Fires of Eden

by Dan Simmons

  I closed my eyes in the hope that all this would turn out to be a dream. The distant chanting, the wind through the thatch of the roof, the sing-song of the old woman’s voice—all this continued. I opened my eyes. The white-haired crone floated three feet above the candlenut flames.

  “You must find not only the stolen ghost of your friend,” she was saying, “but all of the haole ghosts which have been taken beneath the world since these fools opened the entrance two weeks ago. Take them all. If the entrance is to be sealed, no haole spirits can be allowed to remain in the domain of Milu.”

  Mr. Clemens and I both stood so that our eyes were level with the dark gaze of the floating old woman. “What if the men outside try to stop us?” asked the correspondent.

  “Shoot them,” she said tonelessly. I noticed for the first time that the old woman’s lips did not move when she spoke. After all that had happened, this did not seem excessively strange.

  Mr. Clemens was nodding as if all this made sense. “One thing,” he said. “Or rather…a few things. Ahh…how do we find this entrance to the Underworld? And…ah…where would one buy rotten kukui nut oil and find some lengths of ieie vine?”

  “GO!” commanded the crone, pointing toward the door. Her voice held the tone of a parent tried beyond patience by a child’s mindless winnings.

  We departed, both of us glancing back at the lifeless body of Reverend Haymark lying there in the dim light of the candlenut flames. The old woman had returned to her place in the shadowed recess of the long hut.

  Outside, the old men looked at us as if surprised that we were still alive. They interrupted their chant and came our direction as Mr. Clemens untethered our horses and handed me Leo’s reins. Mr. Clemens pulled the revolver from his coat and aimed at the bare chest of the chief of the little band. Mr. Clemens cocked back the heavy hammer with an audible click. The Hawaiian raised his hands, showed one tooth in a foolish grin, and backed away.

  “Haole magic works sometimes,” said Mr. Clemens with a grunt as he swung himself up on his horse. We rode out of the dreadful little village the way we had come, picking our way across treacherous lava terraces as we worked our way downhill.

  Behind us, beyond the smoking volcano, the sky was growing light in the east.

  “What do we do?” I said when we were safely away from the village.

  Mr. Clemens tucked the pistol away. “The sane thing would be to ride for Kona and help. It is the only sane thing.”

  I looked back at the dark rocks in the distance that hid the village from sight. “But the Reverend Haymark…”

  “Do you really think that we can bring him back to life?” said Mr. Clemens, his voice as sharp as the rock our horses were plodding through. “After all,” he continued, “that sort of miracle has not been performed adequately in some years.”

  I said nothing. There was a burning in my throat and I confess that I felt perilously close to tears.

  “Ah, well,” sighed the correspondent. “None of this has been sane. There is no reason to commence sanity now. We will go to the Ghost World.”

  “But how do we find it?” I said, rubbing at my eyes.

  Mr. Clemens reined his horse to a stop. Leo and I had been following their lead and I had not looked ahead since leaving the village. I did so now. Ten yards ahead of Mr. Clemens’s horse, floating above the a’a like a will-o’-the-wisp, a globe of blue fire bobbed six feet above the faint trail, seemingly waiting on us like a patient mountain guide pausing for tardy clients.

  “Geddup,” said Mr. Clemens and his horse began picking its way forward through the basalt. The will-o’-the-wisp floated ahead like a dog released to play.

  Glancing at the slowly brightening sky, whispering something that might have been a prayer, I spurred my tired horse to follow.

  A shadow fell across the page. Cordie Stumpf squinted up at the owner of the shadow.

  “Interesting book?” asked Eleanor.

  Cordie shrugged sunburned shoulders. “Characters are sorta interesting. Plot sucks.”

  Eleanor chuckled and sat on the chair next to Cordie’s. The wind was blowing more out of the southwest now, leaving the coast relatively free of smoke. The sky above the palms was blue. Cordie had turned her lounge chair with its back to the beach so that the late-afternoon sunlight would illuminate the pages. The shadows of the palm trees were growing long across the grass. “Seriously,” said Eleanor. “What do you think?”

  Cordie marked her place with a magazine insert card and closed the leather journal. “I think I understand why you came here, Nell.”

  Eleanor looked at the other woman. Cordie Stumpf’s moonshaped face was pink with sunburn but there was a pallor beneath that and her lips were white. Eleanor knew that her friend was in pain. She set her hand on Cordie’s freckled forearm. “Good,” she said. “I thought you might understand.”

  “I read through it once and now I was just goin’ through it again,” said Cordie. “The details seem important.”

  Eleanor nodded.

  “So what you been up to today, Nell? Sparkin’ with the art curator?”

  “You might say that.” Eleanor explained about the day’s visit to the kahuna. “When we came back, we talked for quite a while. It wasn’t Paul’s idea to invoke the old gods and open the doorway to Milu…their Underworld…but once his great-uncles suggested it, he went along. He’s a kahuna himself, it turns out, but only a novitiate.”

  “That’s like a priest-in-training, right?” said Cordie.

  “Right.”

  “Well, did you tell him that your great-great-great-great-aunt saw his great-great-granddaddies fuck up the same way he and his uncles did?”

  “No,” said Eleanor. “But he knows that I have access to some information about that time…something about Mark Twain that was never published.”

  Cordie grunted.

  “What about you?” said Eleanor. “Quiet day?”

  Cordie smiled. “Yeah. Went kayaking across the bay earlier. Did a little swimmin’.”

  At Eleanor’s look of surprise, Cordie told the story. She spoke flatly, without affect. When she was finished, Eleanor tried to speak…closed her mouth…shook her head…and tried again. “I think you ran into Nanaue,” she said. “The shark-man.”

  Cordie smiled again. “I wasn’t afraid of the man part. The shark part made me worry a bit.” She lifted the journal. “Your Aunt Kidder didn’t talk too much about Nanaue. Do you know anything more about him?”

  Eleanor chewed on her lip for an absent moment. Finally she said, “Just what the legends tell.”

  “I don’t know what the legends tell, Nell,” said Cordie. “I just know that some dork with a hump on his back and teeth in the hump took a big bite out of my kayak. I’d like to hear background on it.”

  Eleanor regarded her friend with a searching gaze. “Cordie, you don’t seem to be having much problem with this.”

  “Au contraire, mi amiga,” said the other woman. “I always have a problem when something tries to eat me for lunch.”

  “You know what I mean,” said Eleanor. “A problem with the…improbability of all this. We’re talking impossible things here.”

  Cordie’s smile faded. She looked down at her rough hands. “Nell, I guess you might say that I’ve never quite grown out of my own little mythopoeic universe. Something when I was a kid sorta prepared me for…well, I guess it prepared me to trust my senses and not much else. Something in the water tried to kill me today. I want to hear what it was.”

  Eleanor nodded almost imperceptibly. “A long time ago, not long after the first Hawaiians settled on the islands, there was a sort of god named Ka-moho-ali’i…the King of the Sharks. As with most of the Hawaiian gods, he could appear in his original form—a shark—or as a human. Eventually Ka-moho-ali’i fell in love with a human woman named Kalei. He came out of the water on the north side of this island—the Big Island—and took on the form of a man and married the woman Kalei. They lived in the Waipi
o Valley, which is all the way across the island from here…on the north shore. When their child was born, it was a male child whom they named Nanaue. The child had a mild hump on its back and on that hump a birthmark…in the form of a shark’s mouth.”

  Eleanor paused. Cordie smiled thinly. “Go on, Nell. I like your storytelling voice.”

  “Well, according to the legends, Ka-moho-ali’i returned to the sea, leaving his human wife behind…”

  “Typical male,” said Cordie.

  “Leaving his wife behind, but warning her that she should never let anyone see Nanaue’s birthmark or allow the boy to eat the flesh of animals. Kalei carried out her husband’s wishes and protected Nanaue until he was a man…covering his increasingly humped back with kapa cloth and keeping meat from his diet. But when he became a man, he ate in the men’s eating house and showed an insatiable appetite for meat. When he swam—which he invariably did alone—he transformed into more shark than man…some of the legends say that he was all shark, others say he still held some of the form of a man…”

  “The second legend is right,” said Cordie. “Go on.”

  Eleanor shrugged. “That’s about it. Eventually Nanaue’s secret was discovered. He had the bad habit of luring local people into the water…he especially liked fresh water like the pool under Waipio Falls…where he would attack and eat them. When the villagers turned on him, he escaped to the sea, but couldn’t live in the ocean for long. The legends say that a band of kahuna chased Nanaue to Maui, near the village of Hana, and then on to the island of Molokai. Eventually he was captured and brought back to the Big Island. There the legends diverge. Some say that he was chopped to bits on the hill of Puumano. Others say that he was banished to the Underworld of Milu with the other demons and evil half-gods when Pele fought them in 1866.”

  Cordie nodded and tapped Aunt Kidder’s journal. “Yeah, well, I guess we know which version of that story holds water.” She twitched a thin smile. “So to speak.”

  Eleanor sat back in her lounge chair. Her body ached, although from the day’s mild exertions or its less-than-mild tensions, she did not know. The sky was gray to the east from the fires she had seen earlier, but the breeze from the southwest still kept the sky blue above the Mauna Pele. Eleanor tried to imagine just relaxing at this resort: playing tennis with someone, swimming in the beautiful bay without worrying about shark-men, jogging through the petroglyph fields without seeing torches underground, and taking walks after dark without waiting for something to come crashing out of the undergrowth. The thought seemed pleasant, but dull.

  “I need to hear more about these legends,” Cordie Stumpf said abruptly, handing the diary back to Eleanor. “If we’re going to work together tonight, I need to know everything.”

  Eleanor sighed. “Yes. I’m sorry it’s taken so long.” She sat up. “You don’t have to get involved in this, you know.”

  Cordie laughed her unself-conscious laugh. “Nell, kiddo, I am involved. And will be until we finish this business.” She glanced over Eleanor’s shoulder at the sun lowering toward the ocean horizon. “And I suspect that will be tonight. It may be wild around here after dark. We need a plan, girl.” She looked back toward the Big Hale. “Are they still serving meals, or have the chefs been eaten by Pana-ewa or one of those critters?”

  “Paul says that there are only a handful of us guests left,” said Eleanor. “But the chef is still working and there are enough workers to keep the main restaurant going. Evidently Mr. Trumbo is having a big bash tonight and is paying out big bonuses to the staff that will come in.”

  “Good,” said Cordie, standing and pulling her towel and wrap and large tote bag up with her. “I’m starved. What do you say to grabbing dinner with me and talking to me over a few cold Pele’s Fires? I want to know everything you know about Ms. Pele.”

  Eleanor also stood, glancing at her watch. “I’m supposed to take that helicopter ride at dusk…”

  Cordie’s eyes glinted. “I think I know what you have planned for that. It’s just about six…you have a couple of hours until sunset. Let’s eat.” When Eleanor hesitated a moment, she said, “It’s probably going to be a long night, Nell.”

  Eleanor nodded, got to her feet, said, “See you at the restaurant in fifteen minutes,” and headed for her hale to clean up and dress for the evening’s activities.

  Trumbo paused.

  The three women blocked his path. Caitlin was wearing bleached cotton resortwear pants and blouse, the natural fabric fluttering slightly in the soft breeze that had come up from the south. She was carrying her Bally handbag and one hand was in the bag, Maya stood in the center of the trio; the model wore a flowery Hawaiian pareu—a yard and a half of simple cotton that she had wrapped around her like a skirt—over the same orange, one-piece swimsuit she had worn in her cover shot for this year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. Maya’s lips and nails were a liquid crimson. Bicki was dressed in high heels and a skimpy mocha two-piece swimsuit that almost perfectly matched her skin color. The effect was that she was nude except for the gold bracelet and rings. Her arms were crossed and her legs were set in a gunfighter stance.

  “Hi, girls,” said Byron Trumbo.

  For a minute the only sound was the rustle of palm fronds and the wheezing of Jimmy Kahekili behind Trumbo. Then Caitlin Sommersby Trumbo spoke. “You miserable little fuck.”

  “You putrid little cocksucking twit bastard,” said Maya. Her British inflection was heavy.

  “Hey, T,” said Bicki. She smiled, showing the grin that had launched a dozen MTV videos.

  “Hey, Bick,” said Trumbo.

  “We’ve talked and decided, T,” said Bicki. “We’re going to cut off your balls and dick and each keep one as a reminder.”

  “Sorry, girls,” said Trumbo. “I’m in a hurry.” He started to move off the path to the left. The three women shifted left as fluidly as the front line of the Dallas Cowboys.

  Myron Koestler pushed himself away from the tree he was leaning against and took a step closer. “Mr. Trumbo…ah… Byron, I’m afraid this complicates matters considerably. In light of this…ah…new development… I’m afraid that my client’s reasonable demands must be…ah…revised upwards.”

  Trumbo put one hand on Jimmy Kahekili’s arm. The Hawaiian’s forearm was larger than Trumbo’s thigh. “Jimmy,” said Trumbo, stabbing a finger in Koestler’s direction, “if that ambulatory hemorrhoid says one more word, I want you to take your axe and chop him into pieces small enough to feed to a mouse. Comprende?”

  The mass of flesh behind Trumbo gave an anticipatory grunt. Koestler backed up quickly, looked at the women, opened his mouth as if to say that they were witnesses to the threat, looked at Jimmy Kahekili, and closed his mouth.

  The women stayed in Trumbo’s path.

  “Look,” said the billionaire, grinning slightly, “I’d love to stay and chat… I know you all want to know how you rated vis-à-vis each other…but I really have to hurry.” He took a step toward them.

  Caitlin took a polished semiautomatic from her Bally bag and aimed it at Trumbo’s stomach. This weapon was larger than Maya’s.

  Trumbo stopped and sighed. “What? Was there a sale on those things at Bergdoff’s?”

  Caitlin braced the weapon with both hands. The other two women watched with no expression.

  “No money in killing me, kid,” said Trumbo. “They’ll probably give you the same cell they reserved for Leona Helmsley and whatshername, the cow that did the diet doctor.”

  Caitlin raised the pistol until it was aimed at Trumbo’s face.

  “I really don’t have time for this shit,” said Trumbo, glancing at his watch again. He was supposed to meet Hiroshe for drinks before dinner. “Come on, Jimmy,” he said, and walked toward the women.

  Maya stepped aside. Caitlin swung like a rusty weathervane, arms still rigidly extended, pistol steady, tracking Trumbo as he passed. Bicki glared the way only proud African-American women can glare. Jimmy Kahekili glanced
nervously to his left and right as he followed Trumbo through the gauntlet. Myron Koestler was standing behind a palm tree with only his pale fingers and pony-tail showing.

  Trumbo walked a dozen paces, went around a bend and out of sight of the females, and let out his breath. “Come on, Jimmy,” he said. “We’ve got to hurry and get Sunny Takahashi back before Sato gets cold feet.”

  “You one lolo buggah, brah. Dem haole wahine da’ kine plenty hu hu.”

  “Yeah,” said Trumbo, jogging onto the paved path through the petroglyph field. “Whatever.”

  Fredrickson was waiting where the path ended and the a’a field began. The security man was gripping a semiautomatic in one dark hand and kept glancing over his shoulder at the lava field as Trumbo and the giant approached.

  “Where is he?” demanded Trumbo. He saw that Fredrickson was gaping at Jimmy and his axe. “Never mind him, goddammit. Where’s Sunny?”

  Fredrickson licked his lips. “And Dillon… Dillon’s here too.”

  “I don’t give a shit about Dillon,” snapped Trumbo. “I want Sunny Takahashi. If you’ve got me out here on a fucking wild-goose chase…” The billionaire and the huge Hawaiian took a step forward in unison.

  Fredrickson backed into the lava field. “Uh-uh, Mr. Trumbo, sir…no. I mean, you’ve got to see… I mean, I didn’t call anyone else because they said…anyway…” He turned and led them into the lava.

  The pit was less than a hundred yards from the jogging trail.

  From the looks of the tumbled boulders at the lip of the crater, the lava tube had collapsed only hours earlier. Fredrickson moved to the edge of the opening gingerly, his pistol raised. Trumbo followed impatiently. Jimmy Kahekili stayed well back.

  “Now what the shit does this have to do with…” began Trumbo, and stopped.

  The lava tube was not too deep beneath the surface here, perhaps fifteen feet. The seaward side of the cave had been covered by rockfall when the roof collapsed, but the mauka or toward-the-mountain side was still intact, a black ellipse opening into the earth.