Cloud Permutations Read Online Free Page A

an … education.
    At that time—the time of Kal’s journey to the tower and his yearning to fly—Port Cargo was busy with maritime traffic. The island of Tanna sailed the archipelago by its own power, drawing to it the trade of a hundred smaller islands. With trade came forged links. Sometimes people fell in love. Sometimes they married. Often, they stayed on. Jon Frum Town was a hub for the different people of Heven. Kal’s grandfather’s uncle’s second cousin (on his mother’s side), for instance, had indeed come to Port Cargo at a time when Tanna and Epi passed each other, had fallen in love, and had married a Tannese man. Her name was Grace, and she was a computer technician in charge of a sub-section of the island’s engines (South Side). She and her husband (a quiet, comfortable man who worked as a teacher) cheerfully took Kal in. They had three children of their own living there, and another one who was grown up and had gone to live on the distant island of Futuna.
    The people of Tanna did not fear clouds. But they respected them. They had taken Kal in, but there was to be no talk of flying. Kal went to school. He helped in the family’s garden, growing Earth-brought breadfruit and pineapple, taro and yams and tomatoes (alongside local food plants, of which the most curious, perhaps, was the Frum Grape, a plant that grew upwards in the shape of a cross, its colour blood-red. Its fruit hung like nails from the cross. Once, Jon Frum had been a religion. One of its symbols was a red cross. It was by far the most popular fruit on Tanna, though not, it has to be said, on any of the other islands. The fruit that came from the cross was small and had a sharp, citrus-like taste. Once a year, the fruit were gathered, and pressed into wine. Like kava, it did not taste particularly good. It had to be drunk in small doses, but gave rise to powerful visions).
    Kal, then, went to school. He worked in the garden. He walked along the beach, and caught krab , which were similar to Earth crab but for having powerful tentacles instead of pincers.
    While he wasn’t doing any of that, the city provided its own education.
    It was not, of course, anything like the giant metropolises of Earth; neither was it like the packed ring-cities of Earth-space, or the densely-populated bubble settlements on Mars and the Jovian moons. This was a city by default. Elsewhere, it would not have merited consideration as a small town. But here, it was the place the urban drift, such as it was, drifted to.
    One of those drifters was Bani Voko Voko Leo: young, presentable, fluent in the languages of a dozen islands, and an occasional thief. In a land of plenty, where one rarely lacked for anything material or otherwise, Bani was a thief by reasons of ideology—such as it was—and not of need. Kal first met him at the place called Naetsaed.
    Night Side was an area that sprawled on the outskirts of the harbour, along the road that led to Anchor Bay, the massive industrial complex where the island’s anchor was maintained. It was an area of late-night eateries and darkened movie theatres, of kava bars and stores that sold liquor and cigarettes; originally a warehouse district, its spacious storage areas had been converted into clubs that drew— with their pounding music, their flashing flickering lights, their clouds of smoke and incense and body sweat—young people like planetary bodies towards a black hole.
    Languages filled the streets like a cloud of fluttering moths. Only the universal language, the old language of the islands of Earth, united them. Bislama, a language that had evolved from English vocabulary and Melanesian structure, the Esperanto of the South Pacific Ocean back on old Earth.
    Amidst the warehouses narrow lanes had formed in shadow and sprouted stalls like mushrooms rising from the damp. The place drew tourists (such as there were), sailors, the curious, the young and those who liked to still think of themselves as young.