Fires of Eden

by Dan Simmons

  At that second I felt a great jolt, as if lightning had struck me. My exhaustion vanished. Power seemed to flow from my fingertips. I looked at Mr. Clemens and saw in his widened eyes that my own visage had changed, perhaps evincing the glow of energy and understanding that I felt at that second.

  I unstoppered the coconut. Reverend Haymark’s spirit flowed out like thick, gray molasses, first pooling along the floor and then rising into the shape of a man. I stood next to it as it coalesced. The old woman’s murmurings became a distant background noise—or perhaps they were only in my mind. I do not know.

  When the ghost had formed into its human shape, it rippled like smoke disturbed by a slight breeze and began drifting toward the door. I did not need the old woman’s urgings to know what to do.

  Standing between Reverend Haymark’s spirit and the open doorway, I slapped at the ectoplasmic shape, my fingers contacting something but sliding into the smoky form.

  The ghost turned back, but the lower half lost human form and began to swirl around the head of Reverend Haymark’s corpse, spiraling like a cyclone seeking the corners of the body’s eyes.

  I roughly slapped it away. Finding that I could grasp the ghost, I seized its shoulders and dragged it to the bare feet. By this time the spirit had all but lost its human form and I felt that my burning hands were holding a tangible fog. I pressed that fog against the feet, feeling resistance at first but then sensing the resistance yielding, bending, and finally the osmotic penetration of the bare and vulnerable soles. It felt a bit like pushing some thick cream through a fine filter.

  The spirit resisted for a moment and these words came unbidden to mind. I began to chant:

  “O the top of Kilauea!

  O the five ledges of the pit!

  The kapu fire of the woman.

  When the heavens shake,

  When the earth cracks open,

  Man is thrown down,

  Lying on the ground.

  The lightning of Kane wakes up.

  Kane of the night, going fast.

  My sleep is broken up.

  E ala e! Wake up!

  The heaven wakes up.

  The earth island is awake.

  The sea is awake.

  Awake you!

  Here am I.”

  At that moment, the earth did shake and the hut swayed back and forth like a grass skirt of a native maiden in one of their sensuous dances. I heard great crackling and rumblings, although whether it was earthquake or lightning or both, I do not know. Mr. Clemens was thrown to his knees, but he never looked away from the wrestling bout between Reverend Haymark’s spirit and me. Somehow I knew at that second that Pana-ewa, Kamapua’a, and the other antagonists had been cast far away from this place, and the Underworld of Milu had been sealed off by flowing lava.

  I concentrated on my work. Perspiration dripped from my nose and chin as I forced the ghost up the cleric’s legs to the hips. Here the struggle intensified, as if the spirit were loathe to rise to the vital organs and allow the body to breathe and live again. I reached behind me as if knowing the old woman would be holding an earthen jug. She was. Taking fresh water from the vessel, I poured it over the body while chanting:

  “I make you grow, O Kane!

  I, Lorena Stewart, am the prophet.

  Pele is the god.

  This work is hers.

  She makes the growth.

  Here is the water of life.

  E ala e! Awake! Arise!

  Let life return.

  The kapu of death is over.

  It is lifted,

  It has flown away.”

  Suddenly the resisting spirit ceased its resistance and seemed to slip easily upward as I slapped and massaged the dead missionary’s sides and belly. I massaged the spirit down the limp arms and slapped the fingers until I felt the warmth returning there. Finally I rubbed the broad neck, massaged the jowls, and set my glowing fingers on the dead man’s face and scalp.

  A moment later I sat back, suddenly exhausted once again, the divine energy flowing out of me so abruptly that I lifted my fingers to the inside corners of my eyes to make sure that my own uhane was not escaping.

  Reverend Haymark made choking noises and then his eyes flickered open. His lips moved. He began to breathe.

  I believe that Mr. Clemens caught me as I swooned.

  Standing in the astronomer’s tumbled office, playing the flashlight on the shattered wall and the dark cavern beyond, seeing the blood smeared on floor and wall and ceiling, Cordie stepped back and said, “Okey-dokey, time to take your clothes off.”

  “Forget it,” said Byron Trumbo. He would jump the bitch before submitting to this indignity.

  Cordie sighed tiredly and raised the pistol. “Where do you want it then? In the thigh or that spare tire you’re carrying around? Either way, I want you to still be able to walk.” Standing too far back to be rushed, she cocked the hammer.

  Trumbo began cursing as he unbuttoned his shirt. By the time he had his underwear off, he had used every phrase he had learned in his colorful life and had started improvising new ones. Behind the flashlight, Cordie was also disrobing. When he was down to nothing but socks and the dumpy little woman had only the gun, flashlight, and tote bag left, he said, “What next? You rape me?”

  “Please,” said Cordie, “I just ate a couple of hours ago. Take them socks off.”

  “If we go in there, the rocks’ll cut my feet,” said Trumbo, hearing something sickeningly like a whine in his voice.

  Cordie shrugged. “The ghosts in there don’t wear socks. I guess we can’t neither. Peel ’em off.”

  Trumbo gritted his teeth and tugged the socks off. “You carrying that bag in? You think ghosts carry tote bags?”

  “I don’t give a whole big good goddamn,” said Cordie. “I need it to haul my stuff, I’m not leaving Kidder’s journal behind.”

  “Whose journal?”

  “Never you mind,” said Cordie. “Time for us to smell ourselves up. You first. Start with the garlic paste, I guess.”

  The next few minutes were beyond anything in Byron Trumbo’s experience. Under the pistol’s one-eyed gaze, he smeared on the semiliquid garlic, then rubbed on the anchovy paste. The smell made him gag.

  “Now the cheese,” said Cordie, applying the garlic to herself even as she held the pistol steady.

  “Fuck it,” snarled Trumbo, and began crumbling cheese. “It won’t stick,” he said.

  “It’ll stick. Keep smearing.”

  Trumbo smeared. The pungent Limburger caked on his chest. Crumbs gathered in his armpits and fell to his pubic hair. He rubbed his legs with crumbling handfuls of the stinking stuff.

  “Great,” said Cordie Stumpf, and took the remaining cheese to rub on her own body.

  Trumbo tried not to look at that body. Since he had made his first million, the women he had chosen to see naked were physically attractive, as close to perfect as he could buy. Looking at this woman’s small, sagging breasts, at the cellulite on her ass, at her fat thighs, and the twin scars on her belly, and at her stubby legs reminded him of his mother and of mortality and of all the things he thought he could put behind him forever. Suddenly Trumbo felt like crying.

  Cordie ignored his glances. “Now the marmite,” she said. “Put it in your hair and on your face.”

  Trumbo opened the jar and almost lost his banquet dinner then. It was not just the rotting yeast stink of the dark spread, but how it blended with the other stenches rising from his own skin. Holding his gorge in check by sheer willpower, he spread fingerfuls of marmite through his thinning hair and behind his ears.

  “Go ahead and upchuck if you want,” said Cordie at one point. “It’ll just add to the smell.”

  Trumbo passed on the offer. “Why the fuck are we doing this?” he asked as he handed the marmite jar over. The damn cow kept the pistol just out of grabbing range.

  “It’s all in Kidder’s journal,” said the little woman as she rubbed the black paste in her st
ringy hair. “Ghosts don’t like bad smells. They look away. If they knew we was still alive, they’d mob us and steal our spirits, just like Pana-ewa did to poor Nell.” She tossed the empty jar aside. “Wish we had some herring in cream sauce. And maybe some cat food. The canned type. Puss’N’Boots would be good. That stuff always made me want to puke when I had a cat.”

  “You are fucking certifiable,” said Byron Trumbo through gritted teeth.

  Cordie nodded. “Okey-dokey, let’s get going.” She gestured toward the hole in the wall.

  “You just expect me to hike down that lava tube with you until we find ghosts?”

  “That’s the plan,” said Cordie, plucking a black gob of marmite from the wet bangs in front of her eyes.

  “Why me?” said Trumbo.

  “The rules say there’s gotta be a man,” said Cordie. “You seemed available. I’m sorry it’s that way, but that’s it. Life tends to be like that.”

  Trumbo considered this bit of philosophy for a moment and then tensed his muscles in preparation for a leap at her fat throat.

  “Don’t even think about it, By,” said the little woman, holding the pistol steady.

  Knotting his fists, Trumbo stepped through the broken wall into the cavern. “It’s pitch-dark in here,” he said, hearing the mild echoes.

  “I’m coming,” said Cordie.

  Above and outside, in the earth, in the sky, and beneath the sea, the battle is joined.

  The volcano Mauna Loa rises an impressive 13,677 feet above sea level, but beneath the waves the bulk of the mountain extends another 18,000 feet to the seabed. If the ocean were to be removed, Mauna Loa would stand as the 32,000-foot mountain it is, the highest peak on planet Earth. Kilauea, now in full eruption with its taller sister, Mauna Loa, would not stand at its modest 4,075-foot level but would be revealed as the 22,000-foot volcanic cone it truly is.

  Now, from the permanent reservoir of seething magma more than seven miles beneath the summit of Mauna Loa, internal forces squeeze great volumes of lava upward through rock so permeated by fissures that it resembles a giant sponge. This ejaculation of molten flame is so powerful that it triggers earthquakes across the Big Island and more than thirty miles out to sea.

  In the Mauna Pele Resort, the tremors are strong enough to send earthquake-savvy Japanese scurrying to doorways while Will Bryant tries to contact either his boss or Dr. Hastings at the Volcano Observatory via cellular phone or radio. Neither answers. At the Volcano Observatory, Hastings and a score of other scientists are monitoring instruments showing the strongest earthquake readings since 1935 and the strongest simultaneous eruption of Mauna Loa and Kilauea since scientists began observing such proceedings on the island in 1832.

  Along the southwest rift zone where the Mauna Pele Resort now lies, more than a dozen new flank eruptions are recorded in less than a dozen minutes as the tremendous pressure rising to the Mauna Loa caldera vents itself along fault lines which have long lain cold and dormant. While not explosive in the twenty-megaton range of Washington State’s Mount St. Helens eruption of 1980 or the 1985 eruption of Nevada del Ruiz in Colombia, which killed more than 23,000 people, this lateral eruption is powerful enough to send lava geysering down the southwest slope of Mauna Loa in innumerable fountains, some rising 2,000 feet into the night sky.

  Gases exceeding 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit are vented along the thirteen-mile fissure and great clouds of sulfurous steam billow among the flames and lava flows. Tens of thousands of strands of fibrous, silica Pele’s hair drift on the heated updrafts and descend on the tropical forests and fern fields. Rock fragments are blasted miles into the air, the heaviest ones tumbling in the vicinity of the fissure but the lighter pebbles and particles traveling hundreds of miles out to sea on the resulting ash clouds.

  All along the southwest rift zone running to the sea, ancient lava tubes are filling with fresh magma. Starting at the 12,000-foot level and running to the sea, rock made porous by tens of thousands of years of cooling and shifting is suddenly filled with lava and agitated by earthquake. Water-saturated rock miles above the lava reservoir explodes in a superheated instant. Steam clouds vie with sulfur clouds as the explosions continue down the thirteen-mile rift zone like a string of giant firecrackers. Over 700,000 cubic yards of lava is flowing, setting a new Volcano Observatory record.

  In front of this lateral flow, forests burn. Highways disappear under 30-foot lava flows moving faster than a man can run. Houses vaporize. Abandoned cars and trucks rise like toys on the magma stream and are carried along at thirty-five miles per hour, paint steaming away in a toxic instant, interiors bursting into flame and gas tanks igniting in a minor counterpoint to the fountaining lava all along the flow.

  Against this, Kamapua’a’s tropical disturbance crashes onto the flaming coast like a stream from a garden hose turned against a three-alarm fire. Steam rises in ten thousand points where the monsoon downpour meets overflowing lava tubes, but mere rainwater will take millennia to prevail against molten rock sizzling along at 2,000 degrees. A tsunami might quench some of the flames, but Pele has planned the night’s eruptions so that while the earthquakes are terrible to feel, no tsunami is created. Twenty-foot waves crash against the flaming cliffs, but no tidal wave arrives.

  As part of Kamapua’a’s age-old strategy, thousands of wild pigs are loosed on the land to eat the shrubs and vegetation, denying Pele fuel for her fires. Most of these pigs die in the first thirty minutes of this new lateral eruption, swallowed by carefully crafted tendrils of lava. Amidst the sulfur stench and steam roar, the night is filled with the luau scent of roasted pork.

  Standing in the doorframes of the banquet hall of the Presidential Suite of the Mauna Pele, Hiroshe Sato watches the lava tendrils burning their way to the sea less than five hundred yards south of the resort and whispers softly to himself. “Hory shit,” he says over and over.

  “I think we’re getting close,” said Cordie. The tunnels had seemed to stretch for miles, one lava tube connecting with another until neither Cordie nor the billionaire had the foggiest idea of which direction they were heading. Each expected to arrive at the sea at any moment, or tumble into the volcano caldera.

  Instead, they reached a point where the walls began glowing.

  “This is a good sign,” said Cordie, patting the tote bag she carried over her bare shoulder. “Kidder’s journal says that everything glows in ghost country.”

  “Great,” said Trumbo. His feet were scratched to shreds. His skin crawled with the stinking concoction she had insisted he smear on himself. Four or five times they had been thrown from their feet by earthquakes that dropped rocks and dust from the ceiling of the lava tube. Each second that passed, Trumbo expected a wall of lava to come barreling into them. “Ghost country,” he said. “Just great.”

  The ghosts, when they found them, were somewhat of an anticlimax. Glowing forms—almost transparent, almost human-shaped—moved in pairs and small groups. As the cavern widened, hundreds of the spirits were visible—playing games, lying together, eating poi, gambling. “Just like in the book,” Cordie said.

  Spirits floated toward them and then swerved away as they came within range of the stench. Trumbo did not blame them.

  Cordie came close, the pistol lowered, and whispered in Trumbo’s ear. “We have to be quiet from now on. They don’t talk. Or if they do, our ears can’t hear them.”

  Trumbo nodded, thinking that he could grab the woman’s arm and take the gun away from her now. Why? We’ve got to get what we came for and get the hell out of here. Despite himself, Trumbo had begun to admire the courageous little woman whose naked form he was getting used to. He realized that she was more dumpy muscle than fat, and that behind those tiny little eyes burned a will hotter than the lava that would probably soon consume both of them. Fuck it, thought Trumbo. Everybody had to die. This would be an unusual way to go. He was just sorry that he hadn’t concluded the deal on the Mauna Pele. If he had to die, it would be better to die with that de
al done.

  The ghosts continued their play and work and silent conversations. All the ghostly forms were nude, male and female, and there were few children visible. Trumbo thought, If this is the afterlife, I’ll pass. It looks like Friday night in Philadelphia.

  “There!” whispered Cordie, almost hissing in his ear.

  It took Trumbo a minute to see what she was pointing at. Then he noticed them in a side cavern—several spirits who looked more haole than the rest. It took Trumbo another minute to realize what these ghosts were up to: Dillon’s ghost and Fredrickson’s ghost and his ex-bodyguard, Briggs, were playing craps with invisible dice with three pudgy guys who looked like New Jersey car dealers. One of them seemed to be missing a hand. Sunny Takahashi’s spirit appeared to be making side bets with invisible money. Some tourist types were putting with invisible putters and eating invisible food at an invisible table. The Mauna Pele’s former astronomer sat reading an invisible magazine while two other middle-aged guys sat watching an invisible television, impatiently changing channels with invisible remote controls.

  The spirit of Eleanor Perry stood alone, wandering, as if seeking a way out.

  “Nell,” whispered Cordie, and crossed the cavern to her. It took less than a minute to uncork the wine bottle and contain the spirit. The bottle seemed filled with smoke.

  “Touch the others,” whispered Cordie, “and they’ll follow you out. But I think you have to capture the ones you want to put back in their bodies.” She handed Trumbo the extra bottle.

  Trumbo hesitated. Briggs and Fredrickson had served him well. Dillon hadn’t really been killed, it appeared, just robbed of his soul. The astronomer and the other employees he recognized here had not deserved their fate. Sunny Takahashi’s return meant money.

  Trumbo took the Gallo bottle and squeezed Sunny into it. It was not as difficult as he would have imagined. All the while, however, the bearded ghost of Dillon flitted around him like a pesky fly. Finally Trumbo relented and uncorked the bottle. “Look,” he whispered, “if there’s room, I don’t mind if…” The spirit flowed in like water into a boot.