Dark Eden

could we really wait in this one place forever, just in case they came?
    And was that really the custom of Earth, anyway, to wait in one place? They were the ones who built a boat that could travel through the stars.

13

John Redlantern

    ‘I’m watching you, John, so keep your mouth shut,’ growled David, shoving me forward suddenly so I nearly fell.
    I wanted to rub the back of my head where he’d been pulling my hair, but of course I didn’t. I acted like it hadn’t hurt at all. And I ignored Gerry too, standing beside me, looking anxiously into my face. Gela’s tits, there was no way I was going to admit to him, or to David, or to anyone else that David had hurt or upset me. I stood up straight and watched what was going on in Circle, like nothing had happened. That was Caroline’s game and I could play it too.
    Helpers were lifting Mitch and Stoop and Gela to their wobbly feet. We’d got to the bit of Any Virsry called Earth Things, where we had to listen to three old blind people tell us about things that they’d never seen and didn’t understand.
    Scrawny old Mitch told how Earth spun round and round like a top so half of it is all lighted up by the star and half of it is dark, and saggy grey Gela told how the people there found metal in the ground that could be used to make knives that wouldn’t smash like blackglass does.
    ‘And they found a thing called the Single Force,’ she said, ‘that could carry them between the stars.’
    ‘They found another kind of force that was even better than that,’ broke in little Stoop excitedly, with his blind eyes rolling around in his soft fat head, ‘a force that could be made to run along strings for miles and miles, and could be used for light and heat and for machines called telly visions that could make pictures that could move and speak. It was called Li . . .’ He stumbled on the word, just like old one-legged Jeffo had done, over by Dixon Stream. ‘It was called Li . . . Leck . . . Lecky-trickity . . .’
    ‘Li . . . Leck . . . Lecky-trickity . . .’ Gerry mimicked under his breath, looking at me to see if I was pleased.
    ‘It’s important to remember the Single Force,’ Gela came back, not happy with Stoop’s interruption. Her blind eyes bulged at us. ‘That’s what got us here, and that’s what will take us home. And not only that,’ she carried on hastily before the others could break in, ‘but they had animals called horses too that could carry them about. Imagine that! Animals!’
    ‘And cars,’ Mitch said, and began to cough and cough while his helpers whacked him on the back.
    The helpers got out the Earth Models, and then, with a lot of coughing and wheezing, Oldest told us about
houses
, which were shelters as big as hills, and
roads
, which were paths made with hard shiny metal, and
trains
and
planes
and
drains
.
    ‘Drains were like streams underneath every shelter,’ Stoop said. ‘They’d wash all your piss and shit away, into a pool as big as Greatpool, covered with a roof of stone.’
    ‘Planes were a kind of bird made of metal,’ Mitch said.
    ‘Trains were long thin shelters that slid along a smooth metal path,’ said Gela, ‘so you could go to sleep in one bit of a forest and wake up in another.’
    They were flagging now, and the group leaders began to prompt them with other things to say.
    ‘What about hosples where they made you well?’ whispered Mary Starflower.
    ‘What about those clones with their big feet and their red noses?’ murmured Susan Blueside.
    ‘What about money?’ prompted Tom Brooklyn.
    ‘Ah,’ said old Gela, ‘money was numbers you held in your head.’
    ‘You could trade them for things you wanted,’ said Mitch.
    Trade things for numbers in other people’s heads? Nobody’d ever understood what that meant, but Oldest spoke about it at every Any Virsry, as if a waking would come when someone would jump up and yell out, ‘Yes of course! Of course! I’ve figured it out now! I know how that worked!’
    What was the point of saying words if we didn’t know what they meant? We were like blind people pretending to see.
    But they say that even Tommy and Angela themselves didn’t understand how Lecky-trickity worked or how you made the Single Force. They didn’t even know where metal was to be found, or how to get it out of the stone it was mixed with, except that you had to heat it with fire.

    Littles got hungry and started to grizzle and cry. Newhairs giggled and whispered