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
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:
‘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.
Tongues of flesh wrapped themselves around Milena to hold her in place. Milena felt the Bulge gather and clench for the blast. She felt in a line down her head like a collar that pulled a weight.
I am not a Party Member, she thought, but they treat me like one. I still have not been Read, and they know it. I have not been Read, but they have made me Terminal. They need me for something. In a line down her head, she felt another weight, something vast and tangled and the size of planet. It was the Consensus. It was present by its absence too. It was watching, through her eyes, listening through her ears. It used her hands to do its work. Milena closed her eyes and waited.
There was dull roar in the bowels of the vehicle below, and the walls trembled, soft and slightly crinkled like chamois leather.
How, Milena wondered, thinking of her life, how did I end up here?
Then she sat back and surrendered to the roar.
After Rolfa had gone, Milena had tried to find her. She remembered wandering through the Shell, through the Zoo, along the walkways between them, asking everyone: where is Rolfa? Where is Rolfa?
Milena asked the little girls who worked at the desks of the Zoo. They giggled at each other’s jokes and were slow to pay attention to her. She stood hopping up and down inside herself, trying to keep her hands still.
‘Rolfa. Rolfa Patel. She has probably just joined the Zoo as a trainee Tech. You must have heard something about her.’
‘No,’ said the child, her pink cheeks swollen with a smile, no trace of doubt or fear. ‘Nothing.’
‘Well, you’ve heard nothing. Maybe the others have?’ Milena looked at the other two children. They were bargaining in low voices, arms folded, something about shoes.
‘Have you heard anything?’ Milena demanded of them.
‘We’re all linked,’ explained the first child. ‘Terminal. One of us knows something, all of us knows it. There’s been no Rolfa Patel.’
Rolfa had disappeared.
Milena looked for her in the Graveyard. She took a candle with her. In the golden light she saw that the dust of the floor had been undisturbed. It lay thick on the shoulders of the mouldering clothes that still smelled of sweat.
Rolfa’s nest was empty. The desk was there, with a few spare pieces of paper still scattered about the floor, and a few dry pens still in the drawers. Milena stood in the place where this particular story seemed to have begun. The place produced a very slight sensation of sadness, a kind of lowering in the stomach, as if accelerating upwards at high speed, but it would have been an exaggeration to say the place was haunted for her. It had already become just another place. Milena wrote with her finger in the dust on the desk.
She didn’t sign it ‘Love, Milena’. She thought that might frighten Rolfa away.
Milena left the Graveyard, and went to the Zoo Keeper. She asked his assistant, the sleek young man, if Rolfa had been there. Had there been any news?
‘No,’ said the sleek young man. ‘Hoi. Can a Polar Bear become an Animal?’
