Starlight shrugged. She wanted to get back to what she’d been talking about. ‘Anyway, the reason I spoke of the fights over the ring is that I wanted you to understand how important Earth is to us, and how much even the smallest thing from Earth means to us. And because of that – I’m sorry to say it, but I’m not sure you Earth guys really understand this – because of that, every single little thing you say and do will change the whole story of Eden forever.’
This was such a different Starlight from the one I’d known when I was a kid. Back then, all she was interested in was having as much fun as she could. Now she was trying to speak for all of Eden.
‘The truth is—’ began Gaia.
‘The truth is you didn’t expect to find us here,’ Starlight said. ‘I know that. Your science told you it was impossible for the children of just one man and one woman to survive and carry on like this. But we are here, and we’ve been waiting for you for generations and generations. Most people here think you’re going to take us all back to Earth, or bring all the good things you have on Earth across the sky to Eden. Many many people think you’re Gela herself who’s come back to—’
Gaia shook her head. ‘Honestly, Head Woman, I’ve done my best to stop that. I keep telling folk I’m not Angela Young, that the only connection I have with Angela is that one of my ancestors was her sister, but no one seems to believe—’
‘Strongheart doesn’t want to ask you this,’ Starlight said. ‘In fact Strongheart doesn’t want to say any of this stuff to you, because he’s so proud to be the one who was Head Guard when Earth came back, but you need to tell us: what can you really give us, and when are you going to leave?’
The Earth people looked at each other. Gaia drew breath.
‘We can’t take people back to Earth,’ she said. ‘Well, maybe one at most, but no more than that. And we haven’t got anything to give you right now, apart from maybe fixing a few more people with the . . . uh . . . poison fever, as you call it, and maybe finding out what’s in this screen. As for how long we’ll be here, we can only stay for a few more days, because the starship is . . . well, I guess you could say it’s like a creature that starts growing old as soon as it’s born. But we’re finding out about Eden and how it works, and what the trees and animals are made of, and when we get all of that information back to Earth, then people there will be able to figure out ways to help you. New ways of feeding yourselves and keeping healthy and making you better when you’re ill. New ways of using the stuff round you to make things. New tools. So next time someone comes, they’ll be able to give you things that will make your life easier and—’
‘Next time?’ asked Starlight. ‘Are you sure there’ll be another time?’
Again, Gaia looked at the other Earth people.
‘I’m sure there will,’ she said. ‘It won’t be any time soon, though, because we have to rebuild the whole starship and that . . . well, like Marius explained before, by the time we’ve got all the stuff together, it could be . . .’
‘It could be fifty years,’ Marius said, still bent over that screen, ‘or even longer.’
I felt a terrible stab of grief. All these years we’d waited, all these generations, making circles on the ground, singing songs, making it okay for ourselves that Earth wasn’t here by telling ourselves to be patient, and one waking it would come. And now it had come, but it would soon be gone again, and we’d be alone once more, scratching in the dirt, fighting over old stories. And when Earth came back, if it came back – even that didn’t sound certain – it would most probably be too late for me. I wasn’t exactly sure how old I was in years – we didn’t count time that carefully out on the Grounds – but I reckoned I was well over thirty, and few people got past sixty seventy.
‘One person can go with you?’ I suddenly said. ‘Is that what you said?’
Gaia looked at me, surprised.
‘Yes, we figure we could take one.’ She smiled. ‘Why? Would you like it to be you? You were the first Eden person we saw, after all, you and Trueheart, and you’ve been a good friend to us.’
Those tears that had been so close to coming out before came pressing forwards again. I laid Metty on the ground beside me and stood up so I could walk a little way off and turn my face away. Would I like to get away from Dave’s moaning and his hands feeling for me after every waking, like I was there to prove to him, over and over, that in spite of his clawfeet he was a man? Would I like to get away from his brother Tom sneaking up on me? Would I like to get away from scratching and scraping to find enough to eat, and then having to find still more to keep the Leader off our backs? Would I like to have my batface taken from me, that ugly face that made me feel like I should apologize to each new person I met? Gela’s heart, of course I would. That would be like laying down a heavy heavy load that I carried every waking of my life.
But to say goodbye forever to my own kids? Well, I couldn’t bear that. And I couldn’t do it to them. I just couldn’t.
Yes and anyway, I said to myself, who was I kidding? I’d never feel at home in that strange pale place. Whatever they did for my mouth and nose and teeth with their metal needles and knives, I’d still feel like a batface among those tall beautiful people, who knew so much. Beside them, I’d always be a foolish child.
Clare had come after me. She laid her hand on my arm.
‘I’m alright,’ I told her. ‘It was a silly question Gaia asked, wasn’t it? She knows I’ve got three kids.’
‘Yes, and Dave would never manage without you.’
Later the Earth people went out in forest again with their strange tools that worked by lecky-trickity. (Yes, there really is such a thing, though the Earth people’s name for it seemed to have changed. They say eleck-trissity. I guess words wear down more quickly when you use them all the time, like the edge of a stone knife.) They promised Strongheart they wouldn’t go far, so he could call them back with horns if the New Earthers came to talk.
Forty-four
Kneel on the snow, stonespear!’ commanded Luke Johnson. ‘Kneel on the snow and bow your head. Show me you admit the fight is over.’
Shivering shivering, blue with cold, Harry half-glanced back towards his guards, and then knelt and bowed as he’d been asked. ‘It is over,’ he said. ‘But not for the reason you think.’
We used to tell a story back on Knee Tree Grounds about John Redlantern, standing on the cliff by the crashed Veekle, trying to decide whether to keep Gela’s ring or throw it out into the Pool. He told people afterwards that he heard the voices of people not yet born, calling out to him, arguing with one another about what he should do next. ‘Throw it away!’ some said. ‘It’ll only bring trouble.’ ‘Keep it,’ said others, ‘that ring is precious precious to everyone on Eden!’
When the story got to that part, we kids would start calling things out ourselves. ‘Keep it!’ some of us would shout. ‘Toss it into the Pool!’ the rest would yell. And then the grownups would point out to us that the voices John had heard were ours! We were the people not yet born, and we were still arguing about his decision, just as John had known we would.
It must have been the same for Leader Harry. He must have known that, whatever happened next, there would be stories in the future about this moment. A hundred Johnfolk facing just eight guards and one leader, the son of the Head Guard facing the son of the Headman, a guard leader kneeling half-naked in the snow with the voice from Earth inside a square of smooth black glass: well, Tom’s dick, how could all of that not become a story?
Headmanson Luke rode forward on his blue-skinned buck, a ringman on a woollybuck riding beside him to give him the light of its headlantern. Luke suspected some kind of trick, though he couldn’t figure out what it might be, and he had an arrow half-drawn on his bowstring.
Harry looked up at the Headmanson and showed him what he held in his hand. The glass glinted in the bucklight. One of Luke’s ringmen
shouted, ‘Father! A blade!’ and Luke fired his arrow at Leader Harry. It hit him in the belly. There was a silence, the kind of silence you only get up on the Dark, with no trees to pulse and hum. Harry felt for the shaft of the arrow with his left hand. He had a puzzled look on his face, as if he couldn’t quite figure out what this thin hard thing might be that was suddenly sticking out of him.
Of course Harry’s two guards, David and Mehmet, rushed forwards at once on their bucks, but they didn’t get far. Straight away Luke’s ringmen fired more arrows, not just one or two but dozens of them, and the two of them fell backwards off their bucks onto the snow. Now the other six guards came riding forwards too. The ringmen aimed their bows. In a couple of heartbeats all six would be dead as well. But then Harry yelled out. He was still alive, kneeling in the light of Luke’s buck, with a big circle of red red snow all round him. And he yelled out not just to his own men but to everyone who was there.
‘Gela’s heart, stop it !’ he yelled. ‘Stop this nonsense, will you, and listen!’
And everyone did. There was something about the way this dying man spoke that pulled them up short, ringmen and guards both, Johnfolk and Davidfolk, even the Headmanson of New Earth. Everyone stopped and listened, and in the silence, the Headmanson and the ringmen who’d rode up beside him heard a woman’s voice, small small, that seemed to be speaking from Leader Harry’s hand.
‘Hello Johnfolk,’ it said, ‘this is Gaia from Earth. Three of us have come in a starship. Please stop fighting now and come to meet us.’
Then Harry tipped forwards onto the bloody snow and the black square fell from his hand. Luke jumped down from his buck and picked it up. Almost at once it spoke again, startling him so much that he dropped it back onto the snow.
Luke stood there for a moment, looking down at it, then he turned towards his men, his face suddenly scared and desperate, almost like he was hoping they’d tell him what to do. Of course they said nothing. He couldn’t even read anything in their faces, hidden away as they were by their buckskin headwraps. All he could see here or there was a glinting eye. After a couple of heartbeats he stooped down again and once more picked up the black square. He must have held it a different way this time because it remained silent. He tipped it back and forth in his hand. He sniffed at it. He turned round to his men again, as if he still hadn’t given up on the hope they might know what to do next, but of course nothing came back to him from those rows and rows of blank buckskin masks. In New Earth, just as in the Davidfolk Ground, low people don’t tell high people what they should do.
‘You!’ he called out to the six guards who were still alive. ‘You guards! Come forwards and talk. We won’t hurt you. Tell us what this thing is!’ Of course the guards didn’t move. They might just be ordinary guards, but they didn’t take their orders from Johnfolk, whether high or low. ‘Please!’ called Luke. ‘Please! We won’t hurt you! I promise you that.’
For a third time he turned back towards his men. He still had no idea what to do. He wasn’t even sure what was happening. Everything was so sudden, and so strange, and so dreadful that it was hard to believe that he was even there. But all the same, two things were becoming slowly clearer to him. The first thing was that a messenger had been sent to him by Earth, and he’d answered with an arrow. And the second was that, when stories were told about Headmanson Luke in generations to come, that would be the one thing he’d be remembered for. Long after everyone had forgotten his face, and the sound of his voice, long after anyone could remember what his friends and his family liked about him, or what he cared about, or what he was good at, people across Eden would remember that Headmanson Luke Johnson was the man who did for Earth’s messenger.
The six guards looked at each other, exchanged nods, and came reluctantly forward. They climbed down from their bucks and squatted down to attend to their leader and their two mates, David and Mehmet. But all three were dead, each one in his own slowly spreading patch of bright red snow.
One of the guards stood up – he was a guy of forty fifty with a thick grey beard called Roger – and looked straight at Headmanson Luke. He knew that Luke was a high man, and he knew that Luke’s ringmen could do for him at any moment, but he was too angry to kneel or bow or be polite. The dead guard David had been his younger brother.
‘Leader Harry got down from his buck,’ he said. ‘He came forward on his own. He threw away his spear and pulled off his wrap. Tom’s stinking dick, man, what else did he have to do to get you to listen to him?’
Luke held out the little square of glass. His hand was shaking.
‘What is this thing?’
‘I don’t know its name but it’s something from Earth. Surely you can see that for yourself ? Earth has come back. Two tall men and a new Gela with black black skin. That’s her voice inside that thing. Their veekle’s sitting in Circle Clearing right now. It’s alive, it moves, it gives out light and makes sounds. Lucky there were Davidfolk there to meet them, wouldn’t you say? Lucky we didn’t all follow your Juicy John. If we’d all been skulking across the Pool there in New Earth, they’d have come and gone and never known anyone was still alive here in Eden.’
Forty-five
As the Earth people wandered about in forest, looking at animals and starflowers and trees, they ran into the Michael’s Place folk who were out there scavenging. Trueheart was with the scavengers, but as soon as she saw the Earth folk there, with their science tools on their bike, she asked to go with them as she’d done before.
‘Certainly not,’ Tom hissed at her, too quietly for the Earth people to hear. ‘I’m your dad, and I’m telling you to stay with us and help find food for your family.’
But Gaia called out that of course Trueheart could go with them, and so Trueheart ignored her dad a second time and ran over to Gaia and Marius and Deep.
Tom said nothing, but two three people described to me how the knuckles of his one hand turned white white round his spear.
Later, when Tom and the others came back to us with the few things they’d found to eat – small bony slinkers, bitter batmeat and stale seeds picked up, one by one, from the dirt – Tom growled to Clare that Trueheart was going to get what was coming to her when the Earth people had gone away.
‘They don’t seem to understand,’ he complained. ‘Okay, I know they come from Earth and I know they’re high high people, but high people here in Eden would never come between a dad and his kid. They’d know whole of Eden works by each person knowing their place between high and low. They’d know there wouldn’t even be high people if there weren’t people in between.’
‘She’s a bad girl, your Trueheart,’ said Flame. She’d become bolder lately, since we’d all felt sorry for her about Suzie. ‘My dad would have beaten me hard hard if I’d behaved like that.’
Clare had been more friendly to Flame lately, but now she glared at Tom. Was he going to let his young shelterwoman speak to him like this, when she wasn’t much older than Trueheart herself ?
Not long afterwards, Trueheart came back with the Earth people. They unloaded a pile of things they’d gathered up – some wood, some wavyweed, a dead bat, a piece of rock, a whole bunch of tiny creepy-crawlies like ants and worms – and Gaia and Marius began to do tests on it all, as they called it, with their lecky-trickity tools. Trueheart watched and asked questions, trying with all her might to understand. Deep, meanwhile, picked up the Screen again and another set of tools, and carried on trying to find things inside it.
‘We’ll show some more pictures tomorr . . . I mean, next waking,’ Gaia told me, ‘and we’ll talk to everyone about how long we can stay, and what Earth might be able to help them with. Your friend Starlight was quite right to ask about that. We can see we’re making things difficult for everyone by not being clear.’
‘You saved my sister’s life,’ Trueheart said. It was the first time I’d heard her speak of baby Suzie as her sister. ‘And you’r
e going to stop the fight with the Johnfolk. I don’t call that making things diff—’
But at that moment an old woman began to screech from across the fence. ‘Gela! Our Mother! You’ve come back for us!’ She was standing among a group of nine ten people who’d just arrived from across the Dark. She was thin thin, and all she had on was one bit of fatbuck skin wrapped round her dry old belly, but she and her companions’ faces were cracked in toothless smiles of delight to see the Earth people sitting there. So it was true! Just as they’d heard on the Dark! Earth had really come!
Gaia sighed, laid down the tool she was working with – it was like a tiny screen with a metal needle attached to it by a kind of string – and stood up to go over to the fence. We’d been through this scene many times now. The old woman and her friends laughed and clapped their hands as Gaia came near, tears running down their faces. They stretched their arms out to her over the fence. ‘I never thought . . .’ they would tell each other later. ‘To think that I was alive when . . .’ ‘If only my old mum could have . . .’
Gaia touched the hands straining towards her, squeezing some of them, and stroking the cheeks of little ones that were held out to her over the fence. She looked so tall and strong, so beautiful and sure of herself, next to those funny shrivelled little Eden people in their rough skin wraps, that it was strange to think that she and them were even the same kind of creature.
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