Gaia gave me a present just before she went away. She gave it to me when no one else was looking, and suggested I keep it to myself. It’s a linkup, one of those black squares of glass. It’s got some of her words in it, thoughts she spoke into it during her time on Eden, and some pictures of Earth, and it’s got all the crackling hissing words they managed to find in that old screen. Gaia told me the bat-tree inside it is stronger than the one in the screen, and might last as long as six seven years if I make sure only to use the linkup just one waking every year. So me and Mary have a little tradition that we settle down to listen to it once each year as we draw near to Veeklehouse just before the Virsry time. One waking, we know, we’ll try it and nothing will happen. The tiny tree inside it will have died and gone cold, and the little bats of lecky-trickity won’t come darting out from it any more. That’s going to be sad, like saying goodbye to Earth a second time, a bit like Gela losing her ring. But even then I’ll still have a silent square of glass to prove to myself that I really did meet that woman who came from Earth.

When we settle down to listen to it, we take it in turns to pick things we want to see or hear. Mary’s sad and angry with herself that she lost the chance to meet the Earth people, so she usually picks some of Gaia’s words, but my own favourite part are the words the Earth people found inside that old screen in Circle Valley. Angela speaks most of them, but the last time we listened, we found a little bit where Tommy spoke as well. People don’t talk about him so much as they do about her – somehow or other we’ve never had difficulty in his case with remembering he was just a person – but as me and Mary sat there side by side in the humming, shining forest, it was kind of nice to hear the two of them together, the first two people in Eden, sitting and talking just like us.