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you in. This place belongs to us, to True Family that stayed together as the Mother of Eden wanted.”
    “It belongs to Davidfolk, you mean?” Angie asked.
    “Well done, Einstein. But I’m feeling kind this waking.” He wasn’t looking at Angie as he spoke, but at me. “And it’ll be kind of fun watching your friend walking round.”
    So we went in. And there it was, the Veekle, in the place where it crashed to the ground, all those hundreds of wombs ago. Tom’s dick, even just the size of it was hard to take in. It was thirty foot wide at least, yet we knew it had once been carried inside that huge starship from Earth.
    We reached out to touch it. The metal was strangely cold, its smooth surface reflecting the orange light of buckfat lanterns burning on poles all around, and the oldness and strangeness of it made us dizzy. Everyone in Knee Tree Grounds knew the story of how John and his friends had come across the Veekle when they were fleeing from the rage of David Redlantern and Old Family. Everyone knew about the three white skeletons they had found inside it, and the picture that had come to life, just for a moment, and spoken out loud in the voice of Michael Namegiver. It had happened so long ago that it seemed more like something from a dream rather than something that had really happened in our own world, yet this thing had been old even then. Even to Jeff and John and Tina, who were like dreams to us, this would have seemed a thing from a dream.
    “That guard’s looking at you,” Angie said.
    “Let’s get out of his sight, then.”
    Ducking our heads, we climbed through a jagged hole into a kind of cave inside the Veekle. The roof was made of a strange stuff that was clear like water, and through it came dimly the orange light of Veeklehouse, casting faint shadows on the dirty orange floor. All around us were rows and rows of strange shapes: circles, squares, bits of writing in small, neat letters. There was a stale, sour smell.
    “Ugh,” said Angie, “it really does smell of blood.”
    Straight away an image came into my head of rotten flesh dripping from the bones of those three men into the brown crumbling stuff on the floor, and I felt sick. I felt so sick that I knew that if I didn’t get out into the open air, I really would be sick. A woman was coming in with her three fat children, and I banged my head on a jagged corner of metal as I squeezed past them in my hurry.
    “You could have waited a minute,” the woman said crossly.
    Back in the open I stood and breathed in. I’d left the rotten blood-smell behind, but the air was heavy with burning fat and the greasy stink of cooking meat, and I had this horrible picture in my head of all human life as a kind of rottenness, spreading like a dirty stain across the stars.
    Why did Greenstone give me that present? What was he trying to say?
    “Ugh!” Angie said happily as she came out after me. “That was horrible ! But wasn’t it great ?”
    At the gate the guard stood in our way.
    “My name’s Mike, sweetheart,” he said to me. “Want to meet up sometime when I’ve finished here? It’d be worth your while. We guards can get hold of things, you know.”
    “Yeah, that would be nice,” I muttered.
    We rushed out into the busy path outside and almost ran straight into a row of three big woollybucks plodding along on their six flat feet, loaded with bags of uncut blackglass. I knew that the smooth headlanterns on the backs of their heads could light the way for travelers across Snowy Dark, but here we could barely make out their glow.
    “Hey, you’re bleeding!” said a voice from behind me.
    It was him! It was that beautiful man Greenstone!
    “Bleeding?” I croaked.
    He pointed at where I’d banged myself coming out of the Veekle.
    “We’ll find someone to clean that for you.”
    One of the two spearmen with him pointed to a two-floored shelter, which had writing up outside it. Of course to me and Angie it was just lines and