Endworlds - Nicholas Read [11]
The weatherman swallowed. “I was told she was on a plane with you and that during the storm six months ago, she and two other little girls vanished from the plane while it was passing overhead. No open hatches. No sign of them anywhere. Like they were plucked into thin air.”
Mouth set, Eisman nodded wordlessly. “Any ideas?”
The weatherman thumbed his sheaf of papers. “I remember the date because the clouds were so rare. There was a cloudbank that spun up out of nowhere several hours before sunset. What made it memorable was the fallstreak hole in its center. And then the strange lightning.”
Eisman’s face made it plain he wanted a clearer explanation.
“Sorry,” the local told him. “I’m talking like a weather guy. A fallstreak hole is a circular or cigar-shaped gap that sometimes appears in altocumulus clouds when the center of the cloud freezes faster than everything around it4. As the ice grows heavy it drops out, leaving a hole in its wake. At least that’s what we think happens. I remember my grandmother’s tales that these holes were where the Skypeople made their palaces, their castles in the air where they would go to in the old times when they weren’t teaching their secrets to their children on the ground. Our old islanders all have stories for what they don’t understand. But as a scientist I know it’s a process called nucleation that forms ice crystals in clouds the same as quartz forms in the ground.”
Hills interrupted. “What was that about sky people? I’ve never heard that legend.”
“Sure you have, sir”, chortled Ohmacai, “Every culture has these tales by another name. The Gods who look down from the heavens, the Teachers, spirits of Dreamtime ancestors; call them what you will. But the fallstreak hole was only one part of the day’s interest for me. For a meteorologist to have two oddities on the same day, well, it was my equivalent of a jackpot. It was the lightning that I’d never seen before. It was different colors, not accompanied by rain, and concentrated in this single cloudbank with the hole cut out, while the rest of the sky was clear. Then it just evaporated like someone blew out the candles on a cake.”
“I know this.” Eisman pointed upwards. “I was up there. The plane was up there. My daughter was up there. Then she wasn’t up there anymore. No more birthdays, no more candles!”
The air grew thicker in the uncomfortable silence that followed. “Tell me something I don’t know.” To the weatherman’s surprise the billionaire’s eyes glistened as he looked out to sea. “Give me ideas. Anything you’ve got.”
The Micronesian took a long slow breath. “The lightning didn’t ground to the earth. It shot sideways between clouds. As if the gods were fighting. And for the briefest of moments, there was a shape inside the hole, like something solid being struck over and over.”
Raef rolled his eyes and got out of his seat, now openly impatient. “That would be my plane, Mr. Ohmacai.” He turned his back to the man, staring to the blue horizon, and Hills knew it was a sign the islander was dismissed.
Ohmacai saw it too. “We could organize a search, sir. Maybe by landing people by helicopter and working down from the top of the mountain we call Nahna Laud. Pohnpei is not a big island, but the interior is very rugged. There could be many things there that would be easily missed.”
Even the bodies of three young girls, he thought sadly to himself.
Eisman cocked his head with interest. “It’s been months. You really think my daughter and the others could be up there somewhere?”
The weatherman smiled wanly. “I don’t want to give false hope. But there is a bird, the Mountain Starling, thought to have gone extinct in the mid-fifties. It was rediscovered in 1995. Pohnpei holds its secrets well. If you’re prepared for what we might find to get the closure you seek, maybe even your little bird is waiting, somewhere up on the mountain.”
Ohmacai flicked a glance at the silently attentive Hills,