Cloud Permutations Read Online Free

asked, he would have been unable to explain it) he tasted it. Then he smiled in surprise: it was sweet.
    Kalbaben , something said. It had the voice of wind, or water, or the rustle of leaves in a wind. He looked up. The world was hazy and bluish-pink. He felt a smile trying to split his face in half.
    Woman like water, speaking in riddles … the water before Kal changed again, smoothed out like paper. The woman stood above them, looking down. Her finger, pointing, moved, and as it did lines formed in the water like a script.
    ‘Wotadroing,’ Kal’s grandfather said. Kal nibbled on some more of the water in his palm and grinned spontaneously. He couldn’t stop.
    Later, when he had first tasted kava, Kal tried to describe that sensation. It was a little like kava, the way the body was numbed, the senses calmed. But it was much, much stronger. Different, too: it made him into a small child again, enchanted by the interplay of light and water. That was it, the word he searched for. Enchantment.
    Perhaps, then, the woman was kava. It was a long-standing belief of the people of the archipelago that kava—that root that, brewed, gave peace and allowed speech and gave some the power of prophecy, too—was a woman.
    But it is unlikely. In fact, records kept by the Tannese show that the woman was named Moli Solomon, wan woman blong wotadroing — that is, a woman who drew in water. Those same records, were they to be pursued by an historian, show that the first instances of wotadroing appeared during the first century of settlement. They were, in a way, a product of a much earlier Earth tradition, which was that of sand drawings. Sand drawings were ancient kastom : elaborate, beautiful patterns in the sand, that told the secret stories of the people and, sometimes, worked as magic: magic for marriage, magic for last rites, magic for fertility and magic for peace.
    Water drawings were … somewhat similar.
    Kalbaben , something said again, and it had the voice of the ocean. On the sluggish water before him, Kal could see a complex pattern slowly emerge as the woman moved her finger and drew. The image began as several straight lines, which were then woven through with increasingly complex, interlocking vortices, the whole thing at first wonderfully abstract, until one final line rose, emerged, completed something and the whole image became suddenly visible, so obvious that you might wonder how you had never seen it before.
    The thing Moli Solomon was drawing in the water, Kal had suddenly realised (though still he could not stop giggling!), was a tower.
    The tower emerged out of the circles and lines, drawn in still water, rising and rising ahead of Kal like an alien monstrosity. Pausing, the woman on the shore lifted her eyes to him. It seemed to him she may have smiled. Then the pointing finger pressed forward, one small sharp tap, and the drawing was complete: a small dot, a smudge really, free-falling against one side of the tower.
    Kal swallowed. And choked. The jellied water, sweet only a moment before, was now turned back to salty liquid. For a moment, the water that stood between the boat and the shore wavered. Then the waves rushed back in, the drawing disappeared, the engine came back to life and the boat moved again, almost ramming the shore. By the time Kal and his grandfather landed on the beach and pulled the boat to safety, the woman had disappeared.

— Chapter 6 —
     
    LAEF BLONG BIGFALA TAON
     
     
     
    WHAT, THEN, of this tower, this dark tower, this thing prophesied in water and revealed in dreams of rain? Over the next couple of years, as the island of Tanna sailed the endless sea and carried Kal with it, Kal tried to learn of the tower.
    He didn’t, really, have much of a choice.
    Kal lived in the city that sprawled all around Port Cargo. It was called Jon Frum Town. Jon Frum was an ancient Tannese prophet, or rebel, or perhaps both. The transition from Kal’s village on Epi to life in the big city was