mix. An orchid, half-remembered, swam into queasy existence. It attached itself to a bush with branches like serpents. The branches writhed in place then suddenly froze. They and the flower were held in place for a moment, and then faded, forgotten. Grass gathered like a slowly poaching egg, a bleary smudge of green. There was a hedge, a few leaves pinpricked out of the mass of it. The sky was full of impossible sunset colours.
I want to get out, thought Milena the director. She stood with Thrawn in some colourless centre, a point of view. There was no air, no sound, no clarity of image. Is this all you can remember, thought Milena, of trees and plants? Can you really see no more clearly than this?
Milena found it nearly impossible to be honest around Thrawn. She would smile tolerantly, when all she really felt was anger. She would offer compliments as if to placate. She had become frustrated with herself. Why, Milena wondered, can’t I speak?
Thrawn placed an image of herself in the garden. At last there was something that Thrawn could see clearly. It was not Thrawn as she was. This Thrawn was tall and lissome and wore a spotless white dress. Her face had been subtly altered. It was beautiful now, and it was backwards. It was a face seen in a mirror, a face with the flaws removed.
What an airy creature she was, this Thrawn, light as a feather, fleshless. The stringy, tormented tendons of her neck were gone, as was the desperate stare of starvation. This is why Thrawn never ate. She thought she could become like this creature. The creature danced, lean as a ballerina, bent over, arms like a swan’s neck.
‘Now this is beautiful. Isn’t this beautiful?’ Thrawn demanded.
The trouble with being dishonest is that it requires an ability to act. Milena could not. She shifted inside her quilted winter jumpsuit. ‘We can see you quite clearly, yes,’ she said.
Thrawn had sensed enough. ‘This is a new technology, you know. No one has done this before.’
‘Oh, I know, I know,’ said Milena, as if no criticism had been implied.
‘I mean here, you try it,’ said Thrawn. ‘Go on.’
She took Milena by the shoulders and stood her in front of the Reformer. You had to stand in the point of view. Milena felt something in her head drain away, as if light, right in the centre of her head was gone. As if it now resided in the machine.
‘Don’t be scared,’ said Thrawn, arms folded, shaking her head in pity at poor Milena. ‘Just try to imagine something and see what you come up with.’
Milena had been rendered self-conscious, as she always was in Thrawn’s presence. It was difficult for her to imagine anything. So she tried to remember instead.
A garden.
She remembered an autumn day, the smell of loam and fallen leaves, and geese overhead, ducks fluttering their wings against still water. She remembered water, and the rose bushes, with their spotted leaves, their last roses, nibbled by the shorter days.
She remembered Rolfa, in Chao Li Gardens. She remembered the rose Rolfa had picked for her. The shock as Rolfa broke the law. She remembered the weight of the rose as it bobbed in her hand, and the scratching of the thorns against her fingers. She remembered the single, round, focusing drop of dew, catching the light.
And suddenly the rosa mundi was in the room. It filled it with huge, dappled shaggy pink petals, curling brown at the tip, but soft and slightly rippled nearer the centre. It bobbed, poised for a moment.
As if something had finally been set free, there was an avalanche of flowers. Milena did not know if she were imagining them in her head or seeing them in the room. What she saw and what she imagined were one and the same thing. She could feel them spill out of her head, as if some great living weight were pushing out flowers, giving birth to them. They tumbled through the room slowly, a turning kaleidoscope of flowers, remembered flowers each one different.
There was a garland of lime blossom in summer, each flower spinning like a star. There were blowzy hollyhocks, liberated from their tall stems, showering their loose, purple petals. Arum lilies lifted up their heads in a chorus, their white hands holding out yellow stamen. They were mixed with tobacco flowers, and crowned with thorny, white ailanthus.
The kaleidoscope turned. There was a tumult of branches overhead in the wind, seem from many perspectives at once all jumbled, fragmented like Picasso, reaching dizzyingly up into a sky, blue behind them, that fell away to heaven. Confusingly, the branches went down below as well as if the sky were the earth. The branches plunged through grass, down into clouds. Somehow the water of the clouds fed them. The grass was blown in waves. The grass came closer with attention. Each cell was revealed in the light. There was a stirring of life within each of the cells, a green movement of protein in and out of their inner structures. There were beetles as polished as jewels, frozen in the attention of the light, waiting for it to swerve away from them. There was a thin crust of earth giving birth to small, wriggling creatures. They were mild magenta. And the green stems of the rose bush rose, like ladders towards the sun.
And suddenly Milena was inside the dew drop, the focus of light. Light burned blearily in it, catching on motes of life, swimming in it. The lens of the surface of the dew drop turned the world upside down. A face was refracted in it. It was a human face with nut brown skin and black, liquid eyes, and there was a smile, and the face was about to speak…
Milena was pushed. With a lurch, it was all snatched away.
Milena looked about her, dazed. She was in a rather small, messy room, with the flowing walls of a Coral Reef shelter.
Thrawn was staring at her, outraged.
‘I had no idea you were a horticulturalist.’ she said. Her voice was acid, her face sour and straggly with panic. Her chest rose and fell with deep, angry breathing. ‘This is my equipment,’ she said, very quietly. ‘You do not hog my equipment.’
Milena was still confused, snatched from her flowers. ‘How long was I on it?’ she asked.
‘How long does not matter. I let you use delicate, new equipment and you treat it it… like… like.’ Thrawn shook her head, at a loss for words.