Dark Eden

I reckon, if I’d just spent an hour wandering around naked on Snowy Dark.
    ‘I’ll tell you a funny thing,’ I said, ‘when we saw those woollybucks up there on the snow, I thought for a moment they were a Landing Veekle from Earth. Hah! That was pretty dumb of me, wasn’t it?’
    Gerry laughed.
    ‘Tom’s dick, John! You just killed a
leopard
!’
    ‘But I suppose one waking someone
will
come, won’t they? They say the starship was damaged when Angela and Michael chased after it in their Police Veekle and tried to stop it. They say it leaked. But even if the starship broke on the way back, and even if the Three Companions died, the people on Earth would find it sooner or later, wouldn’t they? I mean it had a Computer, didn’t it, and a Rayed Yo? Okay it’s two hundred wombtimes ago now that they left Eden. But think how long it must take to build a new starship. I mean it takes old Jeffo half a wombtime just to build one lousy log boat to fish with out on Greatpool.’
    Gerry took my shoulders and shook me.
    ‘Gela’s tits, John, will you
stop
talking about bloody sky-boats! You’ve killed a leopard! All by yourself! With a kid’s spear!’
    It was weird weird. The leopard was still twitching in front of me, I was covered with its black blood, and I was shaking shaking all over. But tears came into my eyes as I thought about the Three Companions, who left Tommy and Angela on Eden to try and get back to Earth: Dixon, who had the idea to steal the starship, and Mehmet, who Angela liked best because he was kind, and gentle Michael, who named the animals and plants. I wished I knew just what happened to them when they set off back across sky to Earth in their leaky sky-boat.
    And I wished we knew how long it would be before someone came for us from Earth.

2

Tina Spiketree

    John was
interesting
. I mean he looked nice, and I fancied him in that way, but what fascinated me most was the way he behaved. All that hunting trip he was trying to be different, trying not to be the same as all the other newhair guys. He went right up that icy ridge. He annoyed Old Roger and David by questioning the True Story. He stayed still and quiet while Gerry was trying to get laughs with his cold feet. Yes, and I’d given him that oyster, and he’d been pleased, but he didn’t make a
thing
out of it like others boys would. He didn’t make a big thing about how he and I were going to have a slip. And now, while the rest of us were hunting bucks, he’d done for a leopard all by himself, which no one
ever
did, not unless they were cornered and had no choice. And his cousin Gerry was telling everyone that John
did
have a choice. He had plenty of time to run up a tree, but he’d decided to stay on the ground and try his luck.
    So why had he done it? I could just about imagine some silly boy doing a thing like that for a dare, or doing it because his friends said he was a wimp, but John wouldn’t go for a dare, and no one thought he was a wimp. He’d done it for some other reason. I hadn’t figured out what it was, but I could see that John was like a good chess player: he didn’t just do what seemed right at one moment, he thought ahead. He thought about where he was trying to get to, four five moves on.
    Well, I was a bit like that too. I knew when to bide my time. So I didn’t ask John why he did for the leopard, however much I wanted to know, and I didn’t make a big fuss of him like most of the others did, and for most of the walk I fell behind him, leaving him to talk to the ones who wanted to go over the story of the leopard, over and over and over again. But I smiled to myself as we walked back to Lava Blob and then to Family, because I was looking forward to figuring him out.

    Family was in eight groups, all bunched up together among the big old rocks that stuck up out of the ground between Greatpool and Longpool and up towards Deep Pool. Each group had its own space with bark shelters and a fireplace where embers were always set glowing. (It could take half a waking to get a new fire going with twigs or blackglass sparks, so no one liked to let a fire go out.) The outer edge of Family was formed by the pools or by rocks, or, when there wasn’t any natural sort of barrier, by fences made by piling up branches and rocks to keep out leopards and other big animals. First group inside the fence on Peckhamside was Batwing, so that’s the bit of the fence we came to first.
    Old Roger Redlantern and big dumb