Dark Eden

away.
    ‘Harry doesn’t like it. Harry wants to go.’
    Tina came out soon after me, then Janny, then Dix, all looking kind of shaken and a bit ashamed, like they’d let something bad come inside them and take them over, and now they regretted it.
    ‘I reckon we should stop this, ‘I said. ‘I don’t think the talking face will come back.’
    Tina nodded. I stood up.
    ‘Come out now! Everyone out!’
    No one argued with me. They all emerged one by one through the hole in the boat – Gerry, Lucy Batwing, Mike, Clare, Jane, little Flower, Clare . . . with Martha and Lucy London coming out last of all, both of them crying bitterly.
    ‘Listen up, everyone!’ I called out.

    They all went quiet quiet, standing there next to the Veekle under the bright whitelantern trees, with the smooth soft sheen of Worldpool nearby.
    I looked round at their faces, grownups and children, excited, scared, hungry for something that they didn’t even understand, and I tried to figure out what I ought to say. It was hard hard because I’d been excited too, and I’d felt that same hunger, and, like all of them, I was still dazed dazed by the face of Michael Name-Giver himself talking to us from the screen. (Who could believe that such a thing would ever happen to us?) But somehow I needed to help the others make some sense out of it, when I hadn’t really made sense of it myself.
    ‘So . . .’ I began. ‘So now we know how the story of the Three Companions ended. After all this time. After . . . all these wombs, and . . . and all these generations.’
    I talked without knowing what I was going to say, but something was creeping up into my thoughts. It was like when you first spot a leopard in forest. To start with you’re still not sure if it really is a leopard or if it’s only a patch of flowers, and then you’re pretty sure it is a leopard but you still can’t quite make out its exact shape. And then you
see
it.
    ‘And that means, doesn’t it, that they . . . That means they never got back to
Defiant
. And . . .
that
. . . means . . .’
    Oh Gela’s heart, that meant . . .
    I looked at their faces. I could see some of them getting it too: Gela, Tina, Dix, the quicker, stronger ones. I took a deep breath to try and get control over my voice.
    ‘And that means that
Defiant
never left Eden at all. I . . . I suppose it must still be up there in sky somewhere, too high up for us to see. All this time, we’ve imagined it somewhere far out across Starry Swirl, but it’s been up there all the while. And that means . . .’
    ‘That means they’ll
never
come for us,’ wailed Lucy London. ‘Never, never, never!’
    Pretty well everyone was crying – grownups, kids, men, women – crying and crying for that old old dream that would never never come true. Tina was crying, Gela was crying, Gerry was crying, Martha London was wailing wailing and rocking back and forth like a mum that’s lost a child. And there were tears running down
my
face too, even while I tried to get us past this. Only Jeff wasn’t crying. I think he’d understood what this meant from the moment we saw the Veekle, and now he was calmly watching everyone with his gentle interested eyes.
    (Right behind him, on a whitelantern branch, a bat was watching too. Its head tipped slightly on one side, it watched, and fanned its wings and scratched its ear thoughtfully with a single thin black finger.)
    ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘It means we have to give up on the idea that we’re waiting for Earth folk to come for us and take us back again to . . . back to . . .’
    It took me three tries to get out the words, I was so sad sad. And yet it was me that that had destroyed Circle, me that had said we shouldn’t just sit and stew in Circle Valley, waiting for help from Earth.
    ‘ . . .back to that place where the light comes down from sky, bright as the inside of a whitelantern, and where they see clearly when we’re blind, and know about all those things that we have to try so hard hard hard to figure out.’
    I was getting some control of myself now. I was pleased about that. And I could see them all looking at me, waiting for me to make it better for them, and I was pleased about that too.
    ‘But listen, everyone. We’re no worse off than we were before we found this thing. We’ve still got each other. We’ve still got fruit and meat to eat. We’ve still got Eden, just the same as it was last waking and all the wakings before, for all those