Fires of Eden

by Dan Simmons

  “Yeah, that’s the one I’m headed for,” said Cordie. “Were you on the United flight that got sent over to Hilo?”

  “Yes,” said Eleanor. She had not noticed the other woman on the flight, but there were two hundred some bodies squashed between decks back there. Eleanor liked to think of herself as observant, but she would have had little reason to notice the woman except for her slightly out-of-place plainness.

  “I was in first class,” said Cordie, as if reading Eleanor’s thoughts. “I guess you was in the back.” There was no snobbishness in the comment.

  Eleanor nodded again, smiling slightly. “I rarely get to fly first class.”

  Cordie laughed her whiskey-rich laugh again. “I never flew up front before. It’s really a stupid waste of money. But my tickets was part of the prize.”

  “Prize?”

  “Vacation with the Millionaires,” said Cordie, and chuckled. “People magazine had that contest, remember?”

  “I missed it,” said Eleanor. She read People exactly once a year, during her annual visit to her gynecologist.

  “So’d I,” said Cordie. “But my boy Howie didn’t. He sent my name in and I won. For Illinois, at least.”

  “For Illinois?” said Eleanor, thinking, I knew it. Outside of Chicago somewhere. Downstate.

  “Yeah, the idea was that one lucky person from each state would win a week with the millionaires at this Mauna Pele place. It’s Byron Trumbo’s big brainstorm. He’s the guy who built the place, according to People. So I was sorta Miss Illinois, only I haven’t been a ‘Miss’ since 1965. Anyway, the funny part is that the contest people didn’t want to tell me, but I’m the only one of the fifty winners who’s actually coming now. All the rest said no and took the cash equivalent or are waitin’ on it.”

  “Why?” said Eleanor, although she could guess.

  Cordie Stumpf cocked her head. “You ain’t heard about the six people who disappeared at this new place? Some says that others have been killed but Trumbo’s people are covering it up. It’s been in the Enquirer. Headline was ‘Billion-Dollar Resort Built on Ancient Hawaiian Burial Ground, Tourists Dyin’ and Disappearin’.’”

  The road was straighter now, rising more steeply. The west slopes of both Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa were presences in the dark set far on either side of the road as the valley opened out. “I have read something about that,” said Eleanor, feeling like a liar for the understatement. She had clipped everything she could find on the disappearances, including the absurd National Enquirer article. “Aren’t you nervous about going there?” she said.

  Cordie laughed softly. “Why, ’cause the hotel’s built on an Indian burial ground and the ghosts are gettin’ the tourists? Shoot, I seen that plot in that movie Poltergeist a bunch of years ago, and about a hundred movies like it. My boys used to rent those horror videos all the time.”

  Eleanor decided to change the subject. “You have six boys? How old?”

  “The oldest’s twenty-nine,” said Cordie. “Gonna be thirty come September. The youngest is nineteen. How old’re your kids?”

  Usually Eleanor bridled at the presumption of people asking questions like that, assuming that she was married, but there was something about Cordie Stumpf that kept her from getting angry. It was the unself-consciousness of it, similar to her physical movements. Broad, gross almost, but coming across as nothing except what they were.

  “No children,” said Eleanor. “No husband.”

  “Not ever?” said Cordie.

  “Not ever. I’m a teacher. It’s kept me busy. And I like to travel.”

  “A teacher,” said Cordie. She seemed to shift in her seat to look at Eleanor more carefully. The rain had stopped now and the wipers made a dry, scraping sound on the windshield. “I had some bad luck with teachers back when I was in school,” said Cordie, “but my guess is that you’re a college professor. History maybe?”

  Eleanor nodded, surprised.

  “What period you specialize in?” asked Cordie, the interest real and audible in her voice.

  Eleanor was even more surprised. Usually people reacted the way the salesman on the plane had—dead eyes, slack gaze, the monotone of indifference.

  “Actually my study and teaching has been about the intellectual history surrounding the Enlightenment,” said Eleanor, her voice rising so that she could be heard over the Jeep’s laboring engine and the whine and rumble of the oversized tires. “The eighteenth century,” she added.

  Amazingly, Cordie Stumpf was nodding. “You mean Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau…those guys.”

  “Exactly,” said Eleanor, reminding herself of what Aunt Beanie had taught her thirty years before—Don’t underestimate people. “You’ve read… I mean, you know their writings?”

  Cordie laughed more loudly than ever. “Me? Read Voltaire? Honey, it’s everything I can do to take time to read Jokes for the John when I’m in the crapper.” The woman turned her moon face toward the road ahead. “Uh-uh, Eleanor, I never read none of those guys. My second husband—Bert that was—he wanted to be educated and ordered the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica for the kids and all. He got this set of other books with it…the Great Books. Ever hear of it?”

  “Yes,” said Eleanor.

  “It’s like a set of important books for people who are worried that they ain’t well educated. Anyway, each of the Great Books got a timeline in the whatchamacallits,” continued Cordie. “The end-papers. Voltaire and all those guys. When they was born. When they died. I helped Howie do a term paper once using those end-papers.”

  Eleanor nodded. She remembered what else Aunt Beanie had said thirty years ago. And don’t overestimate people, either.

  Suddenly the Saddle Road crested and they were looking down on what had to be the beginning of the west coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. Volcano glow glinted on what might be the Pacific Ocean many miles to the west. Eleanor thought that she could see a few lights far to the north.

  They came to a fork in the road. A sign pointing north read: WAIMEA.

  “We want south,” said Cordie Stumpf.

  It was much warmer along the coast and the sky was clear. Eleanor realized how cold it had been high on the Saddle Road with the chilly trade winds at their backs and the rain blowing in on them. The air had become thicker and more gentle since they had followed Highway 190 down to the Waikoloa turnoff and then driven through the scattered lights of the first development they had seen, down to the coast highway. Here the sense of the tropics had returned, the salt-and-decay scent of the sea, the thick air that matted Eleanor’s short hair, and the almost subliminal sound of surf under the tire and engine noise.

  The coast road held little traffic this night, but even the occasional car was jarring after the emptiness of the Saddle Road. Eleanor had expected a much more settled area here, but except for the half-glimpsed lights of Waimea thirty miles earlier and the scattered homes of Waikoloa on the way to the coast, there seemed little enough. Mostly the headlight beams revealed the borders of great lava fields, sometimes softened by scrub trees. As they approached the resort areas, messages appeared in the lava—words and sentences spelled out in arrangements of white coral laid out on the black lava. Most of the messages were in the category of universal adolescent graffiti—DON AND LOVEY, PAULA LOVES MARK, TERRY SAYS HI!—but there was, Eleanor soon noticed, no obscenity, no vulgarities, almost as if the effort it took to find and lay out the dozens of white coral stones for each message eliminated the casual meanness of urban graffiti. Many of the messages were greetings—THE TAJEDAS WELCOME GLENN

  AND MARCI, ALOHA TARA!, DAVID WELCOMES DAWN AND PATTI, MAHALO TO THE LAYMANS—and Eleanor soon found herself looking for her own name, half anticipating some greeting spelled out in coral.

  The resorts were all but invisible, represented along the highway only by torchlit, guarded gates and roads heading seaward through black lava. Eleanor glanced at several of these entrances as they drove south: the Hyatt Regency Waikoloa, where the fat s
alesman would be sleeping tomorrow night, then the distant lights of the Royal Waikoloan, the Aston Bay Club, then a ten-mile stretch of empty road, then the torchlit entrance to Kona Village, the actual resort invisible across the lava fields, then another ten or fifteen miles in the dark before the sodium vapor lamps along the highway and brighter lights to seaward announced Keahole Airport.

  “There’s jets landing,” said Cordie Stumpf.

  Eleanor jumped, so lost in thought had she been. She had almost forgotten the other woman was along. “They must have opened it,” Eleanor said, looking at the stars above. “The ash cloud must have stopped or moved south.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Cordie, “or that jet’s just carrying more important passengers than us. Rules get broke easier for powerful folks.”

  Eleanor frowned at the simplistic cynicism but said nothing. Several miles beyond the airport, the lights of Kailua-Kona glared to the west. Eleanor pulled into the town to top off the Jeep’s tank and found only a single gas station open. She was shocked to see that there was no self-service. A sleepy attendant came out to pump the gas—and she was more shocked to notice that it was almost midnight. It had taken more than three hours to travel the eighty miles or so from Hilo.

  “How far to the Mauna Pele?” she asked the overweight Hawaiian attendant. In her fatigued condition, Eleanor half expected the man to look up, drop the handle of the pump, and say something like, You don’t want to go there, just like in an old Hammer horror movie.

  Instead, the Hawaiian didn’t even look up from his pumping as he said, “Twenty-two miles. That’ll be seven fifty-five.”

  Beyond Kona the road grew more treacherous, the cliffs dropped off more precipitously to the sea, and the clouds occluded the stars once again.

  “Jesus,” Cordie said tiredly over the wind noise, “they don’t make this place easy to get to.”

  “Perhaps we should have stayed in Hilo like the others,” said Eleanor, speaking to stay awake. “And let them bring us over tomorrow.” She glanced at her watch. “Today.”

  Cordie shook her head in the darkness. “Uh-uh. This prize was for seven days and six nights at the place startin’ tonight. I’m not going to miss a whole night of my free vacation.”

  Eleanor smiled at this. The slopes rose more steeply to the east here, the bulk of Mauna Loa half sensed in the night. The slightest orange glow from the distant eruption remained visible through the lowering clouds. Except for a few homes and darkened commercial structures south of Kona, there seemed to be nothing but lava fields and cliffs along this stretch of road. Even the roadside messages spelled out in white coral rock were absent, making the a’a lava fields seem darker and sharper.

  Eleanor had noted the odometer at the gas station, and at about eighteen miles the road left the sea cliffs and moved inland a mile or two, the black asphalt of the highway becoming almost inseparable from the black lava in the headlights except for the white stripes and reflectors, the sense of penetrating a stone wilderness stronger here.

  “It sure doesn’t look like the Midwest, does it?” Eleanor commented to her passenger, wanting to hear the sound of voices again more than anything else. Fatigue and tension from the long drive had given her a headache.

  “Don’t look like any part of Illinois I’ve been in,” agreed Cordie Stumpf. “Nor Ohio neither. Your area around Oberlin’s real pretty.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “The gentleman I was married to before the late Mr. Stumpf had some business there with the college. When he run off with the Las Vegas girl—Lester that is, Mr. Stumpf was too religious to even go to Las Vegas—I took over the Ohio business as part of my own and visited the college there in Oberlin.”

  “What business is that?” asked Eleanor. She had assumed that Mrs. Stumpf was “just” a housewife.

  “Garbage,” said Cordie. “Hey, there’s something up there.”

  The “something” resolved itself into a gate, a stone wall, a guardhouse in the form of a thatched hut, all with half a dozen gas-fed torches illuminating them. The large copper letters on the stone wall—in a type set somewhere between that of Jurassic Park and The Flintstones—read: MAUNA PELE.

  Eleanor found herself letting out a breath she had not noticed herself holding.

  “Found it,” said Cordie, sitting up straighter and pulling her lank hair back over large ears.

  A sleepy-looking man in a security-guard uniform stepped out of the lighted booth as they pulled up. A thick chain ran from the guardhouse to the wall. “Aloha,” he said, looking surprised to see them. “Can I help you?”

  “We have reservations at the Mauna Pele,” said Eleanor, glancing at her watch. It was past 12:30 A.M.

  The guard nodded and consulted a clipboard. “Your names, please.”

  Eleanor gave both their names and felt a second of strangeness, as if she and this odd woman—moon-faced, housedressed, red-fingered Mrs. Cordie Stumpf—were old friends and traveling companions. She put the sensation down to a mixture of déjà vu and pure fatigue. Eleanor loved to travel, but she never slept well the night before a trip.

  “Yes, welcome to the Mauna Pele,” said the guard. “We thought that the guests arriving tonight had all stayed in Hilo.” He unclipped the chain and dropped it on the road. “Just follow this lane for about two miles. It’s a little rough because of some construction traffic, but it gets better when you get closer to the Big Hale. Don’t get off on any of the unpaved roads going through the lava…you’ll just end up at a construction shack. You can just leave the Jeep under the porte cochere with the keys in it and they’ll park it for you. OK?”

  Cordie leaned over. “What’s a Big Hale?”

  The man smiled, his features flickering in and out of shadow in the torchlight. “Hale just means house. The Mauna Pele has more than two hundred little hales—like grass huts only a lot more comfortable—and the Big Hale is actually the seven-story main lodge where the conference center, dining areas, and shops are. There are about three hundred rooms there too.”

  “Thanks,” said Eleanor. “Mahalo.”

  The man nodded and watched them drive on. In her rearview mirror, Eleanor saw him rehanging the chain.

  “What’s a porte cochere?” asked Cordie.

  Since she was three years old, Eleanor had had an inordinate fear of asking what seemed to be a stupid question. Accordingly, she had begun looking up things in books at an early age to avoid showing her ignorance. She respected Cordie’s ability to ask about things she did not understand.

  “It’s a covered section of an entrance,” said Eleanor. “Usually it extends over the driveway. Useful here in the tropics.”

  Cordie nodded. “Like a carport only you can keep going.”

  The lane was in worse condition than the Saddle Road. The Jeep vibrated over patched asphalt, and Eleanor concentrated on moving ahead without skipping into the lava on either side. There were glimpses of earth-moving equipment parked off the main road and twice they saw steel shacks with fences and security lights.

  “Pretty primitive approach to one of the most expensive resorts in the world,” said Eleanor.

  “How much does a room or hale cost…per night?” asked Cordie.

  “Mmmm… I think mine is going to run about five hundred something per night,” said Eleanor. “But that includes breakfast.”

  Cordie made a choking sound. “You’d think they could patch their road with them prices.”

  At 1.6 miles on the odometer, the road grew wider and smoother. Suddenly it divided into two lanes, a hedge of purple bougainvillea paralleled the drive, a carefully tended riot of tropical flowers and ferns filled the median, and gas-flame torches spaced only thirty feet apart lighted the way through the oasis of palms. Eleanor realized that the winding lane was passing through the darkened links of an elaborate golf course. Unseen sprinklers tsk-tsked at the Jeep as they passed and the air smelled of wet grass and dark loam. Electric lights became visible around the bend in the road. />
  A heavy woman in a muumuu came out under the porte cochere to greet them with leis and to lead them into the lobby. The Big Hale was part hotel and part giant grass hut with Disney-fake thatched roofs, with private lanais outside every room and waterfalls of flowering plants hanging down from each balcony as if the place were attempting to re-create the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

  Eleanor felt old as she got out of the Jeep. Her back hurt. Her head ached. The scent of the flowered lei came through the haze of fatigue like a distant shout. The lady in the muumuu had identified herself as Kalani and now Eleanor followed her and Cordie, the flowered muumuu and the soggy flowered housedress, up tile steps, into a beautiful tiled lobby with golden Buddhas flanking the entrance, across an atrium where birds slept in cages thirty feet tall, past a terrace overlooking the tops of palm trees, their rustling fronds catching torchlight, to the formalities of signing the register and imprinting her credit card—Cordie needed to give no credit card imprint, merely receive Kalani’s congratulations, they were so excited to welcome one of the contest winners, “they” being Kalani and the dark-skinned little man who had appeared next to her behind the counter. Eleanor noticed that he wore a Hawaiian shirt and white pants and was smiling as broadly as Kalani had.

  Then she was waving good-bye to Cordie, who was being escorted to an elevator—evidently contest winners stayed in the Big Hale—while the little man led her back to the terrace. Eleanor groggily realized that the Big Hale had to be built on a hillside: the first floor entrance on the porte cochere side was at least thirty feet off the ground on the ocean side. The porter led her down a staircase to a waiting electric cart which already had her duffel bag in the back.

  “You are staying in Tahitian Hale twenty-nine?” asked the man. Eleanor looked at her key, but he had not really been asking a question. “Those hales are very nice. Very nice. Away from the noise of the Big Hale.”