Dark Eden

by Chris Beckett

  I heard someone coming over to use the latrine. It was Old Roger – he’d be grunting and spluttering and stinking there for half an hour – so I slipped the ring back in its pocket and moved away.

  12

  Tina Spiketree

  So third waking of Any Virsry came, and we were all back together in Circle Clearing. Everyone in the world was squeezed into the space between Circle and trees (really everyone this time because all the hunters had returned by now), with jewel bats diving back and forth above us and forest humming all around. I stood with my sister Jane – bloody group leader Liz had made me stay with Spiketrees this time – and John stayed over with the Redlanterns, so I could only wave to him. He looked tired tired. I guess we all did, but he did more than most.

  Council got ready out there in middle of Circle and Oldest were propped up there on their padded logs by six seven of their helpers, and then Any Virsry started off again with the Mementoes being brought out to remind us yet again that we were all one Family and that we came here from Earth. Out came the Boots, the Belt, the Backpack, the Kee Board, and the helpers took them round all the groups so people could reach out and touch them and feel the weird stuff they’re made of that no one knows where to find or how to make (except maybe Boots, which seem to be made of some kind of skin). Kids were excited excited. All the littles wanted to touch Kee Board, and push down those little squares with letters on them. Oldest were allowed to take these things out of their hollow log whenever they wanted, but they were only shown to whole Family once every year at Any Virsries, and for little kids, seeing something from that long ago was like seeing something from a dream. They couldn’t quite believe that it was all really there again.

  And it wasn’t just kids that got excited either. Some grownups cried when they saw the Mementoes, and when they reached out to touch them, some had trembling hands, full of hope and longing, for many people thought that when you touched the things from Earth it made aches and pains go away, or brought dreams into your head of that bright bright world, bright as the inside of a lanternflower. And as for that horrible Redlantern woman, Lucy Lu, she went into a bloody trance.

  ‘I feel them!’ she cried out, the lying slinker. ‘I feel their presence all around us!’

  But pretty soon helpers gathered the Mementoes all together again, shoved them back into the log and closed them inside with a greased lid, and then Family Head Caroline went pacing round in front of Council and Oldest, going through the Genda and telling us what Council had agreed, with little Jane London, the Secret Ree, hurrying behind her with the notes she’d scratched at the meeting on pieces of bark.

  Behind the two of them were lined up all the group leaders: our Liz (that fat, ugly, bossy old thing), and old blind Tom Brooklyn, and silly gushing Flower Batwing, who thinks she is young and pretty when she’s really old and wrinkled and dried up, and Mary Starflower, who likes to draw in breath when someone else speaks, like they’ve said such a terrible, stupid thoughtless thing that she wonders whether it can ever ever be undone, and Julie London with her hard, sharp, pushy face, and Candy Fishcreek, who always whispers so that everyone has to be quiet quiet to hear her, and Susan Blueside, who doesn’t seem smart enough to be a group leader but is stubborn like a lump of rock. Susan Blueside didn’t look too happy, so I guessed she’d lost the battle over London group’s move. But the one that stood out from the rest was Bella Redlantern. She was right at the end of the line, next to Liz, but the space between her and Liz was fully twice the space that was left between any other two of them.

  ‘London is to be allowed to move ten yards Blueway,’ Caroline announced, ‘as long as they rebuild Blueside fence ten yards further out and help Blueside build new shelters.’

  Secret Ree winced and pointed at the writing on one of her pieces of bark. Caroline frowned for a moment, but then corrected herself.

  ‘London is to be allowed to move twelve yards, as long as they rebuild Blueside fence twelve yards further out,’ she said.

  She studied the bark writing for a moment to remind herself what was next.

  ‘Each group,’ she went on, ‘is only going to be allowed to fish on Greatpool during their normal group waking, and each group is only allowed one boat and one net out there at at a time. And no net used on Greatpool can be more than four yards long. This is to stop taking too many fish.’

  There were some grumbling sounds from people in Family who liked to think of themselves as fishers. (Silly buggers. Would they rather catch all the fish and then have no fishing to do at all?) Caroline glanced across at the notes again.

  ‘Youngmums,’ she said, ‘will have to scavenge and hunt like everyone else when their babies are three periods old. Clawfeet and oldies can look after the littles.’

  There were grumbles from youngmums and clawfeet, but on Caroline went.

  I waited. I didn’t really expect anything but I wondered if there’d be anything to suggest that they’d even considered John’s idea about Family moving out wider and not going on forever huddling round the old Circle of Stones. But no, nothing. And when they’d been through all the stuff that had been decided, Caroline said this:

  ‘We have only discussed the properly agreed Genda. We have not discussed things that were not properly raised. And we’ve all agreed that Family must stay together, here, side by side, around these stones that mark the spot where Tommy and Angela and the Three Companions came down from Starry Swirl, and from where the Companions set off on their way back to Earth. Family must not be broken. We must remain one, and we must remain in the place where our sisters and brothers from Earth will come to find us, as we all know one waking they will. And we must work together and live peacefully so as to try and be worthy to be taken back to our true home, even though we’ve forgotten so much, and fallen so far from what we once were.’

  She looked out towards where Redlanterns were standing. She searched the faces until she found John’s. She looked straight at him.

  ‘I hope that’s understood,’ she said. ‘It’s Council’s decision and it’s mine, and it must be accepted by whole Family. And that means everyone here.’

  I saw John look across at Bella Redlantern, but she was staring straight down at the ground, like there was something really interesting going on down there.

  I could see John was angry angry. I could see him struggling inside himself.

  Caroline looked round at us all, letting her words sink in.

  ‘And that’s the end of the . . .’ she began.

  But then John broke in. It was like sap bursting from a cut tree.

  ‘Think about it, Caroline,’ he called out. ‘Work it out. It doesn’t take an Einstein.’

  All round Clearing, people groaned. Not this again. Not this rude little newhair once more. Ugly David Redlantern was pushing towards John through Redlantern group.

  ‘If we were two once and now we’re five hundred and thirty-two,’ John went on, ‘how big will Family be in another . . .?’

  Whack! David slapped him hard across the back of his head with his big hard hand.

  ‘Leave him be!’ I yelled out.

  ‘Get off him, David!’ I heard John’s faithful Gerry shouting, and I saw him pushing and shoving at David. But David swatted Gerry away like he was an ant, grabbed John by the hair and stood there solid as a tree.

  Meanwhile, all round Circle people reacted, each one in their own way. Some laughed, some gasped, a few cheered, and many many called out in angry disapproval, not at what David had done, but at John for causing trouble.

  I could see David lean forward and hiss out a warning, and then he gripped John’s hair more tightly, lifting him up a little so he was hanging by his own hair roots.

  ‘And that’s the end of the Genda,’ Caroline went on, with that particular rock-like stubbornness that she did so well, as if nothing had happened at all and she was just carrying on with what she had to say, ‘and now it’s time for me to go through the Laws that Harry, our second father,
and his three sisters, carved on these Circle Clearing trees.’

  Secret Ree passed her some pieces of bark with the Laws copied onto them, and then walked to the edge of the clearing through London group, so that while Caroline walked round inside Circle, she could walk round the trees and point to each carving, as Caroline read out from the bark what it said.

  ‘You mustn’t kill anything except animals to eat and animals that are dangerous,’ read Caroline. ‘You mustn’t do anything to harm the family.’

  She paused and looked round at us all.

  ‘That means you must not do anything to break Family up,’ she said.

  ‘You mustn’t slip with a child or with anyone that doesn’t want to do it,’ she went on, ‘and grown men mustn’t slip with young girls.

  ‘You mustn’t steal things.

  ‘You must come to Any Virsries and to Strornry Meetings.

  ‘You must respect the Old.

  ‘And that,’ said Caroline, frowning round at us, ‘means not just Oldest, but group leaders, and Family Head, and all grownups.’

  She glanced in John’s direction for a moment, and then went on reading.

  ‘You must look after clawfeet.

  ‘You mustn’t foul streams or pools.

  ‘You must wait for Earth to come, and keep the customs of Earth, so Earth will take you home.’

  John had a point, I thought, he really did. Of course we wanted to go back to Earth, but could we really wait in this one place forever, just in case they came?

  And was that really the custom of Earth, anyway, to wait in one place? They were the ones who built a boat that could travel through the stars.

  13

  John Redlantern

  ‘I’m watching you, John, so keep your mouth shut,’ growled David, shoving me forward suddenly so I nearly fell.

  I wanted to rub the back of my head where he’d been pulling my hair, but of course I didn’t. I acted like it hadn’t hurt at all. And I ignored Gerry too, standing beside me, looking anxiously into my face. Gela’s tits, there was no way I was going to admit to him, or to David, or to anyone else that David had hurt or upset me. I stood up straight and watched what was going on in Circle, like nothing had happened. That was Caroline’s game and I could play it too.

  Helpers were lifting Mitch and Stoop and Gela to their wobbly feet. We’d got to the bit of Any Virsry called Earth Things, where we had to listen to three old blind people tell us about things that they’d never seen and didn’t understand.

  Scrawny old Mitch told how Earth spun round and round like a top so half of it is all lighted up by the star and half of it is dark, and saggy grey Gela told how the people there found metal in the ground that could be used to make knives that wouldn’t smash like blackglass does.

  ‘And they found a thing called the Single Force,’ she said, ‘that could carry them between the stars.’

  ‘They found another kind of force that was even better than that,’ broke in little Stoop excitedly, with his blind eyes rolling around in his soft fat head, ‘a force that could be made to run along strings for miles and miles, and could be used for light and heat and for machines called telly visions that could make pictures that could move and speak. It was called Li . . .’ He stumbled on the word, just like old one-legged Jeffo had done, over by Dixon Stream. ‘It was called Li . . . Leck . . . Lecky-trickity . . .’

  ‘Li . . . Leck . . . Lecky-trickity . . .’ Gerry mimicked under his breath, looking at me to see if I was pleased.

  ‘It’s important to remember the Single Force,’ Gela came back, not happy with Stoop’s interruption. Her blind eyes bulged at us. ‘That’s what got us here, and that’s what will take us home. And not only that,’ she carried on hastily before the others could break in, ‘but they had animals called horses too that could carry them about. Imagine that! Animals!’

  ‘And cars,’ Mitch said, and began to cough and cough while his helpers whacked him on the back.

  The helpers got out the Earth Models, and then, with a lot of coughing and wheezing, Oldest told us about houses, which were shelters as big as hills, and roads, which were paths made with hard shiny metal, and trains and planes and drains.

  ‘Drains were like streams underneath every shelter,’ Stoop said. ‘They’d wash all your piss and shit away, into a pool as big as Greatpool, covered with a roof of stone.’

  ‘Planes were a kind of bird made of metal,’ Mitch said.

  ‘Trains were long thin shelters that slid along a smooth metal path,’ said Gela, ‘so you could go to sleep in one bit of a forest and wake up in another.’

  They were flagging now, and the group leaders began to prompt them with other things to say.

  ‘What about hosples where they made you well?’ whispered Mary Starflower.

  ‘What about those clones with their big feet and their red noses?’ murmured Susan Blueside.

  ‘What about money?’ prompted Tom Brooklyn.

  ‘Ah,’ said old Gela, ‘money was numbers you held in your head.’

  ‘You could trade them for things you wanted,’ said Mitch.

  Trade things for numbers in other people’s heads? Nobody’d ever understood what that meant, but Oldest spoke about it at every Any Virsry, as if a waking would come when someone would jump up and yell out, ‘Yes of course! Of course! I’ve figured it out now! I know how that worked!’

  What was the point of saying words if we didn’t know what they meant? We were like blind people pretending to see.

  But they say that even Tommy and Angela themselves didn’t understand how Lecky-trickity worked or how you made the Single Force. They didn’t even know where metal was to be found, or how to get it out of the stone it was mixed with, except that you had to heat it with fire.

  Littles got hungry and started to grizzle and cry. Newhairs giggled and whispered and pinched each other, and Oldest themselves, who’d started off so excited that they couldn’t bear to let each other finish what they had to say, got too tired to carry on. In fact they were so drained and pale and wobbly all of a sudden that they looked like they might die right there in front of us in their precious Circle of Stones. They had to be helped to step back and sit down and wrap up with skins and be given stuff to drink. And then Caroline and Council and Oldest and helpers got out of the way, and in came Big Sky-Boat, and everyone cheered and clapped and laughed.

  It was time for the Show, and it was Brooklyn’s turn to do it. A whole bunch of them were carrying that great silly wooden thing that was supposed to be the starship Defiant. It was three times the length of a normal boat, and not quite straight. It had poles sticking up from it to hold up a wobbly bark roof like the roof of a shelter, and long branches sticking out of its sides for people to carry it with. It even had another little boat inside it, which was supposed to be the Landing Veekle. And crammed in, at the front and back, were the Three Disobedient Men, laughing and waving to us.

  Of course Big Sky-Boat was tiny tiny compared with the real Defiant. The real starship was longer than Greatpool, and so big that if it ever came down to the ground it would never get back up again into sky. (Even the real Landing Veekle was the size of Circle of Stones, and it was carried inside of Defiant.) But all the same our silly little Big Sky-Boat still looked stupidly big compared to the little log boats that we used to fish on Greatpool and Longpool, and it had so much stuff on top of it that anyone could see that it would have toppled over straight away if you actually put it in water. Plus, with that curve in middle of it, there was no way you could have paddled it straight.

  But of course Big Sky-Boat never did get put in water. It was carried every Any Virsry by a bunch of people holding the ends of three strong branches that were stuck through holes in its sides. Those three grinning Brooklyn men inside it were supposed to be Tommy Schneider, our first father, from whose dick came every one of us, and his two friends Dixon Thorleye and Mehmet Haribey. They were setting out from Earth into Starry Swirl, as calmly and cheerfully as if
they were just going fishing out on Greatpool. Tommy’s face had white wood-ash mixed with buckfat smeared over it, to show that he had white skin.

  ‘Let’s go further out,’ says Dixon, when they’re getting near the edge of Circle of Stones.

  ‘No, we shouldn’t,’ says Tommy. ‘Earth Family doesn’t want us to do that, do they?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Mehmet, ‘and this Sky-Boat belongs to everyone, remember, not just to us.’

  It was said that it took thousands of hundreds of people to build Defiant, and take it up to sky in pieces, and to put it together up there. It took thousands of people all across Earth to find the metal and plastic and everything else they needed in the rocks, and thousands more to get it out and carry it to where it was needed. All Earth was part of the work, which took hundreds or thousands of wombtimes.

  ‘I mean,’ says Mehmet, ‘it’s not like we made it ourselves.’

  ‘True,’ says Tommy, looking serious serious. But then he smiles and looks out at the people all around the clearing: in front of him, behind, left, right.

  ‘Should we do it, kids?’ he calls out. ‘Should we go further out?’

  ‘No! No! Don’t do it!’ yell all the kids in Family, laughing and squealing with delight.

  ‘Yeah but why not?’ says Dixon. ‘It won’t hurt anyone. And anyway, I feel that it’s what Jesus wants us to do. To cross over Starry Swirl and find new worlds. Let’s just do it!’

  ‘No! No!’ yells everyone.

  But Tommy laughs, and cups his hand over his ear, and shrugs, like he can’t hear us any more.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘You’ve persuaded me. Let’s give it a go, eh?’

  ‘Well,’ says Mehmet, ‘I suppose so. But I feel bad bad about Earth Family.’

  ‘They’ll get over it,’ says Dixon, and off they move in their giant boat right up to the edge of Circle of Stones.