‘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.
‘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 lifte
d 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.
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