Cloud Permutations

by Tidhar, Lavie

  ‘Please,’ Bani said graciously.

  The two shells materialised on the counter. Bani carried both over to Kal (the cane was discarded. The cigarette was kept) and handed him one. They went to the edge of the nakamal (which was situated, as was kastom, under a great banyan tree, beneath the grassy hill the Institute sprawled on), drank, and spat almost in unison. Bani smiled. He seemed to be in remarkably good spirits.

  ‘How would you like,’ he said when they had sat down, ‘to go on a little trip?’

  ‘If you’re talking about your cousin’s mushrooms again,’ Kal said, ‘then the answer is no.’

  ‘Awo!’ Bani said. ‘That is not what I am talking about.’ He gave Kal a look of slight reproach. Kal grinned. ‘So what is it?’

  ‘Hemi wan smol trip nomo,’ Bani said noncommittally. It’s only a small trip.

  ‘Yes,’ Kal said, patiently. ‘Be yumi go wea?’ But where are we going?

  ‘Yumi,’ Bani said, grinning over his half-smoked cigarette, ‘Yumi, Kal, go long wan aelan nomo.’ We’re just going to an island.

  ‘Wanem aelan?’ Kal said. What island? And Bani grinned even harder and said, ‘Wan ailan blong ol Narawan.’

  The island of the Narawan. In Bislama, the word narawan means ‘different’, or ‘other’. In this, the new world of the Ni-Vanuatu people, it had taken on another meaning.

  One could say, perhaps, that it was taken to mean ‘alien’.

  In any event, Bani did not give Kal much time to refuse. ‘Come on,’ he said, and stood up, stretching. He flicked his cigarette away. Kal watched it sail briefly across the sky and come to land, still burning, on the broken stones. For a moment it made him uncomfortable … then he shook his head, and followed his friend. ‘We’re going now?’ he said.

  ‘Now,’ Bani said. ‘The ship is sailing in half an hour from the South Docks.’

  ‘Naetsaed?’

  ‘Discretion,’ Bani murmured, ‘needs to be maintained.’

  Kal followed him out of the nakamal. They began walking. ‘I put you on the register as a porter,’ Bani said, smirking. ‘Not that there is a register, as such. Officially, we’re going to see the chief of the 41 neighbouring island in order to record samples of the oral history of the Tusk, for the anthropology department. I don’t know if you know this’—this was an expression Bani had become exceedingly fond of, particularly when talking to Kal—’but the people in these parts seem to have some sort of anti-technology sentiment. Which still doesn’t quite explain why the chief can’t just record himself, but never mind.’ Bani liked technology. He loved computers. Why no one on the islands particularly wanted to use them was beyond him. Kal, remembering a childhood spent in the long and patient pace of the surf and the land, never argued with him. What use was there for a computer, he privately thought, in catching fish or making a fire? You can’t swim in the shallows or bask in the sun with a computer.

  Yet Bani could not bask in the sun, Kal thought. Nor could he swim in the sea, not until the sun had almost set. Perhaps, then, for him, the computers were a substitute. Or perhaps they were just things he loved, and was unlucky in that the majority of people didn’t share his passion. Some people, after all, were like this about bird-watching, or about stamps, or collecting different seashells …

  ‘Come on!’ Bani said, impatient. Kal had been dawdling. ‘Ask me what we’re really going to do.’

  ‘What are we really going to do?’ Kal said.

  Bani came closer and lowered his voice. ‘We’re going to dig,’ he said.

  ‘Dig.’

  ‘See, that’s why I could bring you along. Yu wan boe blong bus, no?’ Bani grinned. Kal, who rather resented being called a boy from the bush, said, ‘And what will you be doing, exactly?’

  ‘Me?’ Bani said, feigning surprise. ‘I’m the leader of the expedition.’

  ‘And leaders don’t like to do any of the hard work, right?’ Kal said.

  ‘That’s right!’ Bani said, and twirled his cane. He seemed almost manic, full of suppressed excitement Kal didn’t—at least then—understand. ‘We leave that to the people from the bush … ‘

  ‘Fuck you,’ Kal said, and Bani laughed. ‘Wait and see,’ he said, putting on something of a mysterious air. ‘Wait and see.’

  The sun had set by the time they arrived at the old docks. An eerie silence hung over the wharf, and the water was a dirty darkness sourly absorbing the last rays of light. Clouds massed high above, and the air had a hushed, expectant stillness, an uneasy anticipation of rain.

  The ship was waiting for them.

  It was a cargo ship, a low-lying iron hulk that looked a little (so Kal thought) like the curved tusk of a pig. It was old, the paint on the hull faded, while rust had settled in creakily at the joints. It was called, appropriately, the Sanigodaon, which meant ‘sunset’ in Bislama.

  Huddled on the dock, evidently waiting for them, was a small group composed, Kal saw, of three students. He recognised a couple of them—Tanuaiterai, a short, bespectacled, smooth-faced anthropology student, and Toa, a quiet man from Futuna whom Kal vaguely thought might have been a computer programmer—and said hello when they joined the group. Tanuaiterai grunted. Toa nodded back but didn’t speak. They seemed to be waiting for something. There was an air between them like the crackling of electricity between two groups of clouds. The third man was fat and quiet, and he introduced himself as Georgie.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Bani said.

  It must have been what they had been waiting for, Kal thought. As soon as Bani spoke the group stirred. They carried backpacks, Kal saw, and these looked heavy.

  They climbed onto the waiting ship. It was piloted by a single man, whom Bani introduced briefly as Captain Desmon. Bani disappeared into the shadows while Kal and the others waited. When he returned, the ship had begun to move.

  The Sanigodaon sailed out of Naetsaed with its engine muted. It moved like a blade on the water, sliding out of the disused harbour like a dagger being drawn in anticipation. A slightly rusty dagger, perhaps, but one still capable of inflicting damage. But damage on what? Why that image, that sense of approaching violence? Kal stood on the deck and watched the lights of Port Cargo grow faint in the distance. Above the island clouds grew, spreading out like a dome that prohibited stars. The air was humid and still. The small breeze created by the movement of the ship failed to cool Kal. Bani came and stood beside him, his hands resting on the ship’s railing. Behind them came the flare of a match, and the first tendrils of cigarette smoke. For a long time neither Bani nor Kal spoke. They stood in companionable silence, and watched the massing clouds.

  — Chapter 10 —

  WAN LESEN BLONG ALIEN ARCHAEOLOGY

  ‘WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?’ Kal said, and Bani grinned back at him and said, ‘Ol smol grinfala man oli no blong ples ia.’ Which translates, roughly, as ‘little green aliens’.

  ‘Was that a joke?’ Kal said. Bani shook his head. ‘We’re looking for Narawan ruins,’ he said. He had discarded the cape and cane for a pair of paint-splattered blue overalls.

  ‘Well, what do they look like?’ Kal said, and Bani shook his head, reaching for a cigarette, and said, ‘I don’t know.’

  The journey on the ship took several hours. The group of students (and Kal) sat on the deck. Bani smoked. A couple of the others tried to sleep. Kal ended up talking in hushed fashion to Toa, who turned out not to be a computer programmer after all, but a xenohistorian. Kal’s obvious first question was, ‘What’s a xenohistorian?’

  ‘Someone who studies the history of alien cultures,’ Toa said. ‘I think that, before the Exodus, it was just a word. But now, at least here on Heven, it’s a real discipline. Or it could be,’ he added, ‘if they would just let us study it properly.’

  ‘You study the Narawan?’ Kal said. Toa nodded. ‘The few remains there are. The few sites we can access. But it’s …’

  ‘Tabu?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Like flying.

  ‘So
why are we going now?’ Kal asked. Toa looked at him and smiled, and said, ‘Because sometimes we do things despite their being tabu, Kal,’ and Kal fell quiet.

  They did not spot the island until they were almost on it. No light showed through the darkness. Kal could hear the breaking of water on the shore, and the humming of insects, and as he looked ahead he could see a mass of blackness that may have been a thick forest. The air remained still, motionless. Kal’s clothes stuck to his skin, and with a grunt of annoyance he removed his shirt. The air cooled him down for a brief moment; then he was sweating again.

  From somewhere in the forest ahead came a shriek that made Tanuaiterai, the anthropologist, jump. ‘What was that?’ he said nervously. No one replied.

  It felt, Kal thought, like the raid of an ancient army, preparing to go ashore in search of an unseen enemy. He did not know these islands. And the moisture hanging in the air felt more than just unpleasant; it had the hint inside it of fragmented madness that sometimes came with rain, and that he had experienced twice before. Sometimes he still woke up from dreams, thinking he was falling. For a moment he thought of just staying on the ship. Then he looked at the others, landing clumsily on the beach, and he could see that they were just as nervous. But still they went on. And so he jumped down to the muddy sand (it stank, as though too many small, dead sea creatures littered the shore, unseen in the darkness) and shouldered one of the heavy backpacks.

  Ahead of him, Bani had lit a torch. In the dancing light his face was demonic in its paleness, and his red eyes shone, giving him the appearance of some ancient, vanished enemy. Then the torch moved, and Bani looked towards him, and it was him again, Kal’s friend, and Kal said, ‘What are we looking for?’ and Bani grinned back at him and said shortly, ‘Ol Narawan’.

  ‘We’re looking,’ Toa said in his calm voice—he had come up and stood next to Kal—’for any existing structures. This island has no human settlement. For the local people it is tabu. So we’re looking for any kind of housing, dwellings, anything artificial in origin.’

  Kal looked ahead. As he had thought, the darkness before him was a jungle, thick and (he thought) impenetrable. He doubted they would find anything there, apart, possibly—and it was a possibility he really didn’t want to entertain—from some wild creatures of the bush.

  ‘Come on!’ Bani said. He moved the torch backwards and forwards above his head. ‘Signal to the ship,’ he said. ‘Captain will be coming back for us next nightfall.’

  ‘He’s not waiting?’ Tanuaiterai said.

  Bani shrugged. ‘We’re not babies,’ he said, a little impatiently.

  ‘And the Captain?’ the fat man—Georgie—said sarcastically. He was an engineering student, or was it marine biology?

  ‘Come on,’ Bani said again, and he started marching up the beach, towards the dark wood.

  Kal followed him. Behind him, trudging slowly, came the rest: Toa, and Tanuaiterai, and Georgie—he was the only one to have successfully slept on the ship.

  The jungle crept up on them unexpectedly. One minute there was only the muddy sand, and the unseen movement of tiny ocean lifeforms underneath. Then the wall of trees seemed to spring up on them, fully-formed and menacing, and they stopped, hesitating (so Kal thought) like a group of children suddenly uncertain.

  ‘Come on,’ Bani said (his vocabulary seemed to have shrunk to these two words; they had become his refrain) and pushed through the vines.

  Kal followed him. Where, he didn’t know. Why—that, also, he didn’t know, not quite, not beyond that Bani was his friend, and that he had wanted him there. Inside the jungle canopy the darkness was complete. Bani was confident, and Kal suddenly knew that they were not just walking in the dark. Bani had a destination in mind.

  Bani lit a torch and shone it ahead, but Kal could see nothing beyond vines, and creepers, and things moving in the darkness. He thought of the stories of Epi, of the things that had lived deep in the bush before humanity came and planted taro and manioc and the banyan trees, bananas and breadfruit and yams, and drove the darkness away. What had his grandfather called them? The Bigfala Olfala Ol Ting—the Great Old Things?

  Regardless, he followed Bani, and the others, too, followed. They walked through the jungle: Kal had his bush-knife out now, a long sharp sword-length blade, and he hacked at the vegetation (it seemed to thicken around him even as he cut it down) as they worked out a slow, torturous path through.

  He could no longer see the stars. Time seemed to have gone awry, a small lost thing in this darkness. He might have been in the jungle an hour, or a day. The humidity was overwhelming, and he got a sense, suddenly, of the sky above the canopy and of clouds massing there, silent and waiting.

  The mind does strange things in the dark. It conjures up dreams, and nightmares too, and fleeting images that seem to have no obvious meaning, snatches of memories now lost to time, the fragment of a song not known until now, the smell of rotting things reminding you of something deep in your childhood …

  A shout woke him up. It was Bani. ‘Just ahead! I can see a clearing!’ Kal looked ahead, but could see nothing but the darkness. Where were they going? What did Bani have, that showed him the way? And, he thought, the way to what?

  As suddenly as it began, the jungle ended. He came out, stumbled. Bani gripped him by the wrist and steadied him. ‘Look at that,’ he said.

  Kal waited as the others followed them out of the trees. Then he looked. They all looked.

  Ahead of them, the clouds parted, and the brilliant golden pattern of stars shone down, the distant suns flickering against a black sky. All was hushed. The smell of rotting vegetation had abated somewhat, and Kal could smell a plant whose name he didn’t know, but which was sweet and calming, like a cool balm against hot skin.

  Ahead of them lay a silent lake; beyond that, the dark mouth of a cave.

  ‘Where are we?’ Kal said.

  ‘Wan aelan blong Doktor Moreau,’ Georgie said, and somebody behind laughed softly. Kal said, ‘What?’

  ‘What do you know about the Narawan?’ Bani said.

  Kal tried to think back. School lessons only half-listened to … Mr. Henri droning on … He said, ‘They’re extinct?’

  ‘Full marks to that boy!’ Georgie said. ‘I can see why he makes such a valuable addition to this team.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ Toa said. He came to stand beside Kal. He looked more relaxed now, Kal realised. They all were. It was as if coming through the jungle and the darkness and arriving at this place had bathed everyone in calm. Even Georgie, who before now had hardly spoken, and seemed focused entirely on his own inner thoughts. ‘The Narawan certainly seem to be extinct. That is, we have not found any live ones in all the years of settlement. Of course,’ he added, ‘no one has really been looking, either. So it remains something of an open question. But the working assumption is that they are, indeed, extinct. Which opens another question, of course, which is—’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Yes,’ Toa said.

  ‘So,’ Kal said, ‘What happened to them?’

  Toa looked at him with a strange half-smile. ‘Maybe that,’ he said, and looked up. Kal followed him, and saw clouds.

  ‘Come on!’ Bani said. He seemed possessed, determined to reach a destination no one but him was aware of. He said, ‘That cave ahead. I have a map—there were people here before, tabu or not—there should be Narawan remains in there. Kal, how is that backpack?’

  ‘Fine,’ Kal said, a little surprised. Bani said, ‘Don’t get it bumped around. It has sensitive equipment inside.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  Bani set off. Kal and the others followed.

  ‘And when we go inside?’ Kal said.

  ‘When we go inside what?’

  ‘What do we do when we get inside that cave?’ Kal said patiently. Bani turned back and smiled. ‘Then we dig, Kal,’ he said. And, ‘That’s archaeology … ‘

  — Chapter 11 —

 
; OLFALA BIGWAN

  LATER, KAL RETAINED ONLY A VAGUE, awful recollection of what had happened, as if his mind, faced with those subterranean horrors, had been forced to shut down, overloaded with what it couldn’t comprehend. It began easily enough: they circumnavigated the small lake (the stars reflected in the still water. A tiny, fragile-looking creature sailed the surface with the buzzing of translucent wings) and entered the dark mouth of the cave.

  They had torches. Bani led the way, and a pool of light gathered about him, its edges moving shadows like the ripples of a wave. The cave was ordinary enough. Rough stone shaped, in some distant past, by the forces of water, burrowing in. Nothing more. The air was dry and hot, the cave small.

  ‘Through here,’ Bani said. Kal looked at him. Bani had something in his hand now, a small device, like a watch or a child’s calculator. He led them towards the back of the cave, then stopped. ‘I think it’s through here,’ he said. For the first time he sounded a little uncertain.

  Kal stepped closer.

  ‘You’re joking,’ he said.

  Bani turned to him and gave a sheepish grin. ‘It’s not that bad,’ he said.

  Kal merely stared at him. And wondered why he had agreed coming in the first place.

  Once upon a time water had created this cave and then withdrawn. But not entirely: a shallow was left in the stone outside and a small lake had formed there, the same one they had just circled past. Kal had thought it a rainwater lake: now he was not so sure.

  Under Bani’s feet, under both their feet, was a circular hole in the ground. It was large, the width of two men, and in formation was too regular—a made thing, not formed.

  Underneath their feet, inside the hole, water rushed past.

  ‘You’re joking,’ Kal said again.

  ‘I think it only flows for a short distance,’ Bani said. ‘After that, if my information is right, there should be a dry cavern of some sort.’

  ‘And if your information is wrong?’