Dark Eden

with starflower juice.
    ‘Hey! Come back!’ she yells up to them. ‘We don’t want you to do that now. Things are hard hard for us on Earth just now. Every time you take one of those sky-boats out across the stars, we all have to work extra hard to give you the stuff you need to make the Single Force. We haven’t got the time for that now. We’ve got better things to do.’
    Mehmet looks at Tommy. Tommy looks at Dixon.
    ‘Just this once?’ Dixon pleads with the other two. ‘I promise you, it’s what Jesus wants.’
    Tommy and Mehmet look at each other.
    ‘Yeah, just this once,’ they agree, and they carry on right up to Circle, ignoring the President, who shouts up ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ in a silly high voice that makes littles laugh.
    In comes Small Sky-Boat, which is meant to be Police Veekle. It also has a bark roof and is carried on another set of branches, but it looks even more wobbly and silly than Big Sky-Boat, because it is made to come apart. The real Police Veekle was as big as Landing Veekle, apparently, and it went round and round sky of Earth, looking for problems and trouble. (Sky there was more full of boats than a hundred Greatpools, and in some of them people were doing bad things, like dropping things onto Earth.)
    Sitting in the Small Sky-Boat are Angela our mother and Michael Name-Giver. They were called Orbit Police. Angela has her face darkened with clay and buckfat to look like the real Angela.
    ‘Go after those silly buggers, you two,’ says President, ‘and get them back before they go and lose our boat in Starry Swirl. They really don’t know what they’re doing, and anyway, they’re not doing what Earth Family wants.’
    Being Orbit Police meant that Angela and Michael had the job of stopping people who didn’t do what the President and Family wanted. Their boat hurried after the Big Sky-Boat
Defiant
, with Angela and Michael both yelling and shouting out:
    ‘Hey! Come back! Stop! That’s not your boat to take away!’
    Angela looks out at us standing all round the clearing. She looks left, she looks right, she looks in front of her and behind, and then she raises her eyebrows and holds out her hands, palms upwards, as if to say, ‘Are you guys not even going to help?’
    The kids know quite well this is their invitation to join in.
    ‘Stop! Don’t do it!’ they yell out excitedly to those three naughty men in Big Sky-Boat. Lots of the little kids have fierce angry faces as if they’re really cross, and really think they can change the story.
    ‘Stop!’ they yell. ‘Go back!’
    But the men in Big Sky-Boat take no notice at all of them, or of Angela and Michael either, until Small Sky-Boat is really close. Then finally Dixon looks back at them.
    ‘Back off, you two, or you’ll get hurt!’ he yells out. ‘We’ve got the Single Force here. We’ve already started it going. We’ve made Hole-in-Sky and we’re going through. You can’t stop us! So back off!’
    ‘No, we won’t back off,’ says Angela. ‘We won’t back off and we
will
stop you – or sink trying. You come back here, mate! We’re not going to let you go!’

    If only the men in Big Sky-Boat had listened, was what we were all supposed to think. If only they’d listened and followed the Laws of Earth and respected President, then we wouldn’t be here in Eden, standing around in our buckskin wraps and wondering how you find metal and what lecky-trickity is and how you make a sky-boat. We’d be there on Earth with that big star above us and the light all around us, the sweet white light, pure and bright like the inside of a whitelantern flower, and we’d
know
about metal and lecky-trickity and all of that. Telly vision, computers, we’d know it all, without even trying.
    But then it wouldn’t have been
us
, though, would it? I thought to myself. Tommy and Angela would never have got together, would they? No way would she have slipped with him if she had all the men on Earth to choose from. And that means that none of us five hundred and thirty-two people would ever have lived on Earth, or on Eden, or anywhere else.
    It was a strange strange thought. All this time we’d been grieving about how things were, but if things weren’t this way, there wouldn’t be an ‘us’ to grieve anything.

    Well anyway, pretty soon, that
Defiant
starts to spin round and round like a log in the water at the top of Exit Falls.
    ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ yell Dixon and Mehmet and Tommy together as they whirl