Dark Eden

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.

It felt kind of shocking to see that silly thing there next to Circle, where none of us were allowed to go.

But then in comes President, the Family Head of Earth, wearing a special President’s wrap with four five big white stars on it done in ash on a square stained blue with starflower juice.

‘Hey! Come back!’ she yells up to them. ‘We don’t want you to do that now. Things are hard hard for us on Earth just now. Every time you take one of those sky-boats out across the stars, we all have to work extra hard to give you the stuff you need to make the Single Force. We haven’t got the time for that now. We’ve got better things to do.’

Mehmet looks at Tommy. Tommy looks at Dixon.

‘Just this once?’ Dixon pleads with the other two. ‘I promise you, it’s what Jesus wants.’

Tommy and Mehmet look at each other.

‘Yeah, just this once,’ they agree, and they carry on right up to Circle, ignoring the President, who shouts up ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ in a silly high voice that makes littles laugh.

In comes Small Sky-Boat, which is meant to be Police Veekle. It also has a bark roof and is carried on another set of branches, but it looks even more wobbly and silly than Big Sky-Boat, because it is made to come apart. The real Police Veekle was as big as Landing Veekle, apparently, and it went round and round sky of Earth, looking for problems and trouble. (Sky there was more full of boats than a hundred Greatpools, and in some of them people were doing bad things, like dropping things onto Earth.)

Sitting in the Small Sky-Boat are Angela our mother and Michael Name-Giver. They were called Orbit Police. Angela has her face darkened with clay and buckfat to look like the real Angela.

‘Go after those silly buggers, you two,’ says President, ‘and get them back before they go and lose our boat in Starry Swirl. They really don’t know what they’re doing, and anyway, they’re not doing what Earth Family wants.’

Being Orbit Police meant that Angela and Michael had the job of stopping people who didn’t do what the President and Family wanted. Their boat hurried after the Big Sky-Boat Defiant, with Angela and Michael both yelling and shouting out:

‘Hey! Come back! Stop! That’s not your boat to take away!’

Angela looks out at us standing all round the clearing. She looks left, she looks right, she looks in front of her and behind, and then she raises her eyebrows and holds out her hands, palms upwards, as if to say, ‘Are you guys not even going to help?’

The kids know quite well this is their invitation to join in.

‘Stop! Don’t do it!’ they yell out excitedly to those three naughty men in Big Sky-Boat. Lots of the little kids have fierce angry faces as if they’re really cross, and really think they can change the story.

‘Stop!’ they yell. ‘Go back!’

But the men in Big Sky-Boat take no notice at all of them, or of Angela and Michael either, until Small Sky-Boat is really close. Then finally Dixon looks back at them.

‘Back off, you two, or you’ll get hurt!’ he yells out. ‘We’ve got the Single Force here. We’ve already started it going. We’ve made Hole-in-Sky and we’re going through. You can’t stop us! So back off!’

‘No, we won’t back off,’ says Angela. ‘We won’t back off and we will stop you — or sink trying. You come back here, mate! We’re not going to let you go!’

If only the men in Big Sky-Boat had listened, was what we were all supposed to think. If only they’d listened and followed the Laws of Earth and respected President, then we wouldn’t be here in Eden, standing around in our buckskin wraps and wondering how you find metal and what lecky-trickity is and how you make a sky-boat. We’d be there on Earth with that big star above us and the light all around us, the sweet white light, pure and bright like the inside of a whitelantern flower, and we’d know about metal and lecky-trickity and all of that. Telly vision, computers, we’d know it all, without even trying.

But then it wouldn’t have been us, though, would it? I thought to myself. Tommy and Angela would never have got together, would they? No way would she have slipped with him if she had all the men on Earth to choose from. And that means that none of us five hundred and thirty-two people would ever have lived on Earth, or on Eden, or anywhere else.

It was a strange strange thought. All this time we’d been grieving about how things were, but if things weren’t this way, there wouldn’t be an ‘us’ to grieve anything.

Well anyway, pretty soon, that Defiant starts to spin round and round like a log in the water at the top of Exit Falls.

‘Oh, oh, oh!’ yell Dixon and Mehmet and Tommy together as they whirl round.

Purple fire is flashing along the long metal spikes that stick out from the huge starship’s shiny metal sides, each spike as tall as a full grown tree. It’s tipping tipping on the edge of Hole-in-Sky, just like a log on the edge of Exit Falls. Single Force is pushing it closer, the Single Force that made the Hole itself. It’s tipping over, it’s tipping, it’s about to fall . . .

Small Sky-Boat comes nearer and nearer till it’s right alongside, and then it starts to go round and round too, and it starts to tip over as well, pulled towards Hole-in-Sky.

‘No! No!’ yell Angela and Michael, the two orbit police.

‘Back off, you idiots!’ yells Mehmet from Defiant. ‘Back off or you’ll get dragged through as well!’

‘Back off!’ yell Dixon and Tommy.

‘It’s too late,’ yells Michael back, ‘the bloody resin’s gone. The skin’s come off the end of our boat. The water’s coming in. We’re sinking. We can’t paddle any more. You’ve got to help us!’

‘Yeah! Help us!’ yells Angela. ‘We’re sinking.’

‘And whose fault is that?’ ask Tommy, Dixon and Mehmet all together, looking at Family round the edge of the clearing, like they expect us to say it’s Michael’s and Angela’s for being foolish enough to chase after them.

‘Yours! Yours! Yours!’ yell out the kids, and the newhairs, and most of the grownups too.

‘Come on! Hurry up! Help us!’ Michael and Angela scream and yell, like they haven’t got time for all this discussion.

Tommy and Mehmet and Dixon look at each other.

‘Quick! Quick! Help them!’ yells out whole Family under the whitelantern trees.

‘Yes,’ says Mehmet, ‘I suppose it is our stupid fault really, and we’ve got to save them. Quick, Dixon. We’ll try and get them into Big Sky-Boat before we drop through Hole.’

This bit is tricky for the people holding the branches, who have to move round each other, and duck under each other’s branches, but, as it tips over, the Police Veekle presses up against the starship Defiant, and Dixon and Mehmet and Tommy reach out and pull Angela and Michael across into their boat, and then Big Sky-Boat, with all five of them inside, moves between the stones and out into the forbidden Circle to show that it has fallen through Hole-in-Sky.

Just in time. Only just in time. The people carrying Small Sky-Boat let it fall into pieces and throw them away in different directions, to show that Police Veekle has been destroyed by Single Force and its purple fire.

Meanwhile the great starship Defiant goes right out into darkness beyond Starry Swirl until Earth and Sun are hidden completely among all those stars. And there they find Eden, a world on its own, far from any stars, which isn’t like Earth at all.

‘There’s no Sun here like we have on Earth,’ says Angela, looking out. ‘But look, everywhere is shining shining, as far as you can see.’

And the others look out, each one in a different direction.

‘Shining everywhere,’ they say. They are amazed amazed, because they didn’t have shining forests on Earth, and they thought light only came from stars and Sun.

‘Let’s get down and look at it,’ says Tommy.

They have that other little Boat inside the Big Sky-Boat, the Landing Veekle, and they take it out and all get into it, helped by the people from Brooklyn that were carrying the Police Veekle until it fell apart. (The real Landing Veekle was round, but we don’t know how to make boats that way, so ours is long and thin.) It carries them down from sky, right into middle of Circle of Stones.

Out get Tommy and Dixon and Mehmet, out gets Angela. But Michael is sick sick and they have to help him down.

‘You bloody idiots,’ Angela tells the three men. ‘Look what you’ve done to Michael. Look what you did to our boat. Look where you’ve brought us. Take us back to Earth now. I want to see my group again. I want to see my mum and my friends. I didn’t want to come here to this dark dark place.’

Tommy looks ashamed, so do Dixon and Mehmet. The Three Disobedient Men all stand in a row with their heads hanging down like naughty kids.

Some of the real kids laugh.

‘Bad boys!’ they shout out. ‘Bad bad boys!’

‘Our boat’s damaged too, I’m afraid,’ says Mehmet. ‘We’re sorry sorry. It’s cracked. It might leak. We’ll try and mend it, but we may sink and drown on the way back.’

‘You bloody idiots,’ says Angela again.

Then Tommy and Dixon and Mehmet get back in the Landing Veekle and go up to the Big Sky-Boat Defiant and squat down by it with pots of glue and skins to try and fix it. And while they work up there, Angela and Michael (who’s started to feel better again) wander about and explore Eden.

But of course really they are wandering around among us, through the crowd, round the edge of the clearing and back again into Circle.

This part of the story is called Michael and His Names, and it’s the bit that kids love the best.

‘Where is this place anyway?’ Angela asks. ‘What do you think it’s called?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Michael. ‘Let me think. Perhaps we could call it . . .’

He pauses.

‘It’s Eden!’ yell out all the kids round Circle, because of course any fool knows that!

Michael frowns, like he thinks he’s heard something but he’s not sure. He holds his hand to his ear.

‘Perhaps,’ he says, ‘we could call it . . .’

‘Eden!’ the kids yell again even louder.

‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘it’s on tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite think of the name.’

‘Ed-en!’ the kids bellow.

Michael smiles.

‘E-den,’ he says slowly, ‘I think we could call it Eden.’

The kids all cheer.

‘Look at this,’ says Angela. ‘What’s this?’

She’s pointing to a whitelantern tree.

‘It’s a tree!’ the kids yell out, laughing. How could anyone be so dumb as to not know what a tree is?

I guess it made everyone feel good to see Angela and all of them not knowing these things we knew so well, after we’d had to listen for so long to that big big list of wonderful things they had on Earth, which we didn’t understand at all. It was kind of reassuring to know that they didn’t even know what a tree was, when we were feeling useless useless for not knowing about metal and telly vision and horses and the Single Force.

‘We’ll call it . . .’

Michael hesitated. The kids laughed. They loved all this. I suppose I did too. I loved it but at the same time I hated it for trapping us and making us feel so helpless and babyish and small.

‘We’ll call it . . .’

‘A tree!’ yell out the kids.

The grownups are smiling and laughing too, and a lot of them are joining in with the kids. Everyone is tired tired, what with the wakings being changed, and the long weary list of Earth Things, and the Laws and the Genda and all, but now everyone is brightening up again.

‘We’ll call it . . . a . . . tree!’ goes Michael, who is really a skinny little guy of forty wombs or so called Luke Brooklyn who’s mainly known in Family for being clever with blackglass.

Everyone cheers.

‘And what’s this?’ asks Tommy, looking over from Big Sky-Boat, which he’s trying to fix, and pointing at a little jewel bat swooping overhead. (He was supposed to be up in sky at this point, but no one seemed to mind!)

‘What’s what?’ goes Michael, looking where Tommy pointed. The bat has gone.

‘This!’ says Tommy, pointing to another bat.

‘What’s what?’ goes Michael again.

‘This here!’ says Tommy, showing him another bat again.

‘Oh that,’ says Michael. ‘Well, I don’t know about that. I’ve no idea. I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t know what to say.’

‘It’s a bat!’ yell the kids.

Michael frowns and screws up his face. He can almost hear them but not quite.

‘It’s a bat!’ they yell again.

He holds his hand to his ear.

‘It’s a bat!’ the kids bellow again.

He frowns like he still can’t hear, and he scratches his head.

Michael was called the Name-Giver because he gave us the words that we still use for all the animals and plants that live in Eden, and found out things about them like how they came up from Underworld when everything was ice, and how dry starflowers could feed our skin like Sun did on Earth. But in the Show he was also the name-hearer, because he didn’t actually choose the names. He only heard us, faintly faintly, shouting them back to him from the future. And then he took them, and gave them to the things in the world, and sent them out again to us the slow way, through the five six long generations between us and him.

‘It — is — a — BAT!’ the kids yell even louder.

He nods. He smiles.

‘I think we’ll call it a bat!’ he says, and everybody cheers.

And then the same thing happens with flutterbyes and birds and anything else that Luke Brooklyn happens to see, until Dixon brings the game to a stop by calling down from sky.

‘Michael? Gela? We’ve done all we can without metal and lecky-trickity to help us,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t look that good to be honest. Do you want to chance it, or do you want to stay here?’

‘I’m going back,’ says Michael. ‘I miss Earth, and I’ve already given names to everything that’s here, so my job’s done.’

The other three men come back from Defiant (they don’t bother with the Landing Veekle this time: they just walk). And Michael walks over to stand with them, leaving Angela facing them all by herself.

‘I miss Earth too,’ says Angela, ‘I miss it so much. I miss Sun and I miss all the people I love. But I’d still rather live in this place than die in sky. If one of you blokes will stay here with me, then if no one comes back for us quickly, we could have kids and start a new Family here in Eden, and wait for however long it takes for Earth to come and find us.’

Of course, it wasn’t Angela really, that woman standing there with her face smeared with fat and clay, it was a plump little red-headed woman called Suzie Brooklyn. And she wasn’t much good at acting. She didn’t know how to say the words like she really meant them, and you could hear she was just repeating things that someone else had taught her. But even so it was sad sad, seeing Angela there all alone, facing those four men, making up her mind not to go back to Earth.

‘Go on! Give her a slip!’ some man yells out from over in Starflower group, and quite a few people laugh, including Angela, who has to put her hand over her mouth to stop herself.

‘I’ll stop with you, Angela,’ says Tommy. ‘We took you here against your will. We should let you have what you want now. We owe you that.’

It’s said that of those four men, it was Mehmet that she fancied most, and Tommy that most got on her nerves. But Mehmet didn’t offer to stay with her, and Tommy did.

‘You owe her a damn good slipping, mate!’ that bloke yells out again.

Not so many people find it funny the second time, but Tommy is really a bloke called John Brooklyn (a tall thin dark bloke with curly black hair, who reckoned to know all the best fishing places in Longpool) and he does find it funny. He sort of grins and gives the bloke a thumbs up, forgetting that he is supposed to be playing a part. And that makes Angela giggle too, and she has to compose her face and make it sad again.

‘You owe me more than that, mate,’ she says, but she holds out her hand anyway, and he leaves the other three, and walks over to her, and takes it. And then the other three say goodbye and they get into the Landing Veekle and go up to Big Sky-Boat Defiant in sky. With a lot of difficulty, whole of the Landing Veekle is put back into Defiant with the men still inside it, and then it’s carried out of Circle.

Those three, Michael, Mehmet and Dixon, the three that went back up to the starship, were the Three Companions. (They weren’t the same three as the Three Disobedient Men, because Michael was with them, and Tommy wasn’t.) And of course, we didn’t know what happened to them. Did they get back to Earth? Did they drown? And if they drowned, did the starship get back without them, like an empty boat drifts to the bank? We all thought it must have done, or at least got near enough to Earth to shout out with its Rayed Yo. How could a huge great thing like that be completely lost?

‘This sky-boat is so busted up,’ yells down Mehmet as Defiant moves out of the clearing, ‘that they’ll probably need to build a whole new sky-boat to come and fetch you.’

‘Yeah,’ says Dixon. ‘It could take a long time getting together all that metal and plastic from under the ground. You’re going to have to be patient patient.’

‘But we won’t forget you,’ calls out Michael as they disappear into the trees. ‘And Earth won’t forget you either.’

‘I wish you’d never brought me here,’ says plump red-headed Suzie Brooklyn.

She knows this is an important moment, and she tries her best to put Angela’s anger and sadness into her voice.

‘I wish I hadn’t too,’ says John Brooklyn.

‘I wish I could go home to Earth,’ she says.

‘A waking will come sooner or later when they come back for us,’ he says, saying the words all in a rush, without any feeling at all. ‘Or someone else will come in their place. You’ll see. We belong on Earth. Our eyes nod . . .’

He pulls a face at his mistake, and corrects himself.

‘Our eyes need the bright light. So do our hearts. We won’t be . . . We won’t be here forever. If they could make Hole-in-Sky once, they can do it again.’

Suzie Brooklyn nods.

‘We’ll make a Circle of Stones here to show where Landing Veekle stood,’ she says. ‘That way we’ll always remember the place and know to stay here. And we’ll hunt in forest round it and fish in the pools. And we’ll tell our children, and our children’s children, they must always stay here, and wait, and be patient, and one waking Earth will come.’

‘Yes, Gela, my dear,’ says John Brooklyn. ‘But don’t you worry. Earth will come, it really will. One waking they’ll come and take us home.’

One waking they’ll come and take us home.

Tom’s dick and Harry’s, there were tears all round the clearing.