Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  Then there was the biological revolution. It was possible to see creatures that had never been noticed before, the living matter of the minestrone, of which only one recently discovered species of pico-phytoplankton in the upper layers of the ocean was reckoned to have a biomass equivalent to the insect life in the Congo River basin. The diversity was overwhelming. She was interested in numbers, in percolation, but almost by accident she had discovered new species. She had overseen the mapping of their DNA, given them a genetic barcode and put them in the book of life (others said the hard drive of life). One of the papers she co-authored with Thumbs had incidentally reinforced the view of some biologists that there were microbes in the sea that were deliberately rare. These microbes were waiting for conditions to change so they could become abundant. She found this a very powerful thought. It changed her idea of what a lifespan meant. A microbe waiting a million years, holding to a different rhythm through those many sunrises and sunsets. What was that rhythm?

  The Pourquoi Pas? rolled and the portholes were washed with seawater. It rolled back and she saw how the glass shone the length of the ship. The fog closed in. She sang to herself:

  In South Australia, my native land

  Full of rocks and thieves and sand

  I wish I was on Australia’s strand

  With a bottle of whisky in my hand.

  It was a shanty her father liked to sing. If the world forgot its sea shanties, forgot the sea, it would be even harder to speak of the strangeness of what was under the waves.

  They passed through the fog bank and Jan Mayen appeared then with the clarity of a photograph taken with the highest quality camera; thin beaches, blues and greys of augite and pyroxene. The volcano looked like Mount Fuji, only more spectral. The cone coughed up cinders. The fire inside of it glimmered on the underside of the clouds. The iron ore on the slopes, the snowfields and shreds of mist about the rim were the sulphurous way in. Looking at it, considering how it plunged into the sea to a point where it swarmed with seismic tremors and was suppurated with magma, she felt she understood what Saint Brendan said when he had seen the volcano on his incredible sixth-century voyage: that this way into hell, the opening to the infernal regions every damned soul must take.

  She pulled a notepad from her bag and a felt-tip pen. She began to write James a letter. It felt good to write to him. These big thoughts were like blackened icebergs. Even in her, with her commitment, they were too big to hold onto. Yet the more she worked on them the less desperate she felt. They effected in her an almost religious sentiment. It was not sub mission – she would work – it was a Buddhist sense of resignation and a feeling of responsibility to her own living form. To Danny Flinders. The very precariousness of her condition and more generally the condition of mankind made her body and choices more precious to herself. It was incumbent upon her to live fully; to give and to receive. The thought of him someplace in Africa brought out a tenderness in her. What she wrote to him then was very intimate, deliberately containing small things which are quickly forgotten: she had a cold, she had managed to avoid having a cabin-mate, Thumbs was in a sweat because he was missing a rock festival and the livestreaming was not working, there were bird droppings on her sleeping bag. It felt good to write with pen on paper in such a place, in such a mood. It felt permanent.

  The colours turned pale. It was gelid. Her breath was like steam. Heroic friendships were being formed below decks, the Nautile was being equipped in the aft hangar for its dive the next day, but she was content to remain up above a little longer, wrapped up, staring out at the productive waters, the shearwaters, storm petrels and eider ducks.

  If you talk about the acceleration that is in the world, you have to talk about the advances in computational power. There was a recent momentous day when a computer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico achieved petaflop speed. One thousand trillion calculations a second. How to conceive of such a rate? If everyone in the world were given a pocket calculator and ordered to tap out sums for six hours a day, it would take them until the twenty-fourth century to match the calculations a petaflop computer can perform in a day.

  The exaflop is the next step in the history of computing: one quintillion calculations a second. Then the zettaflop, yottaflop and the xeraflop. The goal is nothing less than to slow down time and colonise it. Of course, a petaflop computer uses more electricity than the power grid of an African city. Then there is the problem of asking useful questions of it.

  The sand around the camp was filled with thorns. There were long acacia thorns and round thorns spiked like depth charges. Even with flip-flops, his feet were punctured at every step.

  One of the Boni laid a British Enfield rifle and a Soviet PPS submachine gun on the ground together with a few bullets and strips of dried meat. The Boni beckoned one of his children forward. She could not eat. Her belly was swollen and her skin festered with sores around the ankles and the calves. When the man appealed for help, Saif had him beaten with sticks. A leg cracked under a blow and the beating stopped. It was strange: Saif wanted to see a jinn, but he refused to look the Boni in the eye.

  ‘You are not good Muslims,’ Saif told them. ‘You worship trees. You eat pigs. You are not welcome on our island. You must go.’

  The Boni were expressionless. There was no fear, anger, or bitterness apparent in their faces, just the resignation of the enslaved. They left quickly with the injured hunter and their few possessions: bows and arrows, spears, pots and palm matting. One woman gathered a bundle of clothing and strapped it to her back, while the younger women carried the children. The jihadists gave them kerosene and sugar.

  James spoke out in favour of the Boni and was punched in the face. Perhaps it was because he was a witness to the unkindness, or perhaps it was the way he stared so rudely at the wine-coloured callus on the forehead of one of the Pakistanis, where the young man struck his forehead to the ground in prayer. Perhaps it was just because morale was low.

  It was not true that the jihadists were self-sufficient and needed nothing more than a prayer mat. They had had high hopes of this camp where there had been so many martyrs before them. They had expected more. The boys from Mogadishu were especially desolate. They had seen a documentary in a video shack about the British Army and had persuaded themselves that the jihad had these facilities. Instead of a shower block and a canteen there were only ruined huts, the roofs collapsed, with the water a walk through the overgrown bush.

  There was a baobab tree in the centre of the camp that afforded shade and shelter from the rain. He was ordered to make his own shelter under the tree. He took mangrove stems and drove them into the sand and hung up the mosquito net. He made a palm roof and scooped out a hollow in the sand. He was bound again inside the netting, but with such a length of rope that he could crawl freely and see the comings and goings of the camp.

  The first days were spent repairing the huts, hacking out routes in the bush, collecting firewood, and digging latrines. It was hard. They sandbagged the main hut with food aid sacks filled with wet sand. On each of the sacks was a Stars and Stripes and the words Gift of the People of the United States.

  A fighter fell into a Boni trap and was sent back to Chiamboni with a broken thighbone. There was an infestation of flies, also scorpions. They slept outside on plastic sheeting, under mosquito nets. Food was in short supply. They had handfuls of maize meal, fish and crab. Spaghetti was rationed.

  They pinned up a picture of Osama bin Laden. His body was drowned, yet remained living to them. They played games on a laptop, including one where you got to fight Christians in the sixth-century Holy Land. They trained with rocket-propelled grenades and explosives. They trained with knives. There was no mobile-phone signal; the only connection with the world was by speedboat.

  Days passed. Weeks. Baboons encircled the camp. The females had red arses to compare with the blue testes of the male colobus monkeys. He watched the baboons coming and going, quarrelling over fruit and scraps. He studied
their personalities. He named them after his captors. They were dog-human; they pissed like dogs, but their faces were human.

  It was the French polar explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot, who, on his many voyages to the Greenland Sea,2 discovered that the temperature of the Hadal deep is a uniform four degrees Celsius around the world. Its sole virtue is constancy. Its processes are uniform. Cold water percolates into the rock, is superheated, and spurts from the chimneys of hydrothermal vents. It dissolves minerals and metals in the rock and, in this way, provides the ingredients for chemical life in what would otherwise be a deathly night, visited only by matter from above.

  Until the discovery of hydrothermal vents off the Galapagos Islands in 1977, scientists assumed that life on earth was photosynthetic and belonged to the surface. It was the other way around: photosynthetic life came later, when cells strayed to the top where they were cooked for millions of years before evolving a way to absorb the light, and all the while the chemosynthetic life in the abyss was evolving a stability we cannot hope for.

  The hydrothermal vents are only a small part of it. In the fissures, crevices, clefts and cracks; in the volcanic pus, in all the amazing lattices of the deep, are heat-loving or hyperthermophile protists, archaea, fungi and especially bacteria, which together constitute the earliest life on our planet. They are chemosynthetic, with no need of the sun. They live off hydrogen, carbon dioxide or iron. They excrete methane, or eat it. Some breathe in rust to produce magnetic iron. They feed on the anaerobic and on what is no longer living. When you place them in a Petri dish, they multiply into a colony visible to the naked eye. If you dwell on them they change the way we see ourselves. They are the factory workers, unquestioning, dynamic: the base. Less than one per cent of them have been identified, they are a part of you. You carry a weight of them in your belly and on your skin.

  The microbial life of the deep exists in the queerest plane, where worms live in scalding pools and keep fleeces of microbes on their backs that are even more extraordinary than those that live on the timbers of our eyelashes.

  In the white night of the fourth day out of Iceland, the Pourquoi Pas? dropped anchor over the underworld they sought. Enki was the northernmost hydrothermal vent field yet discovered, with some of the largest recorded sulphide deposits. The water that poured from its chimneys was 399 degrees Celsius. There was proof of a chemosynthetic life cycle, with acid-feeding bacteria at its foundation, working up to tube worms, white clams, and other bivalves. It was extraordinarily large and ancient. More than that was unclear. The 2011 expedition had discovered the field near where the Knipovich and Mohn undersea ridges joined after weeks of dragging a CTD (where C was conductivity, T was temperature and D was depth) sensor behind the boat in sawtooth patterns. The sensor looked for anomalies. When it found them, it took a sample of vent water, which could then be analysed for telltale levels of dissolved hydrogen and methane oxidised in the water column by microorganisms. Her challenge for 2012 was to scrape from a fissure some richer material, of mathematical consequence.

  The first scheduled dives to Enki were for orientation and mapping. The next were for the geologists. The dives for the biologists and mathematicians were to take place close to the end of the cruise. There were various teams of biologists. The evolutionary group were working towards extracting DNA. Another was looking at viruses; they wanted to know how they in their sickness spread from one vent field to another. The French and Swiss astrobiologists Danny and Thumbs were working closely with were gathering samples on behalf of the European Space Agency. The hope was to identify new microorganisms. Claude, the French leader of their team, had placed a bet that life would be found in the methane oceans of Titan in his lifetime. He felt that the search for extraterrestial life was compromised by surface chauvinism: it looked only on the outside of planets, moons and rocks, not deep in the cracks where it was more likely to be. She agreed. Man’s fixation with façades, with outward appearances, was another reason why there was not more interest in oceanography.

  She took a bullish view. Microbial life was tenacious. It swarmed even in mineshafts and caves. Seen from up close, the cracks in the sea floor were like the cross-hatching on a metal-plate engraving. She believed that some of them went down 8 kilometres into the mantle, and were carpeted with a density of microbial life that, taken together with the deep biota, was more than all the photosynthetic life on the surface of the planet combined. To prove her thesis she had to come up with methods of counting the methanogens, the hyperthermophilic autotrophic iron reducers, and the peculiar states and leagues of archaea and bacteria. She had also tried to identify the boundary which separated the living part from where there was no life and to understand the percolation between existence and non-existence.

  What they were doing at sea was the start. Once she and Thumbs were back in London, they would assemble the data and send problems – mathematical complexity, the levels of hierarchy which bridged a microbe to the ecosystem – to teams of biomathematicians in Spain and America.

  The Nautile was prepared at night. It dived in the morning. A bell was rung on the boat in the afternoon, when it was on its way back to the surface. People went out onto the deck. They guessed on where the pregnancy in the waters would be. The Nautile looked both small and dramatic from a distance. White and blue, a piece of china. Frogmen sped out on ribbed inflatables to it. They dived in and secured it so that it could be towed back. When the checks were done, the crew of three emerged weary and triumphant through the hatch. Their initial success was less a scientific one than a human one; they had returned. There was often an expression of wonderment. Some of the scientists shook their heads: they had ascended like Orpheus from the soup which contained the magnitude of species, and which would be the sanctuary of life on earth for as long as it kept spinning, primitive, consistent, constant, offering protection from solar flares, nuclear radiation, comets and other yet unknown human crimes.

  An Ogadeni knelt on the other side of the netting, poking him with a stick like a zoo animal and watching him intently. He glared back. He saw the desert in the man’s eyes. They were the kidney-damaged pair of a camel herder, not pellucid and darting, but cloudy, rheumy and bloodshot from years of drinking muddy water, camel milk and urine.

  He turned over. He could not sleep for more than an hour at a time. Sometimes the sky revolved. He was nauseous. He was forever crawling out of the shadow of the baobab. He thought it was falling on him.

  They had been there for months by then. The days had run together. The rot in his netting was making him sick and there was such a heat and outside there were the moving dots of mosquitoes whining at night. He could find no resolution to his anger. He was losing resolve, losing his sense of himself, of his story. His capacity for solving problems was diminishing. He was unloved.

  He really was a dog. He was ordered out each day for his meal. Depending on the mood of the fighters he was helped across the encampment or hit and shouted at. He had learned to identify body language and when any of them approached him quickly he curled himself up for protection. During one kicking a line from a song repeated:

  Like some cat from Japan.

  She held an open house in the lab one evening. Thumbs selected the vinyl records and placed them on his turntable; classic rock, then funk. She ground the coffee beans.

  Colleagues wandered in and traded freshly baked pastries for cups of coffee. The conversation was mostly about music, to begin with. There was no discussion of politics; scientists seem to exist slightly out of time in that way. When the alcohol came out there was a general commentary about microbial metabolism, the hydrogen shitters, and what that might mean for a new generation of fuel cells and the grail of clean energy. There was talk of the abyss itself, its carbon sinks of salp, and whether pollution could be taken from the air and injected into it. It often came back to climate change, because there was research money available for it, and tenure for any bright young academic who could make of the vasty deep an eng
ine or rubbish bin. To the backing of funk, another turn in the conversation concerned vertical transport in the global ocean, VERTIGO. Specifically, how to track ocean currents using elements like thorium, which stuck to marine snow and decayed at a stable rate.

  Then Thumbs held the floor.

  ‘Put yourself in the future,’ he said. ‘Out in space. You’re property developers. You’ve found a planet a decent distance from a sun. You buy the place. Now you have to animate it. You put in air, water and microbial life. How to give it a lived-in look? You need to get back to the basics; dig in ponds, marshes; turf the hills, plant oaks, lay out groves, vineyards; introduce deer and foxes.

  ‘What kind of house would we build?’

  Thumbs raised his hand and gulped down some liquor. ‘Roman, definitely. A villa of the kind found in third-century England; mosaic floors, baths, fireplaces. You’d have space-age fittings too, of course, land sloping down to a stream, and stables filled with horses.’

  ‘No cars?’

  ‘No. This would be marketed as a planet you come to slow down. You arrive out of hyperspace, steady yourself, get your transfusion or whatever, then swap your spacesuit for a toga and ride home along a cobbled Roman road through woods and across fields under twin moons. The autumn effect, the frost, and the rest of it would just be climate control.’

  She was very happy in evenings like this one, when science seemed a shared enterprise, not a jigsaw of vanities. Thumbs kept changing the records, slowing them down. When they got to acid jazz they abandoned conversation.

  They worked through the night with lab assistants. The Pourquoi Pas? had set anchor north of Jan Mayen, directly over the Enki field. It was a stormy night. It rained and sleeted through the midnight sun. They were thrown about, but the instruments and computers were screwed down into the wooden counters and fastened with bungee rope and not a dial moved except of its own accord.