Dark Eden

You
what
? You’re bloody joking, aren’t you, John? Tell me you’re joking.’
    But of course she could see by my face, and by everything that had happened so far, that I wasn’t.
    ‘Tom’s neck, John! You
idiot
. You bloody idiot. Who do you think you are?’
    She grabbed her wrap and started climbing up the rocks away from me.
    ‘Hey Tina, wait . . .’
    ‘Keep away from me, John. You did it on your own. You can take what’s coming to you on your own. I’m not part of it, alright? I’m going back to Spiketree. Don’t come after me. I mean that, John, I really mean it.’
    Well, I could
see
she meant it and I really hadn’t expected this. I’d thought that she’d be of the same sort of mind as me. In fact I’d thought she’d be impressed by what I’d done, like she was impressed with the way I spoke out at Any Virsry. I’d thought it would make me seem brave and strong in her eyes.
    I listened to her climbing up the rocks, heading back to sleeping Family where some time soon, maybe in an hour, maybe in two or three or four, someone or other would wake up and pass through Circle Clearing and see what I’d done.
    And I knew I was alone in whole world. I was lonelier even than Angela was, all those wombs ago, when she came up here by herself and cried.
    I took Angela’s ring out of the pocket in my wrap. Of course I didn’t really believe Angela would come to me or anything. I wasn’t like Lucy Lu. But I sort of hoped I would be able to see her in my mind as I’d seen her before.
    It didn’t happen, though. Why should it? And why would Angela want to help me out anyway, when she and Tommy made Circle and started Any Virsries? They didn’t want those things ended, did they? Whole point of those things was to last and last. And Angela had specifically told all of us to stay by the stones and wait for Earth.
    I put the ring away again. For a bit I just sat there rocking back and forth on my haunches, like I’ve seen mothers do when they’ve lost a child and they don’t know how to get through it, just rocking and rocking and rocking themselves to make a rhythm and make the time go past.

    After a bit I made up my mind to get back in control of myself.
    ‘It’s not like I’ve made some kind of blunder,’ I told myself. ‘This wasn’t a mistake. I thought about it. I knew what I was doing. I knew it would be horrible, for everyone else and for me. But I was trying to make something happen that needed to happen.’
    I couldn’t see Angela or feel her presence, but I could sort of feel the voices of people in the future watching this scene that I was in.
John All Alone
, they’d call it. The scene that came after
John Destroys Circle
and
Tina Dumps John
.
    I imagined them standing round me, those future people, looking in, calling things out. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Maybe they were thanking me for what I’d done. Maybe they were shouting out to me that I’d done wrong. But in a way it didn’t matter, the same as it didn’t really matter whether Tommy and Mehmet and Dixon, the Disobedient Three, did wrong that time they refused to listen to President and carried on instead towards Hole-in-Sky.
    ‘No. Don’t do it!’ we yelled out to them, every Any Virsry. But the fact is that if they hadn’t made that choice, we wouldn’t have existed. We wouldn’t even have been there to yell back to them. Most probably no human being would ever even have heard of this dark world called Eden.
    So we couldn’t really mean it, could we, when we called that out to them? Or at least we could only really mean it in those dark dark moments that no one ever talks about when life itself seems to have no worth at all.

    Then I heard a shout coming from Family way. It was quite faint. I couldn’t hear the words.
    Soon there was another shout, and another, and then the horns started up. It wasn’t long slow blasts this time but the quick
Parp! Parp! Parp! Parp! Parp!
that means a Strornry Meeting. All over Family people would be waking up, afraid. What could it be? What dreadful thing could have happened? They’d look round anxiously at each other, to see if anyone else had a clue. What could it mean? What terrible event could justify another meeting so soon, when they hadn’t even had half a sleep to let them recover from the three wakings of the last one?
    I stood up. A couple of jewel bats were zipping along just above the surface of Deep Pool: dark shadows, fast and smooth across