Child Garden Read Free Page B

bus would take Milena to her next performance. She would sit, arms folded, like a flower that had not yet bloomed, and look at London as it creaked past her window.
    People called London the Pit, with rueful fondness for its crumbling buildings propped up by scaffoldings of bamboo, for its overcrowding, for its smells. The Pit, they called it, because it lay in a depression, a river valley between hills protected by a Great Barrier of Coral that kept back the rising sea and estuary.
    Outside her window, Milena saw women in straw hats smoking pipes and selling dried fish. She saw children dancing to toy drums for cash or pushing trolleys full of dusty green vegetables. Men in shorts bellowed to each other like cheerful bullfrogs, rolling barrels of beer down ramps into basements under the street. Giant white horses stood calmly before the wagons.
    People were purple. Their skins were flooded with a protein called Rhodopsin. It had once been found only in the eye. In light, Rhodopsin broke down into sodium, and combined carbon and water.
    People photosynthesised. It was a way of feeding them all. There were twenty-three million of them in the Pit. In summer they baked in tropical heat, stretching out in the parks in early morning, to breakfast on light. In the raw and bitter winters, they would lean against sheltered walls and open up their clothing in gratitude. Milena would see them from her bus. Their rippled flesh would be exposed; their swaddlings of black winter clothing would be thrown back. They would look like carvings in baroque churches. Milena would then be made restless with semiological error, desperate with Bad Grammar.
    People died in the street. Most mornings, the bus would pass one of them. A man would be stretched out on the pavement, looking back over his shoulder as if in surprise, as if someone had called him. A bell would be ringing dolefully, calling for a Doctor.
    And the actors on the bus would go on talking. An actress might laugh too loudly, a finger hooked under her nose, talking to a director; a young man might continue looking at his feet, disgruntled by a lack of success. Does no one care? Milena would think. Does no one care for the dead?
    There were no old people in the streets. Young mothers worked the stalls. Their children stirred the food in the sizzling woks, or slammed new heels onto old shoes. The dead were young as well.
    The span of human life had been halved. This was not considered to be an advance in medicine. It was considered to be a mistake.
    In the days before the Revolution, a cure had been found for cancer. It coated the proto-oncogenes in sugar, so that cancer could not be triggered. In the old world of great wealth and great poverty, the cure had been bought by the rich before being tested. It was contagious, and it escaped. Cancer disappeared.
    It had once been normal for the human body to produce a cancer cell every ten minutes. Cancer, it turned out, had been rather important. Cancer cells did not age. They secreted proteins that prevented senescence. They had allowed people to get old. Without cancer, people died in or around their 35th year.
    After that, there had been a Revolution.
    Milena sat on the bus in her boiled gloves and saw a nervous light in the eyes of the actors, a fervour for accomplishments completed in youth. She saw the unfailing smiles of people in the markets, and the smiles seemed to be symptoms of disease. It seemed to Milena that nearly everything she saw was wrong.
    She saw the children. They had been given viruses to educate them. From three weeks old they could speak and do basic arithmetic. By ten, they had been made adults, forced like flowers to bloom early. But they were not flowers of love. They were flowers of work, to be put to work. There was no time.

book one

Love Sickness
or
Living in the Pit
     
    Midway in the journey of our life
     I found myself in a dark wood
    For the straight way was lost
     
     

chapter one

Everyday Life