Pears and Perils (12 page)

The truck began to slow as the sounds of waves crashing against the shore reached Clint’s ears. Mano killed the struggling engine and suddenly it was like a bucket of peace had been poured on the world. Gone was the sputtering and shaking; all that remained in its place was the music of the sea and the wind.

The cat leapt from the cab and padded across the sandy grass, coming to the peak of a dune and pointing his tail across the waters. It was a comical, enjoyable moment, or it would have been if the message weren’t clear: the pear was no longer on the island.

The others disembarked from the truck, even Thunder rousing at the voluminous silence. They gathered together by the cat and stared at the dark, choppy waters rocking the small white boats tethered in the harbor. It was Falcon who said what they were all thinking as they watched the moon’s reflection in the waves.

“So, now what?”

12.

Lawrence was enjoying a breakfast of poached eggs, crisp ham, and fresh fruit. He was even branching out from his usual practice of drinking only water and washing it all down with a cold glass of orange juice. It was a good day: things were rolling along nicely, and he had enough spare time to properly nourish himself before the many tasks ahead. One of the waiters at the resort restaurant slid up to the side of Lawrence’s table and refilled his juice. That accomplished, the dark-haired service professional laid a plain white envelope down by the salt and pepper.

“Your passage has been booked for this afternoon at one, sir. Are you sure you don’t want to catch the earlier boat at nine? I inquired with the charter captain and there was still plenty of room.”

Lawrence courteously finished chewing before tendering his response. “Thank you, but I’m sure. There are some things I’d like to see on Kenowai before I begin exploring other locales.”

“Of course, sir. Can I get you anything else?”

“More cantaloupe, when you have the time.”

“Right away.”

Lawrence enjoyed the meat and eggs more than the fruit, but his cardiologist had been quite specific on tempering his appetite with more wholesome fare so as not to put his heart in danger. Lawrence enjoyed life, both the current quality and expected quantity, and saw no reason to ignore the warning and decrease either. Of course, if things with Felbren came together as planned, there would be no need for such concerns; however, years of experience had taught Lawrence the benefits of pessimism. Work to succeed, plan for setbacks. Never failures; only setbacks.

Lawrence speared another piece of salty pig flesh and crunched on it cheerfully. Yes indeed, this had the potential to be a good day.

* * *

“I’m the king of world!”

“Shhh, be quiet, Thunder; Clint finally fell asleep,” April chastised.

“My bad.”

“Whatever.”

April was beginning to feel the stress of the last day and her nerves were fraying as a result. The five humans and one cat were bobbing along in a medium-sized boat - Thunder had traded a Rolex with a local fisherman who’d shown up a few hours before daylight to begin his day’s haul to procure the thing. It was strange; Thunder was such a bizarre being that it slipped their minds he had access to quite a sizable sum of money. The fisherman had been so ready to jump at the deal he’d even thrown in a few rods and the case of beer he’d brought along for the day. Thunder and Mano were making a sizable dent in the latter, Thunder purely by drinking and Mano by sipping and then pouring some over the side. Questioning had only gotten him to yield that it was an “island tradition” (he did it when he was on the island, so to Mano that counted) and nothing more.

Clint had bickered with his stowaway god for most of the night, the two seeming to discuss some pretty heavy issues. By the responses Clint made and the looks crossing his face, April suspected she was happier not being privy to Kodiwandae’s side of the conversation. Most of them had slept in small spans of hours through the night, but as the morning rays broke across the ocean, only Clint was still slumbering. April didn’t begrudge him that; if this was simply weird for the rest of them, it must be cusping on utter madness for Clint.

“Pretty surreal, huh?” Falcon crossed the ship and took a seat next to the younger woman.

“That’s putting it mildly. You know I study biology, right? It’s essentially the study of how everything works organically, mapping the complex system of life and how that functions without things like magic or gods. Yet here I am, on a boat, during what was supposed to be my vacation, because a guy I’ve known for a couple of days is likely suffering a psychotic break.” April expected the older hippie to tell her that she was rightly expanding her horizons, that she was opening up to all the things that existed beyond the scope of science and that doing so was a good thing.

“I hear that. If you’d have told me ten years ago I’d get an all-expenses paid vacation and wind up using it to try and restore an local deity, I’d have called you seventeen shades of stupid.”

April knitted her eyebrows. “Really? I mean, this all sort of seems like, well… you’ve gone along with it fairly happily.”

“We’ve all gone along with it, but if you remember, I’m the only one who needed a hands-on demonstration before I was even willing to leave the hotel room.”

“I remember. I guess I assumed it was because you thought Clint was mocking the local culture, not because you didn’t believe it was possible. No offense meant, but this whole thing does sort of seem in your comfort zone.”

“None taken,” Falcon said with a reassuring smile. “The ten-years-ago me and the me of today are very different people, obviously. I’m still not sure that I believe all of this: Kodiwandae being in Clint, the cat being king of the island, the pear being the only key to solve this whole mess. I mean, it’s a lot to swallow.”

“Yet here we are.”

“Here we are. It’s not because we’re crazy, though, even if it turns out Clint just ate some bad pear and is having a very strange hallucination.”

“That would excuse his delusion, but not ours.”

Falcon patted April on her shoulder, the cotton t-shirt wrinkling under the weight of the older woman’s hand. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to believe. Even if it leads down some unexpected roads, the desire itself is perfectly natural.”

“Not to me.”

“Oh? Well, perhaps you have gone daft then.”

April shot Falcon a speculative glance, which the blue eyes that wrinkled at the corners returned with a strange confidence.

“Or maybe this is just scientific curiosity. Investigation of an anomaly in the accepted structure of the world.”

“Also an excellent possibility,” Falcon agreed.

“Land ho, bros!” Thunder’s voice belted forth from the ship’s front, where, sure enough, another island was visible on the horizon. Of course, it had been visible for several hours; it was just drawing close enough that departure was growing likely.

“I wonder how that one has been able to ride along on all this without showing so much as one instance of worry or doubt,” April speculated.

“You could ask him, though I doubt either of us would understand the answer. They say children and idiots are the favorites of the gods, so maybe he just knows on some inner level that he is being looked after.”

“Must be nice.”

“Probably, but I find intellect a far better weapon than favor.” Falcon’s tone remained cheerful, but there was a flint of something that sparked inside her with those words. April might not be as good at reading people as she was at reading books, but even she could tell that beneath this peace and love mentality there was a basement of something more complex: a place that was shut away from the world, where armor and axes were carefully stowed and just beginning to rust.

“Chicas, you want some land brewskis?” Thunder called.

“Sure,” Falcon said before April could object to the early hour. Thunder pitched the beers over with a technique that had been practiced and refined by manning the cooler at countless parties. Falcon snatched both from the air and handed one to April.

“To searching.” Falcon opened her beer and raised it in a toast. April hesitated then popped the top on the can in her hands.

“To intellect,” April countered, raising her own drink.

“To intellect,” Falcon agreed. The women clinked cans and sipped quietly as the boat drew closer to the island towering before them.

* * *

The Sahara, the Gobi, the very fires of hell had nothing on this parched patch of the world. The mere idea of water, the thought of moisture, was so foreign that the word itself would be choked away by dryness before it could ever be uttered. This cracked, craggy, desolate place was the sort of dry that could chug down a torrential flood and then five minutes later act as though there had never been a drop in the sky. Lucifer himself would have taken a stroll around, puffed out his chest, then made a very fast excuse about having left the iron on and departed. A torrent of cold water washed across the landscape, soothing and soaking, then vanished.

Kaia chugged the bottle of water, three empties already next to her hotel bed. Her throat still screamed for more, to the point where she contemplated rising from her bed and seeking out another bottle. Her first attempt at sitting up left her heaving the newly acquired water into the trashcan by her bed, so it was somewhat less than productive. She wiped her mouth with an unused pillow and flopped back down.

This was not a hangover. This was a punishment from the gods. She imagined she’d broken every commandment in every religion simultaneously to be cursed with this feeling. Honestly, she was just thankful she knew the hotel where she’d woken up. It was a quaint bed and breakfast on Alendola she’d often frequented in her more formative years.

Despite its reputation as a place to “get down and party”, Alendola also housed an impressive library that specialized in local literature. Respected researchers from America frequently visited to comb its tomes, reveling in the sort of bibliophilic catacombs that academia had been invented for. Such places were rarer and rarer with the invention of the Internet, so it was of little surprise that a bright young Kaia Hale had met many travelers here while furthering her own thirst for knowledge, travelers with stories of the sweeping buildings and cold air that existed in other countries.

Of course, that was one very small draw on Alendola; most people knew it for its large parties and the hedonistic culture it marketed to tourists. It was a humorous incongruity that the same island could appeal to two vastly different groups, but out of form and ignorance (depending on the group), no one ever mentioned it.

Kaia stared at the slowly rotating ceiling fan, wishing she could remember exactly why she’d boarded the boat last night. It felt like she’d had a plan, a way to make it all feel better and resolve her nagging issues. That plan, if it had actually existed, belonged to Drunk Kaia, and Sober Kaia hadn’t been included in the brainstorming session that conceived it. She supposed while she was here, the rational thing to do would be to probe the library to see what more she could learn about the Kodiwandae legend. It was one of the stories she’d put the least research into, seeing as even the faithful of Kenowai didn’t really believe it. Who could trap a god, after all? That was before; now Kaia couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t put in countless hours reading over all the versions of the tale. Of course, that revelation had less to do with a new perspective on the anthropological implications of the story than it did with the golden pear she currently had stuffed in her backpack.

Kaia still didn’t know why she’d taken it. Proof, probably; proof that she hadn’t gone round the mental bend into Coo-Coo Town. She had looked at it a few times during the night: those moments stood out like flares along the dark highway of her drunken recollections. Sometimes she’d imagined (or possibly imagined that she was imagining) a feeling of energy coming from the fruit, like the sound one can hear when standing under power lines. Only in this case there were no such lines and it wasn’t a sound. It was a feeling that echoed deep within her, in places Kaia had long forgotten existed.

All of that was subjective, however, dismissible by virtue of the whiskey or mere delusion. The pear’s coloration was fact. Kenowai Pears grew light green on the vine then darkened to a hunter green when they were ready to be plucked. A hunter green pear had been what April set on the altar yesterday during the ceremony. After everything had happened, Kaia had noticed the pear was still whole and had snatched it before racing back to the bus. It had been her anchor in the sea of doubt. But while electricity could do many strange things, Kaia had never heard of a lighting strike changing a pear’s color to gold. Not natural gold, either; this looked like someone had stoppered sunlight into a pear-shaped container.

Kaia didn’t know what it meant; maybe nothing at all. Still, Kaia was a good scholar because she was obsessive, and she couldn’t let go without an answer. She could walk away, certainly, but that wasn’t the same as letting go. Walking away meant a lifetime of lying awake at strange hours of the night, of fleeting thoughts and theories assaulting her otherwise rational ideas. It meant the gnawing feeling in her gut, the one that kept telling her she was standing on the edge of some giant puzzle piece that could give shape to how the world works, would be with her forever. She couldn’t bear that; one day of it had driven her to try and drink all the whiskey in Kenowai. A life of it would destroy her.

She tried to sit up, more slowly this time, and found while the room still spun, it eventually was willing to become stationary. Okay, she could move. Now where should she go? Water first; she felt like she could drain the ocean if it weren’t so salty. Then a shower; no one should have to smell a girl detoxing this hard in the tropical heat with yesterday’s funk piled on top. Once all that was attended to, Kaia could start her real endeavor: research.

Her wastebasket received a second helping from Kaia’s stomach, but this time she didn’t fall back into the comfort of the sheets. Dr. Kaia Hale had set her course with conviction and she would be damned if she let anything deter her from it. Aside from water and a shower, of course.