him that was also a heartfelt mystery to her, a question that was somehow one with the unmoving stars.
Bob answers. We’re embedded in the flesh, the Angel says. He means the flesh of the Consensus, and for a moment, Milena can feel the flesh of the Consensus in her mind, a mountainous and tangled pattern etched in the lines of gravity.
But once we leave it, he says, meaning once we become Angels, then we are embedded in the lines. And we just keep dancing in the wires. And Milena feels how the self could slither up out of the Slide, the Charlie Slide. The self is a perturbation in the forces of attraction. Gravity pulled energy out of nothing. The Angels do not need feeding. The self is embedded in the universe, beyond harm.
Milena remembers: I look through eyes of flesh at the darkness between the stars, the small part of the universe that flesh can see. And I’m thinking that we are embedded in flesh too, and I’m wondering if we can become Angels, too.
Goodbye, says Bob, but the feeling is: you’ll be back, girl, you’ll be back here again.
‘Time to go,’ says Mike Stone, months before I marry him, ducking down into the little Bulge, and feeding the last of my equipment into the holding maws of the cargo racks. I’m strapped into the living chair, and Mike Stone gives me a quick kiss on the top of my head. Like a butterfly, it is beautiful, but I’m not sure I don’t want to swat it away from my hair.
And there is my future husband, standing in the open mouths of the two Bulges, where they meet and kiss. He gives me an odd little wave, just the tips of his fingers moving, as if in a breeze.
Then there is a hiss and the seal is broken. The mouths of the Bulges purse shut, shifting and crinkling and turning inward. I look out of the window, at the stars. I think of the lines and the Angels moving up and down them. The air is full of people dancing.
Next.
And here it comes, on a high, hot April day of a different year, with a different Milena. She walks slowly, musing how to bring the Comedy down to Earth. The animals will be Zoo performers, the souls of the dead will be the dry and empty clothes of the Graveyard. And the clouds of lovers? Will the peak of Purgatory be the summit of the orbit of the Bulge?
There are cries of children, climbing scaffolding, swinging from it. Monkeys. And there is a clutch of Bees, sitting on the walkway to the Zoo, in the sun.
The Bees have learned how to do something new. Perhaps they learned it from the Bulge. Perhaps they learned it from me. They can change their genes by thinking. And now there are leaves sprouting out of their backs, thick, broad leaves on sinewy stems, like purple rubber plants.
They sit up and turn and smile, delighted. There is the woman with the green teeth and the wide happy eyes. There is the young boy, with hair down the middle of his back and he is happy too. They all are happy.
In some other time, someone else is shouting, Keep Well! Keep Well! Keep Well! It is a fervent hope.
The Bees all exclaim in triumph, pointing in unison at me.
‘Cancer!’ they cry, like birds.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Terminal
(Love Sickness)
If cancer did not swim in the same sea as us, we might admire it, as we admire sharks. We might admire its simplicity and fitness for purpose, its lethal beauty.
Cancer is a disruption of the process of growth. Some cancer cells produce their own growth hormone, giving themselves the signal to divide and multiply. Others increase the number of growth hormone receptors on the membrane of the cell, or duplicate the internal message bearers that carry the command to grow. They do not respond to messages of overcrowding from other cells. They need blood to feed and so they secrete proteins that induce the body to grow new blood vessels for them.
They do not need to be firmly attached to the intercellular matrix, as normal cells do. They can split off from the main tumour, float freely in the bloodstream and find new sites to grow. Cancers are a disfunction of what is called differentiation. They do not mature into fully functioning blood or bone or muscle or skin cells — they are not differentiated. When they find a new site, in different kinds of tissue, they can grow there too. They can spread. The word for that is metastasis. The word for that is malignant.
And, cancers are immortal. Normal cells stop dividing after between fifty and one hundred and fifty times. Normal cells senesce. Cancer cells go on growing.
Before the Revolution, in the world of the very rich and the very poor, something terrible had happened. Through some alteration of genes in DNA viruses, there were new strains of cancer that spread with the ease and speed of the common cold. New DNA was inserted in proto-oncogenes, which altered their function. Sometimes as soon as two weeks after infection, tumours began to grow with an almost choreographed dexterity, spinning off and landing with both feet firmly in other tissues.
A final cure for cancer became a matter of shrieking urgency.
Cancers disrupt key genes in the chromosomes. These genes are called proto-oncogenes. They code for proteins that are involved in growth or differentiation or certain kinds of cell structuring. Genetic material might be added to them — as when retroviruses introduce new genetic material. Genetic material might be taken away from them, as when they are irradiated. They might suffer an accident in reproduction where their order is reversed, or they are translocated among other gene sequences.
Proto-oncogenes are normal. When disrupted by addition, subtraction or alteration, they can become oncogenes — genes that are involved in cancer.
All possible proto-oncogenes had been identified. A final cure for all the cancers would be something that would protect these key genes from any kind of genetic change.
The DNA spiral is made of alternating phosphates and sugar. Between them are rungs, like rungs of a ladder, made of nucleic acids. The answer was to coat the rungs themselves in sugars and phosphates — and reinforce the helices of DNA.
The sugar-coated genes were protected against attempts to add new genetic material to them. They were firmly bound to a reinforced spiral and would not be broken and replaced out of sequence. Radiation or chemicals did not remove genetic material from them. They were able to communicate with reverse transcriptase and mRNA. The communication was one-way. They were inviolate to change, locked in sugar.
People called the cure Candy. Engineered retroviruses inserted Candy genes into all cells of the body — including germ cells. Candy became part of human genetic inheritance.
Cloned tumour-suppressants cured the existing cancers. Cancer disappeared. The capacity for cancers disappeared. So did the proteins they secreted.
Cancers had been of unsuspected benefit. They secreted anti-senescence proteins in large amounts of very low molecular weight. The proteins entered other cells easily.
Cancers delayed senescence of other cells. Small, premalignant lesions prolonged human life to its accustomed span. Without cancer, the span of human life was halved.
Attempts to duplicate the anti-senescence proteins produced only localised effects. Only patches of tissue responded.
And the proto-oncogenes and the Candy genes were locked safely behind a wall of sugar.
Bees admired cancer, as we would admire flowers; for their life, for their beauty. For them, it burned like a white light. They could feel its escape from order as a break for freedom by individual cells.
They followed Milena, entranced.
‘It sings,’ they would sigh.
‘Milena! You are a Garden!’ they would call to her. ‘Full of flowers!’
The Bees followed Milena to St Thomas’s Hospital, to the Cancer Wards where she was tested. They
