Mother of Eden

by Chris Beckett

  The chief of Bat Cave stared at me in amazement—real amazement this time, not jokey or put on—and then looked sharply at Greenstone, as if to ask him when he was going to control his crazy housewoman. But again Greenstone backed me up.

  “Yes, get down, Whiteblade. Kiss the ring. You’ve insulted me in front of my men and yours, so it’s the least you can do to make up.”

  The young chief hesitated while his bucks and ours stood with their heads lowered, their mouth-feelers sampling the moist cave air. He glanced sideways at his ringmen. He didn’t want his small people to see him being made to bow, but he couldn’t have them thinking he didn’t respect the ring, either. Finally, with a snort of disgust, he climbed off his own buck, came to the side of the car, and bent his head, just for a moment, over my hand.

  “We’re going to show the ring in Batsky,” Greenstone told him.

  “I don’t agree with that, Greenstone.”

  “You should call me Headman now, Chief Whiteblade.”

  “Gela’s tits, what’s got into you? Okay, I don’t agree with it, Headman. You shouldn’t talk to my small people without getting my agreement first. Are you trying to take all the power away from the chiefs?”

  “Not trying to take your power away, Whiteblade, but reminding everyone that this is one New Earth, and it’s all one ground, not a whole lot of different grounds with their own headmen.”

  “Well, you’re not welcome,” Whiteblade said, and he turned his buck and led his ringmen off up the cave, too fast for us to keep up in our clumsy car.

  Bats swooped and wheeled above us as we emerged from the top end of Bat Cave. It was always a shock, after the brightness of the caves, to be out again under the black black sky. There was still light, of course—trees still shone, and in many places on the slopes on either side of us, firelight glared out from the hungry mouths of greenstone ovens—but the background to every light out top was always blackness: the black sky, the black branches, and, when I looked back the way we’d come, the huge black shadows of the mountains above the caves.

  Batsky was ahead of us, its few houses softly lit by pale pruned whitelanterns, which gave it a sad, colorless look compared to the bright forest that surrounded it. A row of ringmen appeared ahead of us, standing in a line across the path, with metal masks over their faces.

  “Okay, stop the car,” Greenstone said.

  One of our own ringmen jumped down from his buck to help us down from the car, and we walked out in front of it.

  “I’m the Headman of New Earth, men,” Greenstone said, “and I’m asking you to get out of our way.”

  With their faces hidden we couldn’t tell what they were thinking, and of course we had no idea what Whiteblade might have told them. They didn’t move. Greenstone frowned, and I could see he was going to say something sterner, but I put my hand on his arm to still him.

  “Hello there, men,” I called out to them, gently but at the same time firmly, like I’d heard mothers talk to overexcited children back on Grounds.

  Behind us the bucks sniffed and snuffled as the car and our ringmen moved slowly forward.

  I held my right hand out in front of me. “Here I am for you,” I called to them again, gentle but firm. “Here I am with the ring on my finger for all of you to see. And this is your Headman with me. Mother Gela is with him, just as she was with his great-great grandfather John when he led the way out of Circle Valley and over Snowy Dark, all those hundreds of hundredwakes ago.”

  The blank metal faces stared at me, not smiling, not frowning, not even blinking.

  “Come forward, boys. I’ve brought you the ring from Earth, where President lived and Gela and Tommy were born. Come and see it. Come and touch it. You’re ringmen, after all, you’re the men of the ring, and we’ve brought it here specially for you and your people.”

  The men looked at one another uncertainly. Then one of them lifted off his metal mask. Underneath it was a lined, wary middle-aged face: the face of someone’s granddad. He laid down his spear and came forward, slowly slowly, like he was stalking a leopard, to kneel in front of me and kiss the ring.

  “Thank you, my friend,” I said. “Thank you for trusting me.”

  He’d been avoiding my eyes, but now he looked up at me with a gap-toothed smile, all the wariness suddenly gone.

  “A long long life to you, pretty Mother.”

  Other men came then, taking off their metal masks one after another, kissing the ring, muttering awkward little words to me and then kneeling in front of the Headman, too.

  “Come with us, blokes,” Greenstone said. “You and the men we’ve brought with us can take us through to your meeting ground. Perhaps one of you is a fast runner who could go ahead of us and make sure everyone knows to come there? We want everyone to come. Rockwomen, stuffmakers, flowergatherers, bat keepers.”

  A young ringman ran off, and the rest of them formed a circle round us as we passed through the little shelters propped up against trees where Batsky’s small people lived.

  “Follow us!” I called out as folk came running toward us.

  Soon a little crowd was walking with us, swallowing up the car and the ringmen.

  There were more than a hundred people waiting for us when we reached the Batsky meeting ground. I’d heard the sound of them in the distance, the yammering of excited voices. But as we entered that pale, tree-lit space, word that we were there spread across it in seconds and the yammering was buried by a big, excited roar that went on and on. Ringmen cleared a path for us and we continued forward, smiling and waving at the people around us. Greenstone was beside me, and it was good to know he was there, but I could give him no attention, not even a single glance, because everything inside me was focused on the role I had to play. Our lives could depend on me getting this right.

  “Don’t hold them too far back,” I murmured to the ringmen. “Let them touch the ring.”

  “Let them touch the ring,” I heard Greenstone’s voice repeating, somewhere out there in the world. “Don’t keep them at such a distance.”

  These were New Earth people, I reminded myself, people who had no sense of a Watcher looking out of their eyes. The source of things, the spring from which everything came, seemed to them quite separate from themselves, remote and beyond their control. They longed for it, like all people do, they longed for it to touch them and end their aloneness, but they thought they had to rely on others to bring it to them.

  I smiled at faces, I stroked hands and cheeks, I looked into shining eyes. Here and there in the dark sky above us, the huge wheel of Starry Swirl was peeking between the clouds, making little patches of light in the blackness, like far-off rocklanterns on the roof of an enormous cave. I felt fingers and hands brushing me as I walked forward, a blur of touch.

  “I’m here,” I murmured gently, like a mother soothing a crying child. “I’ve come to bring you the ring.”

  There were tearful women, tearful men, tearful children. All the ringmen had removed their metal masks, had ordinary eyes again instead of black, unblinking holes, and in the presence of the Mother of Eden, they were pushing their way forward with a strange tenderness, like loving grown-ups gently lifting aside the little limbs of over-boisterous children.

  A large car, normally used for carrying lumps of greenstone from the digs, had been pulled into the middle of the square, and a ladder propped up against it. A ringman helped me climb up and, as I rose above the level of the crowd, a moment came when, for the first time, everyone could actually see me. Another great roar rose up and burst, like big waves from Deep Darkness breaking at the outer edge of Knee Tree Grounds. And a chant began to form itself out of the noise, a simple rhythm.

  “Mother! Mother! Mother!”

  The rhythm grew stronger and firmer as it drew in more and more voices, until it was the only sound that could be heard at all.

  “Mother! Mother! Mother!”

  I could see out of the corner of my eye that Greenstone was climbing up after me,
and I reached back to him to bring him to stand beside me.

  “Mother! Mother! Mother!”

  I waved at them, and the rhythm broke up at once into another roar. I raised my right hand, as high as I could reach, and pointed to the ring with my left forefinger. There was another, even louder, roar. What a strange strange sound it was, in a way like the roar of waves, or the roar of the river at Steam Fall, yet so different, so different from anything else in all of Eden.

  For a moment I hesitated, wondering whether to take the next step I’d planned. But then, with a tiny nod to myself, I did it. I took off my longwrap so that all I was wearing was a plain buckskin waistwrap, like most of the men and women in front of me. Oh, how they roared!

  After a little while, I raised my hands again. A complete hush descended at once on the entire crowd, and all that could be heard was the hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph of the whitelanterns round the edge of the meeting ground. I let the silence hang there for one—two—three—four seconds, and then I spoke.

  “This is what Angela Young wore when she lived and walked in Eden. And this is what I wore, too, until I came here across the Pool.”

  Once more they roared and roared, as I’d known they would, for the more like them I made myself, the more special and different I became in their eyes. “She’s one of us,” they’d say to one another, but they knew just the same that I could have chosen to be as different from them as any chief’s daughter, so that my being like them was a gift.

  “On the waterhill where I come from there are no big people and no small people,” I told them. “Only people!”

  “Mother! Mother! Mother!”

  “When Tommy cut starflowers and Angela sewed wraps, who was the big person then?”

  “Mother! Mother! Mother!”

  “And Tommy and Gela’s kids—Angie, Clare, Lucy, Candice, Harry—which of them were big people, and which were small?”

  “Mother! Mother! Mother!”

  “And aren’t we all their kids, every one of us? Big people. Small people. Johnfolk. Davidfolk. We all come from one father and one mother.”

  “Mother! Mother! Mother!”

  Is this real? I wondered. Am I really here? Could I really have come, in such a short short time, from where I once was to this? I felt as if the world itself had dissolved and become part of me, a thing inside my head, a dream. I felt that, if I wanted, I could reach out and touch the houses and shelters round the edge of the meeting ground, and pluck the stars from the sky like waternuts.

  “Mother! Mother! Mother!”

  I felt completely relaxed, completely in control. Laughing, I glanced round at Greenstone beside me. He was half facing me, half facing the crowd, looking bewildered but happy. Seeing me look at him, he smiled.

  I turned back to the crowd and held up my hands for quiet. Once again I pointed to the ring.

  “This is Gela’s ring. This is the ring that came from Earth. This is the ring that Angela Young was given by her mum and dad in that far-off ground called Peckham that none of us will ever see.”

  “Mother! Mother! Mother!”

  I slipped off the ring and held it in front of my face. “There’s writing inside it. You can’t see it from there, but I can see it now. Perfect, tiny writing.”

  “Mother! Mother! Mother!”

  I raised my hands again, and there was silence at once.

  Hmmmmph hmmmmph hmmmmph went the trees. Hoom! Hoom! Hoom! called a starbird somewhere far out in the forest, Eden going on with its own life as if these strange, pale human creatures had never come here.

  “I can see what the writing says, and it says exactly the words the stories tell us it says. Tell me what you think they are, everyone, and I’ll tell you if you’re right.”

  There was a rumbling from the crowd as people started to call out the famous words. I pretended to look puzzled, and everyone laughed.

  “What? I can’t hear you! Tell me again.”

  Again the rumbling.

  “Does it say ‘To Angela . . .’?”

  “To Angela,” the crowd boomed.

  “Does it say ‘To Angela, with love . . .’?”

  “To Angela, with love.”

  “Does it say ‘To Angela, with love from Mum and Dad’?”

  “To Angela, with love from Mum and Dad.”

  I slipped the ring back on my finger.

  “Gela’s mum and dad loved her, and that kept her going in those lonely lonely times, when family was only two people, three people, four people, seven people, in forest all by themselves. And just as she was loved by her mum and dad, Gela loved her own kids. And you are Gela’s kids, all of you.”

  I paused to let the crowd roar. I waited for the rhythm: “Mother! Mother! Mother!” Once I’d just happily basked in this attention, like a little child basks in the praise of grown-ups telling her what a clever girl she is, but I was past that now. This was my job—getting this attention, holding it, shaping it—and everything depended on my doing it right.

  “And she wanted her children to be happy, like any good mother does. She wanted them to care for one another, and to always always remember that they were one family. Small people. Big people. Ringmen. Rockwomen. Flowergatherers. Stuffmakers. Diggers. Underteachers . . . Everyone! Even Headmen.”

  I pointed to Greenstone, and he got a friendly cheer of his own.

  “Gela is our mother. We are her children, and there are some things she wanted us always to remember.”

  Again, I hesitated for a moment. I didn’t dare to look at Greenstone. It was a big big step I was about to take. It meant breaking two different sets of rules at once, the rules of New Earth and the rules of Mother Gela both. And it meant great danger for me.

  “Always remember women are just as good as men!” I called out.

  I’d done it now, and it was too late to go back. Most of the women there cheered loudly, but I was sure I could see the faces of women who were surprised and shocked to hear words they already knew.

  “Don’t ever treat someone differently because of the way they look,” I called out, “whether they’re holefaces, or clawfeet, or whatever else.”

  This made more sense, I’d decided, than “because of the color of their skin,” when every face in front of me was the same yellowy-brown.

  “Just because someone thinks they’re important doesn’t mean they’re better than anyone else, and nor does having lots of stuff.”

  It was scary scary to be speaking these words out loud, but it was also wonderful. I had no doubt that they were older than all the other rules, older than the Johnfolk and the Davidfolk, even if they had got a bit mixed up in the telling through all those generations.

  “Don’t treat people like they’re just things! And watch—”

  I broke off for a moment because I’d noticed another car nudging its way through the people at the edge of the meeting ground. Chief Whiteblade stood in it in his red and white wrap, his arms folded and his face tight, ringmen all round him in metal masks. I felt a cold stab of dread. He was a chief of New Earth, and he must have sent women to the fire for saying these exact same words.

  But I raised my hand with the ring again, and the people cheered, and I rode upward again on the sound of it, like the bats rode upward on the warm air above the great crack of Steam Fall.

  “Watch out for men who think the story is all about them!” I called out.

  I said the story as Quietstream had heard it, not as I’d heard it from my own mum. Seeing Whiteblade there had decided me.

  “In fact, the story isn’t about any one person,” I said, moving on from the words that came from Gela, and back to words of my own. “The story is about us all.”

  Greenstone Johnson

  How far she’d come since she had the Timekeeper blow his horn early and mess up my father’s precious time. She was the housewoman of the Headman, but she was wearing the same wrap as a stonebreaker or flowergather, and openly speaking words for which dozens of women had been sent to the
fire. Whether or not she knew I’d recognize them, she must have realized that there would be many out there who would.

  Who else in all of New Earth was this bold, who else in all of Eden? Certainly not me. I was scared, scared both for her and for me, but I was proud proud as well. She was like a new John, standing tall and defiant in front of Family after destroying their Circle of Stones.

  “John Redlantern led you to this ground of New Earth,” she called out. “He led you here, but it never belonged to him. How could it? It’s just ground, isn’t it? It’s been here since long before people first came to Eden, and what’s in it belongs to whoever finds it! The greenstone you dig is yours, and so is the metal you make from it.”

  A big roar of approval went up from a crowd that included many diggers and stonebreakers. She raised her hands for quiet. It was like she’d been doing this all her life.

  “The Headman asks you for some of it. He needs some of it for the ringmen who keep New Earth safe, and for their chiefs, and he needs some of it for the teachers and underteachers, who remember things for us. But it was never just John’s metal, and it isn’t just Headman Greenstone’s metal now. New Earth doesn’t belong to him.”

  As the crowd roared again, I looked across the meeting ground and saw that Whiteblade had gone. Small people had filled up the space where his car had been, like skin growing over a wound.

  “And you don’t belong to the Headman, either, or to the chiefs. The Headman is your leader and the leader of the ringmen, and the ringmen are there to protect the people of Gela’s ring. But the people of the ring do not belong to him.”

  The crowd liked this, too, but then suddenly Starlight said a weird weird thing.

  “And the bats, too. They don’t really belong to anyone, any more than you belong to the Headman. Before people came here they had their own houseplaces and clusters, their own writing. They belong to themselves as well.”

  The faces looking up at us became troubled and confused, and who could blame them? Some of these people would be bat keepers, many would have bats working for them in the metaldigs, and most of them were the smallest of small people, with only bats to prevent them from being the smallest things of all.