Cloud Permutations by Lavie Tidhar

endless journey. I think … I think this world was once a young and vibrant one, a hub of sorts. I don’t know. Now it is a world of clouds and strange rains, and few ruins to tell its story. I’m trapped here, the way you are, though you are too quick and ignorant to know it. Trapped by the clouds, and forbidden from ever rising back into the skies … ‘
    Then something changed. The water darkened, and the hull of the old plane, the RLV, shook. When the Other spoke next, its voice had changed. ‘There is little time,’ it said. It was a heavy, toneless voice.
    ‘And you have a long way to go still. You must reach the tower. The others of your kind, those who call themselves the Guardians—the fools, for when they first came here I spoke with them, and tried to make them see, but they took my meanings and shook them around like pretty coloured glass—they have released the Olfala Bigwan into this sea. It is hunting for you now.’
    ‘How?’ Bani said. Kal grasped the seat’s supports. He remembered the monster too vividly, as yet.
    ‘Worship and sacrifice,’ the Other said. ‘There are only a few of its kind still alive on this world, but I think, before … it was a creature of worship for those you call Narawan. Perhaps the relationship was symbiotic. I don’t know. But it can be made to act, sometimes, when the correct rites are performed, and a suitable sacrifice is made … ‘
    Kal thought again of Tanuaiterai’s body, falling through that hole in the ceiling, falling down into the lair of the giant monster. Anger—and fear. And mingled in with the two, he felt momentarily a hard kind of happiness, born of rage: that he had killed Georgie, who had sacrificed them to the creature.
    ‘This sea is the last of its kind,’ the Other was saying. ‘For aeons I’ve sat here, trapped and alone, computing probabilities. The water here is like the water of the clouds, molecular structure … ‘ he droned on. Bani seemed riveted. Kal grasped the stick and thought of rising from the water and taking to the air. He would fight the clouds, he thought. He would fly and blast at them, breaking through, rising as high as you could go, until there was only space …
    ‘Some of the humans here have a strange ability to engage with water, and clouds,’ the Other was saying. ‘Which I don’t quite understand. But I’ve fed some of my data into the water, or tried to. It affords strange communication … vague prophecies, perhaps. And now you came. As you must leave.’
    The craft shuddered, then began to rise slowly from the seabed.
    ‘Find the tower, Kal, Bani. Set us all free.’ The craft began to move.
    ‘I wish I knew whose plane this was … ‘ the Other said. ‘I found it here, like someone else’s garbage. Not human, though remarkably similar. It isn’t much as a home, though, which is what it has been for me for time too long to count. But it will work this one last time, though not in flight.’
    Kal held the stick and tried to navigate the craft, but of course, he had no control over it. The Other chuckled, unseen. ‘You’ll get your chance to fly … ‘ he said, and then his voice faded and was gone, and the plane sped away, water peeling away from its nose like blood, and the water darkened until at last there was no light left.

PART THREE

     
     
    ANTAP

— Chapter 15 —
     
    SANIGODAON
     
     
     
    THE ISRAELI POET, Lior Tirosh, had once spent what he had described as a “rather miserable month” on the island of Vanua Lava, a place of constant and persistent rain. Tirosh wrote:
    There are always clouds; like shaggy guard-dogs
    Great white greys, their packs mass on top the distant hills
    And watch. Or in the mornings, drifting close, not dogs now, more
    Like white-faced ghosts, shivering as you pass through them,
    Dampening the grass beneath. Or, high above and casting shadow,
    Dragon-clouds, breathing storms. Sometimes they fight, and we awake
    Inside the hut, and huddle close, and