Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

‘Hello Oldest,’ I said.

Caroline gestured to me to approach.

‘And the leopard too,’ she instructed. ‘Bring it forward. My, will you look at that!’

Reluctantly I squatted down in front of the three Oldest. They reached for me with their thin and shaky hands, and I crawled closer as I knew I was supposed to do, and guided their bony old fingers so they could feel my face and my hair and my shoulders, prodding me and pinching me like I was some bloody thing and not a person at all.

‘John Redlantern, you say?’ queried Stoop. ‘Who are you, boy? Who was your grandmother?’

‘Yes, come on boy, spit it out. Who are you?’ complained old Mitch.

‘My mother’s mother is Star.’

‘Never heard of her,’ said Gela, who was named for the first Gela — An gela — the mother of us all. ‘Who was her mother?’

‘Star’s mother was Helen.’

I looked at the Models that were still lying there. Defiant is a tube covered in long spikes. The real one was longer than Greatpool, more than a hundred fifty yards, and so wide that the Landing Veekle could hide inside it. When it set out from Earth those long spikes would start to burn with purple fire, until suddenly the Single Force would open up Hole-in-Sky and let Defiant fall through from one side of Starry Swirl to the other. It was like jumping across Greatpool without crossing the water in between.

‘Helen Redlantern?’ Stoop gave a wheezy little laugh. ‘That cheeky minx. Gave me a bit of a slip once or twice way back. Gave me a nice little slippy slide. She still alive, is she?’

‘No, Oldest. Cancer ate her, four five wombs . . . I mean four five years ago.’

‘Four or five wombtimes is not the same as four or five years,’ muttered old Mitch, giving me a weak slap across the face. It didn’t hurt, but I dare say he intended it to, the vicious old sod. ‘And you should count properly in years as befits all true children of the planet Earth. Don’t you forget it, young man.’

‘Where’s this leopard, then?’ Stoop demanded, and all three of them withdrew their hands from me and gazed greedily beyond me with their sightless eyes.

‘Tell the boy to pay his respects,’ they said, as if I couldn’t hear them for myself. ‘Tell him to pay his respects to Circle while we examine the beast.’

So I walked out by myself into middle of the clearing where Circle of Stones was laid out: thirty-six round white stones, as big as baby’s heads, in a circle thirty feet across, marking where the Landing Veekle had rested when it came down to Eden, with five stones in middle of it representing Tommy and Angela, the parents of all of us, and their Three Companions who’d tried to return to Earth. You weren’t supposed to go nearer to Circle than a couple of yards. Some people even said that if anyone were to touch the stones or go inside Circle, other than Oldest and Council and those they chose, then that person would surely die before their next sleep. I didn’t believe that, but I knew the rules, so I stopped three yards from Circle and, as I was supposed to do, bowed my head slightly slightly towards the five stones in middle.

Those stones were the centre of everything. Everyone knew that we had to remain here in Family, in our groups packed in close around Circle, because this was where the Earth people would head when they came back to find us.

But as I finished paying my respects and turned away again from the stones, a thought came to me.

‘If they had crossed sky and found their way right across Starry Swirl,’ I said to myself, ‘they would surely look a little more widely for us than just this one place.’

And then I felt a bit scared by what I’d just thought, like a little kid might feel if he had wandered too far out into forest and, just for a moment, wasn’t sure of the way back.

We ate well in Redlantern at the end of that waking, and when I finally lay down in the shelter with Gerry and Jeff, sleep didn’t come to me for a long time. The leopard’s heart was heavy heavy in my belly and the leopard’s life, its echo, kept prowling prowling through my mind, like a blackness slipping by behind the little steady lights of my thoughts, singing its tricksy song. Every couple of minutes it was there in front of me again, about to strike. Every couple of minutes I lunged out at it again with my spear.

When that boy John had gone away with his dead leopard, Stoop and Gela went straight off to sleep, the dozy old fools. Those two were more dead than alive. But I felt out of sorts and I couldn’t settle. It was that Redlantern boy that had done it. He’d pretended to show us respect because we were Oldest, and because Caroline and the others made sure all our visitors acted polite, but he didn’t like us and he made sure sure he showed it, the little slinker.

You’d have thought the young ones would be interested in us. You’d have thought they’d want to know the things that only Oldest had got to tell, but they didn’t, the little fools. They didn’t want to know anything that came out from our blind old wrinkly heads, even if it was the story of their own Family.

Bloody Redlantern boy. But he wasn’t there for me to moan at, so I shouted at the women instead, telling them to take away the starship and the Veekles.

‘Leave them lying there, and someone will trip over them and do them damage. I’ve told you that before.’

‘Okay, Mitch dear, we’ll put them away,’ they went, as if they were talking to a little kid rather than the oldest one in whole Family. ‘Gela and Stoop are resting now. Aren’t you going to take a nap too?’

‘I don’t feel like it.’

‘What do you want to do then, love? What are we going to do with you?’

‘Get out Earth Models for me,’ I told them. ‘I want to make sure they’re being properly looked after. Last time I checked some fool had let water get to them.’

‘They’re dry now. We got a nice new log, remember? A nice dry log for them. And Jeffo London made a new greased lid to cover up the end.’

‘That one-legged fool. He probably broke the Models when he was shoving them back in with those clumsy hands of his.’

‘Oh dear, Mitch! We are out of sorts, aren’t we?’

They brought House over and put it into my hands so I could feel its funny square shape and its smooth sticky surface, and the door, and the little holes that Tommy called Wind Ohs. I held it up to my nose to smell the grease and sweat in it, going back to the times before anyone alive was born.

Not that I could smell anything much now. It wasn’t just my eyes that had gone. It was all my bloody senses.

‘Still all in one piece,’ I said, holding it out for them to take it back. ‘Don’t bloody drop it, mind, like that silly girl did a few years back. Remember that thing was made by Tommy himself before he went blind, and show it some respect. Angela helped him cut the bark and smooth it and glue it together. It’s older than me, that House. It was made before I was born.’

‘Older than you, Mitch,’ they chirruped, just like I was a bloody kid. ‘My, that is old old.’

‘Now give me Plane. Come on, get on with it.’

I felt the long flat wings of Plane and the two hard jets underneath.

‘Be careful with those jets,’ I told them as I gave Plane back. ‘They’ve been broken off too many times by clumsy people that don’t know how to look after old things properly.’

‘Don’t worry, Mitch dear. We’ll be careful careful. Here’s Car for you now. Got it safe? Holding tight?’

‘Of course I’ve bloody got it. Michael’s names, stop fussing, woman.’