‘We’re sorry we can’t help you more right now,’ Gaia called out, glancing at the two Earth men as she stepped forward, and holding her linkup near her mouth so the veekle would make her voice louder. ‘We know you’re disappointed and we can understand that. We would be too if—’
‘Shut up, woman!’ a man shouted out. ‘We’re sick sick of all of you!’
Gaia waited for the shouts and jeers to die down a bit. Someone threw a stone at one of the screens, and it fell from its pole to the ground.
‘I’m sorry we can’t give you everything you’d hoped for,’ she said. ‘But don’t forget—’
‘We don’t want to hear your excuses!’
‘—don’t forget that we’ve asked the leaders of the Johnfolk to come and talk to us, and we’re going to tell them to stop fighting you. That at least will help you, surely? I know many of you have had to come here across the mountains to get away from those ringmen, and we’re going to try and make it possible for you to return.’
The shouting didn’t stop but it died down a little. Being able to go back to our clusters would be better than starving here, even if our shelters had been burnt down, and even if the dead bodies of guards were lying rotting all round them. It wasn’t what we’d hoped for when we sang songs round our circles of stones – Earth was supposed to rescue us from that sad hard life we’d lived in Wide Forest, not help us return to it – but it would still be better than what we had now.
‘But now we’ve got that new thing to show you that Deep told you about,’ Gaia said, speaking a bit too eagerly, like a grownup trying to distract a crying child. ‘We’ve looked inside the old screen that used to belong to Angela, and we’ve managed to find some of the things she left there. There are bits missing, but if you listen you’ll hear her voice, the real voice of your own precious Angela, the Mother of you all.’
No one was shouting now. We could hear the trees, we could hear the flip and flap of flutterbyes, we could hear the stream at the edge of the clearing, running over its stones. Then a loud crackly hissing sound came from the veekle, like the sound of a fire and the sound of a waterfall, all mixed up together.
A face appeared on the screens, blurred like it was in a fug, with little lines and sparks of white light that kept shooting out across it. We couldn’t really see what the face looked like, but you could just make out human eyes in there, looking downwards at something inside the picture, and a human mouth moving.
And then a voice spoke, a young woman’s voice. It was sometimes hard to make out what she said, through that crackling hissing sound, and yet we found her easier to understand than the Earth people in front of us, her speech more like our own.
‘So . . .’ she said, ‘to sum up, we can’t all go back together. That’s obvious. The state the ship’s in, those of us that do go back in it will most probably die anyway, but if we all try and go at once, we’ll all die without any doubt at all.’
Forty-eight
The Crying Tree stood by itself at the bottom of that dim white bowl of snow, its lanterns shining out their pure white light, and a thin trail of steam rising upwards from its airholes. A strange little group rode along the ridge above it. The war was still going between guards and ringmen back in Wide Forest, but there were three guards and ten ringmen riding up there together, along with the Headmanson of New Earth. Under their head- and bodywraps, it would have been hard to tell which ones were the Davidfolk and which the Johnfolk.
Behind them came three bucks with corpses tied to their backs, their legs dangling down one side, their heads and arms down the other. The bodies had long since turned cold and hard, and they jolted stiffly as the bucks made their way over the uneven snow. One of the corpses was bare to the waist.
‘I’m guessing that must be the tree where John saw the greatbat,’ Luke Johnson said to the guard Roger. ‘Though I guess you people might not know the story?’
‘Of course we know that story. Mehmet was there, remember, Wise Mehmet who came back to David.’
‘Wise Mehmet? Mother of Eden, is that really what you call that little slinker?’
‘He was a good good man. It was down there by the tree that he first realized that he’d been wrong to follow Juicy John. It’s a brave man that admits he’s wrong.’
Luke would never have let one of his own ringmen talk to him like that before, never mind a guard of the Davidfolk, but now he just rode on in silence.
‘It does take a brave man,’ he finally said. ‘You’re right about that. Some of us are going to have to do that pretty soon, aren’t we – admit we’re wrong – now the Earth people are here to set us straight? And maybe all of us. Who knows what story this new Gela will have for us?’
‘She came to us Davidfolk,’ said Roger, ‘not to you Johnfolk. Doesn’t that tell you something?’ He was full of tears. His brother’s cold corpse was draped over one of the bucks behind them and he didn’t care what he said. The only thing he had to be glad about right then was that Luke was miserable as well.
They carried on riding along the ridge above the Crying Tree.
‘I’m far far away from my father’s house in Edenheart,’ Luke said after a bit. ‘I’ve given up on the fight I’ve been preparing for since I was a kid. My best friend is dead, and I’ve shamed myself forever by doing for a man who was bringing me a message from Gela. And here I am on Snowy Dark, looking down on that tree from the old story, where John saw a giant slinker creeping towards a bat. Back home the teachers say that, in John’s mind, the slinker was David Holeface and all the things that David stood for, and the bat was himself and everything that mattered to him. But I look at it now and I don’t—’
‘David Holeface! That’s how you speak of Great David, is it? The man who worked and struggled all his life to make sure Family was ready for this time we’re living in now.’
Luke waited for Roger to finish, allowed a few heartbeats of silence to pass, and then carried on with what he was saying.
‘But now I look down at it, I don’t see all that. I see Eden down there. That tree on its own, caring nothing for us, living its own life without even knowing we’re here: that’s Eden. And that bat John saw: that was us. All of us, I mean: Johnfolk, Davidfolk, Tinafolk, whatever. That bat was like all the people of Eden, trying to stand up tall and do our best to make our lives mean something in this lonely dark place that doesn’t care about us. All these stupid dreams we have, all these big plans, all these stories we go on and on about all the time . . . It’s like . . . It’s like we have to keep on yammering away because we’re afraid of shutting up, even for a moment, and noticing the silence all round us. Do you know what I mean?’
Roger didn’t answer.
‘My poor sweet Gerry, for instance,’ Luke went on. ‘He used to talk excitedly to me about President guiding the world, President speaking to him across the sky, President being the one that tells the story we’re all of us in, every one of us: Johnfolk, Davidfolk, humans, bats, bucks. But I’ve never heard him, have you? Not if I’m really honest. I’ve never heard him once. Or Mother Gela either, for that matter. There’s no one really speaking to us, no one reaching out to us, no one guiding us. And all the while the darkness is creeping towards us, out of airholes, out of cracks, out of little gaps, the darkness that truly belongs here as we never never will. It’s all round us all the time, watching us, waiting, ready to lunge out at us when the moment is right. Do you know what I mean? Do you ever feel that way?’
Roger said nothing. Why should he listen to the self-pity of a man who’d caused his brother’s death? Without saying a word, he rode on ahead to join the other two guards.
Forty-nine
It wasn’t the voice of Gela as we’d imagined it. We’d imagined her as gentle gentle and wise wise. We’d thought of her as being so grownup that we would all still be children beside her, so that, even if we were grownups ourselves, even if we wer
e old old old, she would comfort and look after us, forgive us the silly things we’d done and love us anyway. But this voice wasn’t like that at all. It was angry and bitter, a sharp tough young woman used to getting her own way, maybe four five years older than Trueheart. It reminded me a bit of Starlight as she was way back when we were in Veeklehouse together and she set out across the Pool.
‘If some of us decide to stay here, they won’t die,’ the voice said, ‘not if they’re careful. We’ve established that you can eat the plants here and the meat as well. It’s all absolutely disgusting, but you can eat it. We’ve even found a source of vittermin dee, which I guess is . . . well . . . lucky, though I can’t say I feel very lucky right now. And . . .’ There was a long pause. The head barely moved, the fire-waterfall crackled away, the lines and flashes kept flickering out onto the screens and disappearing again.
Then the woman’s voice sighed. ‘You don’t have to know much about polly ticks to know there’s not going to be much support back home for getting the other ship ready to come and fetch us. And that’s assuming they haven’t yet scrapped it, which Dixon reckons they may well have done, given the way things have been going. I mean, who’s going to want to go to all that trouble, just for a couple of people on the far side of the glacksy, when there’s so many needing help right there, in Merka, and Inglund and everywhere else? I mean, think of those millyuns flooded out of their homes in Chiner, and all those people in Mecksy Koh. Who’s going to sacrifice millyuns for the sake of two? Our only hope is that they’ll think this place might be useful to them in some way.’ The woman gave a short little laugh. ‘Though I really can’t think how.’
There was another pause. Through that crackly fire-and-waterfall sound, we could just make out the sound of this stranger breathing.
‘Dixon threw the idea out recently that it’s possible the ship might go back on its own,’ she said at last. ‘That was news to me, and I asked him why the fuck we’re talking about anyone going back, if that’s the case? Why couldn’t we all wait here while the ship goes home on its own and brings help? He said he didn’t think there was much chance of help coming for us any time soon, even if the ship did get home to tell people where we are and what’s happened. He’s got kids, and feels he’s got to do everything he can to be with them. Michael’s got kids too, of course, and so has Mehmet. He showed me their pictures: four beautiful little kids, back home in Tirkee. Which is a shame, because I like Mehmet the best. He’s funny. And kind too, I think. I don’t know why, but I feel I could forgive Mehmet for stealing the starship and bringing me and Michael here. I could forgive him in a way that I don’t think I could forgive Dixon and Tommy. I wish he could be the one to stay with me.’
We could faintly hear her sigh as her voice trailed off again, and then there was only the crackly waterfall sound for a bit.
‘Whoever stayed here would have a long long wait,’ she said after a while. It was strange how close her voice sounded when she started speaking after a long silence. It was like she was right next to you, murmuring into your ear. ‘Maybe a whole lifetime. Maybe even . . .’ Again there was a long pause. The waterfall hissed, the fire crackled. ‘Maybe even forever.’
She paused for a few hearbeats and, when she spoke next, there was so much anger in her voice all of a sudden that it made me jump. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’ she hissed, and you could hear her hitting out hard at something with her fist, as she made herself hold in her tears. ‘Bloody fucking shit ! Of all the bloody luck! And my life was going so well, too!’
Candy could hear the anger and it scared her. She pressed up against me, hiding her face in my breasts. I held her and Fox tightly and rocked them gently back and forth. The helplessness I could hear in Gela’s voice was just like the helplessness I was feeling now myself. We too were trapped with nowhere to go. We too had no power to change things. Gela herself had been our one hope of there being something different out there somewhere, something more than life in dark dark Eden. We’d always known that Gela herself felt trapped and alone when she lived on Eden, so there was no surprise there, but it was hearing her voice, hearing that she was just an ordinary human being like us, that made our hope seem so empty and foolish. How could we ever have imagined this woman had come alive again on Earth? How could we ever have thought that she would guide us all home?
When Gela spoke again, her voice had changed once more. You could tell she was trying to make the best of things now, trying to find something to hang on to. ‘But if one of the guys stayed with me,’ she said, ‘we could have kids, and that would be company at least, I guess, company and something to live for.’
The crackling hissing sound went on so long then that I began to wonder if the voice was going to come back at all.
‘Admittedly that would make things kind of complicated,’ she finally said, just when people were starting to get restless, ‘if we did eventually get back home.’ Then she laughed harshly. ‘Kind of complicated! What a fucking stupid pathetic thing to say! That would be easy ! This is complicated.’ There was another short pause, and in among the hissing and crackling we faintly heard a clicking sound, like some people make with their tongues against the roofs of their mouths when they’re busy thinking: tk–tk–tk. ‘There’s always death, isn’t there? On Earth, here, anywhere: death is always an option, it never lets you down. It’ll come soon enough, anyway, and if push comes to shove, we always have the choice of bringing it sooner.’ Again she laughed. ‘Not that I ever will. I’ll always want to know what happens next.’
Tk–tk–tk went her tongue.
‘I mean, when you think about it, I’m no worse off than my ancestors, am I? When they were taken from Affricker in chanes, they didn’t get to choose where they lived, did they, or who they had kids with? And there was no way they could ever hope to get home. Things look pretty bad for me, but I’m still better off than they were. At least I won’t have guys beating me if I don’t work hard enough . . . Or I bloody hope not anyway! . . . No, it really was much worse for them. And yet even so they still chose to live, didn’t they? In spite of everything, they chose to carry on and see what happened next. Otherwise there’d be no me.’
The head on the screens moved. You could tell somehow that she was about to finish.
‘Okay. I’m going to make the offer to all of them, though I know it’ll be Tommy who says yes. Just my fucking luck. He’s handsome, I’ll give him that, he’s got a beautiful body, but he’s so . . . I don’t know . . . He’s such a kid . . . He’s this world-famous astronaut, and he’s never had to grow up. He thinks the whole story’s all about him.’
The face vanished. The crackling and hissing stopped. The screens went black. We were back in Circle Clearing with the trees pulsing all round us. No one knew what to say. We were all kind of numb.
‘That’s the end of that bit,’ said Marius, ‘but there’s another bit here from later on, from the time after the other three had gone, and only Angela and Tommy were still here.’
Fifty
Headmanson Luke rode forward to join Roger and the other two guards. They’d made it pretty clear they didn’t want to talk to him but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to leave them alone.
‘So they came down in the Circle of Stones, did they, these people from Earth?’
‘That’s right,’ said one of the guards. ‘Smack in middle of it. Their veekle’s sitting there right now.’
‘I’m sure you know my ancestor John destroyed the Circle. He thought it was holding us back. He chucked the stones in a stream.’
Roger sighed. ‘Well, we Davidfolk put them back again, didn’t we?’
Luke rocked back and forth on his buck, like he was so anxious and agitated he just couldn’t keep still.
‘Do you know what we keep telling ourselves to do in New Earth?’ he said. None of the guards answered him. They rode together side by side without even looking round at him, like he wa
s just some stranger that was bothering them. They didn’t want to speak to him and, in any case, they had no idea what he was talking about.
‘We tell ourselves, Become like Earth !’ Luke said. ‘It’s written in big letters on the wall of my father’s house in Edenheart. It’s written all over the place. And that’s what we try and do. That’s why our ground is called New Earth. That’s how come we found metal, and figured out how to make windcatchers. That’s why our spears and arrows are so much better than yours. Because every waking we work and work at learning new things so we can find our way back to all the knowledge and power that people have on Earth. We’re even working at making lecky-trickity and jet planes. Did you know that? We have a competition every two hundredwakes, at a place called Winghouse, for the best plane. We already have guys who jump from the top of a high cliff with wings made of wood and buckskin and fly to far side of the valley. They just haven’t figured out yet how to fly up again.’
One of the guards gave a quiet little snort of laughter.
‘But we will,’ said Luke. ‘You can laugh, but we’ll figure it out, believe me. Just as we figured out metal. I guess you’d have laughed if you could have watched our people searching for rocks waking after waking, breaking them up, heating one kind after another in hot hot fire, over and over and over. But we got there, didn’t we? We found the one that gives us redmetal, and no one laughs at that.’
He pulled off his headwrap, showing his troubled face to the freezing freezing air, and rubbing the tired skin round his eyes.
‘But never mind that now. What I’m trying to say is that we want nothing more than to be like Earth, to live up to what Earth achieved. And yet Earth came back to you and not to us! That’s the part I can’t understand. We Johnfolk try so hard to be true to Earth, but Earth came back to that same Circle of Stones that John wanted to destroy.’
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