But however hard she tried, Mary just couldn’t feel this. She was good good at teaching herself to feel things she knew she ought to feel, and not feeling things that she knew she shouldn’t. She was much much better at it than most people. That was where her certainty came from, and her courage. It was how she stopped herself from giving way to doubt. But right now that task, that struggle to make herself feel the things she knew she ought to feel, was too hard even for her.
GAIA YOUNG. SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS.
MISSION DAY 22. 20:05 MT.
There are creatures called ants but, apart from being small and living in nests, they’re nothing like ants at home. They’re like tiny transparent worms with legs and, when they’re provoked, they glow a vivid red. There are things called birds but you couldn’t mistake them, even for a moment, for the birds we have on Earth. They have arms as well as wings, for one thing, and their so-called feathers are more like scales: long flexible scales that clatter and rattle as the creatures blunder through the branches. There are animals called bats, but they stand on two legs and stroke their wings with strangely human hands. And of course the things called trees have no leaves, and the so-called wood that forms the outer shell of their trunks is smooth and bluish and looks kind of mushroomy, though actually, to the touch, it’s chitinous and hard.
The trees are the core round which all of Eden’s life revolves, or at least all of the life that isn’t under water. The warm moist air round us – I wish I could convey its sweet, damp, very slightly ammoniacal smell – is their creation. The sombre glow of their flowers is what illuminates the stage for everything that happens in Eden. But they don’t just provide the light and warmth that on Earth would come from the sun. They’re also the food source on which the entire ecosystem depends, from the glittery starflowers that parasitize their roots, to the strange ribbon-like flutterbyes that drink from their flowers and nibble at the sugar that crystallizes round openings in their trunks. Their pulsing sound is everywhere. Whenever we turn off the whiny motor of our bike, there it is: countless iterations of that steady remorseless beat, merging into a hum. It’s the heartbeat of the planet itself.
Marius is excited. We’ve discovered that, in spite of the enormous differences between Eden and Earth, the basic biochemistry is very similar indeed. We’ve found the same amino acids. We’ve found something very similar to DNA, and in the animals’ blood, a kind of haemocyanin, such as is found in the blood of many invertebrates on Earth, performing a similar function to haemoglobin. All this helps to explain, of course, how the humans here have managed to feed themselves, but what excites Marius most is the contribution it will make to our understanding of the origins of life in the universe. Given that this life has arisen entirely separately from life on Earth, and in an entirely different environment, the biochemical similarities suggest that there may be only one basic template for life, and that any planet that can support life at all is likely to support humans as well.
Speaking just for myself, though, I don’t think that’s the most exciting thing right now. We have to do this work of course, and it really is interesting, but a big part of me regrets the need to turn so quickly away from the mystery in front of us to readings and measurements on our machines. I’m a scientist by training, and I love science, but I still can’t help thinking that there is something slightly neurotic about this need to reduce things so quickly to numbers and explanations. I mean, let’s face it, we ought to know by now that no matter how far the chain of explanations extends – however far back in time, however deep down into the structure of things – and no matter how many new mechanisms and causal relationships we learn to understand, the essential mystery will always remain untouched. Because it is infinite, like those fractal patterns that re-emerge again and again, at every level of magnification.
Once, some centuries ago, people might still have believed they could get to the bottom of things, solve the riddle of existence, but I feel we’re past that now. Whatever the faults of the Salvationists, they imbued our culture with a healthy scepticism about scientistic hubris. There is no bottom, there are no final answers. Science will take us all kinds of places, but it will never take us home.
That’s not how it seems to Trueheart, though. I watch her over there with Marius, the two of them stooped together over one of his experiments, and she’s absolutely rapt. She is a truly exceptional girl. We all spotted that very quickly. She’s had no schooling, her writing skills are miminal, and she believes, like all the Eden folk, that her ancestor Angela has somehow come alive again on Earth and is preparing a home there. But she’s incredibly smart, and her desire to learn is immense. I’m still not sure whether we did right or wrong by pretending we didn’t hear her dad ordering her back – there’s no way we can tell what the ramifications of that might be – but it just seemed criminal to deny her this chance when we know it can never come for her again.
I look at her there now with her strong bare back, her long hair, her athletic shoulders, watching everything that Marius does, listening to everything he says. She’s back at the beginning of science, like – oh I don’t know – like maybe people were in the eighteenth century on Earth. She’s back at the stage when it was possible to believe that this wonderfully powerful tool might one day dispel darkness altogether.
A bat swoops down after a flutterbye not far above their heads, Marius turns his head to watch it, and she looks round with him, so that for a moment she’s looking in my direction. It still shocks me when that happens. It’s like someone has taken a sledgehammer and smashed it into middle of her face. It’s the same with Angie, but poor Angie is so shrivelled and old-looking all over (though from what I can work out she can’t be older than her mid-thirties) that the sheer incongruity is a little less jarring than it is with this tough, strong girl with her beautifully made body.
On Earth her face wouldn’t have to be like that. On Earth she could study and develop the talents she so obviously has. On Earth, without any doubt, she would be someone. But what have we got to offer her here? What have we got to offer any of them, for that matter? They’re so excited to see us. They’re so hopeful. But, oh precious Earth, when we’ve gone again, what will we have left behind that will help them in any way with their tough tough lives?
Deep, meanwhile, is chatting to the guards who’ve come with us. How huge and fair he looks compared with them, standing over there by our unwieldly bike, which all four of them are admiring. As he listens to their questions and comments, he stoops affably towards these small wiry men with their tribal markings, their animal hide kilts, their long beards tied with string. They laugh at some joke he’s made, three of them standing, one squatting down to run his fingers wonderingly over the fat rear tyre.
Nearby their so-called bucks are grazing on a pile of waterweed. I’m half-used to these creatures now. I can look in their direction and, just for a moment, think: There are the bucks. Then that moment passes, and I’m overwhelmed by the utter strangeness of these creatures that just can’t be squeezed into any earthly category at all. If I look just at their shaggy coats, I might persuade myself that they’re a bit mammalian, like yaks or highland cattle, but then I notice those flat expressionless eyes and the tentacles round their mouths and the nearest thing I can think of is something molluscan, like a squid. But then again, the way they stand on their back four legs and use their front pair as arms reminds me more of a praying mantis, while the claws on their six feet are vaguely bird- or reptile-like, and that glowing lump on the backs of their heads makes me think of those weird fish that live in the abyssal depths of Earth’s oceans. There is simply no pigeonhole available to put them in. They are themselves. I watch them feeding over there in the eerie glow of the trees, blue and pink and white, and my head swims to the point where sometimes I almost wonder if I’ve lost my mind.
Thirty-eight
It was a strange time, those three wakings when the Earth people were out
in forest. They’d been here, but now they’d gone again. I’d sometimes go into their shelter, pretending to myself that I was going to sweep it or tidy it, but really just to look at the stuff they left behind so as to remind myself it hadn’t all been a dream. Or maybe I’d take the kids and walk over to look at the veekle perched there in the Circle on its four thin metal legs. There were always people there looking up at it. Once in a while it would make a sound – Beep! Beep! Beep! – and flash its light, and everyone would back away laughing. The children could never get enough of that.
Starlight, Newjohn and Strongheart carried on talking talking talking in Strongheart’s big shelter. They weren’t talking about the ringmen from New Earth so much now – that would have to wait until they heard news from Leader Harry – but they talked a lot about food. Food was running out quickly in Circle Valley, and yet hungry people kept on arriving from across the Dark. Strongheart had asked the two other heads if they could send to their own grounds for more dried meat and flowercakes, but Starlight pointed out that this would spread the news about what was happening in Circle Valley, and bring hundreds more mouths to be fed from Brown River and Half Sky.
‘Yes, and who would we persuade to go anyway?’ Newjohn asked with his dry laugh. ‘Who’s going to leave Circle Valley now?’
‘My Harry went,’ Strongheart pointed out, ‘and eight men with him.’
Starlight thought for a few heartbeats. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘It may be the Earth people that we have to ask to leave.’
When he’d finally figured out she wasn’t joking, Strongheart’s face went purple. ‘John Redlantern walked away from Circle Valley,’ he growled. ‘And so did your Tina Spiketree, Head Woman Starlight. But we Davidfolk stayed here by the Circle, waiting patiently for Earth. No way am I going to send the Earth people away, now that they’ve finally come! Tom’s dick and Harry’s, this is what I will be remembered for in stories! Okay, I may turn out to have been the Head Guard who lost Wide Forest to the ringmen, but at least I’ll also have been the one who was there to meet Earth.’
‘I’m just saying, Head Guard, that the longer they stay, the more people will come into the Valley. Soon there’ll be thousands here from all over Mainground with nothing to—’
Strongheart wasn’t listening. ‘And a bloody good job we Davidfolk did wait here! If everyone had followed John and Tina, the Earth people would have come and found nothing here but the remains of shelters, and the ashes of cooking fires, and the skeletons in Burial Ground. They’d have gone back to Earth saying there was no one left alive, and then we’d have been alone forever. Think about that, Head Woman. If everyone had followed your Tina, where would we be now?’
Newjohn watched him with half-narrowed eyes. ‘And yet you were grumbling yourself, Head Guard, not so long ago, that they would make us all into low people. The Head Woman has a point. What are the Earth people going to give us if they stay, except for hunger? Hunger and the old stories we live by getting all broken up and confused?’
Strongheart glared at him. ‘Well, if nothing else, they’re going to stop the fight with your Johnfolk friends from across the Pool.’
The rest of us went hunting and scavenging. There weren’t any bucks that we could find, but there were starflower seeds to grind up, and the odd bat or fish or slinker. Davidson shot one of those ducks out on the water, but like most birds its meat was too tough and bitter to eat, however hungry we might be. We eyed the bucks that had carried us across the Dark, and wondered whether to start on them. Sometimes we saw other people eyeing them too.
From time to time a horn would blow to let people know that they could get some food from David Strongheart’s stores, and then a long long line would form under the whitelantern trees outside Strongheart’s shelter in Brooklyn, a line of thin sad hungry people, and a bunch of guards would hand out little pieces of dried buckmeat and hard hard flowercakes that could crack your teeth, baked that way so they wouldn’t go bad. If the people had trading sticks or blackglass, they’d hand them over as a trade. If not, one of the guards would scratch down their names and where they came from on squares of bark, so that Strongheart could come to them later and take something back from them. Maybe he’d take a daughter to be one of his helpers, or a bunch of young guys to build a new shelter for him.
I stood in that line myself one time, waiting for maybe a quarter of a waking for a few scraps, and giving the guard one of my precious cubes of metal. All round me there was a sour smell of fear and suspicion. People accused each other of pushing in. Valley folk muttered about outsiders taking their food. Outsiders snarled back that it was their food in first place: the Valley folk had been living for way too long on meat and fruit and flowercakes brought in for them across the Dark. Once a Valley man and a man from Davidstand started to push and shove each other, and guards had to come over and pull them apart.
‘Come on, you guys!’ a woman just in front of me called out to them. ‘Earth has come, remember! Earth is here! What reason is there now to fight among ourselves?’
I got talking to her afterwards while we waited for our dry scraps of food, and she told me her story. Her name was Treelight. She came from a small cluster in forest towards Nob Head. When the New Earthers who grounded up there came towards her cluster, it was decided that the men who were fit to fight would stand and face them with spears, so as to give the women time to get away with the kids and the oldies. Eight of Treelight’s nine sons had been among those men, along with their dad. There was a bit of a hill behind the cluster, and at the top of it there was a crag where the women could look right over the trees on the slope and see what was happening below. Instead of trying to rush the men down there, the New Earthers had ridden round them to make a circle, and now they were shooting arrows at them from every side. Clouds of arrows, it seemed like, cloud after cloud. When the women finally turned away again, most of their men were already dead, and the rest soon would be. But they’d had little kids to look after, so, as best they could, they had to hold their grief inside themselves as they trudged onwards through forest and climbed slowly up onto the Dark.
‘But we’re all going to Earth now, aren’t we?’ Treelight said firmly in a bright bright voice, strangely like that one that Mary sometimes used to speak in. ‘And I know my boys will be there waiting for me, all healthy and strong and well again. I know that for sure.’
When the Earth people came back from forest, they went straight to their veekle to get those pictures ready that they’d promised, while Trueheart nervously returned to her family. Her dad growled and muttered, but he didn’t dare punish her for doing something that the Earth people had offered, especially not when the rest of us were crowding round her to hear her stories about what the Earth folk had said and done.
‘They have strange strange tools,’ Trueheart told us. ‘Little boxes, and tubes, and needles made of glass and metal, and some other stuff they call plasstick that feels a bit like wood. They have tiny screens that tell them what things are made of, and how hot they are, and whether they shine out light that we can’t see.’
‘Light that we can’t see?’ I said. ‘How could that be? Surely light is the stuff we see by.’
‘Gaia told me that there are many of kinds of light that we can’t see. Heat, for instance. Marius thinks that Eden animals see heat as a kind of light.’
Tom snorted scornfully. ‘Heat as light! That’s nonsense. You must have misunderstood them. You might be smart, my girl – you certainly think you are – but you need to remember you’re not half as smart as them.’
‘Well, they said I’m smart smart. They said I’m just as smart as anyone on Earth. I just don’t know as much stuff as they—’
‘Ha! Well, that makes no sense for a start. How can you be smart if you don’t know anything?’
Trueheart ignored her father’s jeers. ‘Marius told me all kinds of stuff. Like . . . well, for example, he told me
that everything in the world is made up of tiny little things called atoms that are so small we can’t even see them. He says once you understand that, you can make all kinds of new things, like . . . Oh it’s too much to explain. Those Earth people are smart, all three of them, but I reckon Marius is the smartest. He’s good good at chess for one thing. I tried and tried but I only ever beat him a couple of times . . . and . . . and . . . Oh yes, I must tell you an amazing thing about playing chess with them . . .’ She had so many things to say that her words almost tripped up on one another. ‘They don’t draw a board on the ground like we do. They play in those glass squares they carry. They show a picture of a board with little pieces on it and you can push them about with your fingers as if they were real. In fact if you want you can even just tell them to move and they’ll move by themselves. It’s hard to believe unless you . . . All three of them play chess. Gaia is pretty good as well, though I usually beat her. Deep too, but he likes another game better, with pieces that run round like little people. Oh Fox, you should see that game! You’d just love it.’ She laughed. ‘It’s weird being with them. It’s weird but it’s great. They know so so much. And I’ll tell you another thing: you wouldn’t think it was a woman and two men, because they all treat each other just the same, like they were all men together, or all women.’
Tom glanced at his friend Davidson and pulled a face, but Trueheart didn’t seem to notice.
‘I’ll tell you another thing,’ she went on, barely even stopping to breathe. ‘Deep told me that they can fix batfaces on Earth. He said it happened to his cousin. They’ve got special stuff on Earth that sends you to sleep, and while you’re sleeping they cut open the meat and skin of your face and sew it together again, and when you wake up you don’t have a batface any more. You don’t feel a thing! It’s a bit sore afterwards, but when it heals up you look just like other people. It’s the same for clawfeet too, he said . . . Oh yes, and another weird thing I found out: you know that ring that Gaia wears on her finger, with the two kinds of metal in it, like the one in the—’
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