Dark Eden

ourselves when there are two three times as many of us?’ John interrupted her.
    ‘Like I said,’ said Mary Blueside stubbornly, ‘that’s for Caroline and Council to sort out, not the likes of you. Now if you’ll excuse us, some of us are trying to find some food for our group right now.’
    ‘Yeah, I can see that,’ John sneered. ‘Pondsnails. So tell me honestly, did you ever think of eating pondsnails when you were kids?’
    ‘What I did when I was a kid is none of your business, newhair!’
    ‘Yes,’ I broke in, ‘but John means that . . .’
    ‘Leave it, Gerry, leave it,’ said John in a tired tired voice, and he walked on again, leaving the rest of us to catch up with him.
    ‘So are we actually going to do some scavenging ourselves?’ asked Candice. She was
pretty
pretty, but she was always finding fault with everything, and I was a bit scared of her sharp tongue. ‘Or are we just going to wait around while John has his own personal Any Virsry out here?’
    ‘Yeah,’ said big slow Met. ‘I don’t like having all these people moan at us. It wasn’t
us
that spoke out in Circle. It’s not
our
fault.’

    I felt sorry for John, with everyone complaining about him. And I kept remembering how he’d looked when he came out from Bella’s shelter last night: lonely lonely, and waving me away so he could stay alone.
    But not
everyone
moaned at him. Once we came upon a group of newhairs from Brooklyn – Mike, Dixon, Gela and Clare – and they were full of praise for him.
    ‘Good for you, John. Why shouldn’t we newhairs have a say if we want one?’ Mike Brooklyn said. ‘We have to scavenge and hunt like grownups, we have to help look after littles and oldies, so why can’t we have a say as well?’
    ‘Yeah, what you said was right, John,’ Dix Brooklyn said. ‘It’s all fine fine for Oldest to say we should keep everything like it’s always been but they’ll be dead soon. We’ve got to think about how it’s going to be when we’re grownups and Family’s bigger.’
    ‘So how big
will
Family be when we’re old then, John?’ asked Gela Brooklyn, and it wasn’t in a sneering way to make fun of John, but because she really wanted him to explain.
    That made me pleased pleased for John.
    ‘You mean when we’ve had kids and our kids have had kids?’ John said. ‘Well, it’ll be thousands, won’t it? Think about it. There were just two people here once, one hundred and sixty-three years ago, and now we’re five hundred and thirty-two. That’s – what? – more than two hundred times what it was. And in another hundred and sixty years . . .’
    ‘What? Will it be two hundred times what it is now?’ Gela laughed nervously. ‘Tom’s neck, I don’t even know the name of that number.’
    ‘It would be,’ said John. ‘Except that most people would starve before then.’
    He was about the only newhair I knew who ever thought about anything except what was happening for them now. And that was what was good about John, and why I stuck by him, but it was also what was scary about him, and about people like him. He would take risks and he would do things that would make people turn against him, if he thought that would work out best in the long run. I just didn’t have that in me.
    But I did have it in me to follow someone no matter what.

11

John Redlantern

    After we’d spoken to those Brooklyn newhairs, we spread out a bit and started looking properly for stuff to eat. There wasn’t much to find, what with all of Family milling around, and all we got was a few lousy little bats and some dirty scraps of stumpcandy – but after about four five hours Candice spotted a little stonebuck grazing in a clump of starflowers. She knew better than to go straight in after it because, once it spotted us, it could run two three times as fast as any of us – we’ve only got two legs, it has six – but she crept back to rest of us and signed to us with her hands where it was so we could spread out around it. I was crawling slowly through the flickering starflowers when I put my hand on what I thought was a funny shaped stone. But when I glanced down at it I could see straight away that it wasn’t a stone at all. It was a ring, like the rings some people carve out of wood and polish up with buckfat to put on their fingers.
    But this one wasn’t made of wood, it was hard and smooth, and it reflected the light of the flowers like water does. I knew then it was made of
metal
, that