by Adam Roberts
‘You’re under arrest, Monsieur Lebret,’ said Billiard-Fanon, getting uneasily to his feet. ‘You’re confined to your cabin. You’ve proved a real Jonah on this voyage, Monsieur; but this – this is too much! Murderer!’
‘An unfortunate accident,’ Lebret mumbled. ‘I assure you …’
‘Stop! Cease! I don’t have time for this now,’ snapped Billiard-Fanon. ‘We need to take advantage of our good fortune – the fact that we’re no longer falling into that volcanic vent. We need to repair as much of the ship as we can. But this is not over, Monsieur! No longer falling into the vent … but we may still crash into the ocean floor at any moment.’
‘It was no vent, Ensign,’ said Lebret – his excitement overcoming his fear. ‘Look! A sun – a veritable sun. Burning beneath the waters, like a magnesium flare. Or perhaps a sub oceanic comet – for it has moved out of our way.’
‘I’m sick to my stomach!’ yelled Billiard-Fanon, ‘of your fantasy stories! I don’t care! I don’t care!’ He was holding something in his right hand, and Lebret saw what it was. The captain’s pistol. ‘Confine yourself to your cabin, Monsieur, or I shall shoot you here and be done with it!’
Lebret put his left hand in front of him. ‘Ensign,’ he said. ‘I beg of you. I intended to help Monsieur Avocat, not harm him. I brought him rum! Look – I fixed a tourniquet to his damaged arm. You can see—’
‘You think I give a damn for your intentions? To your cabin!’
The entire situation resolved itself, with the sudden clarity of revelation, inside Lebret’s head. Boucher was unconscious and so Billiard-Fanon commanded the ship – and Billiard-Fanon hated him. He thought him a murderer!
This was intolerable. He must act. The stakes were too high.
He pictured the course of action in an unbroken series of images. First: he would distract Billiard-Fanon somehow, jump upon him – and kill him with the penknife. Then to cover his tracks; would take the pistol and shoot the … no, first he would clamber up to the hatchway. He would close it most of the way, leaving just enough space to aim the pistol around. Shoot the window – and close the hatch before the water, flooding in, spilled through into the corridor. He could then tell the rest of the crew any story he chose; there would be nobody to contradict him.
He looked Billiard-Fanon straight in the eye. ‘Ensign—’ he began to say.
Something failed in his resolve; something stuttered in his head. He had, it might not be too fanciful to say, a small seizure, a blankness deep inside his head. He heard a whispered voice saying the water loves you, and he knew the truth of it. The water loved all of them utterly. It wanted nothing more than to embrace them with its myriad limbs and press its mouth to their mouths. But although those four words formed in Lebret’s brain, the water loves you, he knew that they had not been spoken by any person in that shaking, swaying room – least of all by Billiard-Fanon. The ensign was a knot of hard land, deep beneath this infinite ocean; no man was made of less fluidity – the look of his eyes was stone, and his thoughts were desert air and absolute certainty. And he hated Lebret. And he would shoot Lebret, given only the flimsiest of excuse.
Where had the strange whisper come from? Lebret looked behind him, and nearly fell as the Plongeur swayed through again. There was nobody there. ‘I’m going mad,’ he said, in a low tone.
‘What was that?’ snapped Billiard-Fanon, still holding his gun.
‘I’m—’ Lebret began to say. Suddenly there were faces at the observation porthole – cuttlefolk, crowding round again. Each head was shaped with the smooth pale perfection of a peeled clove of garlic; their eyes were fathomless. They slapped their fins against the glass, and sucked voraciously at it with hideous mouths. Their gills billowed out behind them, huge folded and pleated membranes. ‘Look! Ensign – look at the window!’ cried Lebret.
Billiard-Fanon looked round.
This was Lebret’s distraction. He could have acted at this moment; lunged at Billiard-Fanon, taken his chances against the gun with his own little knife.
He didn’t move.
‘Ugh!’ cried Billiard-Fanon. ‘The brutes!’
‘I believe,’ Lebret suggested, ‘that we passed so close to the sub oceanic sun that we were in a zone of water too hot for them. But that now we are sinking through cooler water, and so they are swarming around us again.’ said Lebret.
Billiard-Fanon scrambled to the window. ‘They’re all over the ship!’
‘They’ll damage us further – we must get rid of them.’
‘How?’
Picking his way clumsily down, Lebret reached the observation porthole. ‘Start the propellers,’ he said. ‘Push on downwards – they seem to cluster around the light of this, this whatever-it-is. If we accelerate away from it they may drop off.’
‘Accelerate downward?’
‘We are hardly in a position to accelerate in any other direction,’ said Lebret. He pressed his face to the glass, straining to see past the obstructing figures latched to its outside. The wormlike writhing bodies of the cuttlefolk were clinging leechlike all about the forward bulb of the Plongeur – a hideous sight. Three were battened upon the glass of the observation window itself. Lebret could clearly hear the sound their teeth made, scraping and scratching against the outside of the safety glass.
‘Start the propellers,’ he urged, again. ‘Or these beasts will break the vessel apart.’
He felt a metal rod jab him in the side. The pistol, of course. Billiard-Fanon brought his face closer. ‘Maybe I’ll take your advice on this, Vichy-man,’ he hissed. ‘But I’ve not forgotten that it was taking your advice that has brought us to this watery circle of Dante-hell in the first place.’
‘Ensign, please, you must listen when I say …’
‘And I’ll not soon forget that you killed Avocat. Why did you do that? What did you hope to gain?’
‘I didn’t kill him—’
‘You are arrested, Monsieur Lebret. Climb up in front of me; I’ll lock you in your cabin.’
‘We can’t afford to waste time with such nonsense!’
‘If you prefer I can simply shoot a bullet into your skull here and now?’
Lebret did not doubt the man’s sincerity. ‘Very well, Ensign,’ he said. ‘I shall take myself off to my cabin.’
As he starting the awkward climb up the corridor, using what impromptu handholds and footholds he could, Lebret heard Billiard-Fanon close behind him, shouting at the top of his voice. ‘Le Banquier! Le Banquier! Start the props – push us faster downwards before these sea monsters tear us to pieces!’
14
CONFINEMENT
Castor was in the bridge, naked to the waist and wet. Red patches on his arms and stomach showed where scalding water had burned him. ‘I need more men—’ he gasped. ‘Those creatures are outside again – breaches are …’
‘You shall have more men,’ said Billiard-Fanon. ‘But start the props, for Christ’s sake, and hurry us away from these monsters!’
‘The water is scalding – and it won’t play fair!’
‘What?’
‘Flies about,’ said Castor, enigmatically. ‘Like it’s possessed. What about him?’ The chief nodded at Lebret. ‘He could help … I wouldn’t weep to see him scalded.’
‘I’m locking him up. He killed Avocat.’
Castor’s face darkened. ‘You Vichy swine!’
‘There’s been a misunderstanding …’ Lebret began to say.
‘Props, Banquier!’ Billiard-Fanon called to Le Petomain, who was climbing into the sloping pilot’s seat. ‘We need to dive as fast as possible – try to shake off these leeches.’
‘If not him,’ said Castor, ‘then release Pannier, to come help us. He must have sobered up by now – I need every hand I can get.’
‘Alright, I will. In fact, you can go in Pannier’s cabin, you Vichy murderer. I don’t have time to search your cabin for – I don’t know what treacherous things you’ve hidden in there.’
&nbs
p; Everybody felt the kick of added acceleration as the propellers started up.
Billiard-Fanon shoved Lebret up into the aft corridor. The ensign opened Pannier’s cabin door. The cook tumbled out, looking blanched and chastened; a fiercely unpleasant smell followed him. ‘You!’ he gasped, seeing Lebret. ‘You said you’d come back for me! You never did!’
‘Monsieur,’ said Lebret, struggling to regain his composure. ‘You see that Ensign Billiard-Fanon has a gun on me? I am his prisoner, and my actions are not my own.’
But the cook was not to be mollified. ‘You left me to die! Like a kitten drowning in a sack! You left me to die!’
‘Monsieur, I beg of you …’
‘You promised you’d come back,’ Pannier repeated. ‘You abandoned me.’
‘Stop this,’ snarled Billiard-Fanon. ‘Pannier: go forward with Castor – we need to staunch the leaks down there and you can help, you old drunk. As for you, Monsieur Vichy – into Pannier’s cabin.’
Lebret, as he squeezed past Pannier, could not mistake the look of pure hatred upon the cook’s face. He made one last appeal. ‘Messieurs – as Engineer Castor says, we need every last hand … why not permit me to—’
The door slammed in his face.
There was nothing for Lebret to do now. He looked about his new prison. Pannier had left it none too clean. A small metal toilet was set into the corner; but this appeared to be blocked – or else the cook had not bothered to flush it – and the various upendings, rollings and reorientations of the Plongeur had spilled its noisome contents to slop along the impromptu trench made by the angle of wall and floor. Worse, the shaking of the vessel, or perhaps the weird poltergeist breeze, had spread the noisome matter all the way up the wall and floor, even to the ceiling. It was hard to see where a man could sit without becoming defiled.
Some of the cook’s few personal items had been shaken out of the room’s cupboard to lie in filth, caught in corners and niches. There were two books wedged in the space underneath the bunk, both soiled – one, Lebret could see without picking it up, a Bible. There was little else in the room.
Lebret, with one foot awkwardly on either side of the gutter made by the tipped-forward orientation of the room, made his way to the bunk. It was not possible to sit or lie on this, at the angle the Plongeur was current at, even with the bed frame’s wooden lip. But underneath the bunk was Pannier’s trunk. Lebret loosed the catch that held it in place, and it tumbled out. With a little manoeuvring he got it to bridge the gutter, thereby making a clean place to sit in amongst all the smeared filth. Then he sat himself upon this object, with his back leaning against the sloping wall, and smoked another cigarette. Globs of filth were being blown about the space, and there was no way to avoid being dirtied by them; but he made the best he could of his situation.
For a while he simply sat, and let his mind empty. The noises of the submarine blended into a strange melange – the creakings and groaning of the metal structure, the whirr of the propellers, the shouts and yells of men, muffled and indistinct. The roll of the boat was less pronounced now.
It was, he thought, a little cooler now.
He dozed. He woke again after an indeterminate time, almost shaken from his perch by a great sideways lurch of the craft. Clutching the sides of his makeshift bench, he listened – did the shouts of the men sound more desperate? Had there been a fatal breach in the fabric of the submarine?
‘There’s no way to know,’ he muttered to himself, fishing his cigarette case from his jacket. There were three smokes left inside. He had two cartons in his cabin; but that was no good to him. ‘Ah well,’ he announced, to the empty air. ‘If the vessel is about to fill with water, I might as well enjoy these. And Billiard-Fanon is probably going to shoot me anyway, even if we survive.’
He smoked one cigarette, listening. The noises were hard to decipher.
The passivity of his situation, whilst not pleasant, was bearable. It was not the first time he had had to wait, powerlessly, to see how things turned out.
Things seemed to have quietened down. He dozed, woke and dozed again. To stretch his legs he clambered around the awkward metal V Pannier’s cabin now was. He demonstrated to his own satisfaction that the toilet flush still operated, and then he stripped the cook’s bedding and used it to wipe away at least some of the revolting matter smeared about the sloping walls and floor, afterwards stowing the soiled blanket and sheet in a cupboard. This gave him the opportunity to examine Pannier’s two books. The Bible was well-thumbed, with passages underlined and incomprehensible annotations squidged, microscopically, into the narrow margins. Though the text was in French, the inside front cover bore an English name (‘Godfrey Smithson’). The other book was a copy of Jules Verne’s Captain Hatteras. Lebret leafed idly through this for a while. But it did not hold his attention.
He waited.
After a while there came a knock at the door. ‘Alain?’ It was Ghatwala
‘Dilraj!’ cried Lebret, scrambling over to the door. ‘What is going on? Are we all about to die?’
‘Not today, my friend. Tomorrow – who knows?’
‘Did they empty the starboard tank?’ Lebret asked, in Punjabi. ‘I felt a great shock, and then the vessel settled into a more balanced yaw – though we’re obviously still pitched pretty steeply.’
Ghatwala replied in the same tongue. ‘The fish people tore the vent open – I saw it from the observation room. It was a horrible sight! The air hurt them, yet they clustered around it. Surely they are dumb animals?’
‘Perhaps, my friend, but have you never seen human beings acting in a mob-frenzy? Have you never seen a religious rite that tipped people over the edge? Did you not see footage of the rock-and-roll music concerts they have in America?’
‘At any rate,’ said Ghatwala. ‘We have left the underwater sun behind us. You can no longer see it from the observation portal – but if you climb into the con and look through the periscope it makes a fine sight.’
‘How does it work, do you think?’
‘The periscope?’
‘The sub oceanic sun, idiot!’ Lebret lapsed back into French. ‘Does it burn with radioactive fusion, as does the sun around which earth orbits? It cannot. It cannot – the surface of our sun is four thousand degrees centigrade! – such a temperature would surely have vaporised trillions of cubic kilometres of water in every direction.’
‘It would depend upon the length of time this sub oceanic sun has been shining,’ agreed Ghatwala. ‘But I doubt its surface temperature, though hot, was equivalent to our sun’s – it is much smaller, for one thing – no bigger than an asteroid. I tend to think it was a sphere shining at a few hundred degrees, creating a skin of superheated steam about it that in turn generated layers of boiling water, and hot water.’
‘But eventually it will heat up the whole ocean.’
‘If the ocean is genuinely infinite, as you suspect, that would take an infinite amount of time. But, yes; the fact that we have passed from cold to hot water in only a few days of descent – the fact that the water only a few thousands of kilometres away from this sub oceanic sun remains at 4°C – suggests that it is young. I need more concrete data to be able to estimate how young.’
‘Young enough to have been set here by – you know who?’
‘How could he do such a thing! Even he?’
‘I do not know, my friend. Yet this sun is evidently close, relatively speaking, to our point of entry. Is that coincidence?’
‘You are forgetting, Alain,’ Ghatwala countered, speaking again in Punjabi, ‘the population of cuttlefolk. There is a limited but functioning ecological system in place – algae photosynthesise and release oxygen which the cuttlefolk breathe – and presumably there are other fish and shrimp and so on feeding on the algae for the cuttlefolk to eat.’
‘Has it evolved, this ecological system?’ Lebret asked. ‘Or was it created to go along with the sun? Set up from scratch, as it were?’
‘My point is th
at whilst he might be able to manufacture an artificial sun – though with what raw materials or tools I can’t imagine – nevertheless it beggars belief that he could established all these creatures. He is not the God of the Book of Genesis, after all!’
‘Might they have migrated from elsewhere?’
‘Perhaps, my friend. Certainly the existence of elsewhere – of other sub oceanic suns, I mean – would explain the fact of one here. Would it not? Perhaps they are very numerous, and our running into one is not such a coincidence.’
‘Good points, comrade,’ said Lebret. ‘But something far stranger is going on here, I think. I watched the air escaping from the tanks – I saw it from the observation portal. The bubbles did not rise, my friend. They did nothing but bulge out – until the cuttlefolk thrashed into them, and cut the mass of air into myriad smaller bubbles and shapes. Even then they simply roiled about.’
‘If this is truly an infinite universe of water,’ replied the scientist, ‘then you would not expect anything different. Of course the environment would be weightless. Like outer space.’
‘You are missing my point,’ chided Lebret. ‘I am standing on a surface, and so are you. Something is exerting a downward force upon us. But if we are subject to gravity, then why are the bubbles not? And how could we be subject to gravity, if we have come to that place we both suspected? How can we be descending? There is no down in space!’
‘I do not know,’ said Ghatwala. ‘It does not appear to make sense. You are correct, of course. The bubbles’ actions confirms the pressure readings – if we were actually descending through a body of water under the influence of gravity, then the water pressure would rise in direct proportion to our depth. And we would long since have been crushed to death.’
‘Are we in a dream?’ Lebret asked. ‘Might we actually be dead and in some afterlife?’
‘How could we test either supposition?’ the scientist asked, with characteristic practical-mindedness. ‘What conceivable experiment could we design to falsify such a claim?’