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Back Daughter of Eden Save as PDF
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’m a shadowspeaker now. I went back into the Circle and heard the voice of our Mother. It’s completely different from the voice that the Earth people found inside those screens. That Gela was just a woman, like Jeff Redlantern used to say; she was just a woman from Earth and Earth is just a place, even though she was the mother of all of us here on Eden. The Mother that me and Mary hear doesn’t speak in words. Words would never be enough for her. She speaks in feelings, and pictures, and whole big ideas that come suddenly into your mind.

You can’t always be sure that you’ve heard her right, and of course sometimes you wonder if you’ve really heard her at all. But it’s like the bits of this story I’ve told you that are about times where I wasn’t there and can’t be absolutely sure about. I could have missed them out completely, and given you a story with all kinds of holes in it, but I decided to figure out what happened as best I could, even at the risk of getting some things wrong. What else are we going to do? We don’t have science to tell us things like they have on Earth, and if we only spoke about what we were certain of, we’d hardly say anything at all. But people still need stories to make sense of their lives, and clever Mary has figured out a new kind of, story that fits with what we know now and yet still lets the Davidfolk carry on drawing their circles and singing ‘Come Tree Row’, even though Earth has been and gone. It even lets those crazy brave boys up at Rockway Edge carry on burning their backs on spiketrees and showing off their horrible scars.

I travel round the Davidfolk Ground with Mary like I did before, back and forth, rockway to alpway, peckway to blueway. Candy and Metty come with me, but Fox prefers to stay with his dad and his friends. I don’t like to think about it too much but I guess one waking Candy may decide she prefers that too, even though she tells me now that she never will, and that when she’s a grownup she’ll be a shadowspeaker like me and Auntie Mary. Metty, I’m pretty sure, will want to stay behind when he’s older. Children like to have friends round them to grow up with, not just their mum and an old shadowspeaker and a couple of guards, and no one to play with but strangers’ children who tend to keep their distance from the shadowspeaker’s kids.