So it wants to call across space. The call will go no faster than the Angels, but it will take the form of light, radiating evenly, spreading evenly, out through the universe.
The Consensus wants to make an artificial astronomical artefact.
It will be a hologram four light years high.
It will be an image of the human face. Milena saw it, four-sided, four sides of four different human faces: Chao Li Song, Marx, Lenin, and Mao. And the faces will mouth in silence:
Over and over, the movements of the mouth would mimic the movements of the numbers, building up a code of mathematics, to be repeated, for intelligence to perceive and say: this is not natural. This is something calling.
Hubris anyone? Thousand Year Reich? They thought they would be judged by the size of their buildings, too, by the size of the ruins they would leave behind. Madness, monumentalism, Ozymandius, King of Kings.
It is a bit on the grand side, thought Bob, in her head. The Mount Rushmore idea is just a suggestion. They’d be dead chuffed if you had another idea, girl, dead chuffed.
Oh would they, now? Like they are dead chuffed by the Comedy? And the Comedy is just a way to test the gravitational lenses, and the Reforming, and all the techniques of sight and sound. They should have used Thrawn after all.
Oh no, lovey, oh no, don’t be hard and bitter, thought Bob the Angel. Thrawn cannot be trusted. She has the wild humours and will not do as she is asked. We needed someone who would do what she was asked. We had to wait until you were trained by her, until you learned most of what she knew.
Milena’s thoughts went small and quiet. Oh dear merciful heaven, she said to the stars. Thrawn was right.
Yes, Thrawn, it was, but I didn’t know it. I let them use me, Thrawn. I let them use me to destroy you.
Milena rose up, in rage.
So why did you leave me like this? she demanded. You don’t need me independent, why not destroy me too, like you’ve destroyed everyone else. Why not Read me, wipe me, make me so much of a puppet that I can’t realise it? Why not just make Thrawn over, why bring me into it at all?
Because, sighed Bob in the lines and in her mind, we have discovered that the viruses destroy talent.
Take Rolfa, he said, now Rolfa, we couldn’t let that happen again. We Read Rolfa and look at her. Rolfa, this marvellous talent. We destroyed Rolfa. And your love for Rolfa, it pulls you up love, it pulls you along and pulls things out of you no one could have known existed. We couldn’t destroy that, could we?
You need me to love Rolfa, because it makes me work?
Not only that.
Bob showed her the rainfall of the flowers, her twenty-two billion roses.
The Consensus needs someone who can conceive of it. It wants to travel too. It will need you, to bear its image.
Where?
To the stars, said Bob. The Consensus wants you for an Angel. It wants you, Milena, to carry it out there, its image, to meet the Other when it comes. The viruses, you see, love. You didn’t have them, but you had to keep up with them. So you forced yourself through all those years in the Child Garden. You forced yourself to do alone what the viruses do for everyone else. You forced yourself to grow a capacity for memory, for holding images, that no one else has.
All my history. All my self. It’s to be used by the Consensus.
Bob. I’ve got nothing. You’ve left me with nothing. Why did you tell me this?
Because someone with nothing needs to know that. She needs to get something. What she needs to do, said Bob the Angel, is marry Mike Stone.
So Milena went up, and Milena went down and Milena married Mike Stone. Hop, skip, and jump.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
People’s Artist
(The Whole Truth)
Milena remembered being on a platform in the gardens of the Embankment with her husband sitting beside her. On her other side there was some grand personage, whose name she had deliberately forgotten. It was July of the blustery summer, still plagued by high winds, but warm, warm at last.
Milena stepped forward from her folding chair, into the area of the cube that would magnify her. It would magnify her voice and her features, turn her into an artefact. Behind her there was a flapping of banners, long red banners, with medallions of socialist heroes. In front of her were red banners hanging from lamp-posts, buffeted by the wind. The trees moved and the shadows of the clouds moved, as if everything were stirring, alert and alive.
There were rows of faces in chairs. Milena knew many of them. Some of the faces were swollen with pride, proud of her, proud of themselves for knowing her. Others were slightly disgruntled with the boredom of doing a duty, forgivable under the circumstances. Others were sceptical and anticipatory at once. Would this tiny, drab- looking woman have anything interesting to say?
I think I have, thought Milena, looking up at the sky.
All around her was the silence. She could feel it. Silence and light being exchanged without human notice. She looked at the earth, still there under the buildings and the pavements. Besides performing a function, the buildings and pavements seemed to her to embody ideas and ideologies. Milena simply smiled, in the silence.
Milena kept on smiling for many moments, looking at the red banners and trying to really understand why they were there and what they might mean for her. The audience began to shift. Then, as she kept smiling, calm and feeling no need yet to respond or to speak, the audience began to smile with her, to chuckle.
‘So,’ she said finally. ‘Here I am.’
Another long pause as the wind flapped. The banners sounded like the wings of birds. Milena knew what she wanted to do then.
There was a text that she had assiduously prepared, with a careful line of argument, discussing the need for a socialist artist to work for socially defined ends. She held the text in her hands. It was typed, on gold-embossed paper. Paper was still a way of making something important. It meant tradition. There had been copies of the speech waiting on people’s chairs, weighted down by rocks to keep them there.
Milena found she was impatient with the paper. She set it free. She threw it up into the wind. It danced, and spiralled, rose up in the updraft of the Shell, spun around dizzyingly in the air. ‘Wheee!’ said Milena. No order. The audience laughed.
‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘what this title People’s Artist really means. I’ve always found that I have too little to do with people. My work has taken over my life. I wanted it to take over my life. It was as if I could fold myself up and keep myself safe in a drawer, very tidily, unseen. I wouldn’t have to worry about it then. Or, to be honest, be worried by other people. In the end, I was. Worried by people. So here I am. Out.’
A mild, concerned chuckle. Just how embarrassing and personal was this speech going to get?
