BooksBarbecue
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

Deep, meanwhile, is chatting to the guards who’ve come with us. How huge and fair he looks compared with them, standing over there by our unwieldly bike, which all four of them are admiring. As he listens to their questions and comments, he stoops affably towards these small wiry men with their tribal markings, their animal hide kilts, their long beards tied with string. They laugh at some joke he’s made, three of them standing, one squatting down to run his fingers wonderingly over the fat rear tyre.

Nearby their so-called bucks are grazing on a pile of waterweed. I’m half-used to these creatures now. I can look in their direction and, just for a moment, think: There are the bucks. Then that moment passes, and I’m overwhelmed by the utter strangeness of these creatures that just can’t be squeezed into any earthly category at all. If I look just at their shaggy coats, I might persuade myself that they’re a bit mammalian, like yaks or highland cattle, but then I notice those flat expressionless eyes and the tentacles round their mouths and the nearest thing I can think of is something molluscan, like a squid. But then again, the way they stand on their back four legs and use their front pair as arms reminds me more of a praying mantis, while the claws on their six feet are vaguely bird- or reptile-like, and that glowing lump on the backs of their heads makes me think of those weird fish that live in the abyssal depths of Earth’s oceans. There is simply no pigeonhole available to put them in. They are themselves. I watch them feeding over there in the eerie glow of the trees, blue and pink and white, and my head swims to the point where sometimes I almost wonder if I’ve lost my mind.

Thirty-eight

It was a strange time, those three wakings when the Earth people were out in forest. They’d been here, but now they’d gone again. I’d sometimes go into their shelter, pretending to myself that I was going to sweep it or tidy it, but really just to look at the stuff they left behind so as to remind myself it hadn’t all been a dream. Or maybe I’d take the kids and walk over to look at the veekle perched there in the Circle on its four thin metal legs. There were always people there looking up at it. Once in a while it would make a sound – Beep! Beep! Beep! – and flash its light, and everyone would back away laughing. The children could never get enough of that.