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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

We stared. How small it seemed, when all the stories said the star was many times bigger than whole of Earth or Eden.

‘That’s the sun?’ a man said. ‘It’s tiny !’

‘Oh it is big,’ Deep’s voice boomed out. ‘But it’s far far away from Earth, so looks small in the sky.’

‘I thought Earth’s sky was blue,’ said Clare.

‘It is sometimes,’ Gaia said, ‘but it can be many different colours, and every night it’s black just like the sky here.’

So ‘night’ wasn’t a place, whatever Mary had said!

‘Look,’ said Gaia, as the picture changed again. ‘This is my brother’s dog. It’s a kind of animal.’

It was another moving picture. A strange brown creature was running about in a pale place full of strange square-shaped things that it kept banging into. It was hard to make out its shape properly, it was moving so much. And it was shouting shouting shouting all the time.

‘Rough! Rough! Rough!’ the dog creature kept yelling, like it could speak but there was only one thing it wanted to say.

‘Rough! Rough! Rough!’ a boy about Candy’s age called out and began to laugh. Candy looked across at him interestedly for a few heartbeats and then joined in loudly: ‘Rough! Rough! Rough!’ she hollered. And then everyone joined in, the whole big crowd, laughing and shouting at this silly creature from Earth: ‘Rough! Rough! Rough! ’

The Earth people smiled uneasily, glancing at one another. There was an edge in our laughter and it was obvious that they could hear it.

‘Now,’ said Deep, ‘we thought you’d like to see some pictures of people from the past. We didn’t bring many, I’m afraid, because . . .’

He didn’t finish. I reckon he’d been about to say they hadn’t expected to find anyone here, but had then thought better of it.

Never mind that, though. Now there was a face on the screen: a young woman, maybe twenty twenty-five years old, with black skin like Gaia’s, though her face was narrower and sharper. She was smiling faintly as she looked out at us. It was a wary smile, like she’d felt she had to put it on but didn’t really feel like it. She looked kind of tough. You wouldn’t want to argue with her, I thought, or say something dumb when she was listening. You wouldn’t want to take anything that she thought was hers.

Don’t tell us this is Gela, I said inside my head to the Earth people. Please don’t tell us this is Gela!

‘This is Angela Young,’ boomed out the veekle in Gaia’s voice. ‘This is the woman you call Gela.’