Free Child Garden by Geoff Ryman

one direction, stop and go back again, start and stop again, and suddenly pull the rug out from under you by doing it backwards with the simplicity of a conjurer. 'He's the funniest ficken composer who ever lived!' she exclaimed, and laughed, exposing rotten teeth and a roiling mass of half-chewed food.
    Elgar? Funny? Milena examined her viruses. That was not something they told her.
    'Where did you learn all this?' Milena asked.
    'Oh. When I was young,' said Rolfa, 'I went into hibernation. I was only about nine or ten years old. It's something we can do if the weather gets too bad and we have to wait it out. But this time there was no real reason for it. The vet said it was stress.'
    Rolfa lay down on her side. She began to graze. Her long pink tongue reached out and seized a fistful of grass, tore it out of the ground and lazed it up into her mouth. There was something comfortable in the way she talked and chewed at the same time.
    'I just curled up and went to sleep for six months. And all the time I was under, I was thinking about music'
    Rolfa moved her cud to one side of her mouth.
    'I could play piano quite well by then, and I just went over and over all the pieces I knew. Picking them apart, putting them back together. Didn't think about anything else. Didn't dream, didn't open my eyes.'
    'How did they get you out of it?' Milena asked.
    'The vet gave me an injection,' said Rolfa, and smiled with her ruined teeth.
    Milena wanted to lie next to her on the grass, in the sun. She wanted to curl up under her arm and go to sleep. But Milena was afraid. All she did was shift closer to her.
    'You can remember your childhood,' said Milena, looking down at the expanse of Rolfa's body, wishing she had known Rolfa in childhood, had been part of her life then.
    'Can't you remember your childhood?' Rolfa sat up.
    Milena shook her head. No, Milena couldn't.
    'Something happened. I don't know. I can't remember any of it. Well, I know I was born in Czechoslovakia — I can sometimes remember parts of that very hazily. Everything else is gone.'
    'Oh, I shouldn't like that at all!' said Rolfa. 'There are all sorts of things I remember. I'd hate to forget them.'
    'Like what.'
    'Musk oxen,' said Rolfa. 'Especially the calves. They're like little round balls of fluff on tiny, scurrying black legs. That's when we lived on the tundra, what was left of it. Forests advancing you see, but we managed to save some of them.'
    'There's no musk oxen in the Antarctic'
    'No, no indeed, no, we lived in Canada for a while, you see? Papa thought we should go there to make our fortune. North instead of South. Didn't work. He kept trying to save the musk ox. Herd them north, where there was still some tundra. Strange thing to do really. It makes me think my father might not be so bad after all. He taught them how to play football. They're terribly intelligent, you see. They played in teams. I used to play with them. I used to dream that one day I'd turn into a musk ox.' Rolfa's face was soft and her smile was fond. 'Don't you have any childhood memories at all?'
    'No. They gave me a lot of virus when I was ten. Maybe that knocked them all out of me. I don't remember.'
    'Ah,' said Rolfa. Something strange seemed to happen to her face. It seemed to melt, and the eyes seemed to pull back, like snails into a shell. 'Ah yes, of course. I keep forgetting. They give you people viruses, don't they.'
    She smiled again, and the eyes opened out, with a new expression. She was smiling, and the eyes still seemed fond, and the face still seemed happy, but it was pained too. It was a strange, disturbing mixture, like Rolfa's music. There was something powerful in the eyes, that made Milena draw back. Milena couldn't understand it. She had no experience. She didn't know what it meant. The viruses couldn't help her.
    It was routine. Each day, like milk in a pan, about to boil over, Milena would nearly say, 'I love you.'
    Or she would reach for Rolfa, to caress her in a way