Cloud Permutations (10 page)

‘To wait for you here. Gave me the coordinates. Quite a rough little bay, this one, actually. Well-hidden, and the rocks are a nightmare if you don’t know the path.’

‘But you know the path?’

Captain Desmon removed his cap and rubbed his scalp. ‘It was in your message, Bani,’ he said patiently. ‘And the other one, too.’ He looked at him a little disapprovingly. ‘I thought we were only going to the island and back. I didn’t realise you wanted to go wokabaot. I’m not sure I have enough fuel, though I’m sure we could pick some up along the way, and there’s always wind. Still, it would cost you.’

‘What other one?’ Bani demanded. Kal stood on the deck and watched the island. It seemed peaceful and pretty and, to tell the truth, a little dull—not at all the place of conspiracies and death and promises of flight …

‘The other path. The map. Here,’ Captain Desmon said, and handed him a sheaf of bundled papers slightly smudged, by the looks of it, with oil and salt-water. ‘Now stop playing around. Where are the others? Are they staying behind?’

It was all very confusing. Kal left them to it. Each seemed to have more questions than answers for the other.

He gazed out on the island. Suddenly, he wanted very badly to be away from it. He felt restless. There were people pursuing him, and he didn’t know why. The tower remained for him what it had been since that first time: a patch of darkness, a sense of falling, something unknown and unexplained. And he wanted to find out what it was, and why he was going there.

‘Bani?’ he said now, laying down the coconut in its small depression in the sand. He stood up and dusted his short trousers, and ambled over to the fire.

‘Fish’s ready,’ Bani said. He crouched down and dug at the sand underneath the coals with bare fingers, extracting first one, then another yam. ‘Hot,’ he commented, dropping them.

They sat down. Kal nibbled on the fish and took a fistful of hot yam. The sun looked like a burst blood vessel in the sky. Somewhere to their left, but far away, clouds were slowly gathering together high above.

‘What is the tower?’

They had never really spoken of it before. It was as if there was a tacit understanding between them not to discuss that secret destiny that had bound them in twine. It was as if, by not talking about it, the future might simply go away.

Bani looked surprised. ‘I thought you’d have figured it out by now,’ he said.

‘Clearly,’ Kal said, throwing a fish head into the fire, ‘I haven’t. I wouldn’t be asking. Would I?’

‘There’s no need to be
kranki
,’ Bani said. He fastidiously separated meat from skeleton, in a series of quick but delicate moves. The bones discarded into the fire, he cupped the meat in his hands. ‘I thought you’d have figured it out by now,’ he said. ‘It’s a space elevator.’

How did the
Hilda Lini
land? And where? She was a starship, built in space in giant dockyards where there was no gravity. A planet’s gravity well would have killed her, and all her passengers with her. Kal had known the story of the
Hilda Lini
almost by heart; it was one of Mr. Henri’s favourites. But it always ended with the ship arriving at Heven, its cargo waking and taking to the land like, well, like fish to water, really, and haha, to quote Mr. Henri.

So where was she? Where was the heroic ship, the bearer of Man Vanuatu to the distant stars? And what had transpired, in the intervening centuries since Heven was found, to erase the memory of her landing so?

‘Imagine a thin needle—a cable, really, made of something incredibly dense and strong—and imagine it stretching all the way from here—’ Bani indicated the ground with a generous wave of his hand

‘—through clouds and clouds and clouds—’ he moved his hand slowly upwards, like a magician revealing a trick ‘—all the way up
there
—’ and he punctuated that with a stabbing finger that seemed to almost touch the stars that began to appear above their heads ‘—
antap
. To a geo-synchronous point in orbit.’

The sky was turning, pink rose deepening to red. On the horizon clouds whispered. ‘It would stretch all the way from here to the stars, and there’d be a box, a crate, a container of cargo, to go up and down from Heven to the stars. There must be. And when it reached the top … ’

Antap
. For a moment he felt dizzy.

‘The
Hilda Lini?
’

‘Or more … ’ Bani said. ‘Think about it. The Other must have come here by ship. Well, where is it? And that RLV, that landing craft in the bottom of that sea—it wasn’t his, he said, and it wasn’t human either. So there might be as many as four or five ships up there, in orbit, tethered to the other end of the tower. Imagine the treasure!’

But Kal couldn’t. Instead, he said, ‘You knew about this?’ and thought of the Guardians, and the path to the Other’s lair that Bani had stolen. And he thought,
what else didn’t you tell me?

He said, ‘What do the Guardians want?’ and saw Bani’s face curve in a smile like that of a big fish. Bani said, ‘Cargo.’

For a moment Kal thought he meant the Port. Then he saw Bani’s hand gesture, an old gesture which meant money. ‘You think the
Hilda Lini
is waiting up there?’ Bani said. He had finished eating. He was a quick eater. Now he took hold of a stick from the fire and was poking at the embers. ‘She was a starship. She could have gone anywhere, done anything. I think there were Others on the ship, too, even if we have none here. Why would she wait in orbit? And wait for what? No one on the islands is planning a long-distance trip any time soon.’

‘So?’ He reached for his coconut and took a swig. Coughed. Bani, for once, didn’t laugh.

‘The Guardians believe—or have knowledge of, or so they claim— that the ship isn’t, as a matter of fact, waiting for us in orbit. It went away again. But—’ and here he lifted the burning stick from the fire, causing sparks to fly ‘—one day she will come back. She will come back from wherever she went, from the cold vast distances of space, from the greatest voyage of exploration ever made. And she will carry
cargo
with her, the fruits and produce of a thousand worlds, all for us, and—’

‘And the Guardians?’ Kal said.

‘True believers,’ Bani said, with a small smile, shaking the burning stick like a slightly disappointed professor, ‘will naturally be rewarded.’

Kal thought about it. He thought about it all through the night, and in the morning when they left Hiu, and set sail North, towards the equator (‘That’s where you’d put a space elevator,’ Bani had said knowingly) and whatever else lay in that direction. The truth was that even Captain Desmon, who was from the Tusk and had visited, at one time or another, every known island in the archipelago, wasn’t sure. There were storms, he said vaguely. An amassment of clouds that blocked passage and raised dead ships from the sea, and giant serpents. Sailors’ tales: mirage islands that never came closer, however much you sailed in their direction; fish-women, that sang you into the depths of the sea; mind-storms that brought on days of unending rain and drove men crazy. The stories came pouring out of him fast then: he told them of sailors howling at an unseen moon as the rain washed their faces and touched their tongues; how some cried, some screamed, some smiled and stripped off all their clothes and then jumped calmly into the sea, never to be seen again; he told of waves as large as islands, rising so high above that they seemed like sheer cliffs.

He was happy to go, though, he said. Kal was puzzled by this. It was many years later when a researcher—this one a genealogist, and he came across the information by chance, working on the family tree of one family Nin—discovered a footnote in an ancient file in the Tannese Bureau of Family Registration (such as it was) that linked one man, name illegible, origin the Tusk, by profession Captain of a ship, to the family Voko Voko Leo, and from there, through a thin red line that symbolises clan-adoption, to Bani. The evidence is only circumstantial. The man’s name, as mentioned, is not known, and there have always been plenty of ships’ captains who came from the Tusk, the region being notable for its profusion of small islands requiring transport. Was he Bani’s father? More likely he was, in the complex scheme that was and is the familial networking of Man Vanuatu, an uncle-cousin of some sort, a relative to the curious and persuasive albino kid from Port Cargo. Bani had a way with people—when he wanted them to do something for him, at least. And as for Captain Desmon himself—he was a sometimes-runner of illicit cargo (such as there was), who sailed
tabu
areas as cheerfully as if he were passing down a village’s only street, a man who, by reputation (which has been somewhat excessively explored in later years by various biographers without due regard for accuracy) never refused a job.

So, as the ship left Hiu, and sailed through calm blue waters where dolphins would have glided gracefully had anyone thought of bringing some along from Earth, which they hadn’t: Kal thought.

He thought about his world, with its vast ocean and tiny islands, its mysterious clouds that dominated the skies like shaggy guard-dogs, ghosts or dragons, depending on your perspective and your preference in poetry. He thought about the tower, which Bani had said was a space-elevator and not a tower at all, really. Did the Guardians know where the tower was? Or was the knowledge held only by the sea-dwelling Other, saved like a precious slice of cake for his only visitors? Would the Guardians pursue them?

They would. They did.

The
Sanigodaon
sailed due north, away from the Tusk, which lay behind them in the distance like a grin carved into the bark of an elderly tree. It sailed towards the last islands of the archipelago, towards the outposts of what Kal was beginning to realise—the feeling growing on him in stages, source unknown—was the tiny, frail human civilization on Heven.

The first month of their journey passed in peace. They fished off the ship, as their catch changed gradually from familiar stock of tuna and cod to stranger, native sea-dwelling life only some of which they could eat. The water became warmer, and with it came a strange sight: one day the surface of the sea was covered in what at first seemed to be giant water-lilies. As they approached one, Kal was startled when the green-blue petals of the thing shuddered and then rose like an enfolding net out of the water, almost trapping the Sanigodaon. Captain Desmon calmly took out a giant harpoon gun and shot the centre of the net. Dark ink came rising to the surface then like an oil stain, and the petals fell limply back into the water and drifted. It was a kind of squid, the Captain said. ‘Yu no save wori,’ he said cheerfully, putting the gun away and throwing down a rope which hooked into the petals. The Captain started pulling, the flower, colour fading fast, rising onto the deck. ‘Oli kakai pijin nomo.’

When it was done, the thing lay on the deck half-rolled, like wet strands of tobacco.
Don’t worry
, the Captain had said,
they only eat birds
. And Bani, examining the petals carefully, said, ‘Photo-synthesis?’ and the Captain shrugged and said, ‘Gud kakai,’ as if to say, that was enough for
him
, and thank you very much.

They
were
good to eat. They caught two more of the things that day, and roasted the petals, thick and fleshy and full of tangy ink, while Captain Desmon cut off the heads that hid in the centres, their eyes bulging mournfully, and threw them overboard, where other lilies drifted close and fought for them lethargically.

There were other things in the water. Sailing in open water, away from land, the water was clear and they could see down for what seemed like forever. But sometimes a shadow would pass under the ship, as large, or so it seemed, as an island, and yet when Kal looked down that was all he could see, a shadow, and the Captain would shrug again, but cautiously, and say that whatever lived down there had better not be disturbed. And one night, as they were approaching the last few islands that they still knew—small, hardy places, with names like Ewose and Makura and Ulveah, where the population of an island might not have exceeded a few hundred—they saw seawraiths, drifting on the calm surface of the ocean like mist or steam, but taking shapes as they approached and seeming to dance around the ship. Some of the shapes were fantastical, some abstractions, and some … some took on the faces of the dead, drawing the images from the past, from Kal’s mind—he didn’t know. For a brief moment he looked across (the moon was high up in the sky, bright as a streetlamp back in John Frum Town) and saw Vira’s face looking back at him, as white and smoky and expressionless as a cloud’s.

They stopped on an island that had no name and filled up with water and a store of coconuts and wild banana. Here, too, the trees were different, most of them unknown to Kal. One bore fruits that looked like shrunken human heads. Another had great bulbous fruit hanging low from its branches, and as he came closer he saw that the fruits, red and fleshy, pulsated as if a hidden heart was pumping blood through them. They did not pick any.

His world, Kal began to realise, had been small indeed. He had travelled, from his distant home of Epi, through floating Tanna’s trade routes and onto the
Sanigodaon
, through almost the entire sphere of humanity on Heven. Beyond it lay—what? Ocean, Mr. Henri had taught them. Nothing but empty ocean and endless skies.

Yet the ocean was not remotely empty—and neither was the sky.

— Chapter 16 —

WAN BIGFALA WUD

THE WILD HUMANS CAME gliding out of the air like a thing out of story. They came low and dark over the horizon. They were a fall of leaves.

It was night. There was a new moon, a thin sliver in the sky cutting a line of light on the ocean. Dark leaves seemed to float on the wind from the north-west, crossed the line of the moon, and descended on the
Sanigodaon
.

Kal watched them do it. He stood at the prow, watching the dark water part before the ship as it sailed. Nearly two months on board: his skin had turned a deep shade of black, his eyes assumed a habitual squint against the sun and the spray. Bani’s white skin, in contrast, had developed numerous dark freckles that clumped together in unsightly fashion on his arms and legs. Two months, and for the past few weeks there had been no island in sight, no land, and all they had to drink was rain-water, when the clouds came, and the water brought back Kal’s old familiar nightmares. Every night he rose with the kite, Vira behind him, and every night he fell as she fell, the kite breaking, the winds snapping it like the fingers of a hungry boy holding the neck of a chicken. When he woke he could hear Bani still sleeping, breathing hard, speaking into the night in a language Kal didn’t understand. Only Desmon seemed unaffected. He had grown up on rain-water, he had said. There were not too many springs or wells in the Tusk. He was half-cloud himself, Bani had whispered. After a while Kal began to believe it.