House of the Sun by Nigel D. Findley

Author:Nigel D. Findley [Findley, Nigel D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780451453709
Google: CJYJAAAACAAJ
Amazon: 0451453700
Publisher: RoC
Published: 1995-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

15

I remembered a little bit about Punchbowl—Puowaina—from my data search on the suborbital. Apparently, as the Ali'i had implied—it used to hold one mega-important place in the ancient Hawai'ian religion. It was up on Puowaina—Hill of Sacrifices—that the old Hawai'ians used to cack their human sacrifices to placate their gods. Who were those sacrifices? Volunteers? Criminals? Virgins bred specially for the task (what a fragging waste)? "Prisoners of war" from other islands? Search me, chummer. All I knew was that it came to an end with the haoles—the priests and missionaries and pineapple plutocrats—who moved in and "civilized" the place, of course.

I guess Pele, goddess of the earth and of volcanoes, got a mite ticked that nobody was placating her with blood anymore, but it took her a while to do something about it. (You know how it is with goddesses: never a free moment...) In 2018, Haleakala, a huge volcano on the island of Maui, blew its top. Well, not its top, really, more like its side. A ridge on the volcano's west side collapsed, and a massive lava flow obliterated the luxury hotels and tourist traps of Wailea and Keokea. (Tourist fluff still refers to the area—a lava rock wasteland—as "Pompeii of the Pacific.")

In any case, in the twentieth century Puowaina had become a military cemetery for the United States—the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, a kind of "Arlington West." Predictably, it didn't stay that way after Secession. The government, under Gordon Ho's dad, exhumed all the bodies—more than 26,000 of them—and shipped them all back to the mainland, with appropriate honors. (That slotted off more than a few Americans, of course, but after the Thor shots at the Pearl Harbor task force, nobody really dared push the point too hard.)

And that's where The Bus dropped me off in the middle of a baking-hot Hawai'i afternoon, Puowaina, now a public park. A pretty place, an ancient, eroded volcanic crater shaped something like a big bowl. Grassy and green—did that mean artificial irrigation? not necessarily, I supposed—with trees and flowers—forty or so hectares of peace just twenty minutes from the pressure of downtown. From the rim of the crater I imagined you'd get a spectacular view of Honolulu, in all its finery, but I didn't bother looking. More immediate things were attracting my attention.

The Hawai'i National Police Force copmobiles—two of them—were crisp tropical white with rainbow logos on the doors, not the blue and gold of Lone Star Seattle. But it takes more than a flashy paint job to make a Chrysler-Nissan Patrol One look anything other than brutal and threatening. Only half the strobes on the two vehicles' light-bars were operating, but I still had to shield my eyes from the glare, A couple of cops—what had Scott called them? Na Maka'i, that's right—were squatting down, doing something vaguely forensic, near a little copse of flowering trees. Another uniformed officer was sitting on the ground, back up against a tree. He looked drugged or chipped out of his pointy little skull, but I knew better.

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