Dark Eden

but I knew the rules, so I stopped three yards from Circle and, as I was supposed to do, bowed my head slightly slightly towards the five stones in middle.
    Those stones were the centre of everything. Everyone knew that we had to remain here in Family, in our groups packed in close around Circle, because this was where the Earth people would head when they came back to find us.
    But as I finished paying my respects and turned away again from the stones, a thought came to me.
    ‘If they had crossed sky and found their way right across Starry Swirl,’ I said to myself, ‘they would surely look a little more widely for us than just this one place.’
    And then I felt a bit scared by what I’d just thought, like a little kid might feel if he had wandered too far out into forest and, just for a moment, wasn’t sure of the way back.

    We ate well in Redlantern at the end of that waking, and when I finally lay down in the shelter with Gerry and Jeff, sleep didn’t come to me for a long time. The leopard’s heart was heavy heavy in my belly and the leopard’s life, its echo, kept prowling prowling through my mind, like a blackness slipping by behind the little steady lights of my thoughts, singing its tricksy song. Every couple of minutes it was there in front of me again, about to strike. Every couple of minutes I lunged out at it again with my spear.

4

Mitch London

    When that boy John had gone away with his dead leopard, Stoop and Gela went straight off to sleep, the dozy old fools. Those two were more dead than alive. But I felt out of sorts and I couldn’t settle. It was that Redlantern boy that had done it. He’d pretended to show us respect because we were Oldest, and because Caroline and the others made sure all our visitors acted polite, but he didn’t like us and he made sure sure he showed it, the little slinker.
    You’d have thought the young ones would be interested in us. You’d have thought they’d want to know the things that only Oldest had got to tell, but they didn’t, the little fools. They didn’t want to know anything that came out from our blind old wrinkly heads, even if it was the story of their own Family.
    Bloody Redlantern boy. But he wasn’t there for me to moan at, so I shouted at the women instead, telling them to take away the starship and the Veekles.
    ‘Leave them lying there, and someone will trip over them and do them damage. I’ve told you that before.’
    ‘Okay, Mitch dear, we’ll put them away,’ they went, as if they were talking to a little kid rather than the oldest one in whole Family. ‘Gela and Stoop are resting now. Aren’t you going to take a nap too?’
    ‘I don’t feel like it.’
    ‘What do you want to do then, love? What are we going to do with you?’
    ‘Get out Earth Models for me,’ I told them. ‘I want to make sure they’re being properly looked after. Last time I checked some fool had let water get to them.’
    ‘They’re dry now. We got a nice new log, remember? A nice dry log for them. And Jeffo London made a new greased lid to cover up the end.’
    ‘That one-legged fool. He probably broke the Models when he was shoving them back in with those clumsy hands of his.’
    ‘Oh dear, Mitch! We
are
out of sorts, aren’t we?’
    They brought House over and put it into my hands so I could feel its funny square shape and its smooth sticky surface, and the door, and the little holes that Tommy called Wind Ohs. I held it up to my nose to smell the grease and sweat in it, going back to the times before anyone alive was born.
    Not that I could smell anything much now. It wasn’t just my eyes that had gone. It was all my bloody senses.
    ‘Still all in one piece,’ I said, holding it out for them to take it back. ‘Don’t bloody drop it, mind, like that silly girl did a few years back. Remember that thing was made by Tommy himself before he went blind, and show it some respect. Angela helped him cut the bark and smooth it and glue it together. It’s older than me, that House. It was made before I was born.’
    ‘Older than you, Mitch,’ they chirruped, just like I was a bloody kid. ‘My, that is
old
old.’
    ‘Now give me Plane. Come on, get on with it.’
    I felt the long flat wings of Plane and the two hard jets underneath.
    ‘Be careful with those jets,’ I told them as I gave Plane back. ‘They’ve been broken off too many times by clumsy people that don’t know how to look after old things properly.’
    ‘Don’t worry,