Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

I was almost on top of the creatures before I saw them, and realized they weren’t bucks at all. They were tall as trees, standing on four legs that were each the height of a man, and black all over, black black like leopards. They had long long necks, and at the top of their necks, just below their big long heads, they had two strong arms with hands. Two of the animals were slowly feeding from the trees, pulling the branches towards their mouth feelers with their hands and biting off the shining lanternflowers. A third one had its neck bent down to the ground, and was pulling up starflowers in armfuls and feeding them to its slowly scrunching mouth.

I put an arrow on my bow, but I found I couldn’t bring myself to shoot. It seemed wrong somehow to try and do for something that had grown so big. And anyway, what could one person do with a thing that size? So I lowered my bow and, instead of shooting, I called out to the creatures.

‘Hey, big guys! Look at me!’

All three of them stopped. The one with its head down lifted it a bit, the two with their heads up lowered them, and the three of them together stared at me with their round, flat, flickering eyes, snuffling and blowing and chewing. One of them gave a belch — I could smell the sour stink from where I lay — and then all three of them just carried on eating as if I wasn’t there.

I found that they’d left a wide strip of darkness stretching away through forest where they’d been. It was twenty thirty yards wide, a wide dark strip with no lanterns or starflowers growing in it. Even flutterbyes left it alone. I followed it for half a waking, further away still from L-pool and all the others, thinking to myself that this was what it would be like on Earth to walk in a forest at Night.

But then, ahead and over to the right, I saw a new light shining through the trees, smooth and soft like the light of pools and streams. I knew straight away that it was that smooth watery light we’d seen from the ridge, and ran towards it.

Gela’s sweet heart, I came to the edge of the trees, and there it was: a huge shining pool, so big you couldn’t see the other side, and deep deep, with giant wavyweed shining down there, like another Wide Forest under the water.

I stood there for a long long time, looking down on it from a low cliff. Fishes swam through its branches like bats and birds. Little hills of water moved steadily across it until they toppled over on the shore. I couldn’t see the ends of it to the left or the right.

‘You can’t see the other side!’ I shouted to the others as soon as I got back. ‘You can’t see the ends of it! It’s like that C back on Earth. Worldpool, we should call it. It’s another whole world, like Forest, or Dark, or Underworld! Think of that! Maybe we should leave this place, move over there, make strong boats and go and see what’s on the other side!’

But Gela just laughed.

‘All that work you put into building that wide fence here, John, and now you want to leave it all when you haven’t even finished.’

‘And how would Earth find us when they came?’ asked Dix.

It had been two three wakings before I’d even managed to persuade any of them to come over to Worldpool and look.

Remembering that made me feel me feel angry and sad as I headed away from L-pool and back to Worldpool again. I must have been there twenty thirty times since my first visit.

Somehow I needed to get them all to move again. And at some point, somehow, we’d need to get back in contact with Family. Okay, Tina was right, we might end up being speared, or spiked up on a tree, but everyone had to die some time. People drowned, and got eaten by leopards, and died from infected slinker bites, and cancer, and sap-burns. Babies got born that couldn’t suck, and starved while their mothers’ breasts ached with milk. Everyone had to die, and death was usually nasty nasty, but there were still choices in life, it could still be better or worse.

I slashed out at a jewel bat swooping down in front of me.

‘Tom’s neck, I didn’t split up dozy Old Family just to make another dozy Family on the other side of Dark. I did it to make things new .’

But the only one of the others that was still trying to make new things happen was Jeff with his baby bucks.

My first baby I called Peter. He was a little batfaced boy, who looked like my sister, and I knew for sure his dad was Dix.

My next baby was a girl and I called her Star. I didn’t expect this, but John loved her straight away. He was always picking her up. He was always offering to take her over to the pool to bathe her. And for a while he even stopped wandering off on his trips through Forest over to his precious Worldpool.

I thought for a little while that he’d finally learnt how to be at ease with ordinary life, and then I remembered how John found it hard to be with his equals, and thought maybe that was why a baby was easier for him. A baby doesn’t answer back, does it?

‘I am Star’s dad, right?’ he asked me, when Star was five six periods old. ‘We made her that time we slipped next to the pool, didn’t we?’

We were by the pool now, in pretty much the exact same spot he was thinking about. He was holding Star in the water, and she was kicking her little fat legs.

I wished he hadn’t asked me. I knew he longed for me to say yes, and I thought, Shall I lie and tell him he’s the dad for certain? But I didn’t like lying, and nor did John, so I told the truth.

‘She could be yours, John, but she could be Mike’s too. Not long before I fell pregnant with her, I slipped with him once twice while we were out scavenging, and you were way away over bloody old Worldpool or somewhere.’

When he heard that, he lifted Star out of the water, handed her over to me and went off into forest for half a waking. I wished then that I’d told him a lie. It wouldn’t even have been a big lie, because it could have been him that was Star’s dad, and I felt I’d been mean to him, insisting on the truth. I could see how it would be a special thing for someone like John to have a little girl or boy that he knew for certain was his own.

‘It probably was you, John,’ I told him when he got back. ‘It really probably was you that time by the pool.’

I tried to reach and kiss him but he sat stiffly and wouldn’t relax into it. He nodded, and ruffled Star’s head, and then turned and gave me a little stiff smile.

‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ he told me. But I could see it did. All the restlessness had come back into him.

And at the end of that waking, when we were all eating fruit and stonebuck meat round our fire, with bats swooping overhead, he announced that he was planning to go back up Tall Tree Valley.

‘ Why? ’ I asked.

‘No point in cutting ourselves off from Mehmet’s lot, is there?’ he said. ‘We all set out together across Dark, didn’t we? There’s no reason why we can’t be friends. They might even want to come down here with us, if we told them what it was like.’

‘But wouldn’t this just be stirring up an ant’s nest?’ Janny said.

‘Yeah,’ Jane said, ‘it’s been three wombs since we left them. What makes you think they’d want to see us now?’

‘And do you really think Mehmet will be so glad to see you, John?’ asked Gela, looking up from her second little one sucking at her breast. ‘Let’s face it, he wasn’t exactly crazy about you even before you left him up there with just the other five for company.’

‘Who’s Mehmet?’ asked little Fox.

His mum Clare laughed. She had three kids around her now. Our little group had grown. The fourteen who’d walked here from Tall Tree Valley were all grownups. The two babies that came with us — Fox and Flower — were little kids. And there’d been another ten new babies since, ten that had lived, with more on the way.