Cloud Permutations

by Tidhar, Lavie

  After a while Kal had a sense of space both opening and closing around him, and he heard the sound of the sea, and the darkness gave way to patches of gloomy light. They were in the roots, he realised. They rose above and over him, snakes larger than buildings, slimy with weed and salt water. The ocean here was grey and restless. They passed these forests of roots one by one until, reaching one, they saw an anchored boat. Only then Kal spoke, and he merely said,

  ‘Where’s Desmon?’

  ‘Safe. Above.’

  ‘The Sanigodaon?’

  ‘Destroyed. Or damaged.’

  Kal thought of Desmon then, the Captain losing his ship, and it was because of him. He wanted to apologise to him, to do something … But at least he was safe. There would always be other ships. Or so he hoped.

  ‘I won’t leave,’ he said suddenly, stopping. Bani and Moria exchanged a quick, private glance, like two adults confronted with a troubled child. It made him angry, both for the inclusion and the implication that the two shared something that excluded him. Nevertheless, he repeated himself. ‘I won’t leave you.’

  Moria shook her head. Her eyes were older than the rest of her.

  ‘Your only chance out of here is to take this boat,’ she said, voice matter of fact. ‘This harbour is hidden from the attackers. Get out. Go back home, Kal, Bani. Go back to your islands and find yourselves a good woman each and have plenty of children. Make a garden. Follow kastom. Follow the way of our people. Forget the tower.’

  ‘That I can’t do,’ Bani said, ‘just as I can’t forget you.’

  ‘You will,’ she said, and her voice was suddenly sad, and her eyes were older still, as if her mind and body momentarily clashed. ‘It’s easier than you think.’

  Kal wanted to say something but didn’t know what. He saw a flash. Bani moved, quicker than Kal could think. But anyhow it was too late.

  She fell not gracefully, but she did so without much sound, and the bullet tore a hole in her stomach and stained her fatigues with blood. She must have bitten her tongue. Her mouth was bloodied and she gurgled and didn’t speak. Future directors have often tried to portray her death as romantic and noble: the truth was that she died ugly.

  Kal raised his eyes, but he had no weapon. For a moment he saw the sniper’s face. It was startling in its familiarity: a face like his own, an island boy caught in events beyond his control. He may have come from Tanna, or even Epi itself. He might have been caught in this simply because he chose to follow his father or mother. Yet wasn’t the decision to shoot, to pull the trigger—wasn’t that entirely his?

  There was another shot, and then the boy’s face disappeared, and Kal tore himself away and back. Moria was dead. He turned to Bani, helpless, wanting to ask, not knowing what—and Bani swung at him again.

  He fell, landed in the small boat. Bani landed beside him. There was another shot close by, but it missed them again. ‘Get down,’ Bani said. He gripped the outboard motor. ‘Space travellers, and she dies from a projectile weapon?’ His face was white-black, the patches of sunburnt skin more pronounced. He did not look at Kal.

  The engine started. The boat shot out, driven by Bani, moving like a wild thing across the water and between the roots of the tree. There were no more gun shots. They sped across a grey and listless sea and the sun never once shone, and the skies were full of clouds.

  — Chapter 19 —

  END BLONG SOLWOTA

  BANI PILOTED THE BOAT. He was the stronger of the two of them, Kal thought. Bani took charge. He acted, while he, Kal, could only lie there and feel that he was cargo. Cargo. He felt like a ship loaded with it: a cargo heavy and unwanted, weighing him down, binding him forever to a flightless life.

  Back on the tree … no, he thought. Don’t think about her. But he thought of the flying children, of the way they manoeuvred through the air, as graceful as falling leaves … he had began to learn from them, the short time he was there, but he was too large for the fine, light leaves, and the learning of them, the preparation and the launch and the control, were things he had not even begun to master. How could they fly? They flew low, there was that. Perhaps they were only hitch-hikers, getting a free ride on leaves that would go regardless, blow in the wind this way and that before coming to land, quite naturally, somewhere off in the distance? He thought of Moria again, but fleetingly, as if his brain, injured, would skip that part of his memory every time he touched it.

  The small boat sailed; Bani piloted. The sky was grey and the air was heavy with humidity. Water clung to Kal’s skin, mixing with his perspiration: he could smell himself, sharp and musky, but could not find it in himself to jump out, to swim in the cool-blue sea.

  Going was hard. A wind had come and brought with it waves, lines of white on the horizon racing closer, and the boat having to climb each one, ride the crest, try not to fall from antap. Bani was no Captain Desmon; Kal’s body was bruised and rattled from the journey, but there was no stopping, they could see no land, and so they went on, the engine a strange unfamiliar silver device that didn’t seem to need fuel, however much they went. You see? Kal wanted to say. They had—have—advanced technology. You were wrong. And yet—how could they fight so badly?

  They hardly spoke. It was as if something between them had been broken, that was there before without their even knowing it. Some link, a thread that tied them together and had now frayed to nothing. They had been together since they were children; yet now, Kal felt—Kal knew—it was nearly time, and they would separate, and go each his own way. Perhaps that was what they meant by adulthood, he thought: it was a letting go.

  The ocean fell away from them, a blue-grey skin, immense and foreign, with the shadow upon it of the dark skies above. Moisture condensed on everything, nothing was dry, they could catch no fish. For two days they sailed in silence and ate nothing, and the sea and the sky were unchanged, the twin eyes of a storm. There was no rain, only an expectation of it, and the humidity that hung in the air brought with it shards of cloud-thought, hard and unsettling.

  On the third day the wind eased a little, and the clouds parted at noon and let a small sun through. Bani caught a fish and Kal gutted and scaled it, and after that they ate it raw.

  ‘What did your prophecy say?’ Kal asked Bani.

  ‘That I would lose a friend but win the stars.’ They continued to sail in silence after that.

  On a day just like all the rest (they had lost count of the days by then. There was no more sun. Kal marked the passage of time by counting each time he peed off the boat) they saw the tower.

  Future poets like to describe that moment in verse as glorious as sun and flowers: how the clouds parted, how the rays of light shone, how the black tower was revealed in one sharp instance over a suddenly clear horizon, immense and alien and forbidding. The truth is more prosaic: it was a shadow, lost behind cloud, the mere suggestion of a shape. A hard wind had been driving at them for two days, and the waves were enormous: both of them were ill. Kal had lost weight. Bani had a pinched look around the eyes, and the black sun-patches on his skin had faded. Yet the wind did gradually push at the clouds, drove them higher, and higher still; and as the boat continued to sail, its strange engine never failing, the suggestion of a shape became absolute.

  ‘Kal?’

  He was retching, dry sorrowful sounds the only thing to rise from his shrunken stomach. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Sometimes friendships end not with an explosion, hot and strong and hurtful, but quietly, a gradual fading, a dispersal of clouds. ‘Me too.’

  They both raised their heads and stared forward; and Kal felt a strange hope rising inside him, for the first time since they had lost Moria. There was something there, on the horizon. Something huge, and dark, and eternal. Kal said, ‘I thought you said space-elevators were small.’

  ‘This isn’t a space-elevator,’ Bani said, and his voice, which was always so self-assured, had a new note of awe in it.

  ‘What is it?’ />
  ‘Mi no save,’ Bani said. ‘Hemi wan bigfala samting I stap.’

  For a moment they surprised each other by laughing. ‘Yes,’ Kal agreed, ‘it’s a big thing, whatever it is.’

  ‘Kal?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When we get to it … ‘ Bani hesitated. ‘Don’t come up. Stay with the boat.’

  ‘From wanem?’ Kal said. Why?

  ‘Because you are going to fall,’ Bani said. ‘You told me yourself. It is always the same. The story ends with you falling off the tower. Stay. I will climb to the top.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t want to lose you too.’

  But Kal’s eyes were locked on the enormous distant shape. It rose like a mushroom cloud of black smoke out of the ocean bed and up, up, up until it disappeared beyond the clouds antap. It was immense, as if one single building had been erected over the landmass of several large islands at once, city-sized if cities were built vertically and reached the stars. ‘We’ll see,’ Kal said.

  The next day the tower appeared no closer, but the wind had eased up, and the clouds did, in fact, part, less by the demands of poetry and more as if some magnetic field surrounding the tower was directing repulsion upon them.

  Or perhaps, Kal thought, the clouds were reluctant to come too close to the tower. They crowded up in the sky, but high, and their shadow lay on the surface of the sea, and there was no rain. On and on they travelled, Bani and he, in the little boat they never came to name.

  As they travelled the sea became quiet and lifeless. A calm as of death descended on it. There were no fish, nor anything else alive. The water became murky, but it was not dirty: it was, rather, as if the essence of the water itself was changed.

  With every day that passed the tower must have come closer, yet it remained almost unchanged. It filled their vision: a huge towering block from the earth to the skies, a granite monolith that blocked out the sun. ‘How would you build something like this?’ Bani said. He was talking mainly to himself. ‘It would require an entire landmass just to provide the basic material.’

  Kal didn’t care. To Kal, the tower was built with black stone and smoke and storm clouds. That was the way the material appeared to him, the sun-sucking surface of the edifice seeming both impervious and hostile. Yet with each day that passed Bani became more agitated with excitement, and the boat became too small for the two of them, and though neither mentioned Moria she stood between them still.

  Then the tower began to come closer, and the sky, devoid of sun, became very dark, and they could no longer see the edges of the tower but only its face, endless and dark. For days they sailed in halfdelirium, chewing on the few fish they had managed to keep and dry, living on water from the boat’s small purifier unit.

  Then they came to the end of the ocean and the tower was there.

  — Chapter 20 —

  TUFALA GO UNSAED

  THERE ARE MANY VERSIONS of the end of this story. On one point they all agree: that for two days and two nights the boat sailed along the smooth black face of the tower without finding an entrance. They sailed in twilight. The walls of the tower, smooth like glass, absorbed all light. They could not see their reflections in it. Half-starved, dehydrated, they went on for the simple reason that there was nowhere else to go. The water around the tower was cool and clear, but there was nothing to see underneath, no life or light, only the walls of the tower extending downwards into the immeasurable deeps.

  On the third day they came to an opening in the black. The Bay of Black, it has since come to be known: the wall had ended, quietly and without fuss, and extended inwards, opening onto a clear calm bay, as large as a half-moon. It was bigger than Port Cargo. It was bigger than any bay on any island Kal had ever seen. It took them almost another entire day to sail through it, and it felt like entering the mouth of some fabulous beast. The walls of the tower rose and rose and rose around them, closing them in, and the shore could not be seen, could only be hoped for. Yet it was not entirely dark. There were lights in the water, lights in deeps, fickle and wraith-like, but beautiful. Some call it the Bay of Stars, for twofold reasons, the first being that the waters of that bay resemble a map of the stars above, though the stars sometimes change, their configurations seemingly random, displaying, perhaps, the stars as seen from other places, other worlds. The second meaning of that name is more pedestrian: it is the place we come to when we want to reach the stars.

  But the Bay of Black its name remains for most, for there is something awesome and frightening about it beyond its beauty: it is a place of night, and of the vast darkness that lies between the stars. Into this place, huge and silent and unknown, Kal and Bani sailed, and with the last of their power, with the engine failing at last, they rowed to the glassy shore.

  There are many conflicting versions of this story. In some, the Guardians await the two boys on the shore, in one last desperate ambush, and the two boys fight, sustaining many wounds, until at last they win their way into the tower. This is Bani’s version of the story, told each time with more embellishments, with larger and more desperate forces arrayed against them with each telling, but it is probably not true. In others yet, it is the tower itself that halts them, some invisible defences awakening from millennia-long slumber to challenge their two unannounced visitors. In some versions of this there is a sphinx-like figure, or perhaps a jester, who riddles the boys, and in some of those versions it is Kal who wins the day, who solves the riddles and gains entrance for them both. But it is hard to imagine what sort of riddles an ancient alien entity might come up with: the stories are never entirely clear on that point. Nor is the purpose of such riddles particularly clear, and in any case, we have never found evidence of such protection, such interference from the tower. The tower exists, perfect and whole and immutable. It cannot be modified. It cannot be destroyed. And though occasional stories of ghosts do surface from time to time, we have found no evidence of the tower being in any sense aware or alive. It is an edifice, an artefact, a testament to its unknown builders. It has no need to do anything but be.

  In other versions still, the boys encounter a tribe of half-wild waetman, men and women wearing strange tattered uniform clothes that were once, perhaps, a kind of overall-type outfit with a repeating design of sorts, a common motif sewn on their breast. The mythical waetman capture the two boys and seem intent on cooking them. They have a complex social arrangement, with their chief at the top, and everyone else having a specific function, a role they must perform within their rigid hierarchy. Why that should be so the stories never tell: and it seems a curious detail, but only one of many to have attached themselves over the years to Kal’s story.

  At last—so all these stories agree—after much fear and harrowing danger, the two boys escape half-scalded from the cooking-pot, and find their way into the tower and safety.

  But that story, too, is unlikely. Though the tower is large enough to hold hidden entire cities and a multitude of tribes, we have never found a shred of evidence to support the story of the waetman. It is an embellishment, no more, one of the many added over the distance of years by a multitude of story-tellers.

  All that is certain, at any rate, is this: that Kal and Bani entered the Bay of Black; that they reached the smooth, glassy shore and stepped onto it; and that they found at last an entry into the tower.

  Whoever had built the tower favoured huge spaces over practical ones. The whole edifice is what was once called a Folly, a place built for vanity, not use. Though the tower has a purpose, it has no obvious reason to exist; its function could be fulfilled with ease by use of a minimal cord running from orbit to the surface. But the tower’s use is only a side-product. It is first and foremost a statement; or, perhaps, a tombstone.

  The entrance through the Bay of Black is small at first, but it expands startlingly, and becomes cathedral-like, smooth black arches rising for over a mile above, forming an unsmiling mouth through which one enters, stepping on smooth-shiny black stone with footsteps that make no sound. The
re are no echoes. Yet the place, once entered, is not entirely dark; there are strands of silver light running through the walls, like quartz through stone once it is cut open, and that—motif, that design—runs through the entire structure. Walking through First Hall can take days. They camped inside that first night, lying on that smooth, warm stone—for the tower is never cold, and the energies that sustain it from the deeps are those of volcano and quake—and watched the huge darkness above them. It felt like the biggest place Kal had ever been in: bigger than a world, for size is imposed by borders, and the borders of the tower are immense.

  ‘I wish I had a cigarette,’ Bani said, and Kal laughed. They were easier with each other now. He said, ‘How do we get to the top?’

  They were lying in the midst of a dark ocean of calm. They had no water, no food, and no fire. Bani said, ‘Walk.’

  They walked.

  They survived. They went on—starved, desiccated—they walked because there was nothing else to do. Now that they had found the tower, it seemed to Kal impossible that they would ever find a way to the top. ‘We’re going to die here,’ he said to Bani, with a strange, quiet acceptance, but Bani didn’t reply. He was looking at something in the distance and smiling his old cynical smile.

  Think of the tower as a stone, with strands of quartz running through it in spirals like human DNA. What Bani saw—what Bani discovered—was one of the arteries of the tower: a tube that rose from the floor of First Hall and disappeared into the darkness above. It glowed a faint silver glow. As it rose it twisted and spiralled, its multi-faceted sides reflecting nothing. It took them hours yet before they reached it. Its base was as large as a ship, and it seemed dead.