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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

As usually happened when we put on a show in the main cluster of a guard leader’s ground, the leader himself came along. He was a man called Mike and it so happened that we’d heard from two three of the women who’d fed us when we arrived that he was a cruel man. Out of the hearing of guards, they’d told us that he expected any girl who took his fancy to come to his shelter and take his dick, and he didn’t take it well if any woman tried to say no. The women took a risk telling us that, seeing how shadowspeakers were often close to the high people, but Mary had a reputation for being honest, and I guess they hoped she’d say something in her show about how high men should behave, seeing as shadowspeakers always spoke about things that people were doing wrong.

But Mary didn’t speak about it in the show. She spoke about how she admired the Edgefolk, and she picked out a few of their lower people for a telling-off – there was a young woman who slipped with more than one man, a man who held back from giving his share to the guards, an old woman who, so it was said, had told her granddaughters the Secret Story – but she said nothing at all about the guard leader who, so it seemed to me, had behaved much worse than any of them.

‘Mary,’ I said to her later, when we were riding on to another cluster, and the guards were too far ahead of us to hear, ‘can I ask you about something I’ve noticed? How come when you speak to people about the bad things they do, you only ever pick on low people? High people do bad things too, don’t they? That Leader Mike isn’t the only one. And surely Gela doesn’t like high men who behave like that any more than she likes low ones?’

Mary laughed. It was a special loud bright laugh that she used – or so it seemed to me – when I said something that was kind of smart, but at the same time kind of showed up the things that I still didn’t understand. There was a little bit of annoyance in it, I could tell, but then it wasn’t really surprising that she’d sometimes be irritated by my slowness, or cross with me for questioning what she did.