Dark Eden

why a baby was easier for him. A baby doesn’t answer back, does it?
    ‘I
am
Star’s dad, right?’ he asked me, when Star was five six periods old. ‘We made her that time we slipped next to the pool, didn’t we?’
    We were by the pool now, in pretty much the exact same spot he was thinking about. He was holding Star in the water, and she was kicking her little fat legs.
    I wished he hadn’t asked me. I knew he longed for me to say yes, and I thought, Shall I lie and tell him he’s the dad for certain? But I didn’t like lying, and nor did John, so I told the truth.
    ‘She could be yours, John, but she could be Mike’s too. Not long before I fell pregnant with her, I slipped with him once twice while we were out scavenging, and you were way away over bloody old Worldpool or somewhere.’
    When he heard that, he lifted Star out of the water, handed her over to me and went off into forest for half a waking. I wished then that I’d told him a lie. It wouldn’t even have been a big lie, because it
could
have been him that was Star’s dad, and I felt I’d been mean to him, insisting on the truth. I could see how it would be a special thing for someone like John to have a little girl or boy that he knew for certain was his own.
    ‘It probably was you, John,’ I told him when he got back. ‘It really probably was you that time by the pool.’
    I tried to reach and kiss him but he sat stiffly and wouldn’t relax into it. He nodded, and ruffled Star’s head, and then turned and gave me a little stiff smile.
    ‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ he told me. But I could see it did. All the restlessness had come back into him.
    And at the end of that waking, when we were all eating fruit and stonebuck meat round our fire, with bats swooping overhead, he announced that he was planning to go back up Tall Tree Valley.
    ‘
Why?
’ I asked.
    ‘No point in cutting ourselves off from Mehmet’s lot, is there?’ he said. ‘We all set out together across Dark, didn’t we? There’s no reason why we can’t be friends. They might even want to come down here with us, if we told them what it was like.’
    ‘But wouldn’t this just be stirring up an ant’s nest?’ Janny said.
    ‘Yeah,’ Jane said, ‘it’s been three wombs since we left them. What makes you think they’d want to see us now?’
    ‘And do you really think Mehmet will be so glad to see you, John?’ asked Gela, looking up from her second little one sucking at her breast. ‘Let’s face it, he wasn’t exactly crazy about you even
before
you left him up there with just the other five for company.’
    ‘Who’s Mehmet?’ asked little Fox.
    His mum Clare laughed. She had three kids around her now. Our little group had grown. The fourteen who’d walked here from Tall Tree Valley were all grownups. The two babies that came with us – Fox and Flower – were little kids. And there’d been another ten new babies since, ten that had lived, with more on the way.
    ‘I think they’d be glad to hear from us up there,’ Clare said, ‘I reckon they’d be glad to see anyone after all this time. I mean there’s not so many of us here, but there were only
six
of them up there, remember. They must be going completely nuts if they haven’t already done for each other.’
    ‘That’s true,’ Gela admitted, ‘and they’ll have had kids too. It’d be nice to see their kids.’
    ‘It would be nice to see anyone at all that wasn’t us,’ Janny said.
    ‘It could be they’ve all gone back to Family,’ said Jeff.
    Jeff had grown his new hairs now and he had changed. He was
beautiful
beautiful, with fine features and a strong slim body to go with his big deep eyes. All the other seven girls wanted to slip with him and he obliged them just as much as they wanted, like he was making up for all the time when no one would accept him as a proper boy, only as a clawfoot who was outside all of that. For myself, though, somehow I couldn’t quite forget Jeff the funny little kid whose sore feet I’d washed back at Cold Path Neck.
    ‘They’d never do that,’ John said with a snort. ‘Go crawling back to Family after what happened to Dixon and Met and John Blueside? They wouldn’t dare.’
    ‘They might, though,’ Jeff said. ‘It wasn’t any of them that did for those three. Remember how Mehmet liked to remind you about that?’
    John shrugged.
    ‘Only one way to find out.’
    He stood up, looking back towards Snowy Dark.
    ‘Eventually we’ll