‘I can’t believe it!’ the voice said, but much more quietly this time, like it was talking to itself. ‘Still people here! Still—’ It broke off, but after a few heartbeats, it spoke out loud again, talking to us once more. ‘Hello there! Don’t worry. There’s only three of us in here! We’re going to come out and meet you in a moment!’
The light had changed in that glass thing on the top, so we could see not just the shapes of their heads but their actual faces looking out. There was a woman, and two others that looked like men except that they were completely beardless like women or kids. All three were staring straight out at me and Trueheart. Trueheart lifted her hand and waved.
I waved too. ‘Hello,’ I called out. I didn’t feel scared any more. Why would I? Hard as it was to believe it was really happening, this was the moment we’d been waiting for these four hundred years. ‘Hello, I’m Angie Redlantern.’
Who cared about Johnfolk from across the Pool when there was this?
GAIA YOUNG. SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS.
MISSION DAY 20. 20:25 MT.
Far out beyond the orbit of the moon, basking in perpetual noon, we’d turned on the great engine.
Like some kind of prodigious sea-creature, our ship began to heave and strain against the boundaries of space, pushing neither up nor down, neither forwards nor backwards, neither left nor right, but in another direction perpendicular to all of them.
It groaned and shuddered. It threw out purple lightning from its great pylons, only to suck it back in again with equal force, so that it coiled like a fiery whip round the ship’s cylindrical core. To fuel its titanic feat of strength, the ship was consuming more energy than would power the entire Earth, and it was eating itself up in the process. When – or if – we ever returned, our engine, that absurdly costly thing that had taken almost a century to fund and construct, would have to be built again, almost from scratch, if anyone was ever going to repeat what we had done.
Metal shrieked. The engine screamed. The panels round us snapped and creaked. It felt like the ship would burst in two. But then suddenly, with a judder, we were through, and the din of the engine dropped to a steady hum. We were outside space now. We were in a miniature universe of our own. We looked out of the little portholes, and there were no stars, no Earth, no moon. We saw the faces of demons peering back at us from weirdly shaped windows set in a kind of silvery, molten wall. But they were only our own faces, distorted and reflected back to us by the tangled space of a miniature universe that our engine had created and now sustained. They were no further away from us than the far side of a city thoroughfare.
The ship turned and twisted, as its drew on the four-century-old records of the Defiant, its famous predecessor, and felt about itself for the correct hold, like a climber on a rockface.
The lightning flashed out again, and once more the ship shuddered convulsively and began to groan and roar. Our glowing screens, with their diagrams and numbers, their calm lists of options, told us a story of order and mastery, but we knew this was an illusion. We were like those parachutists who jump off cliffs: there was no margin of error, there was no going back and starting again. A tiny mistake now and we would emerge in some region so remote that we would never be able to find our way home. A slightly larger error and our ship would be crushed like a tin can. It was hard to know which would be worse.
Another shudder that felt like the ship breaking in half, and then we were through again, like a cork released from underwater, shooting upwards to bob on the surface of the ocean. Outside our portholes we could see the great Catherine wheel of the Milky Way.
Hours of anxious searching followed before eventually we found it: sunless Eden, a solitary sentinel, slowly orbiting the galactic disc, one face always turned inwards, the other looking out into the abyss. On its surface were the faint blotches and splatters of light that we’d seen in the images that came back with the Defiant four centuries ago, when it limped home broken and crewless.
We were forty thousand lightyears away from anyone we knew. If we’d possessed a radio transmitter powerful enough to send a signal back to our friends on Earth, they wouldn’t just be dead by the time it reached them, their whole civilization would be dead. An ice age would have come and gone. Their bones, those that were left unpulverized, would be twice as old as the cave paintings at Lascaux.
Still in our tiny metal box, we travelled the slow way now, across ordinary space. More than a week passed before we finally fell into orbit round Eden. Then we climbed into our landing vehicle – our Flying Saucer – fired up its gravitational engine, and set its navigation system to return to the exact same spot on the planet’s surface where the Defiant ’s identical landing vehicle had descended.
And now, dazed, disoriented, exhausted, we stared out at a forest of strange, dark, leafless trees. For four generations my family had been working towards this moment, ever since my great-grandmother first uncovered the hidden story of the Defiant ’s return, suppressed for so long by the Salvationist authorities. For four generations, we had been leading the global effort to reconstruct the starship and retrace its steps.
But here we finally were. We stared into that strange forest and saw, to our complete amazement, two human beings.
They were funny, wild little creatures, barefoot and bare-breasted, with nothing on them but rough bits of animal skin tied round their middles, and both had the most horrible facial deformities, like great jagged wounds that had destroyed the entire centres of their faces. But they were undoubtedly human all the same. And what was more, they were – they must be – my own distant cousins, descended as I was from a man and woman of Jamaican heritage who lived in London four centuries ago, in the time before the flood, and were the parents of the only woman from Earth to ever come to Eden.
For a few seconds we just looked at them and they squinted back at us through their fingers, their faces screwed up against the light.
We really hadn’t expected this. It hadn’t been people we’d come to see but the life of Eden itself, the only life known to exist outside of Earth, with its strange geothermal ecosystem that had grown and multiplied and warmed a planet without the help of a sun. As far as human life was concerned, we’d hoped for no more than a few bones, and maybe a clue or two as to what had happened to Tommy Schneider and Angela Young after their decision to stay here by themselves, while their three companions attempted to return to the Defiant. For the genetic experts had all agreed that you simply couldn’t get a viable human population from just one man and one woman.
Recessive genes. Inbreeding. Even twenty men and twenty women, they’d said, would probably not suffice. But it seemed they’d been wrong.
‘We’d better turn off the lights,’ I said. ‘They’re obviously finding them blindingly bright.’
Deep touched his screen. For a few seconds, while our eyes adjusted, the world outside became completely dark and all we could see was the glow from our screens, with their numbers and diagrams, that illusion of order and mastery. But then from the darkness emerged the world that we’d glimpsed in those uploaded images the Defiant brought back, and heard described by Eden’s five discoverers in those haunting diaries. It wasn’t much brighter than moonlight is on Earth, but from all round us a dim light – pink, white, blue and yellow – shone from the strange blooms, some spherical, some elongated and tubular, that dangled from those smooth and fungus-like trees.
Small flying creatures were darting round those lights, as moths and bats might do round streetlights on Earth, and some of these creatures seemed to be shining faintly too. Round the bases of the trees, another kind of vegetation twinkled like the strings of lights we hung up back home to mark the Winter Festival, although very much more faintly. I vaguely remembered that, in the meticulous reports that Michael Tennison uploaded before he died, these lifeforms were called starflowers. He speculated that they were parasites, feeding on the roots of the geoth
ermal organisms he referred to as trees. Mehmet Haribey, who died with him, had discovered they were rich in vitamin D.
But, of course, what held my attention most at that moment were the people. The two harelipped women were the first I’d spotted, and they were still standing there – one of them quite old and wizened-looking, the other more youthful – watching us with their mouths wide open. But there were others too now. Some way over to their left, a very old man with a white beard was clutching a spear like some extra from a movie about the Stone Age, complete with a furry animal-skin garment, and a tribal emblem of white dots on his forehead. And more people were arriving all the time: men with tribal dots and spears, women with bare breasts and skins tied round their middles. We saw two more harelips and a woman dragging herself painfully along on horribly twisted feet. Everyone looked like they were suffering from acute malnutrition. Everyone was shrunken, twisted, gaunt. As you’d expect, they all had Afro-European features, some inclining more to the African side, some more to the European.
‘You sure we should go outside now, Gaia?’ asked Deep. ‘How do we know those guys with spears aren’t just going to run us through?’
‘We take guns,’ said Marius. ‘One shot in the air will have them running.’
A group of new people had arrived, wearing not animal skins this time but a kind of coarse fabric that looked like sacking, in various shades of grey and brown. This lot were mostly men – the one in middle was a fat, bald old guy who looked about eighty – but there were several women among them, and one of them in particular caught my eye: she was taller than most of the men, very straight in her bearing and about my own age, and she could have been described as beautiful if she didn’t look so wasted and wan.
‘Don’t even think of taking a gun, Marius,’ I said. ‘If you can’t face them without a gun, stay inside.’
‘Oh come on, Gaia,’ Marius said crossly, ‘I wasn’t suggesting shooting them. But Deep’s right, they might attack us. We don’t know what they remember about Earth and spacecraft. We could be alien invaders as far as they’re concerned.’
‘He’s got a point,’ said Deep. ‘Do we really want to be the second bunch of explorers who made it here to Eden and never got home?’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We need to be careful. But why don’t I go out by myself first off ? A woman’s less threatening, don’t you think? No guns, no nothing, but if they attack me, just turn the lights back on at full brightness. I mean, look at the light level they’re used to. By the time they can see again, I’ll be safely back inside.’
Part II
Twenty-six
I look back through that tangled forest of memories, through the tree trunks and the lanterns, the paths and the pools, through all the many things that happened afterwards, and that time still shines brightly brightly in the dimness, far brighter than any other. In fact it shines so brightly that it can be hard to see, like the veekle from Earth was hard to see when it first came to ground. You’d think a time like that would be easy to remember, wouldn’t you, since nothing like it had happened to me before or since? And yet it isn’t. It was all so so strange that there are whole big chunks of it that I can’t properly remember at all, and other parts I remember but don’t know when they happened or how they fitted in with everything else. It’s the same for everyone who was there. When we talk about it, we can never quite agree what happened, or in what order. And so many stories are told about it that it’s hard for us to be sure if we’re remembering what we saw, or just remembering a story.
I’m as certain as I can be, though, that after a short time, the lights from the veekle stopped shining all at once. For a moment afterwards – I remember this so clearly that I’m sure this is real – everything round us seemed completely dark. Then my eyes got used to the Eden light again, and I could see the treelanterns and the starflowers. I remember how dim they seemed, in a way they’d never seemed to be before. We’d always thought of them as bright, as shining, but compared to the lights on the veekle, all they gave out was a dim dim glow.
Mainly, though, we watched the dark shapes of the heads behind the glass, me and Trueheart together, still holding each other tightly by the hand.
More people were running into the clearing now, and there was shouting all round us, in the clearing itself, and back through the trees. A bunch of high people in dyed fakeskin wraps had come over the bridge from Brooklyn. I saw that one of them was David Strongheart, who’d sometimes come to the shows that Mary did at Davidstand. He looked much fatter and older than I remembered him, but he was wearing a fine red wrap that would trade for a hundred sticks at least in Veeklehouse. Normally I would have knelt to show my respect, but somehow that didn’t seem to be needed right now: I guess the veekle from Earth was there to remind us that all of us were the children of one man and one woman. There were several other high men with him – one of them I recognized as Leader Harry, who was Strongheart’s second-oldest son, and the boss of Circle Valley – and there were also a couple of women, one of them tall and about my own age, wearing a lovely blue wrap.
And suddenly I realized I recognized her as well! It was Starlight, my old friend Starlight from Knee Tree Grounds, whose dead body I’d been told had been found on poolside, full of water and run through with a spear.
A strange dread filled me. Perhaps the visitors from Earth were bringing all the dead people to life again? Perhaps right now, the dead of Circle Valley were waking up over there in the Burial Ground like they’d only been sleeping, pushing aside those stones they were lying under like you’d push aside a buckskin sleeping wrap, and making their way towards the clearing? Perhaps they were waking up all over Eden, swimming to the surface out in the bright water round Knee Tree Grounds, clawing their way out of the ground in forest near Michael’s Place? Perhaps bones and scattered ashes were flowing towards each other, up and down the forests of Eden, to join together and rise up again as living human beings? It seemed as if every single thing I thought I’d known up to then had turned out to be completely wrong – the dead were not really dead, lanterns were not really bright, high people were not really high – and now the world was beginning again, or beginning for the first time, or appearing at last as it had always really been.
But then I thought, Wait! If Starlight has come back from death, how come these high people are with her, and seem to know who she is?
‘Starlight!’ I called out, and she looked towards me at once. I could see she was surprised, and she was about to call something back to me when a sound came from the veekle and we all turned back towards it.
A square of metal swung down underneath it and straight away a kind of ladder came down. We stared and waited and, after a dozen heartbeats or so, we saw feet on the steps. Me and Trueheart squeezed each other’s hands even more tightly. A woman was climbing down. We saw her knees, her hips, her belly, her chest, and then there she was, standing at the bottom of the steps underneath the veekle. She was smiling. And she wasn’t looking at the high people or at anyone else, she was looking straight at me.
I had never seen such a perfect face. Her teeth were white – white white, and not a single one missing! – her skin was smooth smooth, and so dark that you could almost call it black, and her eyes were bright and clear. I always thought Starlight was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, but this woman was beautiful beautiful in a way I couldn’t even have imagined if I hadn’t seen it. She was tall too, tall tall for a woman, taller even than Starlight, taller than almost every man I knew. And she was wearing a strange wrap that fitted tightly round her body and arms and legs. It looked like it was made out of some kind of grey metal, but it followed her movements in a way that buckskin and fakeskin never did, almost as if it was living skin.
‘Hello there! My name is Gela!’
That’s what I heard her say. That’s what everyone heard her say. And of course we all knew that all the old stories said that Gel
a’s skin was black, whatever Mary Shadowspeaker might have said. A few yards away from me, an old woman began to scream.
‘It’s our Mother! Our Mother has come back to us!’
And now, all round the clearing, people began to scream and shout, and some rushed forwards towards the veekle. But then the lights shone out again, all at once, bright bright, brighter than anything any of us had ever seen, scalding our eyes with their fierce fierce whiteness, so that the people stopped running and backed away again, crying out in fear.
But I didn’t back away and nor did Trueheart. Something about the woman had convinced us there was nothing to be afraid of and, peeping through my fingers, I could see she was still just standing there like nothing had happened.
‘Don’t rush her, people!’ I called out, and then I heard Starlight call out as well. ‘Hold back, everyone! Let her have some space!’
My head was swimming with the strangeness of it all. Here was my friend Starlight, alive and well and wrapped like a high woman, when I’d thought she was dead and lost forever. If it had happened at any time before now, that would have been the weirdest and most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. Yet right now I could barely give it any attention at all!
‘Thankyou,’ I heard the Earth woman say. As she came towards me and Trueheart from under the veekle, she raised one hand and the lights stopped shining again. It was as if that whole huge mass of metal was a living thing that she could give orders to as a skilled rider gives orders to a buck.
Again, for a few moments after the lights had gone, whole forest seemed completely dark, like we’d only imagined there was any light there at all, like we’d only imagined this beautiful woman had come back to us from Earth. And then we saw her again, not in the bright Earth light, but in our own dim Eden light that was hardly light at all: Gela, solid and real as anyone you might meet out in forest, standing right in front of me.
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