Eden Burning (12 page)

Chase forced himself to stop, remembering how it had felt to press himself against Nicole’s soft, hungry body. Thinking about it just eroded the very control he needed.

“Nicole?” he asked again. “Do you know about any studies?”

She swallowed hard and tried to be as casual as he was. He looked so calm, standing broad-shouldered and at ease, silhouetted against the kipuka’s bright foliage. The passionate kiss might never have happened.

“No one has done a truly disciplined study,” she managed. “Not here. Mauna Loa’s kipukas are better known. Especially Puaulu.”

When he pulled out his notebook again and began writing, she felt the last of her anxiety drain away. For a moment, while his back was turned, he had seemed angry with her. Now he was focused on the work at hand. Everything was . . . normal.

She sighed quietly in relief. She understood his concentration, so she didn’t feel like he was shutting her out. She was the same way when she danced or painted; she used every bit of herself, ignoring the rest of the world. There was nothing personal about it. That kind of focus was simply necessary to get the job done.

“Spell Puaulu, would you?” Chase asked, frowning down at the name he had undoubtedly butchered. “I’m even less used to the Hawaiian language than I am to shield volcanoes.”

Smiling, she spelled the word for him before she asked, “What kind of volcanoes are you used to?”

“Cone volcanoes, like Mount Saint Helens. Among other things, I’ve been part of the long-term study of the return of life to the slopes after the first big eruption.”

He looked up from the notebook long enough to estimate the size of the trees in the kipuka that were growing along the margin of the most recent lava flow, springing up among the bleached bones of the trees that had been too close to the fire to survive. The age of the regrowth gave a rough estimate of the age of the kipuka itself.

Sensing Chase’s concentration on the kipuka, Nicole watched him openly. His eyes fascinated her. They were crystalline, nearly transparent, with hints of blue and silver condensed around the pupil. They made a vivid contrast to his dark hair and skin.

“Did you study other volcanoes?” she asked when he looked down at his notebook again.

“I worked on the Heimaey Island volcano in Iceland, with time out for Surtsey Island and for the huge fissure fields on Iceland itself. Then South America, Mexico, wherever the earth burned.”

“Did you like it?”

His pen paused over the page for a moment before he answered. She was the first person who had ever asked about his emotional response to the volcanoes that were his lifetime passion. “I loved working with volcanoes.”

“What drew you the most?”

“At first it was the violence of the eruptions, pure and simple. There’s nothing as exciting as feeling the earth shake beneath your feet and hearing the mountain roaring with a sound greater than any thunder, the kind of sound that makes your bones vibrate. Then comes the fire.”

She watched his face, seeing shadows of remembered awe and excitement in his expression.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said slowly, “like being in on the birth of the world. In a way that’s exactly what the fire and thunder are all about. Birth. Without volcanoes a lot of earth’s land simply wouldn’t exist.”

“Or water?” she asked, remembering fragments of conversations she had overheard in the Kipuka Club.

“That, too.”

“It seems incredible that the oceans could have come from cooled volcanic gases,” she said. It was just one of the many things about the mysterious living mountains that intrigued her.

Chase looked up from his notebook, pleased that she understood something about the volcanoes that had always fascinated him. And for good reason. If present theories were correct, volcanoes were literally the fountains of Eden, perhaps of life itself.

“It’s true,” he said. “Volcanoes are huge, immensely complex chemical factories. Even the air we breathe probably came from beneath the crust of the earth. And if that isn’t enough to interest you, volcanoes make wonderful evolutionary laboratories. They destroy and they also create. They’re God’s own incubators.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you think about it, in many ways the Hawaiian Islands are truly Eden. Their isolation from other landmasses allowed island life to take on shapes that are different from any other life anywhere else on earth.”

Frowning, she tried to follow his line of thought, island life changing and growing in new directions, locked away from its source on the mainland.

“It’s kind of like the Polynesian dances themselves,” she said after a moment. “The first dance came from a mainland time and place long since lost in history. Each culture, each new island that people colonized, took that original dance and made something new of it, something unique. But still a recognizable dance related to other, older dances.”

“Exactly.” Chase looked at the lush vegetation growing up out of the dark lava. “One of the major differences between here and the mainland is that the plant seeds that came to the islands from other continents didn’t have to fight animals in order to survive here, because in the beginning there weren’t any land animals to speak of.”

“What a strange place it must have been back then,” she said, trying to imagine a land without animal life.

“Strange, but logical. A seed can fly on the wind or float in ocean currents or be carried in a bird’s body. Animals—other than the smallest insects—can’t.”

“What about birds?”

“They’re the exception to the animal rule, but at first there would have been only sea birds here, because there weren’t any land plants to feed land birds.” Chase glanced down at an entry in his notebook, crossed it out, and went on speaking as he wrote in something else. “Once a plant seed survived and took root here, the plant began changing.”

“Why? Why wouldn’t it just stay the same?”

“The plant had been adapted to an environment that was thick with competing life forms. Hawaii was different. There wasn’t anything but bare rock waiting to be covered.” He looked up again, watching the kipuka’s varied greenery shift beneath the wind. “It’s estimated that the seventeen hundred flowering plants that were native to the islands b.e.—Before Europeans—came from less than three hundred ancestral plant colonists.”

“That’s more than the number of dances that survived. We’ve lost so many to time.”

“It’s an old story.” Chase’s eyes searched the boundary between lava and life, black and green. “If we were above four thousand feet, this kipuka would be alive with the songs of honeycreepers. But their ancestral finch colonist wasn’t immune to avian malaria or pox. When European man arrived with his barnyard animals and mosquitoes hatched from ships’ water barrels, most of Hawaii’s native birds died.”

“Were the surviving birds somehow immune?”

He shook his head. “The introduced mosquito couldn’t survive above four thousand feet. That’s the only reason there are any endemic Hawaiian birds left at all.”

Nicole thought of the rare flying jewels that brightened the island’s upper reaches and felt her heart squeeze. “Thank God for altitude,” she said starkly.

“Altitude slowed down the extinctions, but it won’t stop them forever. There are other species of disease-carrying mosquitoes that can survive at high altitudes. So far those mosquitoes haven’t found their way to the islands.” Chase’s shoulders moved sharply, as though in denial of what he knew was true. “But they’ll get here sooner or later. There’s world enough and time. And men are careless of their Edens.”

His notebook snapped shut, speaking loudly about the emotion underlying his neutral tone.

“That’s why you agreed to do
Islands of Life
, isn’t it?” she asked. “You’re afraid that Eden is living on borrowed time.”

“I
know
it’s living on borrowed time.”

He looked at Nicole with gray eyes that had seen too many things lost before they had been found, much less understood. Too many possibilities gone forever. Too many cruel people who survived to perpetuate their cruelty.

“Yes,” he said, looking away from her, “that’s why I came to Hawaii. I knew that this would be my only chance to see landscapes and life forms that exist nowhere else on earth. These islands are proof that life bows to no odds. It survives. Somehow it survives.”

“Reminds me of one of Fred’s favorite sayings—something about ‘nature, bloody in tooth and claw.’ ”

“Most of it is. But not here. This was a gentle Eden. Most native Hawaiian plants don’t have thorns or poison to discourage browsers. Not even bad smells.”

He reopened his notebook, then wrote quickly, turned a page, and gestured to the kipuka’s lush life, so startling against the barren lava surrounding it. “In a way the Hawaiian Islands themselves are gigantic kipukas, safe havens for land creatures in the midst of the huge, hostile environment we call the sea. Once mainland life arrived here, there wasn’t any need for it to be aggressive—to fight for water or sun or survival.”

“Why? Surely even in Hawaii there was competition.”

“Not in the beginning. Any kind of life was very rare. There was more habitat than there was life to fill it. After they arrived, plants and animals changed to meet the easier reality of this Eden. Green things lost thorns and poisons. Many of the birds and insects that came here on the wing often lost the ability to fly.”

She started to ask why and saw that he was waiting for the question. “Do you mind?” she asked. “All my questions, I mean.”

Smiling, he ran his fingertip down her arm. “Not a bit. People who don’t have any curiosity are boring.”

“Then why did birds and insects stop flying? To have a wonderful ability like that and then lose it . . .” She shook her head. “I can’t see how it would benefit the birds.”

“That’s human-think. Flying uses up an enormous amount of energy. Taking to the air is good for survival only when the alternative is being eaten. Otherwise, especially for birds, flying is a waste of calories that could be better used making babies.”

She smiled.

“In Hawaii, before European man arrived,” he said, “there weren’t any snakes or cats or even dogs. No land predators until the pigs the islanders brought with them. Birds didn’t need to fly or even to nest in trees. The ground was safe. The birds that kept their ability to fly did it to bring ohia flowers within reach of their greedy little nectar-sucking tongues.”

“Eden without snakes,” Nicole said, trying to imagine it.

“Except for the two-legged variety.”

She smiled wistfully. “Nothing is perfect. I’ll take Eden however I can get it. Even with men.”

Including a rich Adam?

Though Chase said nothing aloud, his mouth flattened at the reminder of what Nicole was really after. When she listened to him so attentively, asked questions, understood the answers, and all the time watched him with her brilliant, nearly gold eyes as though he was the only man on earth, it was hard to remember that he, not Pele, was supposed to be the predator in this particular Eden.

He looked away from Nicole’s disarming, clear eyes, toward the wind-ruffled kipuka. Scents drifted up to him from exotic shrubs and flowers. He hadn’t seen anything like this kipuka outside of botanical gardens.

Yet nothing smelled as good as the woman who stood so close to him that he could hear her quiet, even breathing and sense the warmth of her body.

Impatiently he forced himself to think of something else. The kipuka, for instance. Plants. Trees. Anything.

Near him, just within reach, grew a tangle of shrubbery that could have been a big bush or a thicket of small trees with heart-shaped leaves up to a foot across. A flourish of yellow flowers the size of his palm grew at the tips of some branches.

Using only his fingertips, he stroked one flower from edge to cup. The blossom shivered and swayed as though touched by a gentle wind. The petals were exquisitely soft, fragrant, flawless. Once he would have said there couldn’t be any texture more pleasing to him.

Yet he had just kissed a woman whose mouth was more smooth, more perfect, more creamy. And the textures of her mouth would be nothing compared to the secret places of her body, hot and slick with need. The thought of exploring her satin depths rippled through him like a swarm of tiny, harmonic earthquakes, testing his resistance, warning of the explosion to come.