CHAPTER ELEVEN
Forces of Attraction
(Bouquets of Confusion)
The candle of work had burned out. It was late, so late that the sun had risen over the roof of the Shell, and sunlight flooded Milena’s room. Milena had been awoken by a light touch on her sleeve. She looked up from the Comedy, and turned around.
Moira Almasy was in the room. Milena’s vision was bleary from sleep and dust in her eyes. It seemed to her that Moira Almasy glowed with light so brilliantly that her features were blanched away, with all their lines and creases. Her hair was almost white.
‘Milena,’ Moira Almasy said. There was a hushed quality to her voice. ‘Milena, something’s happened.’
Milena sat up, feeling her hair. As always it hung straight and tidy in its ponytail. Moira was holding out a wad of paper towards her. There was a stack of paper on the floor. Milena took what was offered her, and stared.
It was paper in staves, and on it were written the words:
Divina Commedia
Canticche Uno
Inferno
Canto I
Piccolo
2 Flauti
2 Oboi
Corno inglese
Clarinetto piccolo (Es)
For a moment it meant nothing.
‘After the show, last night,’ said Moira. ‘There was a call to all of the Terminals. They were told to find paper. Stores were opened, withdrawals recorded.’
2 Clarinetti (B)
Clarinetto Basso
2 Fagotti Contrafagotto 4 Corni (F)
3 Trombe (B)
‘Who did this?’ asked Milena, still not fully understanding. It was not her music.
‘The Consensus,’ said Moira. ‘Milena. The Consensus has scored the Comedy. The Terminals, all of them. Last night. They wrote it down. Two Cantos each.’
‘All one hundred?’ Milena felt dazed, hanging between many emotions. ‘The whole thing?’ She thought of all of her own work. ‘All of it?’
Moira nodded yes, her smile muted by awe.
Milena knelt on the floor beside the heap of paper. It rose at least as high as her forearm was long. She fanned through the pages and found Canto Eight. She wanted to see how horns could be both sombre and hopeful.
‘There’s no vocal line,’ she said.
It was instruments only, until Dante asked Virgil the question: ‘
None of the narration was sung.
‘Those were the red notes!’ exclaimed Milena. Most of the poetry was made mute, turned into music.
Milena’s viruses played the notes on the page. She heard it, the swirling horns, deep, dark, water smelling of filth and of corpses. But light glinted on the surface of the water, and over the surface of the music. Even here, crossing the river of death, to the marshes of the Styx, there was purpose, there was justice.
Milena began to shake. ‘Oh Marx and Lenin,’ she said. ‘Oh Marx and Lenin.’
She went to Canto after Canto. Music flowered. It was in gorgeous colours, as pungent as scent, combinations of sound that she would never have been able to imagine.
‘It’s wonderful,’ she said, and began to laugh, and shake her head. ‘It’s all wonderful!’
Something rose up in her, and she stood up and whooped for joy. She jumped up and down in her tiny room, and Moira began to beam with pleasure.
‘Moira! Oh, Moira!’ cried Milena, and hugged her, and Moira chuckled at her pleasure. She draped her hands on Milena’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. ‘It means,’ said Moira, ‘that the Consensus wants us to put it on. We’re going to put it on, Milena.’
Milena covered one eye, as if to protect herself from too much good news. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said simply.
The world changed about her. She felt her place in it change in that moment. The opera was going to exist, it was going to be real, and Milena somewhere had a place in that. She had done something with her life.
‘We’re all fair stunned too,’ said Moira. ‘The Consensus has never intervened so directly in the arts. We’re having a meeting later today, about three. I can leave the score with you, if you want to read it, and think about it.’
All Milena could do was nod yes, yes, yes of course. Could she bring it with her? It was a lot to carry. Milena kept nodding yes. She had been carrying a load for so long, what difference could it make. Yes, yes. The word of acquiesence, which is not the same thing as freedom.
There was an orange on Milena’s windowsill, as round and perfect as the world. As she read through all the Comedy, as all its streams and tributaries of music flowed towards one immense ocean, Milena ate the orange, smelled its zest, felt the spray of its skin. And she looked out of her narrow window at the sky, and saw the clouds.
The clouds were wispy and white, moving as if blown by the music of the Comedy. Beyond them, the sky was blue, and Milena could see that the sky was infinitely deep, masked by a haze of light.
Time pulled. Milena was hauled up through the sky, leaving the orange, the manuscript, her room behind.
And Milena was looking down through the sky, backwards, from above.
The sky was a thin film of blue haze that looked as if it could be peeled back, like the skin of an orange. Earth would be left exposed and defenceless.
Below there was a forest. The forest was like a carpet made of thousands of green needles. Milena could almost see each tree. They were floating above the Amazon. In the west, rising up above the blue haze of the horizon were the Andes, the snow on their peaks pink with sunrise.
On the walls of the Bulge, there were plants growing. They were small mountain flowers, tiny, pale blooms amid spines. They were the flowers of Czechoslovakia. The Bulge remembered the code that grew them. The same helix that coded life coded information. It grew both flesh and thought. Life was a pun.
The vessel was alive and linked to Milena. It knew what she desired and could consult her viruses for genetic codes. Then, by thinking, it altered the genetic code of its own cells. It grew flowers out of itself, mixing memory and desire.
As Milena was about to do.
She was smiling, no longer giddy with weightlessness, but expectant and nervous. There was to be a test of the Reformation equipment. A single image was to be cast. Milena was going to imagine a rose. It was to be a rose that would fill the sky below.
‘What happens next?’ Mike Stone asked. He stood stock-still behind her, his mind maintaining the position of
