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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

‘That’s Eden,’ said the booming voice of Gaia. Now it was so big we could see that the circle wasn’t completely black, but covered all over in patches of dim dim light. ‘That’s what Eden looks like from out in space,’ Gaia said. ‘And here’s the other side. This little black patch here is what you call Snowy Dark. This tiny little patch of light in middle of it is Circle Valley, where we all are now.’

She moved things on too quickly. We could happily have sat and stared at that picture for a long long time, taking it in, and figuring out how it all fitted together. I hadn’t even had a chance to work out which patch of light was Worldpool, let alone where Knee Tree Grounds was, before the picture disappeared. And now we saw another circle, but this time not dark at all, but blue blue blue, streaked all over with swirls of white.

‘And this is Earth,’ Gaia said.

Some people cried. Really cried, I mean: I could hear them sobbing round me. But most, like me, were quiet quiet, not knowing what we felt. All our lives we’d dreamed of Earth, each one of us imagining our true home in our own way. But now, quite suddenly, the question was answered. This was what it was like. And it wasn’t quite what any of us had thought.

The picture changed again.

‘And this is me on Earth,’ Gaia said.

We could see Gaia in the picture smiling out, and beside her was a handsome young man with dark skin like hers. They were standing in middle of the screen and all round them was a pale blue-grey emptiness.

‘That’s me and my brother. We’re standing beside the See.’ She could see we were puzzled, so she explained: ‘It’s water, a big area of water. Like your Worldpool.’

Everyone frowned at the picture, trying to make it out. Gaia walked up to middle of one of the three screens and pointed with her finger. ‘There, look. There’s the See and there’s the sky.’

I could see now that there was a kind of line behind Gaia and her brother in the picture, a dead straight line like World’s Edge, and I could see that the paleness was a bit paler above that line than it was below it. And then I saw that in the darker area below the line there were waves. They were small and blurred and far away, but all the same they were quite like the waves that broke on poolside by Michael’s Place, though the colours were all wrong and there was no light shining up from beneath them.