Hot Pools was a sad sad place when we arrived. Just two wakings before, a little girl, two three years old, had wandered off and fallen into one of those boiling pools. Of course, when the people heard her scream, it was already too late, and by the time they’d managed to fish her, or most of her, out of the boiling water with sticks and hooks tied to strings, her poor little body was already cooked and falling apart, not a child any more, or a human being, but just a mess of flesh and hair and bones. Although I didn’t know back then, as I do now, what it was like to lose your own child, I did have some idea how this must have felt for the twenty thirty people who lived at Hot Pools, because I could remember how it had been back on Knee Tree Grounds when someone drowned, or (as happened to my friend Starlight’s mother when we were little children) was taken by the spearfishes that, once in a while, would wander in from the deeper water and grab people who were cutting bark or gathering waternuts. It’s like the whole world has been poisoned when something like that happens. Nothing means anything any more, and you hate and hate this miserable dark dark Eden where people should never have come.

Mary decided straight away not to put on one of her usual shows. She just sat down in middle of the cluster, with her arm round the mum of the little girl – the woman was scarcely more than a kid herself – and talked to the Hot Pools people like a friend. She told them how Mother Gela never let go, however bad things were. She told them how that little girl’s shadow had flown to Earth and come alive again, as alive as she’d ever been. She told them Gela would look after that little girl, and dry her tears, and make her forget those few dreadful heartbeats between her fall into the boiling water and her death.