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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

‘This whole world is a story,’ Mary told them. ‘And just like in any story, everything has a purpose, even the sad things. Everything’s connected to everything else. It really is, my dears. As long as you keep your heart open to our Mother, you will be holding a string that stretches off into the future, on and on, through times and places you can’t yet see, some of them happy but many of them sad, until at last it reaches your true home, where bad things won’t happen any more and the happiness is there for good. Remember that. Of course it won’t take away your sadness now, but it will remind you that sadness doesn’t go on forever. Hold onto that string, however bad things are, and there will always be a way back home at the end for all of Gela’s true children.’

Judging by their faces, they didn’t fully understand what she meant but they could tell that Mary believed it completely and they could see, as I’d seen myself when I went to that show of hers on Knee Tree Grounds, that she was smart and strong and brave, and had driven out all the weak little doubts and fears that most of us have inside ourselves. And so they believed her, or believed her enough at any rate to get some sort of comfort from her words, some sort of sense that the world did still have some point even if they couldn’t quite understand it themselves.

Again and again, I saw Mary do that for people: bind the world together again for them when it had broken apart, give them something to hold onto when things were empty and pointless and cruel, lay out for them, like she said, a kind of string to hold onto. It wouldn’t change how things were right now, it wouldn’t take away their pain, but it led to a far off place where the pain would be taken away.

It’s no good pretending that I didn’t sometimes have doubts about the things that Mary said and did. Well, how could I not, when I’d grown up with people who thought the whole shadowspeaker thing was a trick to fool people? But again and again, when I had those doubts, I’d see her helping people, like she helped the people at Hot Pools, and the doubts would just blow away. Doubts were a kind of weakness, that was all.