Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

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?