It would be a massacre.
“It’s true,” Niyol said.
Wallace turned to look at his friend. Anger clenched his hands into fists. He wanted to strike him to the ground, and keep hitting until black blood flowed.
“Is this true?” Yiska asked.
Wallace looked at Yiska. What would he do if I said no? Would I sit facing the firelight like Hatathlie?
“It is,” Wallace said.
Yiska stood up. “Then we do nothing.”
Herbert tugged at the ropes that bound his arms. “Let us go!”
Yiska nodded. “We will.”
“Now!”
Yiska ignored him and went to talk with Ahiga.
“Hey!” Herbert said.
Ahiga and Yiska pulled down the tents and piled the fabric and aluminum rods next to the car, ignoring Herbert’s protests. Frans remained silent, perhaps satisfied enough in keeping his life.
“Why’d you cry?” Wallace asked Niyol.
“He was my brother.”
“He’d kill us all.”
Niyol shook his head.
“Do you want us to be like America?”
“No,” Niyol said. “I don’t know. I just want to go home.”
Home. Back to Mother and her little skystone jewelry stand, back to the sheep and the shepherds. Wallace just shook his head.
When Ahiga and Yiska began to push dry brush under the car, both Frans and Herbert yelled in protest. Wallace laughed and went to help.
Soon, the night was lit by two new fires: the car and the plane. Both burned uncertainly for a time, then fountained upward in pillars of fire as the gas tanks caught. It was bright enough to illuminate the far hills.
When the fires guttered and went out, Ahiga and Yiska untied Herbert and Frans. Herbert rubbed his wrists and gave the two elephant men a calculating look.
“You may go,” Yiska said.
“Where? You’ve killed us,” Herbert said.
“I do not believe that is true.”
“We’ll be back.”
Yiska smiled. “And we will still remain.”
“Let’s go,” Frans said, pulling at Herbert’s arm.
“You think you’ll stop us, but you won’t!”
Frans tugged harder.
“We’ll be back!”
One more tug. Herbert tore his arm away from Frans, but walked away with him. The two men shrank into the distance, following the road back toward Paguate.
Yiska and Ahiga mounted their elephants. In the wan moonlight, they looked like ghosts drawn in shadow. Wallace looked up at them. They were what Diné should be.
Wallace heard Niyol’s footsteps crunching away into the night. He turned to see his friend walking down the road, following the two men.
“Niyol!” Wallace cried.
Niyol kept walking.
“Niyol!”
Niyol didn’t look back.
He has something to go back to, Wallace thought. I have nothing.
Wallace looked up at Yiska. “Can I stay with you?”
“That is one path,” Yiska said.
Wallace imagined himself atop a great shining elephant, leading the Diné against whatever might come. Maybe even helping them understand this strange new world they lived in. He could be the avatar of change. He could be the one who saved them all!
“And there is your friend, and what he follows,” Ahiga said.
Wallace turned to look at Niyol’s shrinking figure. Yes, there was his friend. And the men who had promised to come back.
“That is another path,” Yiska said.
The elephants were beautiful. Wallace looked at them for a long time, burning the image into his mind. Tears welled, but he willed them away. He was not their savior. He might not ever find any great path.
“Good-bye,” Wallace said.
Yiska’s expression never changed. He nodded once and turned his elephant around. Ahiga followed. They were almost completely silent.
Wallace waited until they were nothing more than shadows against the stars. Then he went back to camp where Herbert had fallen. He picked up Manycows’s blade.
He stuck it in his belt and started walking, back toward the men, back toward Paguate.
Ardent Clouds
Lucy Sussex
Lucy Sussex was born in the South Island of New Zealand and lives in Australia, where she works as a researcher and writer. She has published widely, with a particular interest in crime and Victoriana.
Her fiction has won Ditmar and Aurealis awards and been shortlisted for environmental awards and the International Horror Guild Award. Her short stories have been collected in My Lady Tongue, A Tour Guide in Utopia, and Absolute Uncertainty. She has also written three books for younger readers, two for teenagers, and one adult novel, The Scarlet Rider. Of the four anthologies she has compiled, She’s Fantastical was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award.
She also writes the “Covernotes” column for The Age and The West Australian newspapers and is completing a nonfiction book, Cherchez les Femmes, on early women crime authors and detectives.
Sussex is an expert at creating vivid, believable characters, flaws and all. She does so in “Ardent Clouds,” a story about an extremely dangerous profession and those who embrace it.
Call me suicidal (many do). Call me a paparazzo, specializing in subjects blowing their top. Call me a groupie for danger. I just love the smell of sulphur in the morning…or any other time. Someone from film school said it best: “You, Bet, are a powdermonkey.”
Yeah, powdermonkey, those boys employed by the British navy to feed gunpowder to the cannons, darting through the noise and smoke of battle. I can just see myself in navy breeches and pea jacket, my A-size breasts concealed beneath a bandage, wrapped tight. Way back then, if a girl wanted a career that didn’t involve babies, wanted adventure, she disguised herself and went to sea. I’d have loved it!
But in terms of fire, noise, and explosion, a cannon just doesn’t cut it for me. Give me a volcano anytime. That’s how I make my living, travelling from eruption to eruption, filming the biggest, most explosive, most uncontrollable things on earth.
It started with an SMS from Spider, as I call him. To others, he’s Herr Professor Dr. Sigurrson, theorist of volcanology. Spider makes his lair at a university in a cold and geologically stable part of Europe. There he sits, at the centre of a web of information stretching all over the planet, like lines of longitude and latitude, provided by seismological sensors. If there’s a twitch from a volcano anywhere, Spider knows about it.
But he can’t go and investigate, because he’s in a wheelchair, some sort of fragile bone syndrome. He doesn’t travel, and we met only once, at a conference on his home turf. When we met, he couldn’t even risk shaking my hand, in case I squeezed his too tight and broke a finger. That’s how some tell if others are okay, by the handshake. Spider does it at one remove, visually. The clear blue Viking eyes behind those bottle glasses, they looked me up and down.
It wasn’t with desire, either: I tend to the stocky and have no-nonsense hair. I also dress super-sensibly—that’s not a gun in my bulging pocket, but a spare lens. Volcanologists do fall in love and get married, even Spider, who has Magga, a devoted nurse-wife, always one pace away from his wheelchair. But their real passions are elsewhere. You could see lust in the eyes watching my film, of an undersea volcano hitting the ocean surface in a maelstrom of steam, stink gas, and lava.
In my accompanying presentation, I threw in a few specialist volcanological terms, to show I was smarter than the average nature documentary maker. And, to show I meant business, told how I’d bribed the coast guards to take me into the danger zone. The boat had been bucking underneath me, I had to keep wiping pulverized pumice off the lens, I was drenched in sulphur-tinged spume—and none of that mattered, because I got great footage.
I also gained something else: a boss. Every grouping has its moieties, opposing parties. I privately grouped volcanologists into Sp
iders and Powdermonkeys. My family, who are old air force stock, distinguished between Shiny Ass fliers and Aces. The former flew desks, the latter Spitfires. If I’d had the math to be a volcanologist in actuality, instead of just a hanger-on paparazzo, I’d have been an Ace, yes siree! If Spider hadn’t been doomed by nature to a life lived apart from his precipitous, dangerous objects of research, he might have been the same. Instead, he was king of the (computer) desk fliers, and as such needed a proxy.
Spider and I have a deal: He tells me where the volcanological action is, I go there and film it. I also report back: I’ve been his ears and eyes all over the world. In the process, though I’ve never seen him again, we’ve developed a rapport. He gets oddly solicitous: If I’m going to Alaska, he tells me to wrap up warm; or in the Philippines, he’ll recommend insect repellent. All this for someone at a far remove, going places he can never physically visit.
“Do you envy me?” I e-mailed him late one night.
The reply came at the end of a long list of technical data, stuff I really had to know for the latest hot spot in volcanology. Then he got, briefly, personal.
“No. Sometimes when I see your footage, almost. Then I remember that I’m better in my office, away from the explosions. Magga says she doesn’t know why anyone would marry a volcanologist otherwise. Someone like you gets up close, but I get the big picture. I don’t envy Bet the ant, walking on a ticking bomb.”
Which was to me, and to many of the people I met in the field, or at conferences, precisely the fun of it. The Powdermonkeys, we got dirty and dangerous, taking photos or collecting gas from steaming fumaroles; the Spiders kept their distance, analyzing the figures, building mathematical models.
I guessed that more likely Spider-proxies, grad students or colleagues, were ruled out for reasons of possible professional jealousy. And in choosing me, I don’t flatter myself falsely that he’d been very astute. Not even top volcanologists can go where I’ve gone. Money is tight in universities these days; business schools are more important than science. What with teaching, grant applications, and admin, few volcanologists can drop everything and dash off to an incipient eruption. But I have connections to TV networks, specialist heat- and chemical-resistant cameras, and an ever-increasing reputation for spectacular images.
“I don’t know how you do it,” said Cody Veitch from CNN. “Always the money shot.”
I bit my lower lip. Network execs tend to the crass, but it was true—although my money shot was large-scale, rather than in the intimate, bedroom realm.
“It’s like you go there, the volcano blows. I remember being an anchorman way back with Mount St. Helens, waiting God knows how long for the fucker to shoot its load. And thinking: Hurry up, it’s a real slow news day! With you, it’s like you’re in and out of the hot spot within twenty-four hours, with your footage. So what’s the secret?”
“Connections. The best.”
Silken ones, I thought, leading to my master, sitting in his wheelchair in front of a computer screen.
But latterly I had begun to wonder: How come Spider gets it so right? Sometimes a volcano can get active, but just sits and grumbles, letting off gas or steam without doing anything newsworthy, let alone cataclysmic. The locals would get evacuated, a costly exercise, and nothing would happen. Spider might have the best information, but clearly he had something else. Scientists don’t sacrifice goats and consult their entrails, even for something as unpredictable, even godlike, as a volcano. Spider was a theoretician, and I figured he was perfecting a theory, perhaps a formula: If x = y to the power of z, then the volcano will blow. Being able to predict eruptions would have huge prestige—it would pay to get it absolutely right.
Someday, I thought, I’ll be at the Nobels, filming Spider as he wheels himself up for his glittering prize. In the meantime, though, I was having the greatest of times. I went everywhere from Iceland to Antarctica, following volcanic action. I’ve even been undersea in the Mir submersible, filming the weird and wonderful fauna that hang around hydrothermal vents, and their warm, mineral-rich emissions. After that anything seemed possible, like a trip to Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io. A girl can dream…
When the mobile peeped, five AM in my Miami hotel room at a documentary film fest, I knew we were in European time, and that Spider was calling.
It was an SMS message, one word: CHILLIPEPPER.
That was the nickname of a volcano in South America. The real name signified some unpronounceable pre-Columbian fire god; Chillipepper was the easy alternative. Obvious, since it was dead centre of an area famous for its chilli production. The soil around volcanoes is typically fertile—it’s one reason why people don’t keep the hell away from them. Chillipepper’s pickles had a cult following, almost an appellation contrôlée, as the hottest and tastiest peppers around. The jar labels even featured an erupting volcano, a bit of a fiction, as Chillipepper had rumbled into life a few times last century, causing a stir, but nothing really dramatic.
The name rang a recent bell, but I couldn’t recall anything more. Early in the morning is not a good time for my synapses. I ordered coffee, double strength, from the dozy room service and got onto the Net, Googling for more information. A name instantly familiar hit the screen: JOE BOY BARRETT. I groaned. Spider might rule the desk fliers, but Joe Boy, Emeritus Professor Barrett, was King Ace and thus eternally at war with Spider & Co. He proclaimed that no theorist could predict an eruption; you had to get up there, smell the sulphur. Like some of the flying aces I’d met as a kid (okay, the family were ground crew), Joe Boy had elephantiasis of the ego. He was big, boomed a lot, and shook hands like it was a strength contest. He had a cowboy image, too: boots, Texas buckle on his jeans, and once he’d hosted a formal conference dinner in a genuine Nudie suit, complete with sequinned volcanoes.
When I started out, I might have idolized him like the postgrads he trailed in his wake, as the man who would stick sensors into smoking fumaroles while the mountain shook beneath him and lightning danced in the air. After working for Spider, I saw things differently; in his quiet, abstracted way my master was getting things right, while others strode around, trailing sulphuric glory and yelling: Look at me, Look at me!
Now I avoided Joe Boy, especially since he’d started putting the hard word on me, not sexually (he had another of these devoted faculty wives) but to make a documentary about him. He even had a title for it, The Danger Man.
I shuddered, sipped more coffee, intent on my laptop screen. This long weekend Joe Boy would be keynote speaker at a Chillipepper conference, to be held in a city literally underneath the volcano. I scanned the list of speakers: mostly Joe Boy’s pals or, if not, considered to be no threat, or easily put-down-able. Not like Spider, the ultimate physical weakling, but who on an intellectual level fought like Shelob. Relations were so poisonous between the two they wouldn’t even e-mail.
I sent an SMS back to Spider:
JOEBOY! MUST I?
(Spider’s response to The Danger Man had been in Icelandic and, he assured me, obscene.)
A few moments later, he replied.
YOU HAFTA
ITS WORTH IT
GETTAMOVEON
I glanced at my multi-time-zone watch: Networks would not welcome a call now, nor would my travel agent. And I was feeling a little unwelcoming myself. Over the past year there had been—for lack of a better term—a husbandly tone to Spider’s missives, as if he’d got used to having me at his beck and call. I was starting to bridle at it. Okay, so he thought Chillipepper was worth it. But I needed something else.
I got onto Volcano-Lovers. In Internet-land, there’s discussion groups for everything, from morris dancing to (coded) incest, and several on volcanology, varying from the highly technical to the fannish. Deep down, those who love volcanoes are simply groupies for the baddest, deadliest, most temperamental things on the planet. They just talk in different languages. I could understand scientific papers, though Spider’s recent publications were eye watering. Bu
t for simple gossip, easy info, and, yes, like souls, I turned to Volcano-Lovers.
Alluringly, there was a thread for Chillipepper. I read through it, stopping at a message sent from a Russian server:
LARISSA: MY ALLOWANCE CAME THROUGH! SO CHILLIPEPPER HERE I COME!
That settled it. Chillipepper here I come, too!
I first met Larissa on a grubby little ferry crossing the Bay of Naples. She walked up to where I leaned on the railing, gazing at the waves.
“This should be Roman galley,” she said.
I looked up, registering the small figure, the raven-wing of hair, and her arctic eyes. Identifying the accent took slightly longer. Unlike some Russians I’d met, including a volcanologist I termed Ivan the Incomprehensible, she spoke clear, if slightly MTV English. But I blinked: How could she know what I was thinking?
As if registering that thought, too, she said: “If Bet Murray, famous volcano photographer, is crossing Bay of Naples from Cape Miseno to Vesuvius, then she’s being pilgrim, on trail of first volcano-lover.”
Russian has no articles, so those learning English as their second language have problems with a or the.
“You’re right, I am following the sea trail of Pliny the Elder,” I said.
Pliny, commander of the Roman navy, had on a fine August day in AD 79 seen what would later be called a Plinian eruption column arising from Vesuvius. And set off across twenty sea miles for a closer look.
She had a book under her arm, and though I couldn’t read the Cyrillic on its cover, I could guess it was a translation from the Latin of Pliny the Younger, the commander’s nephew. He provided the eyewitness account, since Uncle Pliny did not survive his Powdermonkey curiosity.
“You know who I am, but you are…”
“Larissa.”
“You’re from Volcano-Lovers.”
“Also PhD student. My diss is on Bezymianny.”
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 6