Yet when the two boys approached it, something came alive. Systems that had been dormant for millennia returned to the surface with smooth, eternal efficiency, and a part of the tube’s wall dissolved, opening onto an interior full of light.
Kal turned his head away. He had lived in the dark for what felt like years, then. The sudden light blinded him, and he lifted his hand over his eyes, and realised he was crying.
He sat down, cross-legged on the floor. Bani sat down beside him. For a long while they sat in silence, awed by the light.
Kal’s eyes grew gradually accustomed to the glare. When he looked up he saw the interior of the tube, a carriage he might have compared in size to an ocean-liner, if such things had existed on Heven.
The carriage was empty. There were no seats, no controls. The light came from hidden sources embedded in the walls. Bani said, ‘Kal … ‘ and didn’t finish. Kal nodded. They both rose. They held each other’s hand. Kal smiled.
Then they went inside the tube, and the wall reformed on the outside, and closed them in. They could see through the walls. They watched as lights come alive in ones and twos all around First Hall, illuminating the impossibly distant ceiling above, shining everywhere like hidden treasures; and the carriage shot out and spiralled away towards the heavens, and bore Kal and Bani with it.
— Chapter 21 —
ANTAP
KNOWING THE END of a story does not make it easy to tell. Over the generations many have tried, but details are sparse, exaggerations rife. What we do know is this: that the tube they took extends all the way from First Hall to the top of the tower itself; that it passes, in its crazy loops and turns, through Halls Second to Thirty-Fifth (all silent. All empty. All large enough to house the cargo of a thousand living worlds) before it attains the stratosphere and, at last, enters the great Space Port itself, and reaches the end of the edifice they call the Cord-wainer Tower.
Here, where the air thins and clouds cannot rise, the stars are closest, and the blackness of the tower gives way to the blackness of space. The tower rises over Heven, but one cannot see far, for the clouds mass underneath, in groups and clusters, drifting forever over the single vast ocean and its tiny, insignificant islands. Here the tower rises over Heven in all of its immensity, its grandiosity, its purposelessness. It is a Folly, and there are those anthropologists who speculate that the tower itself is a kind of cargo-cult monument, that it was built by aliens who believed in faster-than-light travel, as if by building such a space port, huge and empty, all the ships and bright cargo of the galaxy would be drawn there.
There is another aspect to this theory, far-fetched as it may seem. The argument is that whoever was capable of building such a tower may well have been capable of altering the laws of physics. And where, after all, are the builders? Would it not make sense to assume that they did possess true star travel, and left en masse, and will one day return? The proliferation of theories—and new religious movements—continues. There are few answers.
For Bani and Kal, it was a long, slow, undoubtedly uncomfortable journey. Yet the view may have compensated for it. There are several moments in the carriage’s journey when it traverses the outer wall of the tower, emerging onto the surface of the walls, and from there the drop down is a god’s-eye view, a cloud’s view, and there is another when it circumnavigates the circumference of the tower even as it continues to rise, and the Space Port itself becomes apparent then, there on the border between air and cold space, between sunlight and stars: and the great huge flat landing area of the Space Port becomes visible, stretching out across forever like a harvested field, and what they must have seen then—
‘It’s a spaceship,’ Bani said. ‘Kal, look! It’s a fucking spaceship!’ Kal looked. They were on the edge of space now, and gravity was lessening and he was floating and he was sick. His sick floated beside him. But it didn’t really matter.
All around them rose the Space Port. It was not Bani’s space elevator, a thin strand like a beanpole running up into orbit, but a vast monolith, and at its apex lay a disc of smooth black metal, large enough to hold a thousand giant ships if such ever existed.
And there, almost on the edge of vision, across the empty field—a flash, as of light touching metal. The carriage spiralled and whirled; it had been rising for hours—or had it been days? Yet now, at last, it came to a halt, slowing, settling down finally at the other end of its organic-looking tube. Bani shouted, ‘Shit! Kal, the doors—we have no air!’ as the wall of the carriage began to dissolve. Kal kicked against the wall, fell through the air in an undignified fashion—and emerged out of the carriage and onto the plane of the Space Port itself.
And breathed in air.
The sunless sea Bani described was never found. It has been suggested that the breathable air one encounters at the top of the tower somewhat resembles the story of breathable water, which would suggest a correlation between the makers of that sea and the tower’s builders. If so, it may well be that the builders were ocean-dwelling air-breathers (not unlike the few Great Old Ones still, or so it is rumoured, remaining in the wild), which could also conveniently explain the sheer size of the tower, its halls and transportation system. Yet the sea was never found, and the single Olfala Bigwan ever captured, in the early days of settlement, was deemed unintelligent, a predator which had never developed language or tools. Many questions remain. Yet when Bani and Kal half-floated, half-stumbled out onto the huge landing deck of the tower, the temperature was warm, and they could breathe.
‘Look,’ Bani said again—he pirouetted in the air, rising above Kal like a pale balloon—’Look!’
Kal, too, rose up. He floated until he was level with Bani, and looked as the roof stretched out and away from them in every direction, an empty shiny surface, but for—
‘It’s a ship.’
The thing was far in the distance, a great silent whale of metal, black against the tower. ‘Do you think it’s the Hilda Lini?’ Kal said, and Bani’s answer, recorded for posterity, was, ‘I don’t know, but I’m going to take a look.’
It was a fording, the place where stories diverge, where one branch of a tree becomes two. Bani’s story—what he found there in Space Port itself, and how he explored the place of the Cord-wainer and met the odd Other again and then travelled, and where and how he met the beautiful and enigmatic Mikhaila Petrova—is well-known, and can be found elsewhere. Yet with Kal, it is only the ending that is ever remembered, and not its details, which are these:
Kal had gone across the great roof of Space Port and come to its edge. He looked down.
Perhaps he thought: life is a series of towers one falls from, continuously.
But, in fairness, it is unlikely that he did. Kal looked down and saw Heven.
Below, clouds swirled and danced across a hazy blue sky that appeared like a reflection. Clouds formed and re-formed all over the world, changing and shifting, separating and merging, not a single entity but many that became one, then dozens, then hundreds, then one again: Kal looked down and saw all the myriad permutations of clouds.
A cloud rose, detached itself from another and came towards Kal, rising impossibly high, climbing through the layers of air until it reached the border of space itself, and there it reformed.
The man was small, and his head was entirely bald. His skin was a deep, dark blue, a shade fading into black and yet other. His head was criss-crossed with faint white lines that extended downwards, all the way down his naked body. The man came and sat down there on the edge of the tower, there on the edge of the world beside Kal.
Kal dangled his feet over the world and after a moment of not uncompanionable silence, said, ‘I remember you.’
‘And I you,’ the blue man said, ‘Kalbaben.’ Below the clouds drifted, a skyscape over a landscape, white against ocean blue—a world. Kal thought about Vira, dead in the air. He said, ‘All I wanted was to fly.’
‘You still can,’ the blue man said.
‘How?’ Kal said,
with more bitterness than he perhaps intended.
‘Become a cloud?’
The blue man smiled, and said, ‘There are worse things to be.’
‘Why couldn’t I fly?’
The blue man sighed. ‘It’s a question of ecology,’ he said at last. He seemed reluctant. ‘There is a cycle. Remember what I told you, when we first met?’
Kal did. The blue man had been mocking the magician of Epi, who after that went on to marry a girl from Malekulah and took up farming and was never seen in Epi again. ‘Solwota—’ Kal said, ‘hemi go ap, hemi mekem klaod—’ he had smiled then, because the blue man had been making fun of the magician, with his tale of the blue handkerchief that became water became cloud became rain, but he wasn’t smiling now ‘—mo man, hemi semak.’
‘Man is the same,’ the blue man agreed.
‘How?’ Kal said.
The blue man shrugged. ‘Ocean makes cloud, clouds make rain, rain makes an ocean come back again,’ he half-sang. Below the map of clouds shifted, ridges appearing and disappearing, and somehow there was the suggestion of a face, as large as a continent, and it slightly resembled Moria, whom Kal had loved, and Vira too. This suggestion of a face, the imposition of order on the random shape of a cloud, seemed to be smiling.
‘I can show you,’ the man said. He stood up gracefully, raised his arms in the air, and fell towards the world below.
Everyone knows the ending of the story, if that is the ending. Kal, too, stood up. He looked down for a long moment, and he smiled. He stretched his arms to the sides, left them extended. Then, like a plane taking off, he rose from the edge of the tower and flew below.
We do not know the true ending of this; for, though we can now go into space, though we can theorise and write books and do many things which once seemed like miracles, we still cannot talk with, nor understand, clouds.
LAVIE TIDHAR GREW UP IN ISRAEL and South Africa, but it was his experience of the South Pacific, and the remote islands of Melanesia, that inspired this book. When he wasn’t climbing volcanoes or riding in canoes and boats (or tending his little tomato patch!) Lavie wrote in his tiny bamboo shack on the island of Vanua Lava. He speaks fluent Bislama—the pidgin language of Vanuatu and another major influence on his writing. Lavie’s first novel, The Bookman, was published in January 2010 by Angry Robot Books. Forthcoming from PS are another novella, Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God, and the groundbreaking alternate history novel, Osama.
CLOUD PERMUTATIONS
Copyright © 2011 by LAVIE TIDHAR
The right of Lavie Tidhar to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd in July 2010. This electronic version published in December 2011 by PS by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.
FIRST EBOOK EDITION
ISBN 978-1-848632-32-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
PS Publishing Ltd
Grosvenor House
1 New Road
Hornsea / HU18 1PG
East Yorkshire / England
Contents
PART ONE
— Chapter 1 —
— Chapter 2 —
— Chapter 3 —
— Chapter 4 —
— Chapter 5 —
— Chapter 6 —
— Chapter 7 —
— Chapter 8 —
PART TWO
— Chapter 9 —
— Chapter 10 —
— Chapter 11 —
— Chapter 12 —
— Chapter 13 —
— Chapter 14 —
PART THREE
— Chapter 15 —
— Chapter 16 —
— Chapter 17 —
— Chapter 18 —
— Chapter 19 —
— Chapter 20 —
— Chapter 21 —
CLOUD PERMUTATIONS
Cloud Permutations Page 11