‘Good Piper. Good boy,’ whispered Milena and began to scratch him behind the ears.
Piper gave a yelp of pleasure and shook his bottom from side to side, trying to wag a tail he did not have.
‘He thinks you are his mistress,’ said the King.
You had to understand Bees to know that it was a sacrifice for them to give up Piper. They loved him. You had to understand Bees to know what a tribute it was for them to give Piper to her.
Milena sighed with weariness. Here I go again. She knew what she was going to do. ‘Come on men, Piper,’ she said, ruefully. ‘Come on boy. Or girl. Whichever.’
‘Home,’ said the Bees, all together, in chorus. ‘She takes him home!’ They were smiling.
‘What did I say?’ shouted Root. ‘I said you had to be the one who gets taken care of!’
‘You had all better go,’ Milena said to them. She stumbled as she walked up the coffee-washed pathway. Piper tried to caper about her ankles, but his knees were not sprung like a dog’s ankles.
‘You’re not taking that tiling!’ exclaimed Root.
‘He’s not a thing,’ said Milena, and her voice suddenly thickened and she found she was weeping. ‘He’s alive.’ To her that was suddenly the most precious thing.
The Bees began to withdraw, bowing and stepping onto the lilypads of their brethren. There was commotion in the water as roots pulled themselves free and pushed the lilypads away from the shore. As the helicopters turned back, as Piper nittered and wriggled and tried to pant, and as Root shook her head with misgiving, Milena began to climb the stairs that led to her home. She felt something sluggish in her loins, the ebbing of the life that still washed all about her in waves.
She opened her door, and Mike Stone came rushing forwards from the balcony, his face full of alarm, full of questions.
Milena tottered towards him, fell against him. ‘Mike,’ she said. ‘I’ve got cancer.’ It was not until Mike held her that she realised. She had made herself ill, out of love. But Love of what?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Armour of Light
(The Child Garden)
On Milena’s twenty-first birthday, she and her friends went for a picnic in Archbishop’s Park, near St Thomas’s Hospital.
Al the Snide carried the wine and the fruit juice. Cilia carried the basket of food and Peterpaul carried Mike’s chair. Mike had designed and built it for himself. It supported him from the shoulders and thighs, leaving his swollen buttocks to hang free. Mike had developed a waddle. He walked by shifting his hips from side to side and letting his feet follow. There was a football pitch in the park, covered in vividly red grit. Some boys who were playing on it stopped to laugh at him.
Milena expended her strength by walking up to the boys. They saw her and fell silent, then shared embarrassed smiles. They knew they were going to be told off but they were nice enough to accept it as their due. They also knew who she was.
Milena was bald, and her head leaned forward insecurely on a thin neck, tendons straining. She had started to wear make-up, like an actress. Cilia put it on for her, giving her skin a lightly tanned, purple colour with a smear of silver around the eyes. The silver suited the purple but could not hide how deep the flesh had sunk into the sockets of her skull. Milena smiled with rose-coloured lips, knowing that she showed too much gum and that the grin made her look like a death’s head.
‘Don’t laugh,’ she told the boys gently, through the cane screen around the pitch.
The boys shuffled, looking at their feet. One of them had a nasty graze on his knee that trickled brown-black down his leg.
‘Someone had to carry you, before you were born,’ she told them. ‘Who knows, maybe you’ll be pregnant one day.’
The boys chuckled, shook their heads. ‘Oh, ta. Don’t think so.’
‘Maybe your wife will insist.’
‘She’ll be lucky,’ murmured one of the boys.
‘Are you sorry, lads?’ she asked them.
They nodded. Milena blew them a collective kiss. The Princess came up behind her, little Berry pulling in another direction. ‘Come with us, Milena,’ she sang, to the beginning of Faure’s
Little Berry lived with his mother now, and had done since the Princess had met Peterpaul. They were all Singers. Berry never talked. Sometimes now, especially when he was alone with Peterpaul and the Princess, he would not use words at all. When he was eating, he sang. Different foods had different themes. He sang them over and over, even with his mouth full, celebrating.
He wore a cowboy hat. Milena had worn one for a time, when her hair had started falling out, so he had wanted one too. The hat was black and red, and had a thong and a toggle that was pulled up tightly under his chin. There was circle of white cotton bobbles all around the underside of the brim. Berry loved his cowboy hat. For him, it was alive and there were particular songs devoted to it.
The Princess was trying to help Milena, supporting her by one arm, while pulling Berry, who was leaning with all his weight and all his being towards something he wanted. He sang about it to himself, but the adults couldn’t think what the song was about. The trees? The football pitch?
‘It’s Piper,’ said Milena. Terminals were also empaths with people as well, slightly Snide. As Milena weakened, her ability to Read people improved. ‘He wants to ride Piper.’
The Princess paused and looked up at Milena with a kind of helpless concern. Is she trying to find a song? Milena wondered. There are no songs that ask if a man who thinks he’s a dog can give the virus to your child.
‘It’s all right, Anna. I’ve checked. Piper is not infectious, not contagious, nothing.’
A Speaker could have lied and said that was not a worry. Singers couldn’t lie. Trying to lie clogged the music just as speech clogged the words. The Princess went silent until she could sing something else. ‘What would you do if someone found him, someone who knew who he used to be?’
‘Give him back?’ smiled Milena, and shrugged.
‘What if it was his wife who found him?’
‘That would be sad,’ said Milena, smiling dreamily. ‘Especially as he thinks he’s a female dog.’
Milena felt calm today, she always felt better with people around her. It was at night the terror came, the cold, clinging sweats, the pacing around the room, the life-devouring fear of death. Mike, poor Mike, would wake and hold her as she quivered next to him, teeth chattering.
Milena was immune to the cures. She had unstitched the suppressor genes they tried to give her. So they gave her immune suppressants, so she could catch the cure, and the cancers raced ahead. The cancers ached at night with growing pains. She felt them in her mind, and tried to find the spirals, the spirals that could change with thought. But she had never had so many cells to change before. She had never been so tired or confused before. She sometimes thought, that at night while she slept another part of her, obeying the old program, made the cells cancerous again.
At times, she could find the idea amusing. I can fight off any illness, and so I’m dying, because all the cures are diseases. Haven’t things become just the slightest bit confused?
The only other cures they had were the ancient ones, and they were illnesses too. They killed cells in your body. They made you queasy or sleepy or confused. They parched your throat and made you so nauseous you couldn’t hold down a glass of water. Your hair fell out.
Other things were happening. The patch of fluorescent skin on her palm had spread up and over her arms onto part of her face. Parts of her glowed in the dark. She could feel other things happening in her genes, strange attempts at mutation, trying to grow new things altogether.
All of that was better than the euphoria. When the terror got too bad, happy drugs were given to her. Then
