Cloud Permutations (9 page)

‘Oh, I do hope so,’ the voice said. ‘I’ve been sitting here for a long time, waiting for a boy who could fly. You have a long way to go, still, but … ‘ the voice laughed. ‘Hope is what keeps us human, is it not?’

Kal glanced at Bani. He was sitting motionless in the adjacent chair, a faraway look in his eyes. Now he stirred. ‘No,’ he said.

‘No?’ the voice inquired.

‘You’re not human.’

‘Perceptive,’ the voice said. ‘Be, from wanem?’
But why?

‘You’re a machine,’ Bani said. His fingers moved in his lap, as if he were typing.

‘Every sentient life is a machine,’ the voice said—tolerant, amused. Condescending, Kal thought. ‘You’re a machine made of cells and neurons—not the most efficient model, I should point out—and I am a machine, and the Olfala Bigwan is a machine, and those fish outside, they, too, are efficient little machines, just like you.’

Bani smiled. ‘Narawan,’ he said. ‘Did they make you?’

‘Nobody
made
me!’

The plane shook, and the seat underneath Kal began to shift and change, holding him fast. He struggled against it. Beside him Bani was still, and smiling. ‘You
are
a Narawan, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Not what we call a Narawan here on Heven, but still—an
Other?
We have none on Heven—my forefathers didn’t approve of your kind, I think—but I’ve read about you. An intelligence made, not born. An artificial one.’

‘Artificial?
Artificial?
’ Suddenly, the vehicle stilled. The seats released their grasp. When the voice spoke again it had regained its lightness. ‘I was born in the Breeding Grounds, the compound newborn of those who had gone before me, a new being made of the fragments of the old—just like you, little human. Yes, I am what your kind called Others. It is not a bad name. And I am glad, to see that you think well. You’ll need all your quickness of thinking, on your way to the tower.’ The tower. For a moment the word hung in the air around them, as thick as oil in water. He had been expecting them, this thing, this Other, had said. There was the tower again, which for a little while Kal had managed to forget. He said, ‘What are you?’

‘You make a good team,’ the voice said. ‘A quick mind to answer questions, and a different one to ask them. Very well. I am an Other. But not of your kind.’

‘An alien Other?’ Bani, almost for the first time since Kal had met him, sounded subdued. Almost awed, Kal thought. ‘From where? Here?’

‘This poxy planet? Hardly,’ the voice said. ‘Though I’ve spent more time here than a stone undersea.’

‘So where are you from? What stories can you tell?’ Like all people of Heven, Bani loved
storian
, the sitting down together for the telling of stories. But the Other, rather than being pleased, sounded peeved, and he said, ‘I don’t know, exactly.’

‘You don’t
know?
’

The seats twisted again. Kal turned around quickly and shot Bani a dark look that said,
don’t aggravate it!

‘I think I am old,’ the voice of the Other said. ‘Tingting blong me hemi se mi olfala tumas.
’ I think I am very old.

‘I don’t know,’ the Other said, ‘how old I am. I think I am as old as this place. Perhaps the world I must surely come from no longer even exists. I think I was once an explorer. I had a ship, and I sailed between the stars, the way so few of us the living do. The spaces are too big, the limitation of speed too great … Space travel is the domain of us Others, and the occasional lumbering great hulk of a ship built for you organic lives, a giant refrigerator or a miniature world where lives flare and die throughout an endless journey. I think … I think this world was once a young and vibrant one, a hub of sorts. I don’t know. Now it is a world of clouds and strange rains, and few ruins to tell its story. I’m trapped here, the way you are, though you are too quick and ignorant to know it. Trapped by the clouds, and forbidden from ever rising back into the skies … ‘

Then something changed. The water darkened, and the hull of the old plane, the RLV, shook. When the Other spoke next, its voice had changed. ‘There is little time,’ it said. It was a heavy, toneless voice.

‘And you have a long way to go still. You must reach the tower. The others of your kind, those who call themselves the Guardians—the fools, for when they first came here I spoke with them, and tried to make them see, but they took my meanings and shook them around like pretty coloured glass—they have released the Olfala Bigwan into this sea. It is hunting for you now.’

‘How?’ Bani said. Kal grasped the seat’s supports. He remembered the monster too vividly, as yet.

‘Worship and sacrifice,’ the Other said. ‘There are only a few of its kind still alive on this world, but I think, before … it was a creature of worship for those you call Narawan. Perhaps the relationship was symbiotic. I don’t know. But it can be made to act, sometimes, when the correct rites are performed, and a suitable sacrifice is made … ‘

Kal thought again of Tanuaiterai’s body, falling through that hole in the ceiling, falling down into the lair of the giant monster. Anger—and fear. And mingled in with the two, he felt momentarily a hard kind of happiness, born of rage: that he had killed Georgie, who had sacrificed them to the creature.

‘This sea is the last of its kind,’ the Other was saying. ‘For aeons I’ve sat here, trapped and alone, computing probabilities. The water here is like the water of the clouds, molecular structure … ‘ he droned on. Bani seemed riveted. Kal grasped the stick and thought of rising from the water and taking to the air. He would fight the clouds, he thought. He would fly and blast at them, breaking through, rising as high as you could go, until there was only space …

‘Some of the humans here have a strange ability to engage with water, and clouds,’ the Other was saying. ‘Which I don’t quite understand. But I’ve fed some of my data into the water, or tried to. It affords strange communication … vague prophecies, perhaps. And now you came. As you must leave.’

The craft shuddered, then began to rise slowly from the seabed.

‘Find the tower, Kal, Bani. Set us all free.’ The craft began to move.

‘I wish I knew whose plane this was … ‘ the Other said. ‘I found it here, like someone else’s garbage. Not human, though remarkably similar. It isn’t much as a home, though, which is what it has been for me for time too long to count. But it will work this one last time, though not in flight.’

Kal held the stick and tried to navigate the craft, but of course, he had no control over it. The Other chuckled, unseen. ‘You’ll get your chance to fly … ‘ he said, and then his voice faded and was gone, and the plane sped away, water peeling away from its nose like blood, and the water darkened until at last there was no light left.

PART THREE

ANTAP

— Chapter 15 —

SANIGODAON

THE ISRAELI POET, Lior Tirosh, had once spent what he had described as a “rather miserable month” on the island of Vanua Lava, a place of constant and persistent rain. Tirosh wrote:

There are always clouds; like shaggy guard-dogs

Great white greys, their packs mass on top the distant hills

And watch. Or in the mornings, drifting close, not dogs now, more

Like white-faced ghosts, shivering as you pass through them,

Dampening the grass beneath. Or, high above and casting shadow,

Dragon-clouds, breathing storms. Sometimes they fight, and we awake

Inside the hut, and huddle close, and listen to the thunder rumble to

Infinity like the sound of an alien surf.

That was the sound Kal heard that night, in what he thought of, perhaps, as the opening chapter of his final journey to the tower: the sound of an alien surf, crashing against an alien shore—though of course, his entire life had been the journey to the tower, and the world was not, to him, alien, but merely home.

Heven was a world of islands and sea. The settlers had planted coconuts, peanuts, yam, pineapple, coffee. They put fish of their own (only slightly modified for local conditions) into the sea, including whitebait, tuna, cod, even the type they call in Bislama tiklip, or thick-lips, for the rather surprised expression on its face when caught (and, of course, for its lips). They put lobster and prawns, or
solwota
and
freswota Naura
, respectively into the sea and rivers. Having found an Earth-like world, they had no need to terraform it, but every need to
domesticate
it, which is the same thing as cutting down the bush that chokes the shore in order to build a house.

But the bush is always there. The line that separates house from bush is the line between what we once called civilization, and that which is primal, and regards humanity as merely a transitory and self-deluded—though rather pretty—butterfly, and for which civilization is simply an intrusion and an interlude.

But Kal wasn’t thinking of any of this. Kal, at this, the third or fourth night (the ship’s log we have is incomplete) of his final journey to the tower, was lying on the beach, and all he heard was the surf, and the wind picking at the trees like a satisfied diner, and to be honest his thoughts were occupied less with philosophical musings and more with the smell of frying fish that was coming from a small fire burning, rather cheerfully, a little further up the beach.

The island was called Hiu. It was a small island at the end of the horseshoe-shaped group they called the Tusk. The frying fish was a Papillion, of good Earth-stock, and the person frying it was Bani.

Kal was listening to the surf. The skies above were clear, for once, of clouds. The sun was setting on the horizon, behind the small ship named after the act.

The
Sanigodaon
rocked smoothly in the small bay. The sea was smooth, the colour of liquid silver: a mirror without reflection. Captain Desmon’s head was just visible over its side: he was lying in a hammock, apparently asleep.

Kal reached for the coconut that sat beside him on the sand. He pulled out his knife and punched a hole in the soft area in the pinnacle. A small geyser of slightly-warm drink spouted out, and he lifted the shell to his mouth.

As always when he did (for he was not used to alcohol) Kal sputtered for a moment as the drink went down. A long time before, back on the islands of old Earth, the people of Vanuatu made a drink they called
dry-palm
, which is the Bislama word for yeast. They took out the contents of coconuts and fermented them, with sugar and yeast, and produced a potent, sometimes lethal, drink. Later—perhaps in their time in the asteroid belt, perhaps on the
Hilda Lini
as it threaded its silent way between the stars—perhaps even on Heven itself, for there is no record of the exact people who first did it—the genetic recipe of the coconut tree was modified, edited, and combined. The result was—

‘This stuff tastes like shit!’ Kal yelled, turning his head towards the fire. Bani, standing there with tongs and a grin, nodded his head. ‘Potent stuff,’ he said approvingly. ‘But it gets you high.’

The alien Other had taken them to the edge of the bubble of strange sea that he lived in. They had emerged from the hatch into water, blue and cold and hard, the kind you couldn’t breathe, and swam to the surface, watching the other sea just below them, its light dimming and growing as if subject to a different kind of tide.

When they had broken surface and drew in gulps of air they found themselves inside a rocky pool, with a stone arch for a roof, and an exit: a narrow tunnel that led, in short order, to what, as it turned out, was the other side of the island, and a covered sandy bay—and a waiting ship.

‘Got your message,’ Captain Desmon called cheerfully from the deck as Kal and Bani waddled through the shallow water towards the
Sanigodaon
. ‘Lucky, that. Where are the others?’

There was, it had to be admitted, a little confusion. Kal left Bani to talk to the Captain and simply stood on the deck, feeling the sun on his face for the first time in what felt like days. He breathed in the air (and some fumes from the engine) and revelled in still being alive. He felt strangely dislocated, as if a déjà vu had taken hold of him and refused to let go. The time in the tunnels, the strange sea, the even stranger Other—they seemed as fleeting and illusory as the ghosts he had thought he’d seen in the corridors of stone, as unbelievable to him as his fight with Georgie had been. Was he even himself? Or did the ghost of—something—else take hold of him down there and make him do its bidding?

‘What message?’ Bani was saying.

‘The floating bottle. Came popping out of the sea. Clever, that. I thought you fellows must be diving nearby.’

‘What did it say?’

‘You should know,’ Captain Desmon said, though now he sounded a little uncertain.

‘Humour me,’ Bani said. He had got hold of his cane again and with it seemed to have recovered his cool.