On April the 1st there was a small earth tremor and mountains appeared in the distance that we’d never seen before, illuminated by the lava streaming down the side of a volcano in their midst: big mountains covered in snow, that up to now had been in permanent darkness. For a while a hot sulphurous wind blew and the galaxy was hidden behind black dust. Tommy and I spent a few hours laying out a circle on the ground, using big round stones from the bottom of one of the streams, to mark the site of our original landing. It was my idea. It struck me that whether we stayed or whether we returned to Earth, this was a fairly important historic site for the human race. It was a good spot to be in. There were large pools around it, and streams, with fish in them that were good to eat if you could catch them.
April 3rd it rained. We sheltered in a small cave in one of the rocky outcrops around the pools. The cave was even more full of life than the forest outside. When we finally lay down and tried to sleep – Tommy at one end, me at the other, listening to the rain outside – Tommy said that life on Eden must have begun deep down in underground caves when the surface was still covered in deep ice. You get little pockets of geothermal life even on Earth, he pointed out, in deep caves and on the bottom of the sea beyond the reach of the sun. There was even life in Lake Vostok two miles down under the Antarctic ice. Life here could have begun like that and then spread upwards when it discovered how to heat its own environment. Any life form that could reach the surface and melt the ice would get an advantage because it would be able to spread more quickly than was possible in underground caves.
Tommy was trying really hard to be nice to me and not to slip into his smooth lady-killer routine which he knew I hated. In fact we were weirdly formal with each other. It was such a strange position to be in. I was quite clear in my mind that if we got back to Earth I most probably wouldn’t want to have anything more to do with him. His celebrity as such didn’t impress me and as a person he really wasn’t the type I chose to spend my time with.
But if no one came for us? Well then he would be my life’s companion and this really would be a marriage which nothing could end but death, a marriage more total than almost any other that has ever existed.
Tommy:
April 4th we saw a new animal a bit like a cat, only it had luminous spots and its eyes were round and flat, not spherical. The weird thing was that when it moved its spots could ripple backwards along its sides at exactly the same speed as its forward motion, so as to create the illusion that its skin was standing still. It also had six limbs, like other Eden creatures. The bird-like and bat-like animals, for example, had hands as well as feet and wings. The little bats stood upright on their hind feet on branches and looked down at us curiously, stroking their wrinkled little noseless but oddly human faces with their oddly human hands while they fanned their membranous wings.
April 5th, I shot a pig-like six-legged animal and we skinned it and cooked it over a fire. It was the first thing we had killed, but we knew we couldn’t live on fruit and space-food for much longer. It tasted a bit like mutton, but kind of sweet and fatty.
We didn’t talk much, but I guess we both did a lot of thinking. I’ve never noticed myself as much as I did then. I’d often been told I was selfish, self-centered and self-absorbed – by Yvette among others, though I’m not sure she was really in a position to talk – and I guess I was, yet I’d never reflected much before on me, on this strange being that happens to be myself. I’d always just been this person, blundering and trampling around like some kind of wounded beast, without ever thinking about who he was or why.
Angela:
April 6th I woke up loathing the perpetual night of Eden. It’s not cold, it’s not pitch dark, it looks pretty enough with its lantern-flowers – quite lovely in fact, like a garden forever decked out with Chinese lanterns for a midsummer night’s party. But to think that there would never be a sunrise here, never a blue sky, never a clear sunny day when you could see for miles. Never. Never. Never. For a while I felt so claustrophobic it was all I could do not to scream.
Tommy and I hardly said a word. We’d said we’d wait to April 8th so we did, but really we knew already that no one was going to come back to us, and that Mehmet and Mike and Dixon had not got through. We just weren’t going to allow ourselves to say it yet.
Tommy:
April 7th I tried to fill up the time by following starbirds through the forest. Starbirds was the name Mike gave to those peacock-like creatures with luminous stars on their tails. I liked the creatures, even though they were basically carrion eaters. I liked the way they crashed noisily through the trees. I liked the way that pairs of them would move through the forest some way apart, but in parallel, calling out to each other in loud voices that carried over the humming of the trees, and over the cries of all the other creatures.
“Hoom – hoom – hoom,” goes one.
Then the other, maybe a mile away, goes “Aaaah! – Aaaah! – Aaaah!”
I liked the way that that was all they’d got to say but they were happy anyway to say it for hours and hours, back and forth across the forest.
Starbirds don’t know they’re in Eden, I said to myself several times, as if it was something I couldn’t quite get through my head. They don’t know Eden is in intergalactic space. They don’t know that this ground isn’t the base of the universe itself. To them this is just how the world is.
Angela:
And then it was April 8th. We were both awake watching the GMT click over from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00.
“They didn’t make it,” we admitted to one another at 00:05:00. “They didn’t get through.”
I wondered how it had ended for Dixon and Mehmet and Mike. It was possible that in mid-leap they had been swallowed up inside one of those weird mirror-lined bubbles of sub-E, which are really tiny little temporary universes which shrink back to nothing when the engine stops pulling them into being. But I think it was more likely that the engine died on them after a leap or two and left them stranded: stranded in that smelly little box in the middle of the void, while the food and water ran out, the ship gradually grew cold and Mike’s last sedative shot was finally used up. Poor gentle Mike with nothing between him and his worst fear. Poor friendly, positive Mehmet. Poor Dixon, having to come to terms in the end with the fact that God had let him down. He had found proof that there was life beyond Earth, proof that would undoubtedly have ensured that the Galactic Project would continue and that the gospel could be carried out across the stars, but God had not let him take that news home.
But there was no point in going on and on thinking these thoughts, was there? There was simply no point.
I took Tommy by the hand and we went to a pool we knew and which, without actually speaking of it, we’d somehow both set aside for this moment. It was surrounded by pulsing trees. A soft cool moss grew on its banks, small bats swooped over the water and there always seemed to be starbirds in the vicinity, calling to each other across the forest. It sounds romantic but really for me it was a case of Plan A has failed so let’s move quickly on to Plan B – to Plan Baby. This just seemed the best place to put it into effect.