Green Boy (19 page)

“Rigel,” I said. “Bellatrix. Betelgeuse.”

Grand patted my arm, and took a sip of his drink.

I was looking up at Orion. I said, without really thinking about it, “Children of Gaia.”

“Gaia?” said Grand. “Where you read about her?”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I looked down at his face, turned up to me in interest, the bright eyes over the grey beard.

“I don't know,” I said carefully. “Uh—what is Gaia?”

“An idea people have,” Grand said. He settled back, looking up at the sky again. “An idea that all life on this planet, every living thing, is part of one organism. And she regulate conditions so that life go on. That's Gaia. Big Momma. Whatever one species do to damage things, Gaia will put it right, even if it mean wiping that species out.”

I said, “Including us?”

“Including us,” said Grand.

“You believe it?”

“I don't know,” Grand said. “I'd like to.”

His eyes shifted away from me, and back to Orion.

Reckless now, I said, “What about Pangaia, Grand? What's Pangaia?”

“Never heard of it,” Grand said. Then he paused, considering. “Pangaia? Sure you don't mean Pangaea? That the great big huge landmass about two hundred million years ago, the one big piece of land in the sea. After that it broke up, turned into all the continents, and the islands. Even the little Bahamas, in the end.” The bright eyes looked up at me. “You been readin' some interesting stuff, Trey.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I been readin'.”

 

So then, one fine day, Lou and I took out the dinghy and went out to Long Pond Cay, to see how it was coming along.

This is me, Trey, remember. I'm a writer. I'm twelve years old. This is my book, the story of what happened to Lou and me.

We went out toward Long Pond, pottering along, under a blue sky, over the chalky-blue shallows. The channels and the shoals were still changing, after the hurricane, but we were beginning to get to know them. We could see the long white beach, rebuilding itself, healing the scars. One tall ragged casuarina was waving gently, among the babies starting to grow alongside it.

Overhead, there came that high little piping call:
peeeu, peeeu . . .

It was the osprey, coasting sideways on a current of air, curving down to cross our path. The undersides of its wonderful broad wings were turquoise-white in the light reflected from the shallow sea. It swooped low over us. You could see its cruel curved little beak, and hear its plaintive loving call.

Lou looked across at me from the bow of the boat and smiled, his teeth very white in that round little dark face.

“That our fish hawk, Trey,” he said. “He telling us what happened.”

His voice was soft, soft but strong, like a hummingbird wing, like spider-silk.

Even the “real” parts of this fantasy are fictional. There is no island in the Bahamas named Lucaya; the Lucayans were the earliest inhabitants of the archipelago, now extinct. No character in my story is based on a living person, and the events are my invention.

All the same, events
like
the attempt to develop “Long Pond Cay” do happen. The Bahamians and their government have to guard their beautiful islands “jealously and zealously,” in the words of the current Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Hubert Ingraham. And so should we all guard the environment of our whole world: the earth and air and water whose quality is constantly under threat.

Anyone who is intrigued by the Gaia hypothesis should read the two books written by its remarkable originator, James E. Lovelock:
Gaia
and
The Ages of Gaia.
Also relevant to the story are William Anderson's book
The Green Man
and David Campbell's wonderful natural history of the Bahamas,
The Ephemeral Islands.

ALSO BY SUSAN COOPER

In The Dark Is Rising sequence
Over Sea, Under Stone
The Dark Is Rising
The 1974 Newbery Honor Book
Greenwitch
The Grey King
Winner of the 1976 Newbery Medal
Silver on the Tree
King of Shadows
An ABA “Pick of the Lists”
A
Boston Globe-Horn Book
Award
Honor Book
The Boggart
An ALA Notable Children's Book
The Boggart and the Monster
Dawn of Fear
Seaward

Margaret K. McElderry Books
An imprint of Simon
& Schuster Children's Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas,
New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2002 by Susan Cooper
All
rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any
form.
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real
people, or real locales are
used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and
incidents are the product of the author's
imagination, and any resemblance to
actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is
entirely
coincidental.
Book design by Sonia Chaghatzbanian
Cover art by Paul Youll
The text for this book is
set in Goudy Oldstyle.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data
Cooper, Susan, 1935-
Green boy / by Susan Cooper.—1st ed.
p.
cm.
Summary: Twelve-year-old Trey and seven-year-old Lou, who does not speak, cross
the barrier
between two worlds, that of their island in the Bahamas, and a land
called Pangaia, and play a
mysterious role in restoring the natural environment in
both places.
ISBN-13: 978-1-44244-122-4 (eBook)
[1.
Environmental protection—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Fiction. 3. Mutism,
Elective—Fiction. 4.
Lucaya (Bahamas)—Fiction. 5.
Bahamas—Fiction. 6. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.C7878 Gp
2002
[Fic]—dc21 2001030954