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Back Daughter of Eden Save as PDF
Chapters (68)
  1. Title page
  2. Dedication
  3. Part I
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty-one
  25. Twenty-two
  26. Twenty-three
  27. Twenty-four
  28. Twenty-five
  29. GAIA YOUNG. SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS.MISSION DAY 20. 20:25 MT.
  30. Part II
  31. Twenty-six
  32. Twenty-seven
  33. Twenty-eight
  34. Twenty-nine
  35. Thirty
  36. Thirty-one
  37. Thirty-two
  38. Thirty-three
  39. Thirty-four
  40. Thirty-five
  41. Thirty-six
  42. Thirty-seven
  43. GAIA YOUNG. SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS.MISSION DAY 22. 20:05 MT.
  44. Thirty-eight
  45. Thirty-nine
  46. Forty
  47. Forty-one
  48. GAIA YOUNG. SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS.MISSION DAY 25. 15:30 MT.
  49. Forty-two
  50. Forty-three
  51. Forty-four
  52. Forty-five
  53. Forty-six
  54. Forty-seven
  55. Forty-eight
  56. Forty-nine
  57. Fifty
  58. Fifty-one
  59. Fifty-two
  60. Fifty-three
  61. Fifty-four
  62. Part III
  63. Fifty-five
  64. Fifty-six
  65. Fifty-seven
  66. Fifty-eight
  67. Also by Chris Beckett
  68. Copyright page

‘Those were fast bucks that Harry took,’ I said to Dave, after Starlight had gone back to join the high people. We all spoke softly softly so as not to disturb the sleepers. ‘Do you reckon they’ll have reached the path up onto the Dark yet?’

‘I don’t reckon they can be much more than halfway to the Dark.’ Dave glanced up from a little knife that he’d started to whittle from a piece of bone. He scraped away for a bit then looked up again. ‘What I worry about is that the Johnfolk won’t believe ­Harry’s got a message from Gela, and will just do for him and his guys, without ever finding that . . . well, that talking thing, I don’t know what you call it . . . That little square thing Mother Gela gave Leader Harry with her voice inside it.’

‘Oh they’ll find it, alright,’ said Tom. ‘Even if they do for Leader Harry, they’ll see he’s a high man and they’ll be all over him to find out what he’s got on him.’

‘She’s not Gela,’ said Trueheart. ‘Her name is Gaia, and she’s the many-greats niece of Gela’s sister Candy.’

Tom chuckled knowingly. ‘Or so she says. But look at that dark dark skin of hers. How many people can there be who look like that?’

Marius came staggering out of the shelter, looked at us for a moment, and then hurried off into the starflowers again.

‘I’ll check they have enough water in there,’ I said. ‘You need water when your guts are playing up.’

‘I never thought, somehow,’ said Clare, ‘it just never really struck me before that people from Earth would crap and piss and throw up just as we do. It seems odd, somehow, don’t you think? And yet, if we need to do those things, I guess it shouldn’t be so surprising that they do too.’

Thirty-one

About now, give or take a few wakings, a buck came to the top of the high ridge surrounding Tall Tree Valley, and looked down from the Dark into that little shining forest down there with the darkness wrapped all round it. It was a big old smoothbuck, with a skin draped over it to keep it warm, and on the skin sat a woman, though she was so wrapped in buckskin just then that you wouldn’t have been able to tell whether she was a man or a woman, only that she wasn’t that tall. With her there were two guards on woollybucks, each one holding a spear whose tip glinted in the light of the animals’ headlanterns, and two younger women sharing another smoothbuck. She didn’t have a darkguide. It was tricky to find one just then, and she and the guards knew the paths pretty well.