She walked up to a pretty young woman. ‘You, for example. What’s your name, my dear?’

‘I’m Gela.’

‘Gela. You even carry our Mother’s name, but yet look at what goes on in your head! You think angry thoughts. You long for men who aren’t your own. That’s what our Mother tells me. Is she right?’

The woman lowered her head in shame.

‘Of course she’s right,’ said Mary, and passed straight on to another woman. ‘You look guilty guilty. Wait! Let me listen. What’s our Mother saying? Is she saying you’re one of those that tell that so-called Secret Story? The story about things Gela’s supposed to have said to her daughters long long ago? Ah, I thought so. You silly silly girl. Why tell that foolish lie, when Mother Gela herself is alive and calling out to you?’

Many of them were crying now. ‘Yes, you might well weep,’ Mary told them. ‘Because if you don’t reach out to Gela, she won’t be able to reach you either, and you’ll be lost forever. Drifting, drifting, drifting. Shivering, shivering, shivering. All alone forever, all by yourself, in the cold cold blackness between the stars.’

She stood there, trembling and sweating, as she listened to Mother Gela whispering to her inside her head. ‘Yes, and no starship will ever come from Earth while you act like this. They’ll never come to bring us home. And all our children and our children’s children will have to live their lives out here in dark dark Eden.’

By now pretty much everyone was crying, thinking about their hard lives here in Eden, and about our lost home, full of light, far beyond our reach across the stars, where the Mother of all of us was born.

‘Gela is pleading with me,’ Mary told them, tears running down her own cheeks. ‘Our sweet sweet Mother is pleading with me. She knows what it is to live on Eden and long and long for Earth. “Make them understand, Mary!” she’s begging me. “Please, please make them understand!”’

She raised her hands to the black black sky, where Earth was hiding somewhere, as everyone knew, in the great cold spiral of Starry Swirl. ‘Oh Mother, Mother, Mother,’ she begged. ‘Please don’t cry! I can’t bear to hear you cry!’ Then she fell to the ground, writhing about and sobbing. Everyone was scared and horrified, but of course they were excited too by being so close to our Mother. Earth might be far away but right in front of them was a woman who was hearing Gela’s voice.

‘Listen to our Mother,’ she told them. ‘Don’t imagine she’ll come to you with bright lights and fancy wraps. She is our Mother, don’t forget. Her voice will be as ordinary and familiar as your own mother’s. As familiar as the pumping of the trees.’