The Cloud Hunters Read online

  Jenine was in front of me, next to the window. I watched her face as the men-of-war came. She was almost radiant. Most of the others looked awed or apprehensive. But Jenine just smiled, as if she and the sky-jellies were part of something from which the rest of us were excluded: some natural wildness, something raw and dangerous.

  ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’

  ‘Beautiful as in deadly,’ I told her.

  She didn’t answer me. Just kept watching.

  Maybe it was that they were both travellers and drifters; maybe it was that they were untrammelled and free; maybe it was any one of a thousand things, but she smiled to see them coming, as though they had an affinity, an understanding.

  The men-of-war were low in the sky now.

  ‘There must be hundreds of them,’ someone said.

  ‘Thousands!’

  ‘Millions!’

  I guessed there were about sixty. Some were fully grown adults, others were half developed, others seemed newly born. They floated towards us, tendrils trailing, bodies translucent. You could see their eyes, their veins. Their very hearts were visible through their clear, outer layers; you could see those hearts beating, clenching like fists, then relaxing, then clenching again, pumping blood.

  They all moved so languidly on the air. They could have been massive water lilies floating on a pond. On they came, like an invading army of flowers.

  There was something condescending about them too. It was more than their mere height above us, it was something else, something about the lazy, graceful way they moved which made you feel clumsy, earth-bound and inept. They looked down on us, vast and superior, indulgent, impassive, cryptically smiling Buddhas.

  Yet according to what I had read, they were barely even conscious of their own existences. What brains they had were disproportionately tiny; what intelligence they had was small. When you looked up at one you could see its eyes and heart and digestive tract quite plainly, but as for a brain, it was hard to know where it was.

  It was probably that small grey blob of matter behind the eyes, the size of a large sky-shrimp. It was hard to believe that creatures so huge, so beautiful and so dangerous were also intrinsically rather stupid, with not much more intellect than a vegetable and possibly less than an insect.

  All the same, it was quite a sight.

  ‘Barely conscious of their own existence,’ I said. ‘Brains so small they don’t even know they’ve got one.’

  Jenine turned and glanced at me.

  ‘I’ve met a few people like that,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Me too.’

  The first of them hit.

  Its tentacles collided with the window. The glass was reinforced, precisely for such contingencies. But instinctively we ducked. Somebody fell off the desk they had been standing on.

  There were shouts and a few tears. We could hear the wails of the younger children coming from one of the other classrooms and then the comforting voice of their teacher, reassuring them that it would all soon pass, that there was nothing to be afraid of, that everything would be all right.

  The tentacles brushed the window, held on momentarily, then slithered away, leaving globs of mucous to run down the glass.

  ‘Eeech!’

  It really was disgusting. They weren’t called jellies for nothing.

  The sky was full of them now, like a fiesta of hot-air balloons. It would take a good hour or more for them all to pass. Our teacher let us watch a while longer, then began to say that we ought to get back to some work.

  She was telling us to return to our seats when we heard it. It came from outside. It was the sound of something small and whimpering. I looked out and saw a little dog. It belonged to the janitor’s children. It was outside their house, across the yard. The dog sat on its haunches, gazing up at the darkened sky, whimpering pitifully as a tendril trailed towards it, full of malignant poison.

  We watched, transfixed, as the tendril came. It dragged in the dirt. The dog sat, still whimpering, too petrified to move. There was a small wet puddle under it, spreading out. The animal stared up at the sky, bewildered, mystified, immobile with terror. The tendril passed. It missed the dog by a few centimetres. But more were on the way.

  ‘Somebody should do something!’ a voice said.

  Only who? Who was going to risk their neck? For the sake of a dog?

  A girl was crying.

  ‘The dog, the dog, the poor dog!’

  And of course, we all had sympathy for it, but there was nothing we could do. I watched, with grim fascination and – if I am honest – a certain amount of pleasurable and anticipatory dread. It was like the excitement of watching a fictional horror drama unfold, at some moment of high suspense – like watching the man on the high wire, wondering if he would fall off. Only this was real. I didn’t want the dog to die. Nobody did. But we all saw that its death was inevitable. The men-of-war were so densely packed overhead now that their bodies were touching. They pressed against and bounced away from each other like fat balloons, clearly immune to each other’s poison.

  Their tendrils hung like creepers, like vines. It only needed one of them to touch the soft coat of the small dog. Then the puppy would emit a shrill, sudden whelp as the acid poison ate into it, and it would be over and done with.

  She jumped down from the desk.

  ‘Jenine,’ I said. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Well, if no one else will do anything –’

  And she was gone before anyone could stop her. The door banged behind her. The teacher shouted.

  ‘Hey!’

  Too late. The key had been left in the door. The next moment, there Jenine was, outside, running across the school yard. The teacher banged on the window.

  ‘Jenine! Get back in here!’

  But Jenine didn’t hear, or she didn’t want to. She ran towards the dog. It saw her coming, and decided to do the one thing that wouldn’t help either of them: it ran away. It ran back, towards the approaching curtain of tendrils, hanging like thousands of ribbons from the men-of-war up in the sky.

  ‘Jenine! I order you now . . . !’

  Wasted words. Jenine went after the dog and cornered it. It yapped and whimpered, its little legs strutting almost comically as it tried to get away from her and back out into the very danger she was trying to save it from. She grabbed it by its collar, and scooped it into her arms. Then she turned to run back with it to safety and shelter.

  Only it was too late. The men-of-war were above her, their tendrils dangling; she was surrounded.

  No one spoke. We watched from behind the safety of the windows.

  The dog had fallen silent and ceased to struggle. It seemed to find some comfort in her arms. She stroked its head and talked softly to it. She stood and waited – waited for death.

  But then she began to sway, and strangely, it seemed, to dance.

  Of course, it wasn’t a dance at all, but that was how it looked. She stood where she was, watching the tendrils approach. But then she moved aside as one came, and the moment it had passed, she moved her hips to avoid another. The passage of the tendrils seemed to make her figure shimmer, like a mirage on a heat-hazed horizon. The tentacles even seemed to reach out for her, like supplicating hands, but she eluded their grasp.

  I could hardly breathe. We all watched, silent and fascinated, expecting at any instant to hear her scream and the yelp of the dog as the two of them became entangled in that forest of poison, that hanging-garden canopy of death.

  But no sound came. The men-of-war passed above her, their tendrils trailing on the ground. They twisted and writhed, and as they did, Jenine twisted and writhed around them. They even seemed to dance with her, passing her on as a partner from one to the other, as each tendril waltzed with her a moment, then made its bow, and the next one took its place.

  How long we watched and how long she swayed and danced away, I don’t really know. It was probably no more than minutes, but it seemed like hours.

 
Finally, they had gone. The all-clear sounded. Jenine stood alone in the yard, with the small dog still cradled in her arms. There were globs of poison lying on the ground. She carefully stepped over and around them and walked to the school building. Somebody opened the door and let her in. We heard the dog barking; and then the door to the classroom opened and Jenine entered. Her arms were empty. She must have given the dog to one of the teachers.

  Without a word to any of us, she returned to her seat, took some books out, and waited for the lesson to resume. The men-of-war had all moved on and the sky was clear. The janitor was already out in the yard, shovelling neutraliser over the globs of poison.

  Our teacher looked as if she felt she had to say something – something pointless and predictable, such as, ‘That was a very dangerous and a very foolish thing to do, Jenine. You could have been killed!’

  But the words didn’t come out. She knew, as we all knew, that what Jenine had done had been more than dangerous and foolish. It had been fearless and courageous too.

  The teacher went over to her and touched her on the shoulder.

  ‘Well done, Jenine,’ she whispered. ‘That was brave. Reckless – but brave.’

  Jenine’s face remained as impassive as ever. She just smiled very slightly and then opened up her books to be ready to start work. I looked intently at her, at her sunburnt skin and her perfectly proportioned face, at the deep, disfiguring scars which ran from her high cheekbones down towards her mouth. I’d never seen or known anyone like her in my life. I’d have followed her to the ends of the world.

  I felt that I should have gone out and tried to save the dog myself. That I had been a coward for not doing so. But I also knew that if I had done, I would now be lying dead on the tarmac of the yard, with acid burns over my body and poison on my skin. And the dog would be as dead as I was. So what would have been the point?

  Dancing was not my strong point.

  And anyway, heroism is not much without skill. It can be just a pointless sacrifice or an empty gesture. But Jenine had been more than stupidly brave, she had known what to do, and how to do it. She had never intended to throw her life away for a dog. She had intended to save it. And she had.

  Maybe, like the men-of-war, she, too, was wild and free.

  But unlike them, she had a brain.

  I got a word with her later, as we were going home.

  ‘That was pretty brave, Jenine,’ I said. ‘If a bit stupid.’

  ‘Pretty much the same as you then,’ she said. ‘Only maybe the other way round.’

  It took me a moment to figure that one out. But she was smiling. So I assumed it was meant as a joke.

  ‘So are you coming with us?’ she asked. ‘We’ll be sailing this weekend. Are your parents all right about it?’

  ‘Er – they’ve not actually said yes yet. But I’m hoping they will – imminently,’ I said.

  ‘You live in hope a lot, don’t you, Christien?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I had to concede. ‘I guess I do.’

  Only she didn’t know even the half of my hopes. Nor how much she was a part of them.

  12

  people like that

  My father was impressed when he heard the story, but my mother less so.

  ‘Sheer madness,’ she said. ‘Risking your life for a dog.’

  ‘But they’re plainly courageous people, these Cloud Hunters,’ my father said to her. ‘And resourceful. He’s bound to be safe with people like that, to go away with for a few days.’

  ‘People like that, indeed,’ my mother repeated, but with altered emphasis. You could hear the italics in her voice.

  She really didn’t approve of people like that. People like that had too many tattoos, scars and earrings; they used knives more than forks and didn’t always say ‘excuse me’ when they left the table (when they had a table to leave).

  ‘I can’t see the harm in his going,’ my father said. ‘It’s only for the weekend, after all.’

  ‘What about his homework?’

  ‘He can do it before he goes.’

  ‘Not if they’re leaving immediately.’

  ‘Then he can do it on board. He’ll have hours to fill while they’re travelling. After all, there aren’t any clouds here, are there? It’ll probably be a ten-hour journey before they catch sight of one. And besides, when and where does the girl do her homework? On the boat, I presume.’

  ‘If she does any homework,’ my mother retorted. (Because they wouldn’t bother to do any homework, would they? I thought. Not people like that.)

  ‘She does do her homework,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact she always does it.’

  I could have added that she usually came in among the top five in class. But then I would have been asked why I didn’t, and that wasn’t a debate I wanted to get into right then.

  ‘Come on. Let’s say he can go,’ my father said indulgently.

  ‘Well . . .’

  That was a good sign. My mother was running out of objections and her objections were running out of steam.

  ‘Oh, all right. Just this once then – I suppose. But you’d better make sure you do your homework, that’s all.’

  That was my mother. She wasn’t so bad. She just hated to make a concession. And if she ever did make one, she always liked to qualify it. You could go, but you had to do your homework. You could eat some sweets, but then you had to brush your teeth. Or you had to have fruit first. There was always some condition.

  There were days when I felt it was a pity that my parents hadn’t had more children. Then she would have had someone else to focus on apart from me. Nagging shared would be nagging halved, I reckoned. But I was their only child.

  Most families only had one child: little emperors and empresses, that was us. It was the water: everyone was afraid of drought. So many mouths to feed and only limited water to go round. There had been a long drought once, some fifty years back. Half of the memorial stones in the Field of Remembrance dated from that time.

  It was hard to imagine what it had been like to live in the old world, on a planet that was mostly water. Yet even there, so the history books said, there had been deserts, in a place that was nearly all river and sea. I felt that somebody wasn’t telling the truth. It was only later I discovered that the seawater was tainted with salt and undrinkable, and the rivers were polluted. There had been pure ice caps once too, but they had all melted.

  ‘So I get to go?’ I said to my mother,

  ‘I suppose so. But –’

  I don’t remember what the but was. I never listen to the buts if I can avoid it. If you start listening to all the buts you’ll never go anywhere or do anything. You’ll find yourself butted into an armchair and you’ll never dare to get up from it for fear of all the things that might happen to you if you did.

  And then what have you done with your life, apart from been good and done what was expected of you and always kept your nose clean? All very fine and admirable things in their way. But they aren’t everything, are they?

  I had permission to go and I was going. Just as long as Jenine hadn’t changed her mind in the meantime, or her mother hadn’t changed it for her. As for Kaneesh, their tracker, I’d probably be a useless encumbrance, as far as he was concerned. He didn’t seem to think much of anyone who wasn’t a Cloud Hunter. But then you can’t please everyone, no matter who you are, and it’s a mistake even to try.

  Sometimes Kaneesh would stand on the boat deck, down at the harbour, throwing his knife at the mast, trying to hit a small circle he had carved there. He never missed.

  When he tired of throwing the knife with his eyes open, Kaneesh would close them. Still he never missed. Or he would turn his back to the mast and throw the knife over his shoulder. I saw him miss once that way. But only once. He didn’t miss the next time.

  Those were Kaneesh’s only amusements and occupations as far as I could tell: watching for clouds, rolling dice, throwing his knife at the mast. I never saw him read anything, or wa
s even sure that he could read much – apart from the history and the narrative of the sky, the approach of clouds and the formation of vapour.

  I think the sky was like a book to him: a vast kaleidoscopic volume of innumerable pages, that told some unending, and constantly changing, story. It never bored him and he never seemed to tire of reading it. It was fiction and fact, poetry and reference, religion and entertainment, mystery and encyclopedia, all rolled into one.

  You’d often see him at the harbourside, itching to set sail, sitting on the tethered boat, staring out into the distance as if he’d spied a cloud fifty kilometres away and couldn’t wait to get to it.

  He seldom turned his eyes towards the land or looked with any curiosity at the people upon it. Land and people were a waste of time. All that mattered to him were clouds, as if they had more substance than anything.

  At other times he would just sit on deck, throwing dice, over and over, as if the numbers were going to tell him something. But what they told him, he kept to himself.

  I wondered sometimes about Kaneesh and Jenine’s mother, Carla. I wondered if he had taken her father’s place. But he didn’t seem overly familiar, so it was hard to tell. Carla was plainly still the boss, as owner of the boat. Sometimes she was tetchy and abrupt with him as she issued orders – commands which he either studiously ignored or only condescended to follow in his own good time.

  Occasionally they quarrelled. You would see them on the boat, Kaneesh with his arms folded, stubborn and immovable, while Carla ripped into him with a torrent of reproach or abuse or who knew what it was? When she was angry she didn’t speak any language I could understand, but reverted to some dialect that must have come with her ancestors when they arrived with the first colonisers, all those years ago. They were nomads, even back then.