Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

by Adam Roberts

  His heart was thudding, but the pain was a little less now. Manoeuvring himself awkwardly he got his feet on the ledge. It did feel, crazily, as if he were standing on a ledge at the top of a tower-block. By all rights, and every law of physics, he ought to be able just to launch himself into the water and swim where he wanted to go. But the invisible sucking current tugged palpably at his legs. Fear gripped him. His teeth sang with pain. Awkwardly, and clinging to the fabric of the submarine, he reached up and put his hand into the intake valve for the airlock chamber.

  Pulling himself up was hard, but he was able to bring his left foot high enough up to slip it into the crevice, and from there he could push himself up to a place where the slope of the submarine’s hull was less precipitous. He stopped. A powerful twinge rang through his injured jaw, resonating inside his skull. He could feel the action of the water as he swished his arm through it; the resistance and fluidity of it. Only minutes earlier, he had been immersed in it, and nearly drowned. Yet now, inside his suit, it felt as if he were standing on a high curving roof in air; as if the slightest misstep and he could fall. Impossible!

  ‘Not the first impossible thing,’ he thought to himself. ‘Maybe I need to believe – believe and I will be able to swim.’

  He centred himself as best he could, tried to concentrate on what he was doing despite the pain he was in, and resumed clambering his way up the C-curve. At one point he slipped back a little, but was able to scrabble back up. Eventually, breathing with hisses and clicks, he got to the top of the metal hill. The blue-white light of the sub oceanic sun was bright enough to cast a fuzzy grey shadow. The leviathan seemed to have departed. But, no – looking up, he could still see it – or see them – three of the huge beasts. The bubbles, catching the light and glinting like stars against the blacker upper water. The leviathans turned and threaded the faintly glittery zone, like sharks trying to catch sardines.

  Lebret breathed out. Bubbles twisted around his faceplate and neck like slugs. Why didn’t they go flying buoyantly upwards? He himself felt the downward tug so forcefully; they ought by the same logic to have sped away upwards. He couldn’t say why they didn’t. He had to wave his hand to clear the mirror-shapes from his line of sight.

  But at last he could see the breach in the side of the vessel. Stepping carefully, he started towards it. There were strange tinny pinging sounds inside his ears. His jaw ached terribly.

  A shadow passed over him. Looking round he saw that one of the leviathans was looming up at him. Perhaps it had been lurking behind the far side of the Plongeur, or maybe it had darted down from the school above them. But Lebret could see what had excited the beast – the trail of air bubbles, stubbornly refusing to zip up and away. The bubbles were rising, but much too slowly, and the effect was to lay a sloping trail of bubbles down towards him. Like a line of breadcrumbs.

  Lebret quickened his pace, walking across the ‘roof ’ of the Plongeur’s external hull, but it was not easy moving through water, and the effort made him breathe more heavily, which in turn squeezed more pain out of his broken mouth. The next thing he knew, his feet were sliding over the metal of the hull. Somebody had punched him in the small of his back. He went over – lying flat, face down, and swooshing feet-first onwards. The great flank of the leviathan swept past him.

  The beast’s flipper caught him a second time. With a powerful throb of pain in his jaw, Lebret spun upside down. He saw the long grey arc of the Plongeur’s hull passing away from him, and then he felt the tug in his gut as he started to fall.

  A beat too late he understood what was happening. Trying to ignore the agony in his face, he thrashed his arms and legs as forcefully as he could – if only he could swim hard enough, surely he could reach the submarine. But the dark-grey wall of metal slipped past, and disappeared above him, and he was sinking hard into the depths.

  21

  THE CHILDRANHA

  For long minutes Lebret surrendered himself to impotent rage – despair and the physical pain fuelling pure outrage at the cosmic injustice of it all. He had been so close to getting back inside the Plongeur! If fate wanted him dead, why hadn’t Billiard-Fanon’s bullet simply knocked out his brains? Why survive that assault by a freak chance, and struggle against circumstance and the odds to come within metres of safety … only to have it snatched away at the last moment? For Fate to toy with him, in such a manner – it was too unfair.

  But pain is a very wearying thing, and soon enough he ran out of the energy he needed to rage at his circumstance. The emotion that followed rage was a kind of exhausted acceptance. Looking about him, he saw that he was falling directly towards the sub oceanic sun. The water was already warmer around him; he could feel it. Well, he thought to himself; soon I shall be boiled alive like a lobster. Perhaps not a pleasant way to go, but at least it will put a stop to this raging jaw.

  With acceptance came a sort of peace, for struggle is a draining thing, and there was a speck of comfort in the thought that it would all soon end. But this was contaminated by the irritation that he would die without solving the mystery that had brought him here. ‘It seems I shall not now get to the bottom of it all,’ he said aloud inside his mask. Then, although it hurt to move his jaw, he laughed at the idiom. There was no seabed to this ocean.

  He craned his neck. The Plongeur was far above him now, a black hyphen of metal. The leviathans were distantly visible, swimming about it.

  Directly ‘below’ him was the sun, now too bright to look at directly. If it is drawing me down with its gravity, he thought, then why is it not drawing the Plongeur too? We ought to be falling at the same rate. But, then again, if gravity operated at all in this strange liquid place, then the hundreds of thousands of kilometres of water above him ought to be creating enough pressure to squash him to the size of a sugar-lump. None of it made sense; and soon he would die. Which meant that it would never make sense. For some reason this struck him as funny, and he laughed a strangulated, hissing sort of laugh.

  He was pleasantly warm, now; like a man in a hot bath. Soon, he knew, it would become scorching.

  For a long time he simply sank through the waters. He lost the sense that he was in motion, as if he were simply hanging motionless in the fluid medium. But he knew he was descending. From time to time he would look into the depths below him; each time the sub oceanic sun was unmistakeably larger.

  The passage of time became complicated, hard to parse. Breaths, heartbeats, motion. The throb in his wounded jaw. What did all mean? We descend all the time, and the bottom of the ocean is called death.

  There was motion in the water below him. Soon enough this motion was all around him. Cuttlefolk? No – these creatures were small. The cuttlefolk, with their great trailing capes of external gills, were man-sized; these were smaller. Child-sized. Shoals swarmed below him, but an arc of the creatures was swimming towards him. They were too far away for Lebret to make out details about their physique; but then – abruptly – they were almost upon him, and he caught a glimpse of wide-mouths, and zig-zag teeth, and snapping jaws. They were upon him, in a feeding frenzy. But the most disturbing thing about them was that these alarming-looking befanged mouths were set in faces that had the round blandness of children’s faces.

  There were five, six, seven of them – Lebret was too startled to be able to count, as they circled and snapped and darted at him. But they looked horribly like children in shape and size. Except for the teeth. He felt a mantrap seize upon his leg, a row of diamond teeth sharp digging through the fabric of the diving suit. Another was at his hand – he flapped the arm, frantically. A third lunged at his face, black eyes and small-snout horribly reminiscent of a child’s moon face. He cried out – he couldn’t help himself. Panic possessed him. Bubbles spooled from his regulator, and bulged into the space between himself and the giant piranha-like childfish. The air made the creature reel back, twisting frantically as if stung.

  Enough of Lebret’s presence of mind remained for him to grasp what had
happened. It was the same effect air bubbles had had upon the cuttlefolk – they craved it, but at the same time it burnt them. These children-piranha must be related beasts.

  One of the creatures was tearing at the pack of rolled up clothes on his back; Lebret could feel the sharp little tugs. Another was biting at his shoulder. Teeth ripped through the suit and punctured his skin.

  Cupping both hands together, Lebret scooped some air back and did his best to fling it over his shoulder. The fish immediately relinquished its bite. He brought up his leg – there were two of the childranha-things fixed on his flesh like dogs with a bone – he waved bubbles down towards them. They opened their jaws and spun away as if shot.

  The next minute Lebret had sunk below the level of the swarming monsters. He gasped. Looking up he could see a great knot of the beasts darting into and flinching away from the nest of bubbles he had left behind him. Blood was leaking through the punctures in his leg of his suit, but the ribbons of black-red stayed swirling alongside him, unlike the bubbles, that rose slowly up – or rather, that stayed in the water whilst he sank down.

  He was holding his breath. To exhale would be to emit a necklace of bubbles about him and draw the childranha upon him again. But he couldn’t hold his breath indefinitely! And, looking below him – the sub oceanic sun much larger, brighter and hotter below his feet – he saw a great mass of the things, like insects swarming.

  Being boiled alive was horrible enough; but the thought of being torn into lumps of flesh by these monsters was incomparably worse. He ran his hands up and down his suit, and found a small knife inside a pocket on his thigh. It seemed a pitifully insignificant weapon against such numbers of sharp-toothed monsters.

  As he sank further towards the seething mass of them, he saw the carcass of a leviathan, floating at an angle. The childranha were feeding upon it, great waves of the creatures breaking upon its flanks, tearing chunks and darting away. What looked like convection patterns flowed through the swarm. Lebret could even see shudders pass along the massive, fleshy flanks of the beast as the monsters collided with it and ripped mouthfuls away.

  Was this, Lebret wondered, good news for him? Perhaps the beasts would be so caught up in their feeding frenzy that he could slip past them unnoticed (to – he added, with a rueful inner voice – fall into the sun instead of being eaten alive – only very marginally the better of two horrible fates). Or perhaps the presence of such a large meal, surely a rare occurrence in the life-cycle of the creatures, would have driven them into an ecstasy of violence, and any morsel that passed would be shredded? For all he knew, the childranha were peaceful sluggish fish most of the time, and it was only the presence of this whale-sized feast that had roiled them up.

  It was fruitless to wonder. Another spasm of pain passed through his jaw. He would find out soon enough. And then, because Lebret had been trained to think dialectically, he found himself arguing the contrary position. Might it not be better for the fish to get him? Clearly it would be painful to be torn to pieces, but it would be over quickly – and was he not already in pain? On the other hand, if he escaped the fish, there was every chance that his death would be as protracted and horrible as a witch being burnt alive at the stake.

  Something swam past him, several metres below; and at almost exactly the same time a shape lurched towards his face. He glimpsed twin zig-zag lines of teeth, and two close-set dolls’ eyes, and then he slashed out with the knife.

  The blade struck home, and the creature danced away; but the impact knocked the knife from his hand. He cursed aloud, and looked down to watch the metal blade sinking through the water below him. It wasn’t there. Almost too late he looked up – there was the knife, floating very slowly upwards. He reached out and grabbed it, missed his grip, tried again and took hold of it.

  He examined the blade, holding it close to his face-plate. Definitely metal. It clearly was falling; but equally it wasn’t falling quite as quickly as he was himself. But why should it fall through the water less rapidly than he, with his lungs full of buoyant air? It was nonsensical. This was an Alice-in-Wonderland dimension.

  Suddenly Lebret began to laugh. It was all absurd, simply absurd! Below his boots, the leviathan carcass was growing larger. The granulated waves crashing against its side and recoiling were acquiring definition, resolving into the great clusters of individual flesh-eating fish that they were.

  ‘En garde!’ Lebret cried in his best ‘Three Musketeers’ manner, ignoring the pain in his jaw. ‘Have at you!’ He brandished the small knife.

  A flag fluttered slowly below him, black against the blue-white light. It coiled away, folded up to became almost invisible; then it unfurled again. It seemed to be floating up towards him; but, Lebret knew, that was in illusion – it was actually hanging in the water as he sank towards it. He came within ten metres of it before he saw it for what it was.

  It was a ripped and opened-out stretch of the fabric out of which diving suits were made.

  There was no mistaking it. Lebret knew it instantly for what it was; and what it meant. De Chant had passed this way, encountered the childranha, and then had been pulled out of his suit and devoured.

  ‘Well,’ Lebret said. ‘So now I know!’

  He was heading towards the largest concentration of the beasts. It would soon be over.

  The stretch of ruined wetsuit folded and unfolded slowly in the eddies caused by the massed motion of the fish below.

  Lebret drew a deep breath into his lungs, and tried to centre himself. He had been many things in his life, including spy; but he had also once been a soldier. And one great virtue of being trained as a soldier is that it teaches you how best to meet death. The best way to meet death is: fighting.

  One moment Lebret was sinking through the clear, bright-lit water, and the chaos of the childranha feeding frenzy was below him. The next he plunged, boot-first, right into the midst of it. It was not possible to select individual targets. He swung his knife about him in a rapid series of arcs.

  22

  THE FATHOMLESS DEPTHS

  The light from the sun was extinguished. Lebret entered the vale of shadow. He felt motion all around him as turbulence in the water, and as myriad bumps and knocks. The wave of childranha surged past him, swimming as one towards the leviathan. Lebret felt a dozen sharp points of pain, and lashed out as well as he could with his knife. But they were all over him – biting through his suit at his legs and arms, at his neck and stomach.

  There was a powerful and sudden pain in his left calf. He drew his legs up to his chest so as to able to bring his knife within reach, and cut down at the beast that was biting there. The blade slid easily into its flesh, and the creature released its bite, but the damage was done – a chunk of leg-meat bitten away. The intensity of the pain surprised Lebret. He would not have said that he had become accustomed to the pain in his jaw, and his skull still rang with acute physical suffering; but this new hurt was savage enough to drown out even that.

  It roused him. He thrashed left and right, up and down with his little knife, yelling. With the cry a great caul of air was released from his regulator, and the childranha at his neck and chest reeled away with muscular twists of their tails. With his right hand he stabbed down over and again, and with his left hand he scooped and waved as much of the air downwards as he could.

  All around him the light was dappled by the throng of fish in motion. It was loud in his ears, the flutter and drum-roll noise. He was buffeted. New points of pain stabbed in at him, on his shoulder blade, on his arm, on his left foot.

  And then, as suddenly as he had entered the school, he dropped below it. The fish swarmed above him, a shimmering dark ceiling of living creatures an arm’s length above – and then ten metres above him – and then twenty. One beast remained, its teeth sunk agonisingly into Lebret’s left foot. Gasping, he stabbed at it, cutting it in several places before it let go to lollop off through the water, upwards, to join its fellows.

  Lebret hardly had
time to take stock. He could still breathe, that was one thing – it was a miracle none of the monsters had severed his air-line. But he ached in a dozen places, and his left leg was the site, at calf and foot, of two raging foci of pain that rivalled his broken jaw in their intensity.

  The water around him was now very hot. He was sweating inside the face-plate; and his suit, now shredded and tattered, offered little protection against the scalding water. At least it was – evidently – too hot for the childranha; although that was meagre enough comfort. The sub oceanic sun was large and very bright, directly below him. There was no doubt that he was falling directly towards it.

  ‘Should I pray?’ he said aloud. Thoughts of his first communion returned to him – childhood Sundays in church, the old familiar words. But that would be a betrayal of the dialectical materialism that had subsequently converted him. And even the superstitious core of his mind, the part that rationality and maturity can never quite eradicate – even that remnant of his childish belief could not accept that the God of Abraham and Jesus was present down here. Wherever here was, he had travelled very far from the sites holy to that Deity. Maybe he should pray to a new god? Some alien Neptune?

  But how would he know which was the true suboceanic power?

  Lebret grew still hotter. He became aware that he was very thirsty, and then he considered how strange to be so thirsty whilst surrounded by water. ‘But a man cannot drink brine,’ he muttered to himself, his jaw creaking and sparking with pain as he moved it. Then he remembered – this was no terrestrial ocean – this was another body of water altogether, and not salty. He could drink it, if he wished to. All he needed to do was remove his face-plate; but if he did that, then he would drown. And anyway, this water was too hot. What he wanted was a cold glass, with ice-cubes in it. Or a beer! A cold beer, transparent pimples of moisture on the outside of the bottle, that little exhalation of visible gas, like breath, when the lid was prised off.