Cloud Permutations

by Tidhar, Lavie

  Kal gave up. He began to see faces in the darkness, made of grey stone. The faces came towards him, swooping down, then disappeared, leaving behind them only a faint recollection, a vague unease of shape and form.

  ‘Narawan, Narawan, come out to play … ‘ Bani sang. Their feet trod in perfect silence on the tunnel’s floor. Kal coughed. He began to feel sleepy.

  There was an explosion behind them. Kal felt something sail past his head, so close that he could feel the wind’s wake on his neck. Bani pulled him down. They fell, not gracefully, the movement feeling jerky slow as if done underwater.

  ‘Shit,’ Bani said.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ a voice called out, behind them. It sounded calm and reasonable, and Kal recognised it: it was Georgie, the fat man who was an engineering student, or a marine biologist. Kal hadn’t liked him, before. Now …

  ‘We’ll get you out of here,’ Georgie’s voice said. It seemed a little far, still, and searching, as if the speaker was not sure where the people he was addressing were. ‘These tunnels have fungal walls with mild psychotropic properties. You must be a little confused by now … ‘

  ‘You killed him,’ Kal said. The words were thick in his throat. He had to hack them out like phlegm.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tanuaiterai. You killed him.’

  Perhaps, still, he expected denial. Less than a day before he was sitting drinking kava in Port Cargo, with no worries but who would pay the bill …

  Someone, Kal realised now, always pays the bill.

  ‘It was an accident,’ Georgie’s voice said. It was coming closer.

  ‘Please, stay where you are. It’s for your own safety.’

  ‘What did you do to Toa?’ Kal said. Shouted.

  ‘He … ‘ It almost sounded, in the dark, as if Georgie was shrugging. He said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Kal reached out, found Bani’s arm, pulled. He began crawling on his belly, forward, his head lowered, almost pressed into the warm stone. He could no longer see the faces in the dark; now, they whispered to him instead, voices rising inside his skull.

  There was a second explosion behind them, but it was more distant than the last, somewhere to their left. So Georgie was trailing behind. Good, Kal thought. He and Bani, two eels caught without a stream, slithered on on the stone floor.

  ‘Don’t!’ he heard the shout from behind. It seemed … almost panicked. ‘Bani, Kal, for your own good. Don’t keep going. Once you enter the Ples Blong Narawan nothing will help you … ‘

  The Ples Blong Narawan, Kal thought. The Place of the Narawan. The voices in his head seemed more agitated now, becoming at the same time even less coherent and yet almost understandable. The voices wanted him to go.

  ‘Fuck you!’ he shouted, and was rewarded with a third explosion behind, this one closer.

  But they were almost there. He could feel it, in the small, subtle ways the floor changed underneath him, its heat growing as if its source was close, by its smoothness that suggested frequent travel in this same tunnel in the past (but how far?)—and all the while the voices growing louder and louder, and their faces returning, flickering behind his eyelids like restless ghosts …

  The source. Close to the source. He tensed, a boy on the edge of destiny—and turned back. Beside him Bani was still, breathing hard. Later, in one of the few remaining fragments we have of Bani, he described entering into a trance: he was lying on his back, the ground warm beneath him, his eyes closed. When asked if he was aware of his surroundings, he answered in the negative: he was not aware of Kal’s actions at the time. Was he aware at all then? Bani answered yes. What did he see?

  Clouds, he said. All I saw were clouds.

  Kal was not seeing clouds; perhaps the first time in his life. The absence of clouds lay heavily on him, which is to say, it left him free.

  Kal was not seeing clouds: he was seeing, as the expression goes, red. In one hand he held a knife.

  He crouched, holding the knife, holding still. He listened for Georgie’s approach.

  ‘Kal? Bani? Listen to me.’ The voice, zigzagging in the dark, was nevertheless coming closer. ‘You shouldn’t be here. There is a reason this place is tabu.’

  Another explosion. Rock chipped Kal’s cheek and he almost shouted. He felt the blood, like a woman’s hand on his skin.

  ‘Maybe if you stopped fucking shooting at us!’

  As he spoke he ducked, ran forward, changed direction at random. The tunnel seemed to have no walls. He felt like he could run forever. The shot that came exploded at the place he had been, missing him.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kal! You shouldn’t have come here in the first place!’ The voice, close now, somewhere to his left. Kal felt something under his foot. He stopped, reached down, found a small fragment of rock, slimy to the touch. He hefted it, calculating.

  ‘Don’t do it, Kal! The prophecy shows you dying!’

  He threw the rock, to the left, ahead of the voice. It made a small noise, and then he could hear Georgie moving forward, and he acted.

  There are few paintings showing what happened. The scene, after all, is one of total darkness. Some artists have tried to capture the supposed ghosts, those hallucinatory images Kal claimed to have seen. But it is not a popular image in the public consciousness. It is not the picture of a hero—and in a culture priding itself on peace, what Kal did, even under the circumstances, was not something to be celebrated.

  He attacked Georgie from behind, as the man was stalking him. The knife slashed. He heard the gun (was it a gun?) clutter to the ground. Georgie cursed, kicked out. With luck he connected. The knife flew, Kal’s fingers screaming from the impact.

  He and Georgie fought.

  It was a bare-fisted fight. Georgie tried to gouge out Kal’s eyes. Kal head-butted him, kneed—Georgie twisted, shook free, punched—his fist connected, hitting Kal on the chest—he fell down, swept upwards and heard Georgie swear—

  They rolled together on the stone floor, scratching and kicking. Georgie was strong for such a fat man. Kal elbowed him, rolled under a punch, lunged—

  He was on top of Georgie and his hands found purchase. He squeezed.

  There is nothing heroic about any of this. It was an act of anger, of hatred. It was not, as some have tried to suggest, a liminal act, the thing that turns a boy into a man. It was, if anything, the act of a boy still fighting in the playground. And yet—did it change Kal, afterwards? The killing of a man?

  When it was over he felt only how Georgie’s body relaxed underneath him. He was not aware of his pain, for now. The shots of adrenaline his body had been releasing masked it. Some artists have tried to capture the way he must have looked, the bruises and the cuts, the blood overlaying grime and sweat. It is not, on the whole, the brightest episode in Kal’s story.

  What happened next was this:

  As if in response to Georgie’s murder, the ground shook. It rolled. It moved the way waves move as they approach a sand beach. Kal rolled over Georgie and the ground was like warm water, carrying him. It carried Bani, too. The two of them—one drugged and unconscious, the other wounded and near delirium—floated down a tunnel of liquid rock like two logs caught in a current. Kal closed his eyes. The movement of the floor was relaxing, and strangely reassuring.

  The current carried them onwards, and down to the sunless sea.

  — Chapter 14 —

  … DAON LONG WAN SOLWOTA

  I NO GAT SAN

  DID HE SLEEP? He didn’t know. One minute he was choking the life out of the fat man’s throat. One minute he was flying, carried downwards, always downwards, by…

  He opened his eyes. And gurgled bubbles.

  Kal was floating underwater. The world spread out around him, immense and immeasurable, a liquid bubble of blues and greens and reds with no bottom and no ceiling. He breathed again, involuntarily.

  Oxygen came pouring into his lungs. In surprise, he almost choked, though there was nothing to choke on. He exhaled, and the bubbles esca
ped from his mouth and rose towards an unseen surface. The act of breathing propelled his body forward: Kal laughed, shot forward, executed a somersault through the water. He was a fish!

  No, he decided, after exploring a bit further. He was still Kal. He had two human arms, two human legs, a face, a nose designed for breathing air … yet somehow he was breathing water.

  The water felt warm and thick, almost like syrup. Swimming through it was slow, leisurely. Soft, warm light suffused the globe of water, but Kal couldn’t tell its source. It seemed to be inherent in the water itself.

  The hallucinations, the faces and the voices he had seen and heard, had gone, and he felt clear-headed and bright. The memory of his fight with Georgie was dissipating like a bad dream. Later on, Kal would have a problem recalling exactly what had happened, how Georgie died.

  He touched his nose again. He could feel no blood, no pain. His body seemed to glow from the inside, as whole and healthy as it had been before. He moved his feet like flippers, glided forward, and laughed again. Every time he breathed, a swarm of little bubbles came out of his nose and mouth. He watched them float slowly in the direction he decided must be up.

  So he would travel down.

  He turned, pushed with his feet, pulled his hands to the sides. Downwards Kal swam, like an eel, a namarai, without effort and with joy.

  ‘Kaalllll!’ he heard a voice, conveyed in bubbles. He turned his head. Bani, sailing through the waters just above, pale white body seeming to shimmer. Bani was grinning, sailing forward and down with his mouth open, a caricature of a shark. Kal laughed.

  ‘Olsem wanem!’ he shouted, which means ‘What’s happening?’ or

  ‘What are you up to?’

  It came out as Olllssseeemmm waaannneeemmm … and Bani came level with him and swam alongside, and said, ‘Noooo gaaattt … ‘ which means ‘Nothing’, and they both laughed.

  For a moment they were two boys again, swimming together in the sea. They didn’t know what lay below. Enchanted castles made of sand? A place of sunken treasures, ancient sailing ships lying on their side?

  A giant shadow came overhead and Kal turned and floated on his back, and watched. A huge fish, a kind he had never seen, swam majestically above them, fat body striped in yellows and reds. It opened its mouth and seemed to smile, then slowly disappeared in the depths.

  Kal turned back. Bani was ahead of him, following the fish, and Kal sped up and raced to join him. A shoal of tiny, silver fish came between them, the thousands of fish moving in tandem, a little silent storm of silver dashing here and there in the water. Kal swam through them and they scattered, reformed a little way away. He chased Bani, who chased the fish. Down and down they went, to the bottom of the inland lake.

  Slowly, the light changed. If, before, it was the light of the afternoon, warm and gentle and neverending (though how soon all afternoons must end!) now it became the light of twilight, reddish as of an unseen setting sun, a light that heralds the coming of evening, peaceful still, but a little melancholy. The two boys—the fish long gone—sped downwards, as if sensing the end of their quest was now near. Slowly shapes, features, hovered into view, dim at first, yet growing.

  At the bottom of the sea, as if all stories must, in some form at least, come true, lay a ship.

  It lay wreathed in weeds. Here and there, as Kal moved closer through the water, metal gleamed, but dully. There were silver shells littering the sea-floor, like conches whose occupants had all died a long time before.

  The two boys swam closer still to the ship. It had no sails. As he swam, at an angle to the ship, first one wing, then another, came into view, like rusted blades, and Kal said, surprised, ‘It’s a plane.’

  ‘I think,’ Bani said, though he sounded that rare thing: unsure of himself. Bubbles expanded above his head. ‘I think it’s an RLV.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A Re-usable Launch Vehicle,’ a voice said. It was warm and big and made no bubbles, and it came from within the metallic thing they were approaching. Kal kicked back, startled, and for a moment floundered in water. Bani laughed. ‘It’s a kind of plane, yes, very perceptive of you.’ The voice had spoken in Kal’s own language of Epi, then switched smoothly to the language spoken in Port Cargo. ‘It’s the kind of thing this world doesn’t seem to allow, which is a shame, no? Please, come closer.’

  This is what the ship looked like: it had an elongated silver body, almost in the shape of a cigar, or a rolled cigarette of lif tabak, of the kind smoked on the islands. Two large wings came out of it like the protruding blades from a multi-purpose knife, and two smaller ones, like can-openers, on each side. A hatch slid open on the top surface of the ship—the plane—and the voice from within said, ‘Don’t be afraid. I have been waiting for you for a long time.’

  There were latches on the side of the ship, and the two boys held on to them and pulled closer, until they were touching its surface. First Bani, then Kal, slid inside. It was like passing through an invisible barrier, some kind of force that held the water out; for, as they came inside, they found themselves back again in a dry place, and air was blowing from somewhere, and they stood, not floated. It was a strange feeling: they should have been afraid, but weren’t. It was like coming to a new place and finding it strangely familiar, almost welcoming in its ordinariness. The inside was close, even a little cramped: there were two seats before the nose, which was made of a clear material like glass, so that you could look outside, but the chairs were odd. Bani settled in one, and Kal in another (it was like coming back to school, Kal thought, and finding that your old seat still fitted, though it was somehow smaller now). The seat adjusted itself around Kal, moving slowly so as not to startle him. Before, it had the shape of a … it looked as if the person who had last used it was not a …

  ‘Humans,’ the voice commented, ‘are infinitely fascinating. Most forms of life are, of course. Take the creature you call the Olfala Bigwan—such a creative name for it, by the way—what an amazing form! A predator of the deep, so perfect in its cruelty—and yet, to an extent, it is capable of thought, even of cunning. I think the people you call the Narawan worshipped its kind, though I can’t prove it. They left so little behind them, almost as if they wiped their traces clean behind them when they left—if they left, I should say … The older I get the more I know how little I know. Paradoxical, isn’t it?’

  It had the voice of a grandfather, an old voice, and tolerant, a little rambling. But Kal wasn’t paying it much attention. He was riveted to his spot. Ahead of him was the window, the nose of the plane. Before him, a simple stick for navigating, and a bank of silent instruments whose workings he yearned to decipher. He put his hand on the stick. When he moved it, cautiously, nothing happened. ‘It doesn’t work,’ the voice said. ‘It hasn’t worked in—oh, long taem tumas.’ It had switched to Bislama. A very long time.

  Kal was still pretending to fly the plane. This was where he belonged, he knew—in this seat, holding this stick, looking out from above on an entire world, spread out before him in miniature, like a toy belonging only to him. But instead he looked out only at water and sand and the deeps, and a school of faintly-luminous fish that went first this way, then that, settled briefly on the window and dispersed suddenly as the old voice spoke again. ‘The tragedy of a sentient life is not discovering what your purpose is, or finding out that your vocation is not possible in your particular time and place.’ He was talking to Kal, and Kal knew it, and it made him suddenly angry, and he said, ‘I will fly.’

  ‘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?’