‘You mustn’t kill anything except animals to eat and animals that are dangerous,’ read Caroline. ‘You mustn’t do anything to harm the family.’
She paused and looked round at us all.
‘That means you must not do anything to break Family up,’ she said.
‘You mustn’t slip with a child or with anyone that doesn’t want to do it,’ she went on, ‘and grown men mustn’t slip with young girls.
‘You mustn’t steal things.
‘You must come to Any Virsries and to Strornry Meetings.
‘You must respect the Old.
‘And that,’ said Caroline, frowning round at us, ‘means not just Oldest, but group leaders, and Family Head, and all grownups.’
She glanced in John’s direction for a moment, and then went on reading.
‘You must look after clawfeet.
‘You mustn’t foul streams or pools.
‘You must wait for Earth to come, and keep the customs of Earth, so Earth will take you home.’
John had a point, I thought, he really did. Of course we wanted to go back to Earth, but 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 and pinched each other, and Oldest themselves, who’d started off so excited that they couldn’t bear to let each other finish what they had to say, got too tired to carry on. In fact they were so drained and pale and wobbly all of a sudden that they looked like they might die right there in front of us in their precious Circle of Stones. They had to be helped to step back and sit down and wrap up with skins and be given stuff to drink. And then Caroline and Council and Oldest and helpers got out of the way, and in came Big Sky-Boat, and everyone cheered and clapped and laughed.
It was time for the Show, and it was Brooklyn’s turn to do it. A whole bunch of them were carrying that great silly wooden thing that was supposed to be the starship Defiant. It was three times the length of a normal boat, and not quite straight. It had poles sticking up from it to hold up a wobbly bark roof like the roof of a shelter, and long branches sticking out of its sides for people to carry it with. It even had another little boat inside it, which was supposed to be the Landing Veekle. And crammed in, at the front and back, were the Three Disobedient Men, laughing and waving to us.
Of course Big Sky-Boat was tiny tiny compared with the real Defiant. The real starship was longer than Greatpool, and so big that if it ever came down to the ground it would never get back up again into sky. (Even the real Landing Veekle was the size of Circle of Stones, and it was carried inside of Defiant.) But all the same our silly little Big Sky-Boat still looked stupidly big compared to the little log boats that we used to fish on Greatpool and Longpool, and it had so much stuff on top of it that anyone could see that it would have toppled over straight away if you actually put it in water. Plus, with that curve in middle of it, there was no way you could have paddled it straight.