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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

‘You do have sharp eyes, Angie, and you’re quite right too. Often high people do the worst things. Of course they do, because there’s no one there to stop them. And Gela cries for them, she really does, but at the same time she tells me to be careful, because if I criticize them they may send me away from their ground, and then I won’t be able to help anyone there at all. It worries me and it worries our Mother, but of course it’s the high people themselves who lose out in the end.’

She was sitting in front of me on our buck, but now she looked round and took one of my hands in hers.

‘Don’t ever think I’m on the side of the high people against the low ones, Angie, because you couldn’t be more wrong! Really you couldn’t! Gela cares most about the people whose life is the hardest: low people, women, batfaces, clawfeet.’

I smiled and nodded. I was reassured. It kind of made sense what she said, and I accepted that she understood these things much better than me. And, like I said before, no one could accuse Mary of not believing in what she did.

After we’d been round the clusters of Rockway Edge, we turned alpway again and made our way slowly back towards Veeklehouse by another path, down through middle of Wide Forest, once again zigzagging back and forth to take in as many clusters as possible.

One of the clusters was called Hot Pools, because it was near to a place where water came bubbling up from Underworld into strange yellow pools that were boiling hot, so that the people who lived there could cook their meat without even needing to make a fire: they’d just wrap it up tight in a special greased skin and lower it into the water on a string. These pools had no life or light in them at all, apart from a kind of wobbling jelly that grew round their edges and, with no wavyweed growing in them, they were only lit by the trees round them. Yet they seemed to have a life of their own, bubbling and roaring and pouring out clouds of warm steam that rose up to the black sky with a strange, slightly rotten smell, like nothing I’d ever smelled before.