‘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 hard smooth shiny stuff that comes from Earth. (It was said you could find it in Eden too, hidden in the rocks, mixed up with the rock in some way, but no one knew where to look.) And if it was made of metal, it must have belonged to one of the First Five, to Angela or Tommy or one of the Three Companions.
And then I had a thought that sent a chill going right through me and made my head spin.
Tom’s dick! This could be the ring, the Lost Ring, Angela’s ring that they sometimes do that play about! It could be that actual one.
Anyway, whether it was that ring or another one, it was a Memento, and if I told anyone about it, they’d make me hand it over to Oldest to keep with the other Mementoes — the Boots, the Belt, the Backpack, the Sky-Boat Models, the Earth Models, the plastic Kee Board with its rows of squares with letters, and the blank square that once showed pictures that could move and talk . . .
Bam! The stonebuck bowled straight into me, knocking all the wind out of me and sending me flying, back onto a big ant’s nest.
All the others laughed.
‘He kills a bloody leopard,’ Janny teased me, ‘and then he doesn’t notice a stonebuck when it comes right at him.’
‘You idiot, John,’ said Candice. ‘That would have been a good waking’s kill for us. What in Harry’s name did you think you were doing?’
I stood up, hastily brushing off angry ants with their bodies flashing red in warning that they planned to sting. I felt a fool, but I could have completely explained myself and satisfied all of them — even miserable Candice — if I’d only shown them the ring. It was a find that Family would value more highly than ten stonebucks, and any one of the others would have admitted straight away that they’d have been just as distracted from the hunt as I’d been if they’d been the one that found it.
I would have liked to show it to them too. I didn’t want them to think of me as a wake-dreamer, or as someone that didn’t pay attention in a hunt: it wasn’t the idea of me I wanted people to have, and it wasn’t true either. But you’ve got to think about where you are trying to get to in the future, that was my rule, that was my leopard rule, not just try and make things easy and comfortable right now, and I decided in that moment that it would be better not to show the ring to anyone just now. So I closed my hand around it — it had a lovely smooth cool feeling — and I smiled and shrugged and said nothing. I had sewed a little pocket on the edge of my waistwrap as a place to put small useful things like bits of blackglass and stumpcandy and whitelantern seeds, and I slipped the ring in there when no one was watching me, and kept quiet, and we carried on hunting and scavenging.
‘You’ve gone all weird since that leopard, I reckon,’ Candice said. ‘I mean, speaking out in Any Virsry, talking about going across Snowy Dark, what was that really all about? Don’t give me all that about not enough food, and Exit Falls and all that. That’s not for us to sort out, and you know it. I reckon you just like the attention.’
‘He’s been weird since he’s been slipping that Tina Spiketree, you ask me,’ Janny said.
Met looked at me. Gerry looked at me. Was I really going to let these two girls take the piss out of me like this? But I didn’t say anything. We walked on. Pretty soon we came across David, who was out with Fox. He had just killed a stonebuck with his long blackglass-tipped spear and was looking mighty pleased about it.
‘Hey, that was my buck!’ exclaimed Candice. ‘I spotted that and we would have killed it too if John had just been paying attention.’
David gave a bark of laughter and repeated the old saying: ‘It’s not your buck unless your spear’s in it.’
He looked at me.
‘Not paying attention, eh, John? Too much slip if you ask me. Slip with Martha London, slip with Tina Spiketree, slip with bloody Bella Redlantern herself. This boy must think that’s all he’s here for, making juice for women. Juicy John, that’s what we should call him. Juice is all he’s bloody good for.’
There was so much hate and envy in his ugly bitter batface. I remembered how he’d looked when I crawled out of Bella’s shelter and I thought to myself that, if he could have driven his spear into me now as he’d just driven it into that stonebuck, if he could have done it without being blamed for it, well, he could have done. He would have done it gladly.
On Earth that had sometimes happened, the stories said. One human being would sometimes do for another like we did for bucks and slinkers. In fact sometimes whole groups would turn on one another like when Hitler and the Jar Men turned on the Juice. It was said it had happened there because Family on Earth had split apart, with groups moving away from one another and acting like each one was a Family on its own. It was even said that the White people had once taken the London people — whose skins were black like Angela’s — and tied them up with ropes and traded with them like we in Family traded blackglass and buckskins and leopards’ teeth between the groups. (That was history, and it was one of the things that kids used to learn when we had a School.)
And when I saw that look on David’s face and saw what it was that he would like to do to me, I had a glimpse of what would happen to us if Family was broken apart. I had an image come into my mind of a big old tree being pulled down, a big old tree that gave warmth and light and fruit and bark for shelters, and I saw the deadly scalding sap that comes spurting up from Underworld when the trunk first breaks.