Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  While their ship was repaired and provisioned, the sailors were taken ashore and accommodated in rich lodgings. After some weeks of recuperation they were given a tour of New Atlantis, with great care taken that they kept their distance from the New Atlanteans in the outlying towns.

  New Atlantis was a country in which the guilds and the church, the farmers and the traders, were happily married. In its hills were caves with pits. Scientists were lowered to the bottom on ropes and there coagulated, indurated and refrigerated materials. Hermits sat apart in the same blackness, without candles. Atop the hills were towers of stone and wood for the observation of meteors, lightning, wind, snow and hail.

  The New Atlanteans studied nature and imitated it. They developed flying machines and glided off hills and had ‘ships and boats for going underwater, and brooking of seas’.

  In the towns were institutions that resembled the modern research university. These places of invention brought forth gyroscopes such as were later developed for nuclear submarines and ‘divers curious clocks and other like motions of return’, all of them ‘strange for equality, fineness, and subtlety’. The inventors, scientists, mystery men – the traders of illumination and timekeeping – all processed through the towns. The best of those who had advanced the cause of knowledge were immortalised in a hall of statues, ‘some of brass; some of marble and touchstone; some of cedar and other special woods gilt and adorned; some of iron; some of silver; some of gold’.

  Often in his despond he sat himself down in a cool part of the inventor’s hall in New Atlantis. It stood oblique from the twenty-first century jihadist camp, yet was connected in his mind, as he supposed the jinn cities were connected in the minds of some Muslims, as Danny’s undersea world was not yet connected. The hall was of the highest quality brickwork – red, Venetian – and the light slanted down through the high windows in a different way to the light through the windows in the rooms frequented by Yusuf al-Afghani.

  If he could remain in the inventor’s hall he would be gathered up by the New Atlanteans and cured with kindness. His health would recover, and he would be shown other curiosities, perhaps a clockwork dove that when wound up flew the length of a pasture and returned with each beat of a wooden wing, slower, slower, and deeper, apparently tired, and came to rest again in his hand.

  It was clear to him. Religious authority would not stand a chance once it had to confront the issue of species survival. There would be a shift in morality from goodness to necessity. Islam and Evangelical Christianity would lose their dominion as quickly as the Roman Catholic Church did in Quebec in 1968. What could be accomplished by a Last Judgement the governments of the fascist future would not themselves accomplish? New cults concerned with the harvesting of body parts and brains, he believed, would absorb the mystical agency of angels, demons, miracles and creation myths. Religious belief would be reduced to its most sensible parts.

  Politically, the jihad would become outworn, its arguments and methods a sideshow, agitators among other agitators, as in the dying days of anarchism.

  In tennis, the future decided the past: where the racquet ends up influences where the ball goes. Everything depended on the follow-through. There was no follow-through in modern politics. You could see that in the failure of politicians to grasp the nettle on climate change and in the talk of philosophers about wasted lives.

  The thousands of illegal migrants who journey by sea, he was certain, would turn into millions. When the vessels and rafts were turned back, rammed, sunk, as they inevitably would be, authoritarianism would follow. There would be race riots again. The walls were already being built higher and into a maze. He was one of those laying the bricks. He had seen it in the British embassies in Africa, where the new rule was that an African seeking a visa to enter the United Kingdom could only meet with a clerical officer of local nationality – a pseudo-Roman – and never with a British consular officer.

  Of course none of this touched on Danny’s question of a reboot of mankind, where the genetic distinctiveness of human beings breaks down.

  One characteristic of sea creatures is their constant movement. Not grief, not anything can stop them. A tuna tagged off Martinique recently was caught fifty days later in Breisundet in Norway, near the fishing town of Ålesund.

  The Cuvier’s beaked whale dives, touches the ligament of the sea’s throat, and rises again. It breaks for breath in the light, then returns to the deep. Whereas Christ, after his Crucifixion, continued up from hell through all the visible and invisible heavens to the highest dwelling place of God.

  The Latin term for the feast of ascension is ascencio, which describes how Christ was supposed to have lifted off from the earth under his own power, leaving the mark of his foot in the rock.

  She took with her a pocket calculator, a digital camera, a notebook, soft lead pencils, a thermos of coffee and a packed lunch of bread, cheese and salami bought from the supermarket in Iceland. Thumbs gave her a music compilation to play on the craft.

  It was a clear morning. The sea was calm. The pilot climbed in first, then the other scientist, then her. Two men, one woman. She wore the same running shoes she used for the treadmill. She went up the ladder and dropped down through the hatch. It was a thick nickel sphere. There was no need for decompression: the pressure inside was a constant one atmosphere. The walls were covered in dials and switches. There were three viewing windows and three padded benches. The smell was of bleach and behind it of sick. The carpet was very thin, brown, shiny; of the kind you might find in the entrance to a prison or a military installation. She put on her ski hat. The hatch was closed above them and sealed.

  The Nautile was winched down over the side and into the Greenland Sea. There was a clanging of chains, final checks, and then they sank. The colours coming into the craft changed like the colour of the sky seen by a rocket when it blasts into space, although of a different density: school ink, blue, blue-black, black. She saw charr, starfish and little whirring shrimps. The craft began to breathe. Oxygen was pumped in and the carbon dioxide they expelled was scrubbed clean by a lithium-hydroxide filter. The biggest window was for the pilot. Her window was the size of a laptop screen. She pressed her face to the thick quartz pane. She wanted to feel the trembling on the other side. She could not see much, the monitors from the cameras were a truer guide. Even so it was important to look with her own eyes. She gazed into the deep and the deep gazed back.

  Nuclear submarines went windowless in the wristwatch shallows, without a care to look out – only listening, making no sound. A submersible was just the opposite. It was a seeing device: from the Nautile people had observed the hull of the Titanic.

  *

  ‘Come on, Danny, just play the music,’ said Peter, the German scientist.

  ‘It’s Tom’s usual rubbish,’ she protested.

  ‘We have a whole day together,’ pointed out Étienne, the pilot.

  So she gave up Thumbs’s compilation. The lyrics of the first track reverberated: I travel the world and the seven seas.

  Étienne touched the stern thrusters. They sank, sank, sank. All the waters closed over their heads: 607 metres … 634 metres … out of the mesopelagic layer … into the bathypelagic. There was a time when the dominion of countries ended at five fathoms, the keel of a ship, the run of an anchor. Enki was at 3133 metres, 1741 fathoms.

  The sphere was too small to stand up in; after an hour, her legs became numb. She wiped away their condensed breath from the window and stared out. There was another hour of descent to go.

  ‘Étienne, could you turn off the lights?’ Peter asked.

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Everything that belonged to them disappeared, except the light on the switches and on the emergency lever. The water was alive with bioluminescent fish and eels. The salp and jellyfish gave themselves in disco lights when the Nautile brushed them. Down there everything spoke in light: it was the most common form of communication on the plane
t. The puniest fish had the brightest lanterns. There were fish who wore a cape of silver chain mail to reflect light. Transparency was another form of protection. So was casting a red light to appear black and so invisible. Or to fill one’s belly with ink and so disappear, as surely as slipping on a magic ring.

  There was a slowness at that depth which matched the Ray Charles song that was playing. Here we go again, she’s back in town again.

  ‘That’s you, Danny,’ said Peter.

  ‘You wish.’

  The darkness was so strong it bent her memory of summer twilight in London.

  They sank deeper.

  ‘Can we turn up the lights now?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Étienne.

  Everything was illuminated. The gold dolphin badge on Étienne’s beanie shone.

  The sphere creaked. The microphones picked up ghostly whining, knocks, moaning, shrieks, wailing, and firing. The walls grew cold. They were wet to the touch. She began to smell the men; they might have begun to smell her. She wiped away more condensation from the porthole with her elbow; 921 metres … 1043 metres.

  ‘Starboard. Jewelled squid!’ exclaimed Peter.

  They hovered to get a better look. She zoomed in with the video camera.

  ‘You’re right,’ she conceded.

  The squid were white and appeared to be encrusted with emeralds and amethysts. They had a massive sapphire eye for looking about them and a tiny eye pushed into their bodies like genitalia. They swam at a 45-degree angle to make use of both eyes.

  Peter was wiry, with frizzy hair; an environmental activist. Étienne was more classical, with a Roman nose, very precise; a sacristan, delighted with life, or himself.

  Peter was talking about whales falling. He had a strong German accent. His voice was high-pitched.

  ‘I mean, can you imagine seeing a dead whale dropping past our window. It comes down sharply, like so.’ He demonstrated. ‘What a feast for those at the bottom! Just think of the weight in worms and lice in the stomach.’

  1830 metres … 1832 metres. They were covered up. All of Britain could be sunk over them, the peak of Ben Nevis would not see any trace of daylight.

  There were strings of bell-jar jellies with numerous transparent stomachs, all of them pulsing. The ocean was hungry. It was a mouth, and a grave.

  A beaked whale has a heart attack in the Ligurian Sea and dies. It sinks and its head is mashed on the sides of an underground canyon. Immediately its cheeks are flushed with bacteria. There are worms, spider crabs and all manner of creatures feeding on a single vertebra. Gulper eels eat their body weight in a minute, then go without for weeks. Anglerfish cloak themselves so that their scales are like the glowing excrement of marine snow. Another fish tries to eat the excrement and the anglerfish opens its fanged mouth.

  There was a fish with an eye covering half of its head. She saw a fish with a deathly pallor whose face was like a sponge with holes pushed into it by a pencil. Each of those holes was a sensory pore detecting the slightest movement nearby.

  The Nautile stopped in a cold layer of the water. It keeled over, righted itself, shuddered, and continued to sink. The thermal layers were like a staircase going down. She said thermal layer and a lithograph presented itself of her slave ship halted on such a layer, not able to sink any deeper, instead carried forever on the North Atlantic Drift, its fire doused, its souls intact, in irons, their lungs full of water.

  ‘It’s scary,’ Peter said. They were talking about the deep. ‘I mean, there’s a reason hell is down there. There’s a reason heaven is up there. It’s conditioned by evolution.’

  Étienne believed that, in geological terms, man was going to be a short-lived species. ‘We are poisonous. We are quick. We are the noodles of evolution.’

  ‘Instant noodles,’ she said. If the world kept spinning, if the waters held in, the deep would be constant until the end of geological time. Instantly made, instantly gone. If man had a sense of proportion, he would die of shame. His salvation was that he lived in denial. She had not given up, but it was in the balance. Homo sapiens was either at the start of a very long journey, or close to the end of a very short one. If it was to be an odyssey, the history which had passed since Sumer would come to seem priceless and savage. If it was to be a short venture, man’s mark would be the rubbish he had buried in the ground.

  ‘Even eating our way through cows, apples, everything, in our billions, you know we’re nothing compared to the life down there. That life can’t be destroyed, it feeds on death – or less than death – it reconfigures and goes further in, into hotter water.’

  A lot will depend on the ability of scientists to manipulate microbial life, so that in the future it can be trowelled into the grooves on an irradiated orb and animate life there. Once we learn how to throw a dome over the rock and calibrate gravity so that it does not stretch or wither us, make us sick, dull or depressed, then the animated moon can serve as a vessel. It will sit at the centre of a Saturn-sized ball of water and cruise through space, encased, a miniature Abzu, a marble within a marble.

  The new world’s challenges will be similar to those at the bottom of the sea: how to avoid predators, how to eat and how to find a mate.

  It is understandable you would want to come back as yourself into a wonderland with the sharpness of colour of the Queen of Hearts in a newly opened pack of cards. But coming back as yourself is resurrection. It is uncommon. It may even be greater than the scope of mathematics.

  We cannot talk with definition about our souls, but it is certain that we will decompose. Some dust of our bodies may end up in a horse, wasp, cockerel, frog, flower or leaf, but for every one of these sensational assemblies there are a quintillion microorganisms. It is far likelier that the greater part of us will become protists than a skyscraping dormouse. What is likely is that, sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or pools of molten sulphur on which the tongue fish skate.

  You will be in Hades, the staying place of the spirits of the dead. You will be drowned in oblivion, the River Lethe, swallowing water to erase all memory. It will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in. It will be a submergence. You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms, because they are the foundation of all forms. In your reanimation you will be aware only that you are a fragment of what once was, and are no longer dead. Sometimes this will be an electric feeling, sometimes a sensation of the acid you eat, or the furnace under you. You will burgle and rape other cells in the dark for a seeming eternity, but nothing will come of it. Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity. It is stable. Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness.

  He had watched lambs gambol on the hill by the jinn pit. It would be an ecological future, where even the gas from cremations would be captured for power generation. Yet his experience in Somalia – with darkness and deprivation, the famished condition of the Somali people, the desolation of the wadi, his clashing on behalf of the Enlightenment (so he persuaded himself) – would look like a buccaneering life to many in that future, to be envied above a world in which every infant was to be registered at birth and tracked with implants drilled into bone.

  In another of the letters Danny had written him, she had reported the unexpected pleasure of looking after a dog for a friend; taking the dog for walks, brushing its coat, trying to read its expressions in the evening, before moving continuously into thoughts about the new human beings that will be available within a few decades:

  I wonder if we’ll have anything of Jenny in us. Her eyes, her wagging tail, her eagerness to please. Probably not. We’ll get new muscle and ligaments, new skin, new eyes and ears. What’s the Olympic motto? Faster, higher, stronger? It’s predatory. We’ll go for snakes, hawks and sharks. Some of it will be messing a
bout with genes, splicing, but a lot is going to be technology. A metal exoskeleton, I should think. More bounce, better protection. We might find a way to link human memories to a mainframe …

  The letter ventured off into talk of the town and holiday plans, then circled back.

  People who say no to upgrades will end up in caravan parks and wild places. They will become slower and weaker relative to the others. In time they will turn into curiosities, human beasts, until curiosity dies like it did for Kafka’s hunger artist, who fasted to death in a cage and was replaced with a panther.

  His brain was white stuff: spermaceti, galantine. The shapes that played on the inside of his eyelids were vivid, and when he retreated further into New Atlantis he saw the important horse race of the season was run on a course very like the racecourse in his town in northern England – a flat race that had been run since the reign of King George III – he sensed that the place names of the villages in New Atlantis were Anglo-Saxon, and that this was natural, because the Angles and Saxons came from a landscape that was similar to that remote island – their language was sensitive to dips in the land, the culvert under a hill, the slopes and mounds, there were leas, dales, holts, slades and wolds in New Atlantis, as there were in England. Somalis must have similar words. The land he passed over on the lorry had glowered; it was waterless, unmarked and unnamed to him, just the wadis, the companionless trees, and the shadows in the cuts of the badlands.