Dark Eden

said old Gela. ‘We all know that. But what I’m telling you, if you’d only bloody listen, is that you count the days all wrong.’
    ‘I’m sure we can come to an agreement,’ purred Caroline.
    ‘I don’t get them wrong, you lazy old woman,’ Mitch told Gela. ‘You just get behind in your count because your fat heart beats so slow and you sleep too much.’
    ‘Yes, she’s behind alright,’ said bent old Stoop, ‘but you’re behind as well, Mitch. You’re days and days behind the true time.’
    ‘No I’m not,’ said Mitch, ‘your heart beats way too fast, and it always has done. And anyway I’m oldest of Oldest, and you should listen to me. I’m a hundred and twenty years old, you know, and I’m closest to the beginning, and that means my wakings are the true days like they had back on Earth.’
    ‘Don’t talk rot,’ spat fat old Gela, ‘you’re just a muddled-up old . . .’
    Caroline laid her hand on Gela’s arm.
    ‘Here he is,’ Caroline said in that special kind voice that people used with Oldest, half respectful, and half like they were talking to a little kid. ‘Here they all are: the boy John Redlantern who did for the leopard and most of Redlantern with him by the look of it, plus a whole lot of other folk besides.’
    All three Oldest peered towards us with their blind blind eyes. You don’t get much past Old Roger’s age without losing your sight, and our Roger was forty fifty wombs younger than any of these three.
    ‘Hello Oldest,’ I said.
    Caroline gestured to me to approach.
    ‘And the leopard too,’ she instructed. ‘Bring it forward. My, will you look at that!’
    Reluctantly I squatted down in front of the three Oldest. They reached for me with their thin and shaky hands, and I crawled closer as I knew I was supposed to do, and guided their bony old fingers so they could feel my face and my hair and my shoulders, prodding me and pinching me like I was some bloody
thing
and not a person at all.
    ‘John Redlantern, you say?’ queried Stoop. ‘Who are you, boy? Who was your grandmother?’
    ‘Yes, come on boy, spit it out. Who are you?’ complained old Mitch.
    ‘My mother’s mother is Star.’
    ‘Never heard of her,’ said Gela, who was named for the first Gela –
An
gela – the mother of us all. ‘Who was
her
mother?’
    ‘Star’s mother was Helen.’
    I looked at the Models that were still lying there.
Defiant
is a tube covered in long spikes. The real one was longer than Greatpool, more than a hundred fifty yards, and so wide that the Landing Veekle could hide inside it. When it set out from Earth those long spikes would start to burn with purple fire, until suddenly the Single Force would open up Hole-in-Sky and let
Defiant
fall through from one side of Starry Swirl to the other. It was like jumping across Greatpool without crossing the water in between.
    ‘Helen Redlantern?’ Stoop gave a wheezy little laugh. ‘That cheeky minx. Gave me a bit of a slip once or twice way back. Gave me a
nice
little slippy slide. She still alive, is she?’
    ‘No, Oldest. Cancer ate her, four five wombs . . . I mean four five
years
ago.’
    ‘Four or five wombtimes is
not
the same as four or five years,’ muttered old Mitch, giving me a weak slap across the face. It didn’t hurt, but I dare say he intended it to, the vicious old sod. ‘And you should count properly in years as befits all true children of the planet Earth. Don’t you forget it, young man.’
    ‘Where’s this leopard, then?’ Stoop demanded, and all three of them withdrew their hands from me and gazed greedily beyond me with their sightless eyes.
    ‘Tell the boy to pay his respects,’ they said, as if I couldn’t hear them for myself. ‘Tell him to pay his respects to Circle while we examine the beast.’
    So I walked out by myself into middle of the clearing where Circle of Stones was laid out: thirty-six round white stones, as big as baby’s heads, in a circle thirty feet across, marking where the Landing Veekle had rested when it came down to Eden, with five stones in middle of it representing Tommy and Angela, the parents of all of us, and their Three Companions who’d tried to return to Earth. You weren’t supposed to go nearer to Circle than a couple of yards. Some people even said that if anyone were to touch the stones or go inside Circle, other than Oldest and Council and those they chose, then that person would surely die before their next sleep. I didn’t believe that,