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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 put my fingers over her lips to make her stop. ‘Listen, Mary. I did hear our Mother in the Circle, but I didn’t like what she was saying to me, so I pretended to myself I didn’t. Not so brave at all, I’m afraid.’

Mary looked at me. Her face was more lined than I remembered, but those small sharp eyes were so familiar as they searched me, so familiar and also so dear. ‘So . . . So can I ask what she said to you?’

‘There were things I was hiding from you. She told me I shouldn’t keep them secret.’ I hesitated for a moment, but it didn’t seem so hard any more to tell her those things that I’d been so afraid to speak of before. ‘I was hiding the fact that my best friend went over to the Johnfolk across the water. And that she wore Gela’s ring on her finger, and spoke the Secret Story out loud. I was hiding the fact that I was proud of her. I was hiding that I knew the Secret Story myself.’

‘Oh that stupid story,’ Mary snorted, waving the thing away with a sweep of her hand.

‘Listen, Mary, I got to know those Earth people. You were quite right back in the clearing, they are just people. But they aren’t bad people, and they didn’t come here on purpose to trick us. The truth is, Mary, they didn’t expect to find us at all. They assumed people wouldn’t have survived here. They just came here to look at the animals and the trees. Don’t ask me why. It’s something called science. But listen, Mary, that voice from the screens telling the Secret Story. It was Gela. The life in those screens comes from a thing called a bat-tree – I guess because it’s like a living tree that life comes flying out from – and the Earth people told me that a bat-tree of that kind only lasts five years at most. And that’s only if you don’t use the screen at all. If you use it a lot, it doesn’t even live half that long. So if you think about it, even if it was only used that one time when the voice was put inside it, there would only have been one grownup woman on Eden when that screen died, and that woman was Gela.’

Mary picked up a stick and pushed the wavyweed about in the water like you do when you’re looking to see if any fish are hiding underneath, though I doubt she’d have noticed right then even if there was a whole bunch of them. Forest hummed all round us. Not far away the stream trickled down a sparkly little waterfall into a pool.