Dark Eden

was always up for a laugh and a joke. And Gerry was alright, I suppose, boring but alright, and so, in his own funny way, was clever weird Jeff. And bloody old John was okay too, at least some of the time, and I guess I cared about my brother Harry, or I felt responsible for him anyway, though it drove me nuts having to sort things out for him when he annoyed people with his noisy stupidness. I even got on alright with Lucy Batwing, and the two London girls.
    But that wasn’t a lot of people to fill a whole world with, not when there was forest forest forest stretching away on both sides of us for miles and miles and miles. Thousands and thousands of trees shining and pumping –
hmmph
,
hmmph
,
hmmph
– thousands of flutterbyes and bats and bucks and treecats and slinkers and leopards, all with their flat eyes and their two hearts and their greeny-black Eden blood, taking no notice of us, carrying on with the things they’d been doing for hundreds and thousands of wombs, ever since they first came up from Underworld: it was lonely lonely when you thought too much about it. So much space, so much life going on that didn’t know or care we existed – and then us, just us, us few human beings, by ourselves in the middle of it all.
    We made babies as quickly as we could. Even
I
worked on making babies, though I was never that keen on being a mum. I slipped with Dix, I slipped with John, I even slipped with Mike once twice. And often I found myself doing it like a broody oldmum back in Family, not really thinking about the thing itself and what it felt like, just waiting for the job to be done, and then laying back after the bloke was finished, whichever one it was, and trying to keep his juice inside me. All the girls did the same.
    ‘Slipping should be a special thing,’ John said one time, when a bunch of us were together by the fire, scraping buckskins clean. ‘Not just something you do with anyone you feel like, or anyone needing a bit of juice. We should go back to how it was on Earth. One man just slips with one woman, so he knows which kids he was the dad of, and a kid knows which bloke is his dad. This way of doing things we’ve got into on Eden, where everyone slips with everyone: it only began here on Eden in First Harry’s times, when there
was
only one man in the world and it was him.’
    He looked straight at me as he said it. He hated that I slipped with Dix, and he knew I knew that he hated it. And in a way I understood what he felt, because I didn’t used to like it much either when he slipped with the oldmums back in Family. Back then I wanted him for myself, and now he wanted me to be just his alone. But how could I agree to that with a bloke like him, who wanted to slip with me one waking and then, for wakings and wakings after that, wasn’t even interested in even
telling
me anything, let alone touching me?
    ‘How would that work, though, John,’ Janny Redlantern asked, practically, ‘when there are eight girls here and only six blokes?’
    ‘Yeah,’ said Clare, lowering her voice and looking round to make sure my brother was out of earshot, ‘and out of the six of us that
did
get a bloke, how would we decide which one got bloody old Harry?’
    They all laughed at that, though a couple of them looked guiltily at me and my sister Jane.
    Even John laughed.
    ‘You’ve got a point there, Janny,’ he said. ‘I admit you have a point.’
    Five six wakings later I came across him in forest with ugly merry Janny Redlantern, giving her a slip from behind, while she chattered away to him, just like some oldmum back in Family. He looked up and spotted me. Gela’s heart, I could tell how much he hated that I’d seen him. And soon afterwards he took his spear and a leopard tooth knife and a rope, and went off into Wide Forest on one of his long lonely trips.

    He was always going off into forest and, if he wasn’t in forest, he was toiling and toiling away on the big fence, dragging up branches, hacking at trees, all by himself if no one would help him, to enclose that stupid massive space that we wouldn’t need for bloody generations.
    He was restless
restless
all the time.
    Gela’s tits, he’d broken up Family, he’d killed Dixon Blueside, he’d led us though ice and darkness, he’d lost Suzie and nearly killed the lot of us, all because he wanted to cross Snowy Dark and start again on the other side, but now we
were
here, it wasn’t enough for him, this little group of familiar