Fires of Eden

by Dan Simmons

  Trumbo almost dropped the vodka bottle he was pouring from. “He came back? Out of the hole? The pig let him come back?”

  “I don’t know about the pig,” said Will, “but they found Sunny’s body in one of the cold-storage lockers in the restaurant. Dr. Scamahorn says that it looks like he’s been dead for about twelve hours. I haven’t informed Mr. Sato or his party yet, because I knew you would want to. Security Chief Dillon’s body was also found there. We tried to get you, but you weren’t answering your radio. Scamahorn wants to do an autopsy after the authorities are notified and…”

  Trumbo grabbed Will’s arm again and pulled him farther from the banquet table. “Where’s his body?”

  “Who…”

  “Sunny’s!” said Trumbo, and lowered his voice again. “Sunny’s. I don’t give a shit about Dillon’s. Where is it?”

  “In the infirmary. Both bodies were taken up there about twenty minutes ago.”

  Trumbo prodded a heavy finger against Will’s thin chest. “Get on the radio…no, go personally. See to it that Sunny’s corpse…hell, both bodies…are returned to the freezer. Keep a lid on it. Don’t tell anyone.”

  This time, Will Bryant did look strangely at his employer. “Boss, it’s over. Mr. Sato will never sign now that his friend has been killed here. It’s over. We have to…”

  Trumbo backed Will farther away from the cocktail party. “Uh-uh. You don’t get it. I saw Sunny Takahashi not thirty minutes ago. Admittedly, he was glowing and lurching around like a fucking zombie, but it was Sunny. If he’s been dead and frozen for twelve hours like Scamahorn thinks, it must mean that the pig has his ghost held hostage or something…”

  “His ghost?” said Will Bryant. The executive assistant did not drink alcohol, never had, but now he reached for the vodka bottle.

  “Ghost, spirit, whatever the fuck,” said Trumbo, keeping his voice as low as he could. “I don’t know about this Hawaiian religious shit. But the hog was willing to give Sunny to me…he, it…the pig knew that Sunny was important to me and he was willing to deal. I mean, I don’t know about Hawaiian pig gods or whatever, but I know when someone’s willing to deal, and that fucking pig was.”

  Will Bryant tossed back his vodka and nodded. “All right,” he said, “but Sunny and Dillon are still dead…”

  “Dillon can stay dead,” hissed Trumbo. “But maybe the pig will give me Sunny back. He said that Sunny was mine when I wanted him bad enough. He said that all I had to do was go down there in the hole in the ground and talk to him…talk to the pig…about it.” Trumbo trailed off, biting his lip.

  Will set the vodka glass carefully on the counter. “We should get back to the party. Hiroshe and the others will be ready to eat.”

  Trumbo nodded distractedly. “But you think they’ll sign if Sunny comes back?”

  Will Bryant hesitated only a second. “All the paperwork’s been vetted. The meeting room’s still set up. Sato doesn’t like to do business at night, but they’re talking about wanting to fly out early tomorrow.”

  Trumbo’s gaze was not on anything in the room as he nodded. “OK, well… I figure how to get Sunny back and we get the damn thing done before morning. OK, you go supervise getting the two bodies back in the freezer…”

  Will made a face.

  “Goddammit,” said Trumbo, “you can wash your hands before coming back to the banquet. Just get the bodies back in the freezer. Maybe the pig will toss Dillon in for free. Don’t let Scamahorn start an autopsy on either of the stiffs… Sunny wouldn’t be much of a bargaining chip if I got his ghost back in but he was missing a brain or liver or something.” He gave Will a light shove. “Go! I’ll entertain Hiroshe and get everyone seated.”

  Will Bryant nodded and started for the back door to the suite. He paused at the door.

  “What?” said Trumbo.

  “I’m just wondering,” mused Will. “What next?”

  The lights went out.

  Eleanor had taken off for the helicopter ride just after sunset and just before dark. The smoke from the lava fires was heavy. Vortexes from the small helicopter’s rotors sent complicated spirals behind them as they circled the Mauna Pele once and then flew south along the coast.

  Paul Kukali had scrambled into the backseat—more a narrow, upholstered bench with seat belts than a seat—while Eleanor had buckled into the single passenger seat in front. In the rotor noise and business of getting buckled in, she had missed part of the pilot’s name in the shouted introductions. His first name, she caught, was Mike. Before the pilot pulled sunglasses from his denim shirt pocket and set them in place, Eleanor had caught a glimpse of the most startlingly clear gray eyes she had ever seen on a man. Mike appeared to be about her age—mid-forties—with tanned skin, a pleasant smile, a nicely trimmed beard, and strong forearms with surprisingly sensitive hands at the controls. The pilot was gripping a control stick between his legs and another control rod by his left leg. His sneakers were planted on pedals and Eleanor could see the ground through the Plexiglas of the bubble beneath his feet.

  Paul Kukali had put on earphones and now he leaned forward and gestured for Eleanor to do the same. She took the earphones from a niche on the cluttered console between her and the pilot and slid them over her head, adjusting a small microphone in front of her as she did so.

  “Is that better?” Mike was saying. “This machine is elegant, but she makes a lot of racket. It’s easier to talk on the intercom. Can you hear all right?”

  “Yes,” said Paul’s voice, tinny in her ears. Eleanor nodded and then said, “Yes.”

  “Well, OK…pleased to meet you, Eleanor,” Mike said, and held out his hand. Obviously he had caught Paul’s shouted introduction.

  Eleanor shook hands with the man, blinking at the concurrent impression of strength and sensitivity in that brief contact.

  “Shall we go?” said the pilot. “It’ll be dark soon enough.”

  Eleanor nodded and within seconds the engine roar increased, the rotors blurred, and the little craft seemed to bounce once and then leap into the air with an agility that literally took Eleanor’s breath away and made her clutch the sides of the small seat. Her side of the helicopter had a flimsy door that Paul had pulled shut, but a sliding window in it was cracked open and it seemed that there was no barrier between her and the tops of the flapping palm fronds that seemed only inches away when they pitched forward and banked to their left as they climbed.

  “You can grip that bar there,” Mike was saying over the intercom to her, “but do keep your feet away from the pedals. Thanks.”

  Eleanor nodded again, feeling rather ridiculous. Then any self-consciousness fled and she watched out the bubble canopy ahead of them as they roared over the Big Hale and the Shipwreck Bar. Eleanor caught a glimpse of Cordie on the walkway three hundred feet below them, her moon-shaped face visibly pink as it lifted to watch the helicopter pass over, and Eleanor risked raising a hand to wave. She did not see if Cordie waved back. Then they were over the penthouse terraces of the hotel and crossing the beach, Eleanor saw the riot of palms below, the hales perched on their precarious stilts, the thatched roofs falling behind, and then they were out across the bay and she watched as the light green water changed to dark blue beyond the coral reef.

  “Storm coming in from the west soon,” said Mike, pointing out to sea. “About two hours, they say. Time for our little mini-tour and for me to get home.”

  “Where is home?” asked Eleanor. She heard her own voice booming in her earphones and realized that she had shouted into the microphone.

  “Mike lives on Maui,” came Paul’s voice. She swiveled to look at the art and archaeology curator. Paul had his lap belt buckled, but the cabin of the helicopter was so small that when he leaned forward his shoulders almost touched Eleanor’s and the pilot’s. “Near Hana,” he said.

  “Kipahulu,” said Mike. “No electricity. No water. No cable. We love it.”

  “Mike is married to a famous researcher and has two nea
t kids,” said Paul. “Their house is this beautiful Japanese-style home set in the middle of the jungle there along the coast, and their nearest neighbor is Mike Love…the Beach Boy.”

  Eleanor nodded, although she was not quite sure if Paul meant a member of the old rock-and-roll group or some Maui personality.

  “What kind of research does your wife do?” asked Eleanor.

  “Medical,” said the pilot, throwing two switches on the console in front of him and settling back comfortably.

  They rushed south, a mile or so out from the coastal cliffs. The crash of surf to their left and flashing rocks reminded Eleanor of the opening of some old television series…Magnum, P.I. She smiled and watched as the petroglyph fields and the area she had jogged in that morning fell behind. She caught a glimpse of the blowhole spouting. “Do you give helicopter rides professionally?” she asked Mike.

  The pilot grinned. There were pleasant laugh lines around his eyes, visible even with the sunglasses in place. “Sort of. I own the machine and contract out to Science City…” The sunglasses turned in her direction. “There’s an installation way up on Haleakala…that’s the huge dormant volcano on east Maui…and most of their work up there is astronomy and meteorology and classified stuff for the Air Force, but Kate…my wife…works at an immunology lab up there and I drive her to work each day. Up from our shack at sea level to ten thousand and twenty-three feet where her lab is.”

  Eleanor blinked at that image, traveling from tropical heat to arctic ice and back each day. “Why would they have an immunology lab so high and far away?” she asked.

  Mike shrugged slightly. His right hand was easy on the stick while he seemed to be handling the pitch of the rotors with his left. “I guess they figure if some ugly bug gets loose up there, it dies. Meanwhile, Kate may be the only person in Hawaii who commutes to work in sandals and a goose-down parka each day.” Mike turned his head and they banked in toward land, passing over a peninsula on which stone ruins and carved wooden figures seemed to stare out at the rising sea. “City of Refuge,” he said.

  A moment later they reached the first lava flow. Through the softening twilight and smoke, Eleanor could see the asphalt ribbon of gray highway inland cut by the wider gray ribbon of smoking lava flow. The coastal village of Milolii flashed under the helicopter’s runners and Eleanor leaned forward to see the widening fan of glowing lava where the flow met the sea. The steam cloud still rose to fifty thousand feet or higher, a white and horribly solid column impaling itself on the sky less than half a mile to their right. “We won’t get too close to that,” came Mike’s voice over the intercom. He moved the stick and they swung left with an amusement-park falling away that sent Eleanor’s heart lurching higher in her body.

  “There,” she said, pointing through the Plexiglas. The lava flows seemed closer to the Airstream trailer of Leonard and Leopold Kamakaiwi, kahunas. Grass fires and flaming shrubbery seemed to surround the small structure, the orange flames reflected in the dull sides of the beetle-shaped trailer.

  Mike circled lower. “Is this someone we should check on?”

  “No, it’s all right,” said Paul. He pointed. “Their pickup is gone.”

  “Where could they drive to?” she asked, looking in both directions. To the southwest, the pillar of steam rose like a nuclear explosion. To the east, the lava flows from Mauna Loa fanned down the southwest rift zone, cutting the Belt Road in three places that they could see from here, separating the South Kona Coast from Ka’u and the south tip of the island more effectively than minefields.

  “They’re all right,” repeated Paul. “Uncle Leonard and Uncle Leopold are stubborn…not crazy.”

  “OK,” said their pilot. “Shall we do this? Shall we see the volcanoes?”

  “Yes,” said Eleanor. And then, without thinking, “Please.”

  They flew across the south tip of the island, keeping clear—as Mike explained—of the major ash cloud from the Mauna Loa eruption.

  “Paul’s probably explained that it’s been a while since we’ve had major eruptions of Kilauea and Mauna Loa at the same time,” said Mike as they climbed over the ridge running down the tail of the island like a serrated spine. The twilight was fading but the land ahead of them was on fire.

  “Yes,” said Eleanor.

  “I think 1950 was the last time Mauna Loa sent lava down the west side like this,” continued Mike. He had taken his sunglasses off and his eyes moved between the instruments and the rising land ahead. The helicopter continued climbing but remained a thousand feet above the tortured lava fields of Ka’u. “That stuff travels about five-point-six miles per hour…it can reach the coast in less than four hours. Plus, there are dozens…hundreds…of lava tubes carrying the molten rivers beneath the surface. I was ferrying some scientists up to Kilauea from Kona this afternoon and we watched as a whole new flow erupted up north, near your resort.”

  Eleanor was listening but her attention was being captured by the scene opening up ahead of them. Lines of orange-red fire as the scores of lava flows from the larger volcano on their left and the brighter eruption from Kilauea straight ahead sent rivers of flame twenty miles and more to the sea. Fountains of flame burning against blue-black ash clouds darker than summer storms. A thousand smaller fires from trees and fields of grass and—presumably—some human structures incinerating themselves in an instant of unspeakable heat.

  “Believe it or not, I can pressurize this little thing,” said Mike. “And I’m required to if we climb above Mauna Loa at thirteen thousand six hundred some feet…but I’ll keep us lower. We can see both eruptions and stay off the oxygen.”

  Eleanor could already see both eruptions. From ten miles away, Kilauea was an overflowing lake of flame. Ash cones became visible in the gloom, illuminated by the fountains of sullen magma spurting from rents in Kilauea’s flanks.

  But it was Mauna Loa that held her attention. While the summit of the volcano—several miles north and a mile or so above them now—spewed a thick column of ash that drifted above them like a ceiling, it was the line of fissures running down the southwest rift that burned and glowed and flamed like cracks in the ceiling of hell. Eleanor saw ribbons of flame running six miles or more at a stretch, columns of incandescent gas pouring into the evening sky, wild lava fountaining nine hundred feet and more into the air down the entire six-mile slash of fissure.

  “My God,” she whispered.

  “Yes,” agreed Paul.

  They passed over the fountaining wall of fire with little more than two hundred feet of safety. The helicopter lurched and surged from the updraft and Mike moved hands and feet in sure motions to steady the bucking machine. Eleanor could feel the heat through the soles of her shoes. “My God,” she said again.

  They passed just south of the caldera, still several thousand feet lower than the actual opening of Mauna Loa, and then rushed down the mountain toward the firestorm that was Kilauea.

  It was dark enough now that both land and sea resolved themselves only as distinct darknesses between the innumerable rivers and tributaries of flame. Within each river there were ripples, fountains, textures of molten fire. The rivers of flame moved downhill in visible surges, sluggish, unstoppable. Ten thousand subsidiary fires burned along the path of each lava flow. Each flaming ohi’a tree became a distinct beacon, a part of the general burning but separate at the same time. The smoke shifted across the geysers and ribbons and rivers of flame like a torn curtain, sometimes temporarily occluding but never obscuring the fissures of flaming orange.

  Mike flew them three hundred feet above the surging lake that was Halemaumau in eruption. Eleanor looked down at the steaming gases, the red geysers within orange fountains, the bubbling caldron of superheated magma, and thought about the engine failing, the helicopter autorotating down into that…and she willed herself not to think of it again. Heat pressed against the Plexiglas like a blast from an open hearth, and then they were beyond the lake of Halemaumau, beyond the overflowing crater of Kilauea,
and following one of the lava streams downhill at a dizzying rate, banking around columns of black smoke that billowed up at them like giant tree trunks in the night.

  “They’re all active,” Mike was saying. “All the spatter cones and old lakes… Mauna Ulu, Pu’u O’o, Puu Huluhulu, Pauahi Crater, Halemaumau…look there.”

  Eleanor followed his pointing finger and saw a lava dome rising like a serrated globe in a flaming lake to their left. The dome bubbled hundreds of feet above the pahoehoe surface and became something very close to a sphere—blood-red, ribbed with surging black that slid from the hemisphere in sheets of cooling lava—before beginning its slow collapse. But then she realized that Mike was pointing beyond the lava dome, beyond that lake of fire, to a fountain along the main fissure running down the southwest rift zone. Eleanor saw a tiny speck passing in front of that orange column and realized that it was another helicopter circling, an inconsequential mote drifting in front of a thousand-foot fountain of flame.

  Mike toggled a switch and spoke swiftly into his microphone, voice clipped and precise. He switched the intercom back on. “The scientist I was ferrying up here earlier today estimated that more than a million cubic yards of lava was issuing from that one vent every hour. We mapped nine vents along that rift zone.”

  Eleanor shook her head, unable to speak.

  “It’s getting dark for real,” Mike said. “I’d better get you good people back to the Pele and get myself home to dinner.”

  They flew west. Crossing the long spine of the island, Eleanor saw the storm clouds far out over the Pacific, but the western slopes of the volcano held the last twilight more firmly. The long fissures of flame were moving through a visible landscape here—the vast, high, lava desert that was Ka’u.

  Eleanor amazed herself by reaching out to touch Mike’s arm. He looked at her quizzically.

  “Mike…” she began, and had to regroup. “This flight has been an extraordinary gift… I so much appreciate it…but could you possibly…” She took a breath. “Do you know the region around here called Ka-hau-komo?”