Dark Eden

46 John Redlantern

We spent one two hours in there, just trying to get the talking face back on the screen. All the time people were pushing to get in, pushing each other out of the way, pushing the bloody little squares, pushing past the bones of the Three Companions like they were just dead twigs in forest.

‘Watch what you’re doing!’ I said. ‘You’ll knock the others’ heads off as well!’

No one was even listening.

‘Try that one there!’ someone said.

‘No, try pushing the ones that Flower pushed!’

‘No, don’t do that! What’s the point of that? We’ve tried that a hundred times. Leave those alone and let me try this one.’

‘Hey! Back off and let me through, I’ve got some more lanterns here. Let’s get some light on this!’

The strain in people’s faces! The desperation to get someone they didn’t know to appear for one moment more on that screen and speak words to them that they could hardly understand! That one thing, the screen with its voice, had taken over from all the other wonders here: the dead Companions, the Landing Veekle itself. Perhaps they just didn’t want to think about what all this really meant.

I crawled back out through the hole and left them to it. Jeff and Harry and Gela were already outside. Gela and Jeff were looking after a couple of babies plus five six littles who didn’t want to stay in the sky-boat because they found it scary. And Harry agreed with them about that. He didn’t like the bones or the metal cave, and he’d hated hated the strange voice that spoke to us from the screen. Now he was pacing around and muttering and moaning to himself, wanting to get away.

‘Harry doesn’t like it. Harry wants to go.’

Tina came out soon after me, then Janny, then Dix, all looking kind of shaken and a bit ashamed, like they’d let something bad come inside them and take them over, and now they regretted it.

‘I reckon we should stop this, ‘I said. ‘I don’t think the talking face will come back.’

Tina nodded. I stood up.

‘Come out now! Everyone out!’

No one argued with me. They all emerged one by one through the hole in the boat — Gerry, Lucy Batwing, Mike, Clare, Jane, little Flower, Clare . . . with Martha and Lucy London coming out last of all, both of them crying bitterly.

‘Listen up, everyone!’ I called out.

They all went quiet quiet, standing there next to the Veekle under the bright whitelantern trees, with the smooth soft sheen of Worldpool nearby.

I looked round at their faces, grownups and children, excited, scared, hungry for something that they didn’t even understand, and I tried to figure out what I ought to say. It was hard hard because I’d been excited too, and I’d felt that same hunger, and, like all of them, I was still dazed dazed by the face of Michael Name-Giver himself talking to us from the screen. (Who could believe that such a thing would ever happen to us?) But somehow I needed to help the others make some sense out of it, when I hadn’t really made sense of it myself.

‘So . . .’ I began. ‘So now we know how the story of the Three Companions ended. After all this time. After . . . all these wombs, and . . . and all these generations.’

I talked without knowing what I was going to say, but something was creeping up into my thoughts. It was like when you first spot a leopard in forest. To start with you’re still not sure if it really is a leopard or if it’s only a patch of flowers, and then you’re pretty sure it is a leopard but you still can’t quite make out its exact shape. And then you see it.

‘And that means, doesn’t it, that they . . . That means they never got back to Defiant. And . . . that . . . means . . .’

Oh Gela’s heart, that meant . . .

I looked at their faces. I could see some of them getting it too: Gela, Tina, Dix, the quicker, stronger ones. I took a deep breath to try and get control over my voice.

‘And that means that Defiant never left Eden at all. I . . . I suppose it must still be up there in sky somewhere, too high up for us to see. All this time, we’ve imagined it somewhere far out across Starry Swirl, but it’s been up there all the while. And that means . . .’

‘That means they’ll never come for us,’ wailed Lucy London. ‘Never, never, never!’

Pretty well everyone was crying — grownups, kids, men, women — crying and crying for that old old dream that would never never come true. Tina was crying, Gela was crying, Gerry was crying, Martha London was wailing wailing and rocking back and forth like a mum that’s lost a child. And there were tears running down my face too, even while I tried to get us past this. Only Jeff wasn’t crying. I think he’d understood what this meant from the moment we saw the Veekle, and now he was calmly watching everyone with his gentle interested eyes.

(Right behind him, on a whitelantern branch, a bat was watching too. Its head tipped slightly on one side, it watched, and fanned its wings and scratched its ear thoughtfully with a single thin black finger.)

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘It means we have to give up on the idea that we’re waiting for Earth folk to come for us and take us back again to . . . back to . . .’

It took me three tries to get out the words, I was so sad sad. And yet it was me that that had destroyed Circle, me that had said we shouldn’t just sit and stew in Circle Valley, waiting for help from Earth.

‘ . . .back to that place where the light comes down from sky, bright as the inside of a whitelantern, and where they see clearly when we’re blind, and know about all those things that we have to try so hard hard hard to figure out.’

I was getting some control of myself now. I was pleased about that. And I could see them all looking at me, waiting for me to make it better for them, and I was pleased about that too.

‘But listen, everyone. We’re no worse off than we were before we found this thing. We’ve still got each other. We’ve still got fruit and meat to eat. We’ve still got Eden, just the same as it was last waking and all the wakings before, for all those generations. Nothing has changed except for one thing, and in a way it’s a good thing. Now we know for sure we can just get on with things and don’t have to wait around for Earth.’

I looked at Tina, and that reminded me of something she’d said to me once by Deep Pool, when we were newhairs back in Family.

‘It’s like when a kid gets lost in forest. The kid’s mum can’t rest, can’t get on with anything but searching and crying and searching, until they find the bones. And when they do find the bones and bring them to her, she’s sad sad, and she screams and cries and rocks and tears her wraps. But at least she knows there’s no point in searching any more, and slowly slowly she gets back to her life as it was before, and back to her other kids, knowing there’s no need to look out any more for the one that’s gone. We’ve always known that Earth might never come. We’ve always known that, even if Earth did come one waking, it probably wouldn’t be while we were alive. I mean, that’s what decided Tommy and Angela to stay here in the first place, isn’t it? But we’ve always deep down secretly hoped that Earth would come soon and carry us away from all our sadness and trouble, even if the odds were against it, and even though we knew — don’t forget this either — even though we knew that Earth had bad bad troubles of its own. We just couldn’t help it. We didn’t fully give ourselves to Eden because we were dreaming about that other place full of light. But now we can really be here.’

Jeff recognized that I’d got that last bit from him, and he gave me his funny little smile. Tina nodded. And Gerry, even though he was still crying crying, looked proud of me, and that always felt good. I nodded to myself. I thought I’d done well. I was pretty sure I’d got through to most of them.

I wiped tears from my own eyes and finished what I had to say.

‘We can’t stay here,’ I told them, ‘we’re still too close to Tall Tree ridge. And we can’t take this sky-boat with us. So we’ll just have to leave it behind us here. But it’s good that we found it. It’s good good. Those three have been sitting in there all this time like they were still trying to cross sky and finish their story, but now we’ve found them, that’s all over. They’re back in our story again and we can let them rest.’

They were back in our story. They existed again, and I was pleased about that, in spite of the sadness and loneliness of knowing they never even made it to Defiant, and the horrible sadness of losing even the hope of Earth.

For a moment I had a sense of people from the future all around us, generations and generations of them, watching this scene, calling to us in their faint thin voices. But I couldn’t make out what they were saying because living people right in front of me were shouting things out as well.

‘What will we do with the bones?’ asked Tina.

‘We can’t just go,’ sobbed Martha London, arm in arm with bulgy-eyed tear-stained Lucy. ‘There’s telly vision here, and lecky-trickity, just like Earth.’

‘We should take the bones out of the Veekle and bury them properly with stones,’ Gela said. ‘Give them a funeral.’

‘No time to find stones,’ I said at once, pulling myself back into the moment. ‘And anyway, remember why we buried people under stones when they died? It was so Earth could find them and take them home. And that’s . . .’ I stopped to steady my voice. ‘Well, like we’ve just talked about, that’s not going to happen, is it?’

Several people started to sob again at the thought that even our bones would never return to Earth. But one or two were already trying to figure out a new way of dealing with our dead.

‘Maybe we should just take them out and lie down them here, then,’ said Janny.

‘What?’ said Gela. ‘So David’s lot can find them and take them back for Lucy Lu to drool over?’

‘I know what we’ll do,’ said Tina. ‘We’ll put them in Worldpool, and all that swirly water will take them away.’

That was what we did.

Clare scratched their names on stones, with her tongue hanging out just like Secret Ree’s, and we laid them on the ground next to Veekle like the stones in Ash Clearing back in Circle Valley:

FIRST DIXON, ASTRONORT

MEHMET, ASTRONORT

MICHAL, ORBIT PLICE

Then we carried the bones down the rocks, and waded two three yards out to the place where the bottom of Worldpool dropped down into a deep deep waterforest. And we let them fall, twisting and turning and falling apart as they sank through the water lanterns and the shining shoals of fish, deeper and deeper into Eden.

We all clapped and cheered, except for sobbing Lucy and Martha London, who were still grieving for the telly vision and the lecky-trickity. And then we went back up the rocks and everyone started loading things up again onto the bucks. I didn’t even have to ask them to do it.

‘John? Alright? Everything’s ready now. Shall we go?’

Tina spoke in that pained voice she used when she could see I was troubled about something. Bloody old Tina, it was always the same: she wanted me to show myself more, but she wanted me to hide myself more as well, both at the same time.

‘Just a moment,’ I said. ‘Just give me a moment.’

I walked over to the edge of the cliff. The shining water of Worldpool was bright bright and three big fatbucks were swooping and swerving through the swaying branches and coloured lanterns of underwater trees.

I took Gela’s ring off my little finger and turned it around in my hand. Of all the things we had in Eden that came from Earth, this was still the most perfect and the most beautiful, this little ring with the words inside it: ‘To Angela with love from Mum and Dad’. But we were saying goodbye to Earth here, weren’t we? So perhaps I should leave it behind here, or throw it out into Worldpool, along with the bones of the Three Companions?

‘No! No! No! Don’t leave it!’ called out the voices of future people, looking in on our story, appalled. ‘It’s the most precious thing left! You will never, never be forgiven!’

But other voices said the opposite:

‘Leave it! Leave it behind! It’ll just bring trouble, trouble, trouble, and more blood. You destroyed Circle, you’re leaving the sky-boat behind, so why not leave Gela’s ring as well and be done with it all?’

I turned the ring round in my hand. I held it up close to my face so I could read the message written inside it to the woman who was the mother of everyone. Everyone’s mother, even mine.

I looked back towards the others waiting beside the broken sky-boat.

I slid the ring back onto my little finger.

Starry Swirl shone down. It shone down over everything: the wide forest with its thousand thousand trees, the fatbucks gliding through the shining water, the black black shadow of Snowy Dark, the distant volcano burning red . . . It even shone down over David and his Guards somewhere out there, still far away, but creeping towards us like little angry ants over the great face of Eden.

Tina and Gerry came over to me, and so did handsome gentle hobbling Jeff.

I smiled. These were my Three Companions, I thought, these were my First Three, the ones who were with me from the beginning of all this.

As he reached me, Jeff opened his mouth to speak.

I put my finger to his lips.

‘I know, Jeff, I know. We are here. I just said it back there, didn’t I? I said it for you. We really are here.’

And Tina laughed her sweetly mocking laugh.

Hoom! Hoom! Hoom! went a starbird out there in forest between us and Tall Tree ridge.

Aaaah! Aaaah! Aaaah! another one answered back.

‘We should pick up those loose bits of metal there and take them with us,’ I said. ‘They’ll be useful for spears and knives.’