Chris Beckett: Dark Eden

Of course, with no trees to give off light with their lanternflowers or to warm the air with their trunks, it was dark dark up there — you could only just barely make things out in the starlight and the light from the edge of forest — and it was cold cold, specially on our feet. But us newhairs dared each other to run up as far as the snow. The ice felt like it was burning, it was so cold, and most kids took ten twenty steps, yelled and came running down again. But I took Gerry right up to the ridge of the hill and then, ignoring Old Roger yelling at us to come back, went far enough down the other side so that the others couldn’t see us.

‘We’ve made our point now, haven’t we, John?’ Gerry said, shivering. We only had waistwraps on, and buckskins round our shoulders, and our feet were hurting like they’d been skinned. ‘Shall we go back down to rest of them now?’

My cousin Gerry was about a wombtime younger than me — his dad was giving his mum a slip, in other words, about the time that I was born — and he was devoted to me, he thought I was wonderful, he’d do just about anything I asked.

‘No, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Be quiet and listen.’

‘Listen to what?’

‘To the silence, you idiot.’

There was no hmmmmmmmm of forest, no hmmph, hmmph, hmmph of pumping trees, no starbirds going hoom, hoom, hoom in the distance, no flutterbyes flapping and flicking, no whoosh of diving bats. There was no sound at all except a quiet little tinkle of water all around us coming out from under the snow in hundreds of little streams. And it was dark dark. No tree-light up there. The only light came from Starry Swirl.

We could barely make out each other’s faces. It made me think about that place called Earth where Tommy and Angela first came from, way back in the beginning with the Three Companions, and where one waking we would all return, if only we stayed in the right place and were good good good. There were no lanterntrees back there on Earth, no glittery flutterbyes or shiny flowers, but they had a big big light that we don’t have at all. It came from a giant star. And it was so bright that it would burn out your eyes if you stared at it.

‘When people talk about Earth,’ I said to Gerry, ‘they always talk about that huge bright star, don’t they, and all the lovely light it must have given? But Earth turned round and round, didn’t it, and half the time it wasn’t facing the star at all but was dark dark, without lanterns or anything, only the light the Earth people made for themselves.’

‘What are you talking about, John?’ Gerry said, with his teeth chattering. ‘And why can’t we go back down again if you just want to talk?’

‘I was thinking about that darkness. They called it Night, didn’t they? I’m just thinking that it must have been like this. What you get up here on Snowy Dark: it’s what they would have called Night.’

‘Hey John!’ Old Roger was calling from the far side of the ridge. ‘Hey Gerry!’ He was scared we’d freeze to death or get lost or something up there.

‘Better go back,’ Gerry said.

‘Let him stew a minute first.’

‘But I’m freezing freezing , John.’

‘Just one minute.’

‘Okay, one minute,’ said Gerry, ‘but that’s it.’

He actually counted it out on his pulse, one to sixty, the silly boy, and then he jumped up and we both climbed back over the ridge. Gerry went running straight down to the others, but I stood up there for a moment, partly to show I was my own man and didn’t go scurrying back for Old Roger or anyone, and partly to take in how things looked from up there on top of the ridge: the shining forest, with darkness all around it, and above everything the bright bright stars. That’s our home down there, I thought, that’s our whole world. It felt weird to be looking in on it from outside. And though in one way the bright forest stretching away down there seemed big big, in another way it seemed small small, that little shining place with the stars above it and darkness looking down on it from the mountains all around.

Back with the others, Gerry made a big thing about his freezing feet, asking some people to feel them and rub them, begging others to let him ride on their backs until he had warmed up, and generally hopping and skipping around like an idiot. That was how Gerry dealt with people. ‘I’m just a fool, I won’t hurt anyone,’ that was his message. But I wasn’t like that. ‘I’m not a fool by any means,’ was my message, ‘and don’t assume I won’t hurt you either.’ I acted as if I didn’t feel the cold in my feet at all, and pretty soon they were so numb anyway that I really didn’t. I noticed Tina watching me and smiling, and I smiled back.

On we went, just below the snow and along the top edge of forest, where there was a bit of light from the trees, Old Roger grumbling and moaning about how newhairs had no respect any more and things were different from how they used to be.

‘Old fool was scared he’d have to go back to Family and tell your mums he’d lost you,’ said Tina. ‘He was thinking of the trouble he’d be in. No more slippy for Old Roger.’

‘Like he gets it anyway,’ said dark-eyed Fox, who my mum had told me once with a shrug was like as not my father. (But then another time she said it could have been Old Roger — he wasn’t quite such a fool once apparently — or maybe a pretty little newhair boy from London she once slipped with. I wished I knew, but lots of people didn’t know for sure who their dad was.)

We came to Cold Path, which ran down beside a stream that carried meltwater from a big snowslug. Woollybucks made this path, and we crept up to it in case there were some on it now. There weren’t, but there were lots of fresh buck tracks coming down off the snow and onto the muddy ground beside the stream as it headed down to forest below. The bucks had come down already. The dip had brought them down from wherever it was up there they normally lived, and from whatever it was that they normally did up there.

‘I saw a big big bunch of them in this exact spot once,’ said Roger. ‘Coming down the path from the snowslug there. About ten fifteen wombs ago. There were ten twelve of them, plodding down in single file from up on Snowy Dark there and . . .’

I stopped listening then. I looked up into the blackness of Snowy Dark as he talked, and wondered. No one knew anything about that place up there except that it was high high and dark dark and cold cold cold , and that it was the source of all the streams and the great snowslugs (‘glay seers’, as Oldest called them), and that it surrounded our whole world.

But then I noticed a light high up there in sky: a little far-off patch of pale white light hovering up there in darkness.

‘Hey look! Up there!’

Normally when you see something that you don’t know what it is, it only takes a second or two before you do know, or at least can have a good guess. But this I couldn’t make out at all. I really had no idea what it could possibly be. I mean, there’s one source of light in sky: Starry Swirl. And there’s another source on the ground: living things, trees and plants and animals, plus the fires we make ourselves. But the only light I’d ever seen in between these two sources was from volcanoes like Mount Snellins, and they were red red like fire, not pale and white.

It sounds dumb but all I could think of for a moment was that it was a Landing Veekle, one of those sky-boats with lights on them that brought Tommy and Angela and the Three Companions down to Eden from the starship Defiant .

Well, we were always taught that it would happen sometime. The Three Companions had gone back to Earth for help. Something must have gone wrong, we knew, or the Earth people would have come long ago, but they had a thing with them called a Rayed Yo that could shout across sky, and another thing called a Computer that could remember things for itself. A waking would come when they’d find Defiant , or hear the Rayed Yo, and build a new starship and come for us, across Starry Swirl, through Hole-in-Sky, to take us back to the bright light of that giant giant star.