Daughter of Eden
Page 38
None of that changes the fact that the most perfect moment in all my life was when the veekle came down in front of me in Circle Clearing and I met Gaia. I dream about it often. She comes back and speaks to me, her voice close close, like Gela’s voice speaking from those screens.
I also dream often about Trueheart, good brave Trueheart, far far away across the stars, walking and talking in that strange pale place with its drowned houses and its sky that’s sometimes white and sometimes pink and sometimes black like ours. Every single waking, I remind myself that she really is there on Earth right at this moment, alive and seeing and breathing: someone I know, someone I’ve held in my arms, a daughter of Eden like me. It makes Earth seem much much nearer and Eden seem much less alone. (And we really aren’t so alone, are we – we really aren’t – now we’re certain that Earth knows where to find us?) I often stop and wonder what Trueheart’s doing there right now, and whether she understands science yet as well as Marius, and if I’d even know her with that new face that the Earth people will have sewn for her with those fine metal needles of theirs. I won’t ever see her again, I’m sure, and nor will her mum and dad, but I like to think her sisters and brothers will, and so will my own kids.
Gaia gave me a present just before she went away. She gave it to me when no one else was looking, and suggested I keep it to myself. It’s a linkup, one of those black squares of glass. It’s got some of her words in it, thoughts she spoke into it during her time on Eden, and some pictures of Earth, and it’s got all the crackling hissing words they managed to find in that old screen. Gaia told me the bat-tree inside it is stronger than the one in the screen, and might last as long as six seven years if I make sure only to use the linkup just one waking every year. So me and Mary have a little tradition that we settle down to listen to it once each year as we draw near to Veeklehouse just before the Virsry time. One waking, we know, we’ll try it and nothing will happen. The tiny tree inside it will have died and gone cold, and the little bats of lecky-trickity won’t come darting out from it any more. That’s going to be sad, like saying goodbye to Earth a second time, a bit like Gela losing her ring. But even then I’ll still have a silent square of glass to prove to myself that I really did meet that woman who came from Earth.
When we settle down to listen to it, we take it in turns to pick things we want to see or hear. Mary’s sad and angry with herself that she lost the chance to meet the Earth people, so she usually picks some of Gaia’s words, but my own favourite part are the words the Earth people found inside that old screen in Circle Valley. Angela speaks most of them, but the last time we listened, we found a little bit where Tommy spoke as well. People don’t talk about him so much as they do about her – somehow or other we’ve never had difficulty in his case with remembering he was just a person – but as me and Mary sat there side by side in the humming, shining forest, it was kind of nice to hear the two of them together, the first two people in Eden, sitting and talking just like us.
When Tommy speaks, him and Gela have been listening to starbirds calling out to each other in the distance. Hooom! Hooom! Hooom! From inside our little square of glass, me and Mary could still just hear that bird from four hundred years ago, faintly faintly, behind all the crackling and hissing. And then, even more faintly, we heard another one answering it back in the way that starbirds do: Aaaaah! Aaaaah! Aaaaah! It was so familiar and yet so strange at the same time that it made us both laugh. I don’t know how long a starbird can live if no one does for it – how would you begin to find out? – but I guess those two birds we could hear are long since dead, so that all that remains of them now are those calls inside our little square of glass. When the bat-tree dies, they really will be gone for good.
We were listening for the first bird to call out again, when suddenly Tommy spoke. ‘They don’t give a damn, those starbirds, do they?’ he said. ‘They don’t even notice that great wheel burning up there in the sky. They don’t give it a moment’s thought.’
‘No, they don’t,’ said Gela. ‘You’re right. This Eden, this dark Eden, it’s just life to them, isn’t it? It’s just the way things happen to be.’
And then a real starbird cried out right next to us, so loud that it made us jump. Hooom! Hooom! Hooom! said the starbird, and straight away, maybe a hundred yards off, another one answered: Aaaaah! Aaaaah! Aaaaah!
Also by Chris Beckett
The Holy Machine
Dark Eden
Mother of Eden
First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2016
by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Chris Beckett, 2016
The moral right of Chris Beckett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 782392 39 2
Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 782392 38 5
E-book ISBN: 978 1 782392 40 8
Printed in Great Britain
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An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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