Kathleen Ann Goonan - The Bones of Time

485 Pages·2016·1.17 MB·English

by  Goose Mother

The Bones of Time
Kathleen Ann Goonan

3S XHTML edition 1.0
scan notes and proofing history

Contents
|Prologue| |1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20|21
|

Tor Books by Kathleen Ann Goonan
The Bones of Time
Queen City Jazz
A Tom Doherty Associates Book
New York
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events
portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used
fictitiously.
THE BONES OF TIME
Copyright © 1996 by Kathleen Ann Goonan
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this
book, or portions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Map by Ellisa H. Mitchell
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10010
Tor Books on the World Wide Web: http ://www.
tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty
Associates, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goonan, Kathleen Ann.
The bones of time / Kathleen Ann Goonan.
—1st ed. p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 0-312-85916-3
I. Title.
PS3557.O628B6 1996 813’. 54—dc20 95_40994
First edition: February 1996
Printed in the United States of America

For Joseph, again

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Mahalo to our friends in Hawaii who graciously allowed us to stay in their
homes while researching this book—Kay and Daniel Susott, Dan and Keiko
Formanek, and Carol and Craig Severance. I would also like to thank Kam Sung
for giving me a copy of the Permaculture documentary he produced, which
introduced me to the philosophy of primal societies.
Thanks to Ted White, George Andrews, Richard Moore, Dave Bischoff, and
Steve Brown, who gave valuable feedback not only regarding the novella from
which this book grew, “Kamehameha’s Bones,” but who immensely improved
everything I put through the group.
Thanks to Wanda Collins and Pam Noles for critiquing this manuscript, Bil
Click for the first-draft map, and John Gribbin for granting permission to use a
quotation from his book Unveiling the Edge of Time. David Hartwell also
deserves many thanks, for helping me envision the book within the original
material and helping it come to light.
Thanks especially to my husband, Joseph, for our times in
Hawaii and for the enthusiasm with which he has supported my ideas and this
Project.
And finally, thanks to my parents, Tom and Irma Goonan, for having the
courage to move to Hawaii with three small children when it was a brand-new
state. I must have been born under an unlucky star, as I seem to have my life
planned out for me in such a way that I cannot alter it.
—Victoria Kaiulani, Hawaii’s last princess, in a letter to a friend Jersey,
England, 1897
What matters is that there seems to be nothing in the laws of physics that
forbids travel through wormholes.
—John Gribbin,
Unveiling the Edge of Time

THE BONES OF TIME

PROLOGUE

Waikiki, Hawaii
February 2, 1887 The first thing Princess Kaiulani saw, as her eyes adjusted to
the dim light in her mother’s sickroom, was the old holy man. The kahuna.
Her breath caught in her throat as she paused in the doorway.
Thin as a barracuda, golden and dry as sand, he looked out of place, yet stood
with grace and authority. Polished Victorian furniture crowded the large
bedroom, a fit setting for the sister of the king of Hawaii, but the kahuna ignored
a cluster of mahogany
side chairs and carefully unrolled a mat he had brought with him onto the
Belgian carpet. He sat cross-legged upon it in a single, lithe movement.
Kaiulani had watched the kahuna approach the house from her second-story
window an hour ago. She had been staring across the tops of the blossom-laden
mimosas at the brown, craggy slopes of Diamond Head, wondering why her
mother had chosen to die. How could anything be more beautiful than the deep
blue line of sea, the sweet scent of pink-spined mimosa fans, and the hush of surf
beyond the narrow tidal swamp? Her mother had said something once, a few
months ago, about old Hawaii vanishing. Eaten by the sharks, she had said. Who
were the sharks? Kaiulani wondered, blinking against sudden tears, gripping the
windowsill as hard as she wanted to grip the slender thread of her mother’s life
and hold it on this side of death.
Then the kahuna had emerged from the shade of the long green lane that led to
Ainahau, startling Kaiulani.
He wore only a loincloth, and his white hair was short. His bare feet raised
puffs of dust from the unpaved drive. In his outstretched arms he carried with
obvious reverence a large, bulky bundle. As he passed the tortoiseshell carriage
with gleaming silver fittings in which Kaiulani and her mother made their many
obligatory social calls, he seemed a throwback to an ancient world, one which
Kaiulani was young enough to have only glimpsed.
He stopped before vanishing beneath the porch roof. With fathomless eyes he
had stared up at her as the white curtains snapped in the wind. She had stared
back, wondering what he thought of her.
Now, on the threshold of her mother’s room, she did not want to enter: not
with him there. Her father gripped her hand more tightly when she balked in the
foyer like a stubborn horse.
“What is it?” he asked.
“What is he doing here?” she asked. Her old Hawaiian nursemaid
told her many frightening stories about kahunas, but she had rarely seen one, and
never close up. This one had been at her aunt Liliuokalani’s house only two
months ago, though. His look an hour ago had chilled her. Implacable, judging,
urging.
“You must go in,” her father said, voice hoarse from weeping. “Your mother
has been asking for you. She loves you so.”
Kaiulani felt utterly alone as she stepped inside; the door clicked shut behind
her.
Neither the new electric light in the wall sconce nor gentle oil lamps
illuminated the room, and the sun was likewise resolutely excluded. Princess
Likelike’s room had been darkened at her request since she took to her bed after
Christmas, though a thin stripe of light leaked through the curtains and bisected
the kahuna’s thin dour face.
Kaiulani breathed shallowly, not wanting the camphor-laden air in her lungs.
No wonder her mother was…
Dying. She said it to herself. Dying.
Likelike had cut herself off from the outside. From light, from air. The
constant birdcries and the rustle of the botanical paradise her father created in
the Waikiki swamps were muffled by closed windows. The faint sea-tang that
filled the other rooms of the house was replaced here by the close cloying smell
of sickness. The old Hawaiian nurse turned and set an empty washpan on a table.
Kaiulani jumped at the sudden clink. Open the windows, she wanted to shout.
Let my mother breathe!
Her mother, a small, shadowed figure on the enormous four-poster that was
swathed in lacy white bedclothes from England, twisted restlessly, then lifted her
head.
“Come, my keiki,” she said.
Kaiulani ran and flung herself at her mother, kneeling next to the bed. She
could barely feel the weight of her mother’s hand, light as a bird’s claw, on her
hair. Likelike hadn’t eaten for weeks. It was as if she had simply decided to die.
The whispers and gossip of the palace and the servants filled Kaiulani’s mind.
For the past few weeks it seemed as if every Manoa stream bubbling over the
rocks was filled with those whispery voices, as if each plant rubbing two leaves
together in the wind spoke the same horrible, fatalistic thought: Likelike is being
prayed to death by a kahuna. What else could it be? they asked. The royal
doctors, educated in America and Europe, said nothing was wrong, and Likelike
was only thirty-six years old. And just this morning word had come that a school
of red aweoweo had been spotted several weeks ago off the coast of Hawaii. Her
mother had once been Governor of that island, and the aweoweo was a portent of
death for the royal family. Had she angered someone there, maybe by marrying a
Scotchman and diluting the royal blood? But many Hawaiian royals had married
haoles in the past fifty years. Kaiulani had asked her father about it and he had
become angry, for he had no patience with Hawaiian superstitions. One careless
servant had said that she should beware, for it was Princess Likelike’s own
brother, King David Kalakaua, who was behind it. Kind Papa Moi? Kaiulani
couldn’t believe that.
Kaiulani turned at a deep, hollow sound, almost like bells. She rose slowly,
wiping tears with the back of her hand while the nurse hastened to hand her a
handkerchief.
The kahuna, leaning forward, was unwrapping his dank bundle, which
smelled of cold dark earth. He had donned one of the Hawaiian masks that had
always frightened Kaiulani when she was younger. This was a simple one: black
on the left side, white on the right. No snarling teeth, no terrifying frown. The
straightforward, inescapable gravity of day and night, life and death.
Kaiulani saw what had to be bones: a pile of enormous bones, overflowing the
woven mat and spilling onto the priceless rug. Too large to be dog bones, the
sacrifice of choice since Kamehameha forbade human sacrifice a hundred years
ago. Her stomach clenched.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded, unafraid suddenly. She was heir to
the throne of Hawaii; he was most properly her subject. “Are you the one who is
killing my mother?”
The nurse turned, shot her a look of raw fear behind the kahuna’s back, and
crossed herself. Likelike opened her mouth, but no words came out. Kaiulani
stood very straight and grasped her mother’s hand.
“No,” said the old man, his voice unusually melodious, yet studied and calm.
He beckoned. Kaiulani stayed put.
“Go,” whispered her mother.
Kaiulani took one step only toward him.
“Touch these,” he said. “They are the sacred bones of King Kamehameha,
from whom you are descended.”
Kaiulani shook her head. Related, and only through Kamehameha’s cousin.
She knew her genealogy well.
“Do as he says,” Likelike commanded, her voice surprisingly strong.
Kaiulani hesitated, then knelt, her full skirts billowing on the floor. She
brushed one of the bones swiftly with her fingertips.
The kahuna caught her hand and yanked it toward him, pressed it beneath his
onto the jumble of bones and held it down with surprising strength. The bones
were neither warm nor cold to touch.
“This is your baptism, your initiation,” he said. “Not the haole one, the
Christian one. You are our last hope, the last hope of all Hawaiians. You are half
haole, but you are our last alii, our last royal child. Our people have a life, which
you are bound to preserve. Our people have a land, which you are bound to
preserve for them.”
Tears glimmered in his dark eyes and he seemed unashamed as they
overflowed and traced glistening trails on his withered cheeks. The room stilled
utterly, as if the ceaseless trades had stopped, as if time itself were holding its
breath.
And then the cries of the peacocks that roamed the grounds burst
forth, loud and dreadful, even in this closed room.
Mad, sudden dreams rose all around Kaiulani, rushed toward her, enveloped
her. Foreign cities shimmered, color and sound like a blow, so strange that she
barely grasped that each one was a city before it faded into the inevitable next:
new streets, new canals, new rushing crowds. Flames, screams and horror;
buildings crumbling, strange gray battleships exploding against the unmistakable
background of the Koolau Mountains, and burning men leaping from them into
the deep, crystal-clear harbor into which the Pearl River flowed. Festivals of gay
music, grim hordes marching. Was this her world? For an instant a small girl lay
gasping for life in her arms, a red gash in her side soaking her clothing. Small
poor shacks were crowded with ragged beggars next to impossible glass towers.
Between the carnage flashed scenes of sanguine beauty—billowing green
forests, wide, slow rivers weaving through grassy plains, a small golden island
topped with sparkling coconut palms across a brilliant blue lagoon. Kaiulani was
filled with dazzling light as these visions passed through her one after another
like waves, as if her body were made of light like them, permeable and fluid,
frighteningly without a center, an ocean of time filled with images and pain
without end, without a beginning. She cried out, but it,was like the voice of
someone else, falling on her own ears like the muffled bird cries outside the
sealed windows.
The kahuna was still holding her hand to the bones when her mother spoke,
and the swirl of images became shadowed. Likelike’s words fell into the dark
room like bright stones tossed into a deep pool, shimmering then receding into
darkness while ripples spread endlessly outward. She spoke in a harsh whisper;
the words were sharp and precise and offered singly, slowly, charged with
inevitability. “You will live far away,” Likelike said. “You will never marry.
You will never be queen.”
Shaking, struggling for breath, Kaiulani yanked her hand from the bones, from
the kahuna’s dry strong grasp. She took two steps across the ornate designs
woven into the rug, strange abstract
turrets and passageways that stood out for her somehow in the slowed and awful
moment.
At her mother’s bedside, she saw the sick woman’s eyes were closed. Her
chest—was it?…
Yes, it still rose and fell. Barely.
Barely. Kaiulani touched Likelike’s cheek, but those dear eyes remained shut.
She felt the itch of sweat rolling down her face. She grasped her mother’s
narrow shoulders with both hands. And shook her. Just a bit. Wake her up. It
didn’t work. She shook harder. “Wake up, Mama. Wake up!”
“Princess!” shouted the nurse, and Kaiulani struggled against the strong arm
around her waist, hauling her backward. The door slammed open and her father
rushed in, heavy boots thudding.
“What has happened? Is she… ?” He whirled to face the kahuna, shouted at
him, “Get out of here!”
Kaiulani had never once heard him shout before.
The kahuna stood and chanted, in slow, beautiful Hawaiian.
It was a passage chant, words to build a bridge to the otherworld for her
mother’s spirit.
She ran from the room and rushed down the wide, polished hallway, through
the great room cluttered with chairs and tables where her mother had so recently
played cards with the German ambassador and his wife, her shining dark hair
piled high and laced with flowers.
Holding up her long skirt, Kaiulani burst into the bright sunshine, ran toward
the strip of bright blue ocean that shone at the end of the leafy lane, away from
the terrible visions, the conflagrations, the barely glimpsed deaths of loved ones,
each of whom went into the fearsome dark alone.
Princess Likelike, the sister of King David Kalakaua and Liliuopkalani
Dominis, neither of whom had children, died at four o’clock that afternoon.
Her daughter Kaiulani, the sole surviving heir of the Hawaiian royal family,
was twelve years old.

Lynn
Honolulu 2034

1

Lynn Oshima paced, then whirled, short-stepping within a larger rhythm to leap
a pothole. Caught in the endorphin flow of running, she let every objection to the
pain dissolve in pure white energy. She could forget, when running, that she
knew too much about the illegal genetic work of Interspace—IS—because it was
based on work that she had done. She could forget that she chose to do nothing
about it. She could forget Nana’s constant criticism of her Zygote Clinic embryo,
implanted two months ago.
And she could almost forget, in the glow that emanated from everything after
the first three miles, that despite her disgust with IS, she was nevertheless