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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

I got talking to her afterwards while we waited for our dry scraps of food, and she told me her story. Her name was Treelight. She came from a small cluster in forest towards Nob Head. When the New Earthers who grounded up there came towards her cluster, it was decided that the men who were fit to fight would stand and face them with spears, so as to give the women time to get away with the kids and the oldies. Eight of Treelight’s nine sons had been among those men, along with their dad. There was a bit of a hill behind the cluster, and at the top of it there was a crag where the women could look right over the trees on the slope and see what was happening below. Instead of trying to rush the men down there, the New Earthers had ridden round them to make a circle, and now they were shooting arrows at them from every side. Clouds of arrows, it seemed like, cloud after cloud. When the women finally turned away again, most of their men were already dead, and the rest soon would be. But they’d had little kids to look after, so, as best they could, they had to hold their grief inside themselves as they trudged onwards through forest and climbed slowly up onto the Dark.

‘But we’re all going to Earth now, aren’t we?’ Treelight said firmly in a bright bright voice, strangely like that one that Mary sometimes used to speak in. ‘And I know my boys will be there waiting for me, all healthy and strong and well again. I know that for sure.’

When the Earth people came back from forest, they went straight to their veekle to get those pictures ready that they’d promised, while Trueheart nervously returned to her family. Her dad growled and muttered, but he didn’t dare punish her for doing something that the Earth people had offered, especially not when the rest of us were crowding round her to hear her stories about what the Earth folk had said and done.

‘They have strange strange tools,’ Trueheart told us. ‘Little boxes, and tubes, and needles made of glass and metal, and some other stuff they call plasstick that feels a bit like wood. They have tiny screens that tell them what things are made of, and how hot they are, and whether they shine out light that we can’t see.’

‘Light that we can’t see?’ I said. ‘How could that be? Surely light is the stuff we see by.’

‘Gaia told me that there are many of kinds of light that we can’t see. Heat, for instance. Marius thinks that Eden animals see heat as a kind of light.’