I sat outside, mending our bodywraps and footwraps in case we needed them again. Helpers came regularly from Strongheart to see if the Earth people were awake yet. The crowd watched and waited, sometimes softly singing ‘Come Tree Road’ or one of the other old songs about going home to Earth. Over in Circle Clearing, another crowd stared up at the veekle. From time to time that huge metal thing would make a little sound and a light would flash, like it was a living thing that was stirring in its sleep.
Away across the Valley, Leader Harry and his eight guards were climbing up towards the Dark. We didn’t know what was going to happen, and everything felt strange, like we were dreaming and awake both at the same time. But this was a happy time, full full of hope.
And good news seemed to keep coming. Little Suzie wasn’t so ill now: she cried and squirmed about again, when a waking ago she’d been limp and unconscious on the edge of death.
At last Marius came out. We all knelt and bowed, like people do when a high person appears, and an excited murmur went round the watching crowd outside the fence. He looked embarrassed, waving to us to sit up again and squatting down with us, without even seeming to notice the crowd. He had a stale weary smell to him, and he looked just as tired as he did when he went to rest.
‘How long ago was it that you were on Earth?’ Trueheart asked him.
‘About twenty days,’ he said, using that old Earth word again. ‘It seems much longer when you’re living through it, but I think that’s about right.’
We were all amazed. These people were still on Earth, standing under its blue sky, when the Johnfolk set out across the Pool!
‘That seems hardly any time,’ I said. ‘We thought Earth was far far away.’
‘It is far away,’ Marius said. He pointed up at the great wheel of Starry Swirl above us. ‘That’s far away. All of it. Further away from here than any human being can really imagine. And it’s bigger than anyone can imagine too. Earth is deep inside it. We only got here so quickly because we kind of cheat and don’t go through space at all, or only a bit of it, anyway, and then take a kind of shortcut. You see, we . . .’ I was still fixing torn bodywraps, and Marius picked up a scrap of buckskin lying in front me. ‘Imagine this is space,’ he said, and then folded it over, so that the two opposite ends of it lay side by side. ‘We jump across from one side to the other, instead of going through what lies in between.’
That made no sense at all to me, or to Tom or Clare, or to any of the other Michael’s Place grownups that were listening. But I noticed Trueheart watching Marius with bright eyes. It was like he was talking about things that she’d never heard named before but had somehow known were there.
‘This is . . . what? The skin of an animal?’ asked Marius, looking at the scrap in his hands. ‘What an interesting texture. I’d like to see some animals soon. That’s what I study, you see, animals and plants, and—’
‘I don’t get that thing about cheating and space,’ I said, ‘but if it only takes you twenty wakings to get here, and if you knew how to find us, how come you’ve taken four hundred years?’
Behind me, Gaia had just come out of the shelter and it was her that answered me.
‘You need to understand, Angie, that for the first three hundred years, hardly anyone on Earth knew that Eden existed, or even that the Defiant had come back. It was all kept a secret. My great-grandmother found out about it and, after a lot of work and a lot of arguing, she managed to find the . . .’ She broke off, and looked at Marius for help. This was going to happen often: one or other of them would be speaking and then suddenly they’d stop and look at one of the other two, realizing that they’d been about to say a word we wouldn’t understand and hoping for suggestions for another word to put in its place. ‘My great-grandmother found the Defiant ’s memory,’ Gaia said. ‘I think that’s the best way to put it. She found the memory of where it had been, and the . . . well, you saw the linkup, didn’t you, that black square thing I gave to Leader Harry? So you know we’ve got a way of saving pictures and sounds and words? Well, my great-grandmother found pictures of these trees you have here, and she found . . . well . . . the voices of the five people who found this place. And they were . . . well, I guess you won’t know this word, but . . .’
Marius took over from her. It made me think of kids playing football, and how they pass on the ball to someone else when they’re about to be dragged down. ‘It’s a bit hard to explain,’ he said, ‘but we can send pictures and voices from one place to another—’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Trueheart. She and Fox were still sitting over their game of chess, but they’d been listening to everything. ‘We know about lecky-trickity and telly vijun.’
Marius and Gaia glanced at one another and smiled.
‘Well, yes,’ said Gaia. ‘It is like telly vijun. The original landing veekle was sending those voices and pictures up to the starship right up to the moment it crashed. The starship . . . well . . . it kind of stored them, and when it saw there was no chance of anyone being able to get back up to it from the surface of Eden, it brought them back to Earth. My great-grandmother found out about those pictures and voices and tracked them down. She was a . . . well, you might not know the word, but she was a historian, which means her whole job was to figure out things from the past. She found out about Eden and what happened here, and then she gave all the rest of her life to trying to find a way of getting a starship back here again. Her son, my grandfather, did likewise, and so did my mum and dad. But it’s hard to build a starship. It . . .’ Again, like a football player who’s been cornered, she passed the ball back to Marius.
Marius rubbed his hands over his tired face. ‘Okay,’ he finally said. ‘Imagine some guy here in Eden wanted to build something that would take a thousand people ten years to make: a thousand people working solidly, let’s say, with no time for anything else, with another ten thousand people needed to work alongside them for all those ten years to gather together the things needed to build it with. It wouldn’t be easy, would it, for that guy to actually make it happen? How would he persuade all those people to help him? And even if he did persuade them, how would he find enough for them to eat and drink and . . .’ He said some words that we didn’t know, but by his actions we could sort of see he was asking how people could wrap themselves or make themselves shelters, if all their time was spent building this thing. ‘Do you see what I mean? It would require, well, I don’t know, but let’s say ten thousand more people, just to get food and all of that for those one thousand who were doing the building and for those ten thousand who were getting the stuff together.’
We nodded. It was hard for us to imagine anything that would take all that time and effort, but it wasn’t difficult to understand that people wouldn’t easily be persuaded to do it. And anyway, that was twenty-one thousand people he’d spoken about! Were there that many in all of Eden? I had no idea, but it didn’t seem likely to me.
‘It’s a bit like metal, I guess,’ said Davidson after a moment. ‘They say it takes hundreds of people to get that special metal stone out of the ground, and heat it up in fires, and gather the wood for the fires. The only way the big people over there can get the small people to do all that is to force them at the point of a spear.’
This interested Marius, tired and ill as he was.
‘You’re making metal? Already? ’ He seemed quite impressed. ‘Where is this?’
‘Oh it’s far away from here,’ Davidson said. ‘It’s another ground across the water called New Earth, and—’
‘But what I still don’t get,’ I interrupted, ‘is why was it kept a secret that the Defiant had come back?’
‘Well,’ Gaia said. ‘That’s kind of complicated too, but it was to do with the fact that it wasn’t supposed to come here in the first place.’
Deep had come out as well now, that tall tall man with his strange pale skin that had so little colour in it tha
t you could see the pink blood beneath it. He smiled at us when we noticed him, a bright warm smile, and raised one big hand in friendly greeting. Their hands fascinated me, I remember. I kept looking at the little marks on their skin, the tiny wrinkles, the uneven edges of their nails. I guess they sort of proved to me that these people weren’t shadows or dreams or characters in stories. Only real people, surely, could have wrinkles on their skins you could count?
‘The thing is that the Defiant wasn’t supposed to come here in the first place,’ Deep said, squatting down. ‘Things were really bad on Earth back then. There were floods and storms in some places and no water at all in others. There wasn’t enough to eat. Folk were starving in many different places. Folk were running from their homes in search of new places to live. All over the world, people were fighting for . . .’ He said another word we didn’t know but which seemed to mean ground. ‘And there were fights for water too. I know you have a war going on here at the moment,’ at least we knew that word now, ‘but back then there were lots of wars on Earth, all going on at the same time.’
‘That’s right,’ said Gaia. ‘That’s how it was then. And a lot of people thought it wasn’t right that this huge effort should be going into trying to find another world, when they already had all these problems at home, particularly since finding a new world really wouldn’t solve any of them. I guess if I’d been alive then, I would probably have agreed with them.’
‘I would have done too,’ said Deep. ‘But anyway, just before the Defiant set out – in fact it was when the three astronauts were already inside it – lots of angry people, right across the Earth, started to demand that it shouldn’t go, that it should be broken up and brought back down to Earth so its parts could be used for things that would actually help people. It’s gen rater, for instance, was more powerful than any—’ He broke off, realizing that he’d lost us all.
‘Anyway,’ said Marius, ‘it was decided that the starship shouldn’t set out, and that the three astronauts should come back down to Earth. But—’
‘But they refused to stop,’ said Gaia. ‘And that’s why five people ended up coming here. Only three had set out, but when they refused to come back, two more were sent after them to—’
By now all the Eden folk round them were smiling and nodding.
Gaia laughed. ‘Oh I see you know that part already!’
Know about it? Tom’s dick, of course we did! Every single Virsry that old story was acted out in every single cluster in the Davidfolk Ground, beside every little circle of stones. Three men were carried about in the Big Sky-Boat, pretending to be Dixon, Mehmet and Tommy, the Three Disobedient Men, and a man and a woman were carried after them in the Small Sky-Boat, pretending to be Gela and Michael Namegiver in the Police Veekle. In the smallest clusters, people might not get round to building those boats, but even they would act it out with little toy ones.
‘And when the starship finally came back,’ said Deep, ‘new people were in charge in the biggest . . .’ He said another word that sounded like ‘come trees’ but also seemed to mean grounds. ‘They didn’t want people getting all excited about other homes across the stars, because obviously it wasn’t going to be possible to move large numbers of folk from Earth to here, and they thought the news would just distract people from what needed doing right there. So they kept it completely secret, so secret that it could have been forgotten if Gaia’s great-granny hadn’t—’
‘How is Suzie?’ interrupted Gaia. She’d noticed Flame nearby nursing her baby against her breast. ‘I must clean that cut again soon.’
‘She’s much better,’ Flame told her, and then she suddenly thrust the child into Clare’s arms and ran over to kiss Gaia’s hand. ‘Oh thankyou, Mother Gela! Thankyou! Thankyou! Thankyou!’
All this time the people crowded outside the fence had been silently watching us, keeping quiet quiet as they tried their best to make out at least a little bit what was being said. But now, at last, something had happened that they could all understand, for everyone knew by then about the baby and the red box and the metal thorn. They cheered and clapped and began to sing.
They were still singing when helpers arrived from Strongheart’s shelter to invite the Earth people to come and talk to the high people. The rest of us settled down to wait for their return, happy happy still, but full of questions, and some of us beginning to sense that, however wonderful this all felt, the ground we stood on was falling away beneath our feet.
I thought about Leader Harry on the back of his buck. He was getting near to the edge of the Dark. The headlantern of his buck was starting to light up the ground round him, and monkeys were jumping and wheeling away from him, and up into those last few trees before the snow.
Thirty-three
Mary probably saw monkeys too as she rode down into Tall Tree Valley with her guards and helpers, but if so they’d have been the special flying kind that you get in the High Valleys, the ones with the flaps of skin that stretch out between their six arms, and let them glide between those big trees as if they had wings. Tall Tree Valley is a little steep bowl in middle of darkness and you can easily see from one side to the other. As her buck climbed down the path, there was a row of little white patches of light moving slowly down far side of the valley. It was more frightened people climbing down from David’s Path.
Of course I didn’t know until later that Mary was at Tall Tree at that time, but she was in my thoughts all the same. The truth was that, even after eight years, and even though I hadn’t seen her once since the time she turned her head away from me in Circle Valley and told her guards to keep me away from her, I still thought about her every waking. And she was particularly in my thoughts when something new happened, something unexpected, because, even after all this time, I would still ask myself, What would Mary say? What would Mary’s opinion be? How would Mary sort this out? However unkind she’d been to me, the fact was that her views were much more interesting than the views of anyone I’d met since. I guess that was because she didn’t just think about the world we can see with our eyes, like most people did in Michael’s Place, but about the greater world that hid behind it, the wider story, in which each person’s own little life is only just one thread.
Although I hadn’t seen Mary since that time, I certainly could have done. In fact I could have seen her at least five times, because that’s how often she’d come to put on shows in Veeklehouse while I’d been living at Michael’s Place. Each time she came I heard people talking about her a little more excitedly than the last, as Mary became one of the best-loved and best-known shadowspeakers in all of the Davidfolk Ground. ‘Some of them just keep on about their presents,’ people would say about her, ‘so you end up wondering if presents are all that really interests them. But that Mary never even mentions them. Not once. She takes whatever we have to give, of course – well, she’s got to live – but you get the feeling she’d put on her shows anyway if we gave her nothing at all.’ I felt kind of proud of Mary when I heard people speak of her like that, but I still kept away, afraid of what it might stir up inside me if I saw her again.
I was still angry angry with her for the way she treated me in Circle Valley, turning her back on me after all that time, not even giving me a chance to speak, not even thinking about how lonely and desperate I might feel to be left there alone, so far away from anyone I knew. ‘Listen to me, Mary!’ I wanted to yell at her whenever I thought about it. ‘Just bloody listen to me for ten heartbeats! You got it wrong. You got it all wrong. I don’t think I’m better than you. Of course not. How could you be so dumb? I look up to you! Surely that’s obvious! I wasn’t trying to say I knew better than you, I was just asking for a bit of the help you happily gave, waking after waking, to everyone who came to your shows.’
But at the same time I could understand quite well why she’d been angry with me. Mary was much braver than me. She dared to believe in something – really believe in it,
like it was as solid and certain as a rock or a tree trunk – even if she couldn’t prove it for certain. And, what’s more, she didn’t just say she believed in it, like a lot of people do, but had given up pretty much everything else for that one thing that she believed in, which is something hardly anybody does at all. It was as if she was playing a game of toss-up, like the one I once watched guards and traders playing at Veeklehouse, and had bet everything she had on one single throw of the dice, so certain was she that she knew which side would come up on top. I’ve not met anyone else who did that, except maybe Starlight, who bet everything on a man she hardly knew from far side of the Pool.
So, even though I was angry with her for the way she’d treated me, I still looked up to Mary. I still loved her in a way. And the truth was that, however angry I might be with her, I was much angrier with myself for what had happened.
I mean, Tom’s fat dick, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t warned me! ‘Our Mother’s voice is quiet quiet,’ those were her words. ‘She doesn’t shout at us. She speaks so softly you might think it was just your own thoughts.’ You couldn’t get much clearer than that. And yet, not once but twice, the first time and the final time I went into the Circle, a firm clear voice had spoken to me in my mind and told me exactly what I needed to do, and I’d just ignored it.
Again and again and again, in the eight years since I’d last seen her, I’d gone over that in my mind. How could I have failed to listen to the voice inside my head that told me to go over to Mary and tell her about the things I’d been holding back from her? Could there really have been any doubt at all that telling her was the right thing to do?
And of course the answer to that was no. I should have been honest with Mary. Once I’d done that, once I’d got those secrets out of the way – who knows? – perhaps I would have begun to hear Gela herself more clearly, and learned to tell the difference between her voice and my own thoughts. But how could I ever have expected to hear her if I refused to listen even to myself ? How could I expect to open my mind to Gela if I closed it up to my best friend and teacher? Over and over, I asked myself these things. Of course, I knew perfectly well that the reason I hadn’t spoken to Mary about my secrets was that I was afraid of making her angry, afraid of her asking things of me that I’d find difficult to do. But as it turned out, she couldn’t possibly have been angrier if I had told her than she was when I didn’t, and she couldn’t possibly have made things harder for me either.
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