Fires of Eden

by Dan Simmons

  Eleanor had perused the menu, making note of the specialties such as Portuguese bacon and French toast with coconut syrup, and then ordered an English muffin and coffee. The coffee was excellent—fresh-ground Kona—and Eleanor sat looking around as she sipped it.

  She was the only solo diner on the lanai. This was not a new experience for her: for all of her adult life, Eleanor Perry had felt like a solitary mutant on a planet made up of cloned couples. Traveling, going to films or theater or ballet, eating out—even in post-feminist America, a woman on her own in a public place tended to be unusual. In many other countries of the world where Eleanor had traveled during her peripatetic summers, it was downright dangerous.

  She did not care. Being the only single woman, the only solo person of either gender, on the lanai this morning seemed natural to her. For years she had brought books to read when dining out—indeed, Aunt Kidder’s journal lay on the table at this moment—but at some point early on in her post-college life, Eleanor had realized that the book was a shield, a buffer against loneliness amidst all these happy families and couples around her. So she still read occasionally while eating—certainly that was one of the great benefits of remaining single, she thought—but she never leapt behind the book at the beginning of the meal. Eleanor Perry had become a restaurant voyeur, a veritable connoisseur of judging her fellow diners. She pitied the families and couples, so lost in their usual conversations that they failed to see the psychodrama going on in every restaurant and public place.

  There was little psychodrama this morning in the Mauna Pele breakfast lanai. Only about six of the other tables were occupied—all near the open windows—and these were all couples. Eleanor appraised them at a glance: Americans except for the young Japanese couple and the gray-haired couple that might be German, expensive resortwear, the men with razor cuts and tans, the women with short, stylish hairdos and the less aggressive tans that were coming into vogue now that skin cancer was such a worry, the conversation soft or almost nonexistent as the men pored over copies of the Wall Street Journal and the women perused the day’s activity sheet left on each table, or merely sat looking blank as they ate.

  Eleanor looked out over the palm trees at the small bay and ocean beyond. Something large and gray suddenly broke the surface halfway to the horizon, a flipper caught the light, and a tall splash of water marked the place where the gigantic shape had disappeared as suddenly as it had emerged. Eleanor caught her breath and watched intently until she saw a spout of water about twenty yards from where the mammal had first appeared. The Whale Watching Lanai appeared to deserve its name.

  She looked at the other patrons. No one seemed to have noticed. One woman three tables away was whining about how limited the shopping was here. She wanted to go back to Oahu. Her husband nodded, took a bite of toast, and continued to read the paper.

  Eleanor sighed and lifted the single sheet of paper that listed the special activities that day at the Mauna Pele Resort. The printout was in cursive script on a heavy gray linen paper, looking as elegant as an invitation. There were the usual recreations one would expect at such a resort—none of which interested her—but two items caught her eye: At 9:30 A.M. there was an Art Tour led by Dr. Paul Kukali, Curator of Art and Archaeology at the Mauna Pele. At 1:00 P.M. there was a Petroglyph Walk, also led by Dr. Kukali. Eleanor smiled. Poor Dr. Kukali was going to be tired of her before this day was over.

  Glancing at her watch, Eleanor smiled and nodded at the young waitress waiting to refill her coffee cup. Beyond the bay, the humpback whale hove into sight and slapped the water in what seemed to her to be—though Eleanor knew it was the worst sort of anthropomorphizing—a celebration of the beautiful day.

  Trumbo led the procession down the long tunnel carved from black lava. Inset lights overhead provided pools of illumination.

  “The problem with most of these damned resorts,” Trumbo was saying to Hiroshe Sato, “is that most of the support services get in the way of the guests. Not here.” He turned right at a broad intersection. White signs on the wall pointed the way. Another service cart passed, then a woman in hotel uniform on a bicycle. Large, round mirrors set high on the stone wall allowed riders and pedestrians to see around the corners.

  “We’ve got all of the support stuff down here,” continued Trumbo, gesturing at lighted offices as they passed. Windows looked out on the main corridor as if this were just another shopping mall. “The laundry here…at peak season, we do more laundry than any other place in Hawaii. There’s twenty-six pounds of linen in every room and hale. Here…smell that? This is the bakery. Eight bakers on the staff. This place is humming all night…you should smell it about five A.M. OK, on our left here is the florist—we subcontract to a local garden, but somebody has to cut and arrange over ten thousand floral arrangements every week. Here’s the office of our resident astronomer…ahh, here’s the vulcanologist’s office… Dr. Hastings is up at the volcano this week, but he’ll be here to talk to us tomorrow morning… OK, our resident butcher, we get all our beef from Parker Ranch up by Waimea…paniolo country, those are Hawaiian cowboys…and here’s the art and archaeology curator’s office… Paul’s a hell of a guy, he’s native Hawaiian, Harvard-trained, and was our worst enemy when we were developing the Pele. So…what the hell… I hired him. I guess he figured the devil he knew, you know what I mean?”

  Hiroshe Sato stared blankly at the American billionaire.

  Trumbo turned left into another corridor. People looked out of doorways and lighted windows, nodding as they recognized the owner. He waved expansively, occasionally calling the workers by name. “Security here… Grounds and Maintenance… Water gets a special office… Ocean and Environmental Coordinator… Masseuse, we’ve got great masseuses here, Hiroshe… Wildlife Director, you may have noticed we’ve got birds and mongooses and other cute little critters coming out the ass…and here’s Transportation…”

  “How many?” said Sato.

  “Hmmm? What’s that?” asked Trumbo. Behind them, Will Bryant had laughed at something Mr. Matsukawa had said.

  “How many employees?”

  “Oh. Around twelve hundred,” said Trumbo.

  Sato lowered his chin to his chest. “Five hundred some rooms. Say average capacity of…eight hundred guests?”

  Trumbo nodded. Sato was right on the number.

  “You have one and one half employees for each guest.” Emproyeez.

  “Yup,” said Byron Trumbo. “But these are world-class guests. These are people who book suites at the Oriental when they’re in Bangkok, who summer at the best private hotels in Switzerland. They expect the best service in the world. And they pay for it.”

  Sato half nodded.

  Trumbo sighed and then turned up a ramp. A door opened automatically and they rolled out into brilliant sunlight, squinting. “But that’s all detail, Hiroshe. Here’s what we’ve come for this morning.” The procession rolled through the shadow of tall coconut palms toward the low glass-and-cedar buildings surrounding the first tee.

  “Ahhh,” breathed Hiroshe Sato, his head coming up and the first smile of the day forming. “Golf.”

  EIGHT

  The smoke bends over Kaliu.

  I thought my lehuas were tabu.

  The birds of fire are eating them up.

  They are picking my lehuas

  Until they are gone.

  —Pele’s sister Hi’iaka’s chant on Pele’s betrayal

  June 14, 1866, Volcano of Kilauea—

  Battered bones, aching muscles, and a fatigue so overwhelming as to be frightening, all forgo me from the added labor of writing this entry, but nothing can prevent me from recording the elation, thrill, majesty, and sheer, incommunicable terror of the last twenty-four hours. I write this by the light of Madame Pele’s fiery handiwork.

  I believe that I wrote earlier that Hilo seemed “the true paradise of the Pacific,” and it is in terms of its blossomed streets, its quaint, white cottages, its exotic botany: lauhala, the pand
anus, droops everywhere its funereal foliage and sends its aerial roots toward the wooden sidewalks as if preparing to join the other pedestrians on their evening sojourns, while banana plants hang their purple cones of undeveloped blossoms like proud medals, and each yard is festooned with gardenias, eucalyptus, guavas, bamboos, mangosteens, kamani trees, custard apples, coco-palms, and a veritable Garden of botanic delights. The missionaries who populate this particular terrestrial Garden offered me such attention in the way of social invitations that it was a full, frustrating week before I could begin my voyage to the volcano. For whatever reason, Mr. Clemens was similarly detained, so we began our adventure together.

  I should mention here that the residents of Hilo, both native and transplanted, all ride regularly, each with the greatest skill and fervor I have ever witnessed, and all except the oldest of the ladies ride astride their mounts with perfect equanimity. Thus it was when I chose my mount—a handsome roan made up with an ornamented Mexican saddle and stirrups shielded with leathern flaps to protect my boots while riding through the brush—it was no surprise to see that I should be riding in the local manner. All of the horses chosen for this adventure had twenty feet or more of tethering rope wound about their necks, and the saddlebags were bulging with bread, bananas, and bottles of tea.

  Our group for this outing included the younger and duller of the Smith twins, young Master Thomas McGuire (Mrs. Lyman’s nephew), the corpulent Reverend Haymark, and our brash correspondent, Mr. Clemens. Master Wendt, who had first proposed this daring assault on Pele’s realm, had taken ill and, from his sickbed, all but ordered the rest of us to go on without him.

  I confess that I had widely contradictory feelings about Mr. Clemens’s inclusion in our merry group: on one hand, his cynical presence threatened to reduce the spiritual dimension of what might be a transcendent experience; on the other hand, the Smith and McGuire boys were tiresome, totally incapable of either wit or the ordinary rigors of sustained conversation, and the asthmatic Reverend Haymark seemed interested only in Galatians and dinner. Thus it was that I greeted Mr. Clemens’s expressive brow, untamed locks, and aggressive mustaches with something almost approaching relief.

  Our guide, Hananui, who was dressed and garlanded most resplendently in the native style, wasted no time in introductions or explanations of the trip ahead, but spurred his horse and led us out of Hilo in a gallop. I then had the choice of either pretending to guide my horse or hanging on to the saddle horn with both hands and actually staying on the beast. I chose the latter.

  We soon passed out of sight of the pretty little houses and trim little steeples, plunged through a jungle wild beyond anything in my experience, and continued climbing through this profusion along a hard track of black lava no more than twenty-four inches wide. Clinging to the saddle horn, the wide but soft-brimmed hat I had bought in Denver months earlier hanging around my throat by its drawstring, I could only watch for low branches and festooned trailers so that I would not be brushed off my horse, an obdurate creature I had thought was named “Leo,” a name I later discovered as just a form of the Hawaiian for “horse”—lio. Passing out of this tropical forest, we soon moved through equally dense fields of cane, pausing about an hour’s ride above Hilo as Hananui dispensed tin cups of cold tea to us.

  After our tea party, we cantered out of the cane fields and final groves of trees onto the pahoehoe, or smooth lava, which continued on up the mountainside for as far as we could see. Such devastation—continuing on as it did for some twenty-three miles—would have been enough to make even this hardened traveler turn back, had it not been for the profusion of ferns and grasses which softened the black extrusion at every turn. As we climbed ever higher, the Pacific glowing far below and behind us in rich afternoon light, I easily identified a score of fern varieties, including the lovely Microlepia tenuifolia, the common Sadleria, the wirelike Gleichenia hawaiiensis, and the small-leaved ohias (Metyrosideros polymorpha) with their crimson blooms.

  The human companionship was not of such a colorful variety. Here on the lava fields, the trail had widened and our party fell into sociable pairs. Hananui and the voluble Mr. Clemens led the way. Young Masters Thomas McGuire and Smith (the twins were never called by their Christian names since it was such a chore to tell them apart) followed, while the Reverend Haymark and I brought up the rear. The clergyman did not appear comfortable in a saddle, nor did the rather small horse under him appear comfortable with the clergyman’s girth, and their combined lack of enthusiasm held back the pace more than if the other men had just been adjusting to my slower gait.

  Mr. Wendt had told us that the trip was not an easy one—more than thirty miles, most of it across the extensive lava fields, gaining some four thousand feet in elevation as we went—but I had not been prepared for my exhaustion late that afternoon when we reached what Hananui had called the “Half Way House,” a term which had conjured images of comfortable chairs, hot tea, and warm scones, but which turned out to be a run-down grass hut. Even then, I might have collapsed in its shelter—a mild rain had come up and my hat was dripping from its soggy brim—but the “Half Way House” was quite securely locked.

  Hananui was now visibly worried that we would not reach our objective before dark and, tying his horse by its tether, he went around to each of us and made sure that we had donned spurs—heavy, rusted Mexican instruments with rowels an inch and a half long. Upon Mr. Clemens’s inquiry, Hananui admitted that there were at least five more hours of hard riding ahead of us with no place to rest or find water along the way.

  Soon after leaving the Half Way House, I dropped behind, so exhausted were my limbs from their unaccustomed arrangement on this barrel-chested beast. I barely had the energy to keep spurring the tired animal on while clinging to the saddle horn. I found that if I turned my head to one side, the water from the now serious downpour would drip from my hat brim to the ground without soaking either my legs or the horse’s neck.

  I was surprised when I looked up to find Mr. Clemens riding alongside me. His solicitude, if that is what it was, irritated me, and I spurred “Leo” on to new heights of plodding indifference.

  The correspondent was smoking one of his terrible cigars, the burning end just protected from the rain by the extra brim-width of the sombrero he was wearing. I noticed with something approaching envy that he also wore some sort of ankle-length waxed duster that—although it must be warm in such a climate—appeared to be repelling the rain with great effectiveness. My own skirts and layers of riding apparel must—I had estimated during the duller lengths of the Reverend’s explications on Galatians—now weigh in the vicinity of a hundred pounds, so soaked were they by the evening’s drizzle.

  “Magnificent country, isn’t it?” asked the former river pilot.

  I agreed as noncommittally as I could.

  “It was nice of the natives to perfume the air for us in this way, was it not?” he persisted. “And to choose this particular form of Sabbath light.”

  “Sabbath light?” I said. It was not a Sunday.

  Mr. Clemens turned and nodded behind us, and for the first time in hours I swiveled in my saddle and looked to the east. It was raining where we were on this black-lava slope, but far out to sea the low sunlight ignited waves in a blinding gold and white. Other clouds and squalls cast their shadows on the sea, and these shadows moved like furtive animals seeking shelter from the general brilliance. To our left, where the low evening light passed through the valley between the Mauna Kea volcano and our own Mauna Loa, sunlight broke through clouds in streams and near-horizontal shafts, the light so golden that it seemed a solid thing, illuminating canopies of jungle so verdant that the green was not of this earth.

  “Sort of makes you wonder why the heathens didn’t surrender and convert to Christianity even before the first missionaries arrived, doesn’t it?” drawled Mr. Clemens. He rode with the arrogant ease of someone who has spent much of his life in a saddle. The water dripped from his sombrero in rivulets.
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br />   I sat straighter, taking the reins in my left hand as if I were in charge of my horse’s direction. “You are no friend of the church here, are you, Mr. Clemens?”

  My uninvited companion smoked for a moment in what may have been meditative silence. “What church is that, Miss Stewart?”

  “The Christian church, Mr. Clemens.” I was soggy and sore, in no mood for what may have passed for banter in Missouri or California.

  “Which Christian Church is that, Miss Stewart? Even here, the heathen have so many to choose from.”

  “You know very well what I mean, Mr. Clemens,” I said. “Your remarks have shown a contempt for the efforts of these brave missionaries. And a contempt for the belief that has sent them so far from their comfortable homes.”

  After a moment, Mr. Clemens nodded slightly and touched the brim of his hat so that water drained away. “I knew a missionary lady once who was sent out here to the Sandwich Isles. Extraordinary thing, really. She was dispatched from St. Louis. Actually, I knew her sister…a more generous woman you would never want to meet…why, if you wanted something and that kind lady had it, you could have it in a minute. Have it and welcome.”

  The correspondent seemed lost in happy contemplation of this memory, so after a moment of no noise except for the rain pelting us and the clop of our horses’ hooves, I said, “Well, what happened to her?”

  Mr. Clemens turned his mustache and glowing cigar in my direction. “To whom?”

  “To the missionary,” I said with some exasperation. “To your friend’s sister, the missionary who came here to the Sandwich Islands.”

  “Ahhh,” said the correspondent, removing the cigar to flick ashes over the pommel of his saddle. “Well, they et her.”