Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

by Adam Roberts

  It looked for a while as if Boucher were going to put it to the vote. Billiard-Fanon, however, cut across this. ‘The decision must be yours, sir,’ he insisted. ‘There’s no place for voting on a naval vessel!’ Boucher’s authority was fragile enough without inviting the contempt of the men via spurious appeals to democracy.

  ‘Then,’ said Boucher, sounding flustered, ‘let us go down a little further, and see what these lights are. Yes, we shall see if Monsieur Lebret’s bizarre theory is correct. I am willing to spend another day on that mission. But if the lights merely are some form of phosphorescence, then we shall immediately re-fill the tanks and ascend.’

  ‘It may be,’ suggested Lebret, ‘that the light has something to do with Seaman de Chante’s … disappearance.’

  ‘He must at least have made it to the ballast tanks,’ was Castor’s opinion. ‘We have functioning vents, at any rate.’

  ‘But the tanks became functional before he went out,’ said Billiard-Fanon. ‘I believe it was coincidence.’

  ‘There are many oddities here,’ agreed Boucher. ‘I mean, about the functioning of the ship, never mind the world outside. When we return,’ – for that seductive idiom of hope had started to percolate into the general conversation aboard the ship – ‘an official investigation will be able clear them up.’

  He sat himself tentatively in the captain’s chair. Le Petomain was pilot. Lebret, the two scientists and Billiard-Fanon were at the observation porthole. The remaining crew were at their posts at various places in the craft.

  Once again, the Plongeur tipped forwards to dive down through the waters.

  Down they went.

  At first the light was indistinct – a vague, blue glimmer. After two hours it was possible to discern an area of more focused light, away to the left. Lebret suggested Boucher come down to the observation chamber and see for himself.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ said Lebret. ‘We ought to steer towards where the light is brightest.’

  ‘Very well,’ agreed Boucher. He passed co-ordinates to Le Petomain, through the speaking tube, and the Plongeur reoriented itself in its descent. The brightness swung round to occupy the exact centre of the observation porthole.

  ‘What is it?’ Jhutti asked. ‘It is too localised to be the whole sky.’

  ‘I do not know what it is,’ said Lebret, looking forward as if hypnotised. ‘But soon we shall find out!’

  The colour subtly changed, very slowly. The light was now a slightly greener shade of cyan. Brightness was evident in a wide spread up ahead, but it was now certainly most intense in a circular patch.

  ‘Might it be a clump of phosphorescence?’ asked Jhutti, leaning forward.

  ‘Or an entrance, as if to a tunnel? A cave mouth through which sunlight is shining?’ suggested Ghatwala.

  ‘A portal, perhaps,’ said Boucher, with wonder in his voice. ‘Just as you said, Monsieur Lebret. If it is some manner of gateway, how can we determine whether it is safe to pass through it? Where will it take us?’

  Lebret was silent, staring intently at the brightness below them.

  Slowly the descent continued. Another forty thousand metres rolled past on the depth gauge. Boucher returned to the bridge; went aft to check on the engines, and finally returned to the observation porthole. Lebret, the scientists and Billiard-Fanon were all gazing at the slowly strengthening light, as if rapt.

  ‘I have read accounts of people at the moment of death,’ said Lebret, as Boucher took a seat beside him, ‘in which they talk of a circle of light, hypnotising them and compelling them to move towards it. Do you think this such a phenomenon?’

  ‘Are we not yet dead, then, Monsieur?’ Boucher asked, trying to humour but sounding only strained and anxious.

  Everybody was silent for a while.

  ‘What gives it that colour?’ asked Ghatwala. The light was now a deep glaucous-blue, magenta tinged with green.

  ‘Algae?’ suggested Jhutti. ‘If we are approaching a source of sunlight then we might also expect to encounter manifestations of life. Blue-green krill, seaweed, anything that can make use of the energy of the light.’

  ‘And perhaps fish,’ agreed Ghatwala, ‘that feed upon the vegetation.’

  They sank deeper through that mysterious sea. The light strengthened. It was evident now that a central circle, or sphere, was the source of the light.

  ‘The sonar!’ announced Le Petomain, excitedly. ‘At last – it is returning something – an image.’

  ‘I thought you said it was broken?’ said Boucher. ‘No matter – that’s excellent news! What does it report?’

  ‘Lieutenant, it’s a—it’s a dome. Or perhaps it is the prow of something. Something enormous. And there’s a lot of noise, perhaps a fleet of little craft – or a shoal of fish, I think.’

  ‘The prow?’ repeated Boucher. ‘You mean – another vessel?’

  ‘Look!’ exclaimed Lebret. ‘There are things moving!’

  Everybody strained forward. Tiny rice grain-shaped objects, dark blue against the light, were swirling around the source. ‘Exactly as I said!’ said Ghatwala. ‘Fish!’

  ‘Monsieur Lebret,’ said Boucher. ‘I must congratulate you on your intimation! Surely we are approaching the surface, howsoever unconventionally … for surely fish cannot shoal like this in the deep depths, but only at the surface.’

  ‘The surface,’ agreed Lebret. ‘Or a surface.’

  ‘Lieutenant?’ It was Le Petomain’s voice, reedy through the communication pipe. ‘The external temperature has risen quite markedly.’

  ‘Getting warmer!’ said Boucher. He looked pleased. ‘It all makes a sense. Except only that we are apparently descending, when we ought to be ascending, it makes sense! The pressure increased when we went sank through the Atlantic; it reduced again as we passed into this mirror ocean. The temperature went down, now it comes back up. It got darker, now it gets lighter. It can only mean we are returning!’

  ‘Praise the Lord!’ cried Billiard-Fanon.

  The more they descended, the larger and brighter everything was. The circle of blue-green brightness was now, very obviously, a distinct thing, the cause of, but differentiated from, the more diffuse brightness all around them. The indistinct shapes of the swimming creatures – whatever they were – began to acquire definition – more like octopi than ordinary fish, for they trailed tentacles behind them as they moved.

  ‘It’s warm,’ observed Jhutti. The air inside the observation chamber was palpably hotter.

  ‘It is,’ agreed Boucher. He picked up the communication pipe. ‘Le Petomain?’

  ‘Lieutenant?’

  ‘What is the external temperature reading?’

  ‘37°, Lieutenant.’

  ‘What? How can it be so high? A few hours ago it was 4°C!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Lieutenant Boucher,’ replied the pilot. ‘I must report it is 37°.’

  ‘Something is wrong,’ said Jhutti. ‘That is much too hot.’

  ‘I am unpleasantly reminded,’ put in Billiard-Fanon, in a gruff voice, ‘of the story of the frog placed in cold water which is slowly heated up. The frog,’ he added, perhaps superfluously, ‘fooled by the slow increments of temperature increase, and not realising his danger, does not leap from the pot, and so dies.’

  ‘How can it be so hot?’ Boucher repeated.

  ‘Le Petomain,’ said the lieutenant, speaking into the tube. ‘What do the instruments say? How can it be so hot, suddenly?’

  ‘I don’t know, Lieutenant.’

  ‘What about the sonar?’

  ‘Something is jutting out, the source of the light and the heat. But there are so many of these strange fish swimming about it is interfering with the signal. Too much noise.’

  ‘Jutting out, you say?’ asked Boucher.

  ‘Yes, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Like the peak of an undersea volcano? That would explain both the heat and light.’

  ‘It would be consistent with the data,’ said Jhutti, in a grave v
oice. ‘What if we are finally approaching the bottom of this impossible ocean?’ He scratched his beard. ‘I can’t explain the lack of pressure – but what if we are looking at some kind of volcanic eruption through the ocean bed? It would explain how there is light and heat at this great depth.’

  Lebret shook his head. ‘Monsieur, consider the colour! Observe it! Magma would surely be red!’

  ‘I cannot explain the colour,’ conceded Jhutti.

  ‘No, no,’ said Boucher, fretfully. ‘We cannot risk getting closer.’

  Disappointment was palpable. The prospect of a quick passage back to normality had possessed everyone; to have that suddenly snatched away lowered morale.

  ‘We simply cannot descend any further, given the increase in temperature,’ Boucher said. ‘To go lower would be to cook ourselves. And besides, if the seabed is approaching, we must avoid a collision. Time to go back up, I think.’ He gave the order, and the Plongeur stopped descending.

  Not even Lebret challenged this. The two scientists begged an hour to observe what they could of the peculiar phenomenon, and it was agreed that a short period would be given over to the collection of whatever scientific data could be gleaned from the circumstance.

  Jhutti and Ghatwala had left their camera down in the observation window. They went back down; and Boucher angled the submarine in the water so as to bring the light source – whatever it might be – into better view. In ones and twos the whole crew came down to take a look for themselves. Lebret, smoking, scowled through the glass.

  ‘Another crack in the seabed, perhaps, Monsieur?’ Jhutti suggested, to him. ‘A circular vent, through which is pouring … what?’

  ‘It cannot be lava,’ was all Lebret would say.

  ‘But,’ Jhutti pressed. ‘The lieutenant is surely right to be cautious. If the external temperature became too high, it might provoke further malfunction …’

  ‘Look!’ Lebret interrupted him. ‘We have, at any rate, attracted the attention of the local fish.’

  It was true – a number of the creatures had broken off from their circling trajectories around the light, and were coming towards the Plongeur. As they approached their shape became easier to make out. Crewmen crowded into the observation chamber to look at them.

  ‘We are surely the first ever to clap eyes upon these forms of life!’ Lebret declared. ‘There are dozens of Nobel prizes in science to be claimed if we could capture one!’

  ‘They look like,’ said Boucher, in an awed tone, ‘like men!’

  ‘Are they mermen?’ asked Avocat. ‘Have we passed from reality into a realm of legend and myth?’

  ‘Hardly that,’ observed Lebret. ‘It is surely nothing more than a freak of parallel evolution. Their flippers or … tentacles, or whatever they are, merely resemble limbs.’

  ‘They are certainly unlike any kind of cuttlefish hitherto observed,’ was Ghatwala’s opinion.

  The creatures possessed skinny torsos, from which two front and two rear fins (or perhaps they were fat tentacles) trailed; and their bullet-shaped heads protruded necklessly from their bodies. They were of a silvery-blue or blue-white colour, as fish tend to be; their eyes were black saucers and their mouths gaped on under-jaws shaped like a Norman arch. Yet despite all these obviously piscine qualities, there was something uncannily human-looking about them – something to do with their undulating passage through the water, some freakish reminiscence of mankind about their arrangement of body, head and limbs.

  Yet the most distinctive thing about them had no human analogue. From their ‘shoulders’ sprouted two great seaweed-like appendages – five or six times as long as their actual bodies, branching and bifurcating into a foliage-like complexity away from their bodies. As the creatures swam and circled about the observation porthole these great doubled bunches folded, and swirled, following after like two great crinkled capes.

  ‘Gills?’ suggested Jhutti.

  Lebret seemed to have recovered his spirits. He was right up against the glass. ‘Marvellous!’ he breathed. ‘Exceptional! The cape-things must be gills. There was no oxygen in the higher, black water – but down here, with a source of light and heat and blue-green algae, there must be some.’

  ‘External gills, though?’ said Ghatwala. ‘And of such prodigious size?’

  ‘It suggests that such oxygen is here is in low concentration.’

  ‘They’re certainly fascinated by us!’ Lebret noted. ‘And why not? They’ve surely never seen anything like it in their lives.’

  ‘Visited by the great metal whale!’ laughed Boucher.

  ‘Perhaps they will worship us as a god, as the South Sea Islanders did Captain Cook?’ Billiard-Fanon suggested.

  ‘Did the South Sea Islanders not murder Cook?’ said Ghatwala.

  ‘That was afterwards. And anyway,’ said Boucher. ‘They are but fish. They clearly do not possess the intelligence to …’

  There was a loud thump. One of the fishmen had thrust itself up, suddenly, close against the glass of the observation porthole. The collision was not accidental. The creature grasped the slight bulge of glass with two forward flippers – lined with suckers like the holes in Swiss cheese – and battened his large mouth against it. The overlong lower jaw was clearly capable of being extended and retracted, and its shape adjusted to the contour of glass. A fat, black tongue, covered in rasping protrusions, slithered up from the beast’s throat and licked horribly over the outside of the window.

  Lebret had recoiled from the glass at the impact, but he now stepped forward again. The black eyes of the monster swivelled, following him. ‘He’s watching me,’ he observed.

  More thumps and bangs were audible, at various points along the metal hull of the vessel. Castor and Capot hurried from the observation room.

  ‘What are they doing? Is it trying to bite through the glass?’ asked Boucher.

  ‘I think we should move away, Lieutenant,’ said Jhutti.

  The creature affixed to the observation window was still rubbing its black tongue against the surface. Then, abruptly, everything inside dimmed. It took a moment for the people inside to see why – the creature had brought its two huge cloak-gills round and draped them across the glass.

  Ghatwala took another photograph, and cursed the light. ‘Where are the flashbulbs stored?’ he asked.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ said Billiard-Fanon. ‘I concur with the Indian gentleman. I suggest we ascend immediately, and try to shake off these …’

  There was a horrible crunching sound; the metal fabric of the Plongeur shook and thrummed like a gong.

  ‘They’re ripping us to pieces!’ yelled Boucher. He leapt up, and made to run up the sloping floor and out of the observation chamber. But he was too hasty; his footing was not sure, and he fell, knocking his forehead against the bottom lip of the hatchway.

  ‘Lieutenant!’ cried Billiard-Fanon, leaping to the fallen officer. He turned Boucher over – a smile-shaped cut had been grooved into the man’s forehead, and blood was flowing freely from it. He groaned, still alive, but close to insensibility. ‘Avocat! Help me move the lieutenant.’

  There was another terrible wrenching, shuddering noise; like metal being cut by giant scissors.

  ‘What is going on?’

  ‘They want to eat us!’ cried Ghatwala.

  ‘What creature eats metal? No – no – I believe it’s our air,’ said Lebret. ‘Our air. They’re greedy for our air!’

  The whole of the Plongeur shook, leaned through twenty degrees, and tilted further forward. The men inside the observation chamber tumbled and fell, scrambled back to their feet.

  Lebret leapt over the supine form of the lieutenant, and scrabbled up the steeply sloping corridor, hauling himself physically into the bridge. ‘Le Petomain,’ he called. ‘Release air – open the forward vents and release air.’

  ‘Where’s the lieutenant?’ the pilot demanded.

  ‘It’s life-or-death man! Do as I say!’

  But Le Petomain hesitated.
>
  Jhutti and Ghatwala were just behind him, pulling themselves up into the bridge. ‘What is on your mind, Monsieur?’

  ‘You said yourself – oxygen levels down here must be very low. They can smell it in us! They want it! They have somehow intuited that we’re full of it. I don’t know how. But they can never have experienced the stuff in gaseous form. They cannot know how reactive the stuff is. They’re moths to the flame … well, let the flame burn them, and shake them off the Plongeur. Sailor – do as I say!’

  The pilot looked from the scientists to Lebret and back again.

  Suddenly the whole craft shuddered violently, and the three standing men fell to their knees. A cacophonous din resounded through the air.

  ‘Too late—’ shouted Le Petomain. ‘Too late – they’ve pulled the port vent clear off—’

  ‘I must see,’ said Lebret.

  He slid on his rear down the sloping corridor, past Billiard-Fanon and Avocat who were endeavouring, with only limited success, to haul the unconscious lieutenant up the shuddering, bucking vessel.

  The observation porthole was free again; the sea-beast that had been battened there had gone. Great constellations of bubbles flushed past the glass, not only floating upwards, but disseminating in every direction. The mermen-creatures were twisting and struggling, their gill-cloaks tangling about them. They contorted in agony – or in ecstasy, it was impossible to tell.

  The whole vessel tilted once again, and bubbles flew past the glass. Lebret’s could feel in his stomach that they were sinking.

  He could hear the shouting from the bridge as Le Petomain expelled the remaining water from the one remaining functioning ballast tank, attempting to compensate for the loss of air in the other. The whole structure of the Plongeur shuddered. The white-noise of the air pumps cut cleanly through the other various noises – the groaning of the metal, the clangs and bangs, the weird subsonic groaning or moaning side.