Daughter of Eden

by Chris Beckett

  Parp! Parp! Parp! Parp! Parp! The sound of wooden horns came from the direction of Circle Clearing, three four of them, summoning us back to the Circle, a new horn blower joining in when one of the others stopped for breath.

  Thirty-nine

  There were three screens tied with string onto poles in front of the veekle, spaced about twenty feet apart from each other. They weren’t like the crumbly old Screen that the Earth people had in their shelter. They were black and smooth all over. The Earth people waited beside middle screen as people came crowding in. Guards stood ready with their spears to hold people back if they pushed too close to the Earth people or the screens.

  Gaia had kept a place for me and the other Michael’s Place people, right in front of her and the other two by the edge of the Circle. I settled down there with Candy on my lap and Fox beside me. Their bright eyes were darting back and forth as they tried to take everything in. Dave was behind me with Metty. A little further back, tall wooden seats had been set up for the high people so they could look over our heads. Starlight was there, sitting with David Strongheart and his shelterwomen, and Newjohn and a few other high people from the Davidfolk Ground, Half Sky and Brown River.

  Someone started to sing ‘Come Tree Row’ and pretty much everyone joined in, the people already sitting or standing, and the people still squeezing into the clearing. All the arguments and disagreements between Valley and outsiders were forgotten. Men and women sang out happily together, high people and low people, and on those high wooden seats, Davidfolk, Johnfolk and Tinafolk stood singing side by side. Then Gaia stepped forward so she stood in front of the Earth people, and the singing changed into a chant: ‘Gela! Gela! Gela! Gela! Gela! ’

  ‘Gela! Gela!’ Candy joined in enthusiastically, bellowing as loudly as her small lungs would let her. Fox joined in too until he looked round at me and noticed I wasn’t shouting along with everyone else. I knew that Gaia didn’t like it that people thought she was Gela, and she’d said many times that she wasn’t. But people hear what they want to hear.

  When the shouting had quietened down a bit, Gaia held one of those linkups in front of her mouth and began to speak. Everyone gasped – you could hear the sound of that gasp right across the clearing – because, though we could see her lips moving, what we heard was a loud loud version of her voice that came booming down from the veekle, like it was a huge creature that could speak for itself.

  ‘Welcome Head Guard Strongheart. Welcome Headman Newjohn. Welcome Head Woman Starlight. Welcome everyone,’ the booming voice said, speaking slowly slowly, so we Eden people would understand.

  Then Deep held his own glass square in front of his mouth, and the booming voice changed so that it sounded like his instead of hers: ‘Hello there, everyone. Thanks so much for coming.’

  Marius said ‘Hi’ in the awkward way he had when he was faced with a bunch of Eden people. Both Deep and Marius had proper beards now, just like Eden men.

  There was another big gasp as a picture suddenly appeared on the screens, exactly the same on each. We all stared at it. How could that happen? How could a picture suddenly be there without anyone to draw it or scratch it or paint it? And of course it wasn’t a picture like we might make ourselves on a piece of bark or a stone. It was like the pictures Gaia had showed me and the other Michael’s Place people of our own faces: not so much a picture, more a copy of the thing itself.

  ‘Hey! That’s Starry Swirl!’ someone shouted out.

  Gaia’s booming voice laughed. ‘That’s right. Starry Swirl. On Earth we call it the glacksy, though we’re right inside it of course back there, so we can’t see it so clearly as you can. But look at this! What can you see now?’

  There was a tiny black dot against the brightness of the Swirl, and as we watched it, we saw it grow, like it was coming towards us. Worried voices started to murmur. Candy pressed her face into my shoulder. Fox grabbed my hand. People who’d never seen these Earth pictures before jumped and backed away, and some cried out or shouted angrily – ‘Hey! Watch out! What’s going on?’ – like they thought they’d been tricked. But the black dot didn’t come out at us. It became a big black circle that filled up most of the screen, but the screen was where it stayed.

  ‘That’s Eden,’ said the booming voice of Gaia. Now it was so big we could see that the circle wasn’t completely black, but covered all over in patches of dim dim light. ‘That’s what Eden looks like from out in space,’ Gaia said. ‘And here’s the other side. This little black patch here is what you call Snowy Dark. This tiny little patch of light in middle of it is Circle Valley, where we all are now.’

  She moved things on too quickly. We could happily have sat and stared at that picture for a long long time, taking it in, and figuring out how it all fitted together. I hadn’t even had a chance to work out which patch of light was Worldpool, let alone where Knee Tree Grounds was, before the picture disappeared. And now we saw another circle, but this time not dark at all, but blue blue blue, streaked all over with swirls of white.

  ‘And this is Earth,’ Gaia said.

  Some people cried. Really cried, I mean: I could hear them sobbing round me. But most, like me, were quiet quiet, not knowing what we felt. All our lives we’d dreamed of Earth, each one of us imagining our true home in our own way. But now, quite suddenly, the question was answered. This was what it was like. And it wasn’t quite what any of us had thought.

  The picture changed again.

  ‘And this is me on Earth,’ Gaia said.

  We could see Gaia in the picture smiling out, and beside her was a handsome young man with dark skin like hers. They were standing in middle of the screen and all round them was a pale blue-grey emptiness.

  ‘That’s me and my brother. We’re standing beside the See.’ She could see we were puzzled, so she explained: ‘It’s water, a big area of water. Like your Worldpool.’

  Everyone frowned at the picture, trying to make it out. Gaia walked up to middle of one of the three screens and pointed with her finger. ‘There, look. There’s the See and there’s the sky.’

  I could see now that there was a kind of line behind Gaia and her brother in the picture, a dead straight line like World’s Edge, and I could see that the paleness was a bit paler above that line than it was below it. And then I saw that in the darker area below the line there were waves. They were small and blurred and far away, but all the same they were quite like the waves that broke on poolside by Michael’s Place, though the colours were all wrong and there was no light shining up from beneath them.

  And then suddenly the picture came alive, like that picture had done of me and Fox and the others, where you could see us move and hear us speak. Again, some people yelled out with the shock of it, seeing the waves moving, just like the waves on Worldpool, and hearing Gaia and her brother talking inside the screen, though they were talking too quickly in their strange Earth speech for us to be able to make out a single word. Behind the voices, we could hear the sighing sound the waves made on the beach, and those of us who knew Worldpool – and of course there were many here who didn’t – could hear that it was the exact same sound that Worldpool made as it broke on poolside here in our own Eden.

  Then the sound stopped all at once, and another picture came.

  ‘This is my house,’ Gaia said.

  House, we knew that word. A house was a kind of shelter with a door and windholes. Traders in Veeklehouse would give you a toy one for ten sticks, and offer you a car with wheels to go with it. But this was a real Earth house, so big that you could only see a part of it in the picture. It was made of something smooth and white – Earth seemed to be a pale pale place – and in front of it, small like they were far away, stood Gaia’s brother and another woman. This second woman had skin like Deep’s: skin so pale that you could see the pink blood inside it. Next to them was a big thing that we couldn’t figure out at all. It was pale green and many tim
es taller than they were.

  ‘It’s a tree,’ said Gaia’s booming voice, when people called out to ask what it was. ‘That’s what trees look like on Earth.’

  Candy jumped up indignantly from my lap. ‘That’s not a tree !’ she shouted out. And everyone laughed, in that way people do when a child says something that grownups think but don’t like to say themselves.

  It had no lanterns, that Earth tree, and it was the wrong shape, all covered by that pale green stuff that looked a bit like a cloud. Yet when I looked carefully I could see that – yes – hidden under the green was a sort of trunk and branches that were a little bit like a tree. Behind it was a blank pale greyness, almost white, in the place where a sky ought to be.

  The Earth people had laughed at Candy’s interruption along with the rest of us. ‘Well, I’m sorry if we’ve got it wrong,’ said Deep, ‘but that’s what we call a tree on Earth. I suppose it is pretty useless compared to your Eden trees.’

  People liked that. It was nice to hear him admit that a thing could be better on Eden than on Earth, even if he was only joking. We smiled at each other, and some clapped.

  ‘Useless tree,’ Candy shouted, and a little cheer went up from the crowd.

  ‘What sound does it make?’ a man called out.

  ‘Our trees don’t make any sound,’ said Gaia, ‘except when the wind blows through them.’

  How strange that seemed. In Eden there was no sound that was more constant in our lives than the sound of trees. They were pumping pumping pumping all round us right now, as we looked at the pictures and listened to the Earth people speak. Even out in Knee Tree Grounds, ten miles away from Mainground, that sound had always been there while we were awake and while we slept, like the heartbeat of the world. How weird it must be to live among silent trees.

  ‘How does it get its heat then?’ asked a woman.

  ‘Our trees aren’t hot,’ Deep said. ‘They don’t give out heat, like yours do. Or light either. Those green things at the top are called leaves, and they don’t give out light, they take it in. They take in the light of the sun, which they need in the same way that we need food.’

  People nodded. We remembered that was part of the old stories, that the trees on Earth reached up their branches and drank in the light that came down from the star they called the sun. But I’d always imagined them with little mouths reaching upwards from the tip of every branch, open to the sky. In fact I’d carried a picture of that in my mind since I was a little kid: the trees with their little wide-open mouths that fed on light. In my head, those trees had always seemed kind of friendly, somehow, but this one just seemed strange.

  ‘That little girl was right,’ another man said. ‘No heat or light. Earth trees are useless.’

  Several people cheered again.

  Then the picture changed once more. There was more colour this time, and at the same time more darkness, which made it seem a little more like Eden.

  ‘Ah,’ said Gaia. ‘This is another picture from the beach. It’s what we call a sunset. It’s what happens when the sun goes down at the end of the day.’

  The water was dark now, but where the sky should be, above World’s Edge, everything was bright and full of colour: pink, blue, green. It was the opposite of our Worldpool, where the sky is dark and the water shines. In middle of this strange sky, there was a small round circle of bright bright yellow. A long line of light stretched down from it across the water, broken into pieces by the waves.

  ‘This is the sun,’ Deep said.

  We stared. How small it seemed, when all the stories said the star was many times bigger than whole of Earth or Eden.

  ‘That’s the sun?’ a man said. ‘It’s tiny !’

  ‘Oh it is big,’ Deep’s voice boomed out. ‘But it’s far far away from Earth, so looks small in the sky.’

  ‘I thought Earth’s sky was blue,’ said Clare.

  ‘It is sometimes,’ Gaia said, ‘but it can be many different colours, and every night it’s black just like the sky here.’

  So ‘night’ wasn’t a place, whatever Mary had said!

  ‘Look,’ said Gaia, as the picture changed again. ‘This is my brother’s dog. It’s a kind of animal.’

  It was another moving picture. A strange brown creature was running about in a pale place full of strange square-shaped things that it kept banging into. It was hard to make out its shape properly, it was moving so much. And it was shouting shouting shouting all the time.

  ‘Rough! Rough! Rough!’ the dog creature kept yelling, like it could speak but there was only one thing it wanted to say.

  ‘Rough! Rough! Rough!’ a boy about Candy’s age called out and began to laugh. Candy looked across at him interestedly for a few heartbeats and then joined in loudly: ‘Rough! Rough! Rough!’ she hollered. And then everyone joined in, the whole big crowd, laughing and shouting at this silly creature from Earth: ‘Rough! Rough! Rough! ’

  The Earth people smiled uneasily, glancing at one another. There was an edge in our laughter and it was obvious that they could hear it.

  ‘Now,’ said Deep, ‘we thought you’d like to see some pictures of people from the past. We didn’t bring many, I’m afraid, because . . .’

  He didn’t finish. I reckon he’d been about to say they hadn’t expected to find anyone here, but had then thought better of it.

  Never mind that, though. Now there was a face on the screen: a young woman, maybe twenty twenty-five years old, with black skin like Gaia’s, though her face was narrower and sharper. She was smiling faintly as she looked out at us. It was a wary smile, like she’d felt she had to put it on but didn’t really feel like it. She looked kind of tough. You wouldn’t want to argue with her, I thought, or say something dumb when she was listening. You wouldn’t want to take anything that she thought was hers.

  Don’t tell us this is Gela, I said inside my head to the Earth people. Please don’t tell us this is Gela!

  ‘This is Angela Young,’ boomed out the veekle in Gaia’s voice. ‘This is the woman you call Gela.’

  There was another big gasp that filled up whole of the clearing, then, for a few heartbeats, a strange stunned silence followed by muttering and murmuring, as we all stared at this stranger. She was completely different from what any of us had pictured when we’d listened to the stories. And she was different too, in spite of having the same dark skin, from the Earth woman standing in front of us.

  This time the Earth people had the sense not to move the picture on so quickly. We needed to study this picture, we needed to absorb it, we needed to weigh it up in our minds, like a Veeklehouse trader weighs a lump of blackglass in his hand, turning it this way and that, looking for cracks and blemishes. More than a hundred heartbeats passed in which all the grownups who could see at all, and all the newhairs, and all the kids who weren’t too small to understand, were staring staring staring, some in silence, some whispering to one another, as they tried to figure out what this picture meant to them.

  Off over to the left of where we were, there was a bunch of people who were standing because there was no room left to sit. And from over there, another small child suddenly spoke out loudly as little children do. ‘Who’s that, Mum?’ the child asked. But this time no one laughed in the way that they’d laughed when Candy spoke, and her mum stooped down and whispered the answer in her ear.

  ‘It’s Mother Gela, apparently,’ I guess the mother said to her little daughter, ‘but now be a good girl and be quiet.’

  The kid wasn’t having that, though. ‘I thought you said that was Gela over there !’ she said, still in the same loud voice that everyone could hear.

  ‘Sssssh!’ her mother told her, looking anxiously round. I’m sure most grownups there were every bit as confused as that child was, but no one else spoke out, no one else asked to have the confusion cleared up, even though not long before they’d all been s
houting: ‘Gela! Gela! Gela!’ Partly because they were embarrassed, I guess. But mainly because people didn’t really want to hear Gaia answer the question as to whether or not she was still Gela in some way – Gela born in a different body, maybe, Gela changed by being made new again – or whether she was someone completely different. They preferred to leave that unexplained.

  Presently Strongheart spoke from his high seat behind us, his voice gruff and choked up. ‘Make her talk and move like the other pictures.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Gaia, ‘but we’ve looked and looked and it seems we’ve got no moving pictures of Angela with us, and we don’t have her voice either. We’re hoping that when we get a chance to look inside that Screen of yours we’ll find some . . .’ She said some words we didn’t recognize: ord yohs, they sounded like. ‘But until then, I’m afraid a few still pictures are the best we can do.’

  ‘Another picture then,’ said Strongheart.

  The next picture was cloudy, like we were looking at it through fug or muddy water. There were three young young men sitting behind a kind of table. None of them had beards, which made them look even more like kids. In front of them was a big crowd of people, some sitting, some standing, so we saw the three men over the backs of their heads.

  ‘This is Tommy Schneider, Mehmet Haribey and Dixon ­Thorleye,’ said Gaia. ‘I know a lot of you are named after one or other of these three guys. Tommy, your ancestor, is the one on the left.’

  The three of them seemed so small, somehow, and so so young. And they were kind of . . . well, ordinary. It was hard to believe that guy on the left was the father of anyone, let alone the dad of all the people of Eden, the one we spoke of when we said, Tom’s dick, or Tom’s neck, the one someone in every cluster acted out each Virsry when the old story was told. He was barely more than a newhair, and he had a kind of silly nervous smile.