Daughter of Eden

by Chris Beckett

  The guards refused to speak. They’d set out with Leader Harry to bring this man back to Circle Valley, and that’s what they were doing. No one had told them they had to talk to him.

  ‘Yes,’ Luke said, pulling his headwrap back on again, ‘and we try to be true to Gela who’s always helped us so much right from the beginning, and true to her father, President. My own mother wears Gela’s ring on her finger, and teaches the small people what Gela wants from them. I don’t think you guys even know that Gela led us to the ring not just once but two different times? John found it first, after it had been lost for generations. But not so long ago it was stolen from us by a woman from this side of the Pool. She took it right across Worldpool but still Gela brought it back to us. I mean, think about it! How could you explain that if Gela wasn’t on our side? What other explanation could there be? And yet now she’s come to your people and not to us. I just don’t understand it.’

  He took out the smooth black linkup from the pocket in his bodywrap and turned it over in his hand, his eyes glinting in the bucklight as he looked down at it through the holes in his headwrap. He’d figured out by now which part of it he had to touch if he wanted to make it speak, and he carefully avoided that part. The thing itself was proof enough that the Earth people were really here, without his having to listen to Gela’s voice. And each time he heard her it felt like a reproach, not just for Harry’s death but for many other things too.

  He thought about the people they’d met on the Dark before Harry appeared. The guards his men had spiked up on their own spears, the little groups of desperate people whose bucks they’d chased away, and whose pots of embers they’d scattered across the snow. There was one group in particular that his men had told to run away. One of Luke’s men had counted to fifty, while those poor terrified folk blundered off through the snow: old women, kids, newhairs, trying their best to run and help one another, with snow right up to their knees. Luke’s ringmen had laughed loudly as they readied their arrows on their bows.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said, quickly so as to blot out the memory. ‘You’re thinking it’s about time I admitted that the Davidfolk were right all along. Isn’t that so? You’re thinking we destroyed the Circle that Gela and Tommy laid, and we broke Gela’s Family in two, and we stole Gela’s ring from the rest of Family, and now, as if all that stuff wasn’t bad enough, we’ve brought all this killing to Old Ground, and done for Gela’s messenger as well. Is that right? Isn’t that what you’re thinking? Never mind that the ring keeps coming back to us. As far as you’re concerned, everything points to us Johnfolk being the ones who are in the wrong.’

  The three guards said nothing. They didn’t even turn their heads towards him.

  ‘Mother of Eden, guys!’ Luke cried out. ‘I don’t care what you say! I don’t care if you want to yell at me! But answer me at least!’

  Fifty-one

  So, it’s done now.’

  From behind the loud crackling and hissing, the young woman’s voice murmured into our ears like she was right there next to us. Lines and flashes appeared on the screens and vanished again.

  ‘It’s just me and Tommy here now. Him and me. We’re everyone there is on Eden. He’s already driving me nuts, but it seems we’re stuck with each other. We gave them two months before we’d make up our minds that we were here for the long haul. Tommy figured that was how long it would take to get the other starship ready and bring it back to us, if the ship hadn’t already been scrapped, and if Earth was interested enough to get right down to it. Those two months have gone.

  ‘Of course, the other three may still have got back to Earth for all we know, but the odds were always against it. We just can’t know what’s happening out there, far away in the depths of this dreary black night sky that’s always above us, but my agreement with Tommy was that at this point we’d start acting like this was going to be home for a good long time. Last night . . . No, wait, I am going to have to stop saying night and day . . . At the end of our last waking time, me and Tommy had sex. It wasn’t exactly a promising situation. I don’t love him. He expects women to love him at first sight because there were plenty of women on Earth to tell him he was godz gift, but he isn’t my type at all, and I’m just so angry with him and the other two for trapping me here in the first place.’

  She sighed. ‘But then again, we’re both lonely, and we’re both scared, so I guess any kind of comfort is a plus. I bet my ancestors felt the same, back in J’maker. I bet there were times they turned to whoever they could reach.’

  There was crackling and hissing for a while before she spoke again. ‘And it was unprotected of course,’ she said. ‘I could be pregnant already for all I know, and if not now, then probably sometime not too far away. “It’ll be tricky for the third generation,” I said to Tommy as we lay there afterwards, “if no one has come from Earth.” “What do you mean?” asked Tommy. “Oh come on, mate,” I snapped at him, “it’s not so hard to figure out! If no one comes from Earth, our kids are going to have to do to one another what you and me have just done, unless of course they’d prefer to die alone.” “Jesus!” he said. “Did you have to completely spoil it?” “Wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s remind ourselves who spoiled it. Let’s just think, shall we? That would be the ones who created this situation, wouldn’t it? And – let me see – that would be Dixon Thorleye, wouldn’t it? And Mehmet Haribey, of course, and – oh yes, I almost forgot! – Tommy Schneider, also known as you. The three arrogant idiots who stole the starship, the three who dragged me and Michael through the wormhole after them. I wonder if Michael got back, eh? I wonder if he saw his kids again? I somehow doubt it. He was a real family man, you know. He was about to leave the service so he could spend more time at home.” Tommy just turned his back to me and pretended to go to sleep. Well, he can’t very well walk out on me, can he? Or me on him.

  ‘Anyway, we lay there back to back, near enough to one of those things that we’ve started to call trees to be able to feel some of its warmth. In the distance two of those booming creatures were calling out. Hooom! Hooom! Hooom! goes one, and then the other answers, Aaaaah! Aaaaah! Aaaaah! Michael gave them the name of starbirds. Not that they look much like birds – they have six limbs, for a start – but they fly, sort of, and they have those long scaly things that look vaguely like feathers, covered in glittery dots like stars. We lay there, back to back, listening to the starbirds, Tommy thinking his thoughts and me thinking mine.

  ‘I don’t know what was going on in Tommy’s head – he doesn’t talk much about that kind of thing – but I thought about the kids the two of us would have, and how this place would be their world. And about how, however horrible it might seem, and however much Tommy might prefer not to even think about it, they really might end up having kids with each other. I know that’s not good, but I’m no doctor and I’ve got no real idea what kind of problems it will cause them. All I know is that, whatever happens, we’ll just have to deal with it. If it kills us, it kills us. No point in fretting about it now.

  ‘Then I got to thinking about what we’d tell the kids. They’d have no school, no media, no one else but us to learn things from. So what information did we need to give them? What would they really need to know? And I thought about all the shit we’ve had in the history of Earth. Idiots claiming that some mouldy old book was the truth about everything, and it was okay to do for people you didn’t like, just because the book said so. Other idiots coming up with fancy arguments to say it’s fine for white people to buy and sell black people, or men to stone women to death for having sex without their permission . . . All that shit, which even a child could see was just nonsense, that gets to be called the truth because it suits some bunch of people, almost always men, who’ve got a bit of power.

  ‘And I thought, well, one good thing: we can start again here. We can set aside all of that, and teach our kids some sense. This is Eden after all. This is a new
Eden. And then I thought, hang on a minute, this is Tommy Schneider we’re talking about here, and he is full of shit. I mean, I guess we all are, to be honest, but he really is. There’s no way I can rely on him not to pass on that old crap all over again. So then I decided to do two things. One, I’m going to do my best to come to an agreement with Tommy about the right things to teach our kids. Two, regardless of what we agree, I’m going to come up with a list of stuff that’s obviously true but seems to keep being forgotten. That black people and white people are as good as each other, for instance. That women are as good as men. That having a lot of stuff doesn’t make you more important than other people, or entitled to more stuff. That you need to watch out for guys who act like the story is all about them . . .’

  I felt a kind of shiver go right down my back. There must have been women all round the clearing who felt the same. This was the Secret Story! This was the story that my aunt Sue had told me on Knee Tree Grounds and asked me not to tell anyone else until I had daughters or nieces of my own. Sue had been told it came from Gela herself. Mary had said that it was a lie, as all the shadow­speakers did. But the shadowspeakers were wrong, as it turned out, and Auntie Sue was right, because here it was now, the Secret Story, coming not from someone’s mum or auntie, but right from Gela’s own mouth.

  I guess some of the guards and high people there must have known those words as well. And I guess a lot of other people, men and women, had heard enough about the Secret Story to kind of guess what it was they were hearing, for there was a new tension in the crowd. Bit by bit, the True Story of the Davidfolk was crumbling in front of us. As we strained to hear every one of Gela’s words, some people glanced at one another, while others tried to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes at all. I wanted to look round and see how Starlight was taking it, because of course she knew the Story too, but I decided I shouldn’t.

  ‘I’ll make a list of all those things,’ Gela’s voice said through all that waterfall hissing and crackling, ‘all those simple important things that ought just to be obvious but keep getting lost and buried, and then, if we have daughters, I’ll pass it on to them and ask them to—’

  ‘That isn’t Mother Gela!’

  It was the firm loud voice of a woman shouting from the back of the crowd, drowning out the rest of what Gela had to say, and dragging us all back to Circle Clearing, and the pulsing trees, and the people from Earth who would soon be gone again.

  ‘That isn’t Mother Gela! Why are we all listening to it as if it was? Tom’s dick, people, doesn’t anyone recognize these words she’s saying?’

  It was like we’d all been woken from a dream. We were ourselves again, we were back in our own lives, and right there in front of me was someone from my own life that I’d been avoiding for eight years. For the woman who’d called out was Mary the shadowspeaker.

  Fifty-two

  Mary had been thinking hard hard as she made her way across the Dark. While her guards and helpers rode sullenly behind her, wishing they could be with the cheerful crowd from Tall Tree they knew was following after, Mary had struggled and struggled in her mind.

  How could half the old story be so right, she wondered – Earth would come back, a veekle would come down again in the Circle of Stones – if the other half was so wrong, the part about Gela reaching out and speaking to us through the stars? Mary always tried hard to be honest with herself, and she knew it no longer made any sense to say that Gela had been speaking to her, right up to that show in Tall Tree, if Gela herself had been on Eden right at that moment and Mary hadn’t known. She felt a fool. She felt deep deep shame. She remembered times when she’d laughed at other people’s ideas, and she knew quite well that she was the one who deserved to be laughed at now. She had given up many things to help the Davidfolk find meaning, but now the meaning was pouring out from her own life. It was like when you crack a jug of badjuice. You put your hand over the crack to keep the juice inside, but the crack is too big, the jug itself is falling apart, and the juice just comes streaming out anyway over your fingers and down onto the dirt.

  But if it hadn’t been Gela who’d spoken to her and kept her strong all these years, then who had it been? Mary kept reminding herself that it wasn’t as if the whole story had been nonsense. Earth had come, just as she’d always said it would, and Gela was alive, just as she’d always told people, over and over, in all those little clusters, up and down between Rockway Edge and the White Streams.

  ‘I must be patient,’ Mary kept telling herself. ‘I just have to wait for Gela to set me straight.’ Gela was good and wise, and must surely know that Mary had done her best. She’d help Mary understand as Mary herself had helped so many others. She’d explain everything, and then it would all fit together again, just like it did before.

  She remembered that her helpers and guards were behind her, and stopped to look round at them.

  ‘You lot are quiet!’ she called out, in the most cheerful voice she could manage. ‘Cheer up! We’re going to see Gela and the people from Earth. I’d have thought you’d be happy happy!’ And she made herself laugh loudly, trying not to notice too much the lonely sound of her voice echoing back from bare rocks, hidden in the darkness above them.

  ‘I guess you’re worried that I may have got the story wrong? Is that right?’

  They didn’t answer, and of course she couldn’t see their faces behind their buckskin headwraps.

  ‘Well, look at me! I’m not worried. I know I’ve done my best. There are some things I obviously didn’t understand properly, but I know our Mother can see how I’ve tried to help her, and I know she’ll explain where I went wrong.’

  But she still couldn’t help wondering just how Gela was going to do that, and worrying about what the answer might be. In some ways, it might actually have been easier for Mary to have accepted that the whole story wasn’t true than to accept that part of it was true but that she herself had been completely wrong about her own place in it. It might have been easier to accept that Gela was dead, and that no one would ever come from Earth, than it was to accept that Gela was alive and Gela had really come back to Eden, but that she’d never ever spoken to Mary.

  A couple of wakings before Luke reached the same spot, she passed along the ridge above the Crying Tree. She thought of her ancestor Wise Mehmet, down next to that exact same tree more than two hundred years ago, beginning to face up to the fact that he’d made the wrong choice, followed the wrong man, believed in the wrong story.

  But it was easy for him, she thought. He’d only been with John a short time. He was still young. No one was asking him to give up something he’d believed in all his life.

  She’d reached Old Family cluster just as the crowd was gathering in Circle Clearing to see that second show of pictures on the screens. There was the new veekle standing there in middle of Circle on its thin thin legs, just where the Davidfolk had always said it would be. There were the tall Earth people in their strange smooth wraps that seemed to be made out of some kind of soft metal. There was a beautiful woman with dark dark skin.

  So it really was true! Poor Mary was trembling. Her mouth was dry. She didn’t know what to feel or to think. She’d always said that Earth would come, she’d always told people they must get ready for it, but it turned out that she wasn’t at all ready herself. She’d certainly never really thought she’d see Gela standing in front of her in her own lifetime, as alive and real as anyone she met as she travelled across the Davidfolk Ground.

  Part of her was excited in the same way that we all felt excited at the beginning of all this – how can you not be excited when something happens right in front of you that you’ve been longing for all your life? – but for Mary it meant losing so so much. If you spent your life speaking for Mother Gela, what was left for you when Gela was here to speak for herself ? Mary made herself notice her own jealousy. She made herself notice her own bitterness at the fact that Gela didn’t spot her t
here, didn’t call out to her: ‘Hello Mary, my old friend. I’m glad we can finally meet!’ She realized that she was a complete stranger to Gela, just as Gela was a stranger to her.

  Then the Earth people showed their pictures of London. I’d already seen the strange flat paleness of Earth, but it was the first time for Mary and I guess it was as disappointing for her as it was for most people. We’d all thought that when we saw Earth, it would be like when you see a dear familiar face from long ago. You might not have been able to picture that face in your mind any more – how long do you have to be apart from a person before you lose the trick of doing that? – but, as soon as you see that face, you remember it perfectly, like there’s a gap inside you that only that one face can fill. Each of us had felt a hole inside that we thought was the same shape as Earth, and we’d assumed that when we saw Earth again it would fit into place at once. But that didn’t happen. It was strange and unfamiliar, that’s what Mary discovered, the same as we all had done, and it didn’t bring back any memories at all.

  And then the Earth people talked about troubles that had happened back there: the floods and the fights, and how people had been driven out of their houses, and how miles and miles of London now stood empty and crumbling. That was a shock for Mary. She’d always told people that everything was perfect on Earth, everything was safe.

  And of course, after the Earth people had showed their pictures of Eden, the news came that changed everything all over again. This black woman was not Gela. She hadn’t brought anything special with her. She couldn’t take us back with her. She was just a woman from Earth who’d come to see what Eden was like. Mary was new to the Earth speech and must have found it hard hard to follow, but Gaia spoke slowly slowly for this part and Mary’s mind was quick. She heard Gaia insist that she was not Gela. She heard Gaia say that the people of Eden were much closer to Gela than she was herself.