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Back Daughter of Eden
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

‘Well, yes,’ said Gaia. ‘It is like telly vijun. The original landing veekle was sending those voices and pictures up to the starship right up to the moment it crashed. The starship . . . well . . . it kind of stored them, and when it saw there was no chance of anyone being able to get back up to it from the surface of Eden, it brought them back to Earth. My great-grandmother found out about those pictures and voices and tracked them down. She was a . . . well, you might not know the word, but she was a historian, which means her whole job was to figure out things from the past. She found out about Eden and what happened here, and then she gave all the rest of her life to trying to find a way of getting a starship back here again. Her son, my grandfather, did likewise, and so did my mum and dad. But it’s hard to build a starship. It . . .’ Again, like a football player who’s been cornered, she passed the ball back to Marius.

Marius rubbed his hands over his tired face. ‘Okay,’ he finally said. ‘Imagine some guy here in Eden wanted to build something that would take a thousand people ten years to make: a thousand people working solidly, let’s say, with no time for anything else, with another ten thousand people needed to work alongside them for all those ten years to gather together the things needed to build it with. It wouldn’t be easy, would it, for that guy to actually make it happen? How would he persuade all those people to help him? And even if he did persuade them, how would he find enough for them to eat and drink and . . .’ He said some words that we didn’t know, but by his actions we could sort of see he was asking how people could wrap themselves or make themselves shelters, if all their time was spent building this thing. ‘Do you see what I mean? It would require, well, I don’t know, but let’s say ten thousand more people, just to get food and all of that for those one thousand who were doing the building and for those ten thousand who were getting the stuff together.’

We nodded. It was hard for us to imagine anything that would take all that time and effort, but it wasn’t difficult to understand that people wouldn’t easily be persuaded to do it. And anyway, that was twenty-one thousand people he’d spoken about! Were there that many in all of Eden? I had no idea, but it didn’t seem likely to me.