by Adam Roberts
His eyes were closing of their own accord. He had to will himself to keep them open. But why was he bothering to do that? There was nothing to see, now, but brightness. His mouth was dry, although his face was runny with sweat.
And then he became aware of a new sensation, deep in his gut. It was like driving a car in a straight line, and then cornering. He felt tugged from true.
It was weird, but undeniable. His whole body thrummed, his limbs trembled.
Slowly, like a blimp banking and drifting through the air, the sun moved.
‘Galileo Galilei!’ gasped Lebret. But there was no mistaking it – the sun was hauling itself away to the right. The water was desperately hot. Lebret squeezed his eyes shut – for an intense moment he wanted, more than anything in the world, to be able to pull off his face-mask, to rub his face with a towel. It itched almost unbearably. But he resisted the impulse to fiddle with his mask, and shortly the urge passed.
Slowly, very slowly, the sun swung about until it was away to his right. He knew he was still dropping through the water, but it was difficult to grasp the passage of time. Maybe he slept, or passed out, or something.
The next thing he knew was the flicker of movement below him. Somehow he had fallen past the sun – and that meant that he would soon fall back into the sphere occupied by the childranha.
But he felt a little more alert. The water was still hot, but less so. He looked down upon his own body, the diving suit ripped and torn in two dozen places. At least, he thought, I have descended further than de Chante managed, the poor fellow.
An idea occurred to him. He tucked his knife back into its little pocket, and used both hands to scoop air bubbles and smooth them over his skin. Little patches and pearls of air caught in the folds and rips of his suit and stayed there, glinting like silver. He worked carefully, like a cat grooming itself, and managed to spread a layer of air over most of his body. It was not a continuous covering, and it might prove useless in protecting him against the creatures – but perhaps it was better than nothing.
He brought out his knife again. For a while he amused himself by holding it down by his knees, letting go of the blade and watching it float up his body before grabbing it again. As if it were made of wood instead of iron! There must be some explanation for this mystery.
The motion below him was intermittent; no great swarms of the creatures moved below him – there being, he supposed, no great feast of dead leviathan flesh to draw them. Perhaps the bulk of the population of childranha has swum round and above, to where the food was. But there were still some down there. Lebret readied himself.
Time passed. The water began to cool. He could feel it.
A single fish lurched up at him, teeth flashing. He swept the knife in an arc in front of his chest, but the beast seemed to misjudge Lebret’s location in the water, and swept past him. He twisted his head, his jaw complaining at the action. He could hear as well as see the scissory snip-snap of the thing’s jaws in the water. It was biting at his blood, a scarf-life dissipating trail which was accompanying his descent. Why should his blood sink through the water faster than an iron knife-blade?
Lebret wriggled in the water, and rotated his position, to bring his blade to bear. But the fish was out of range, and seemed uninterested in him.
A line of three childranha snaked up at him from his left; he thrashed out with his boot and connected with one’s snout – the odd little button protrusion in the middle of its circular face. It didn’t like that, reeled away. But another swerved in and fixed its teeth in at the open wound in Lebret’s calf. He swore, and slashed out with the knife.
The blade cut deep into the beast’s back, severing its spine. This had the unfortunate effect of clamping the creature’s teeth into Lebret’s flesh in a death-rictus. He howled again, and tried to get the knife blade in to prise the jaws open. Other childranha were zeroing in on him, swimming up from the left and right.
One of the creatures swept up towards Lebret’s face, but was forced away by the air. Three or four more went for his wounded leg and foot; but two of these bit into the body of the dead fish already attached there. They began worrying at the corpse, which shook Lebret’s limbs and body painfully. The others darted off.
He slashed out again, and with two deep jabs he cut away the bulk of the body of the dead beast. The decapitated chunk slipped upwards past him, trailing black blood into the water, and the childranha all went after it. Only one remained, nipping at the diving-suit fabric, and Lebret was able to dislodge it.
Soon enough he was sinking into cooler, darker water, and the unwanted attentions of the childranha were behind him – or above him.
He pulled up his hurt left leg, tucked it into his stomach, the better to be able to work into the attached head of the fish with his knife blade. Trying to lever the teeth from their grip had little effect, apart, that is, from sending stabs of agony up and down his limb. He changed tack, and dug into the side of the creature’s jaw, gouging out chunks of matter that slipped up past him. Soon enough he exposed the cartilaginous skull of the thing, and with a few quick stabs he broke open the hinge of the jaw. Then, stowing the knife carefully in its pouch, he prised the two portions apart, and pulled the teeth from their puncture wounds. It was unpleasant work, and sent sparkles of sharper pain shooting over the backdrop of more general agony.
Blood seeped from the leg. But there was nothing he could do about that, and the exsanguination was not too severe.
Lebret looked around him. Craning his head back, he could see the suboceanic sun above him, and the glittery shimmer of its attendant life forms swirling and swimming. Below, though, was only darkness.
It occurred to Lebret that he had escaped two very unpleasant deaths – being torn to pieces and being boiled alive – only to encounter a third: asphyxiation. Eventually the air in his tank would run out, and he would choke. He could simply wait for that grim eventuality. Or he could simply pull the mask from his face and drown.
He smiled.
It was not possible to know how long he sank through those waters. It felt like days, but he doubted the three narrow tanks on his back contained so much air. Incrementally the water darkened around him, and chilled. There was a period when this was pleasant, after the scorching water above; but soon enough he was shivering. He was weak with thirst and prolonged pain, and presumably from blood-loss too; but he was also wholly and completely alone.
Down he went, eternally. His whole body was in pain. Soon enough the thirst grew so intense that he decided to risk removing his face mask.
He took a breath, pushed the mouthpiece out with his tongue and mask up just a little. The weird physics of this ocean meant that the air inside the mask did not bubble and gush away as he did this. In fact almost no water got inside the mask. Still holding his breath, Lebret gulped one, two, three mouthfuls of water. It was cold, and piqued pain from his hurt jaw, but it tasted clean, unsalty – even delicious. He was able to replace the mask and start breathing again without hiccough.
Assuaging his thirst provided only temporary respite, however. It allowed the many other aches and agonies of his battered body to press upon his consciousness. His jaw raged; his left leg was a string of separate little agonies; there were nicks and bruises all over his body.
It was darker still, and colder. Down, further down, and deeper …
Lebret dozed. He was not aware of falling asleep; and only knew that he had because he dreamt of monster-fish swarming up at him, and woke with a start to find himself scrabbling for his knife. But there were no fish, and he recognised the sensation – of sudden awakening – for what it was.
Soon enough his heart settled.
He pondered his situation. Was there any way he could work it exactly how much air he had? He tried wriggling to look over his own shoulder at the tanks, but the valves and dials were not accessible. He hung in the nothingness for a while, and a sensation of despondency stirred inside him. Surely it was demeaning merely to wa
it, passively, for his fate? But what else could he do?
His leg had stopped bleeding, at any rate. This was hard to see, for the light had dimmed almost to total black, but he could just about see detail in his own shadowy limbs. Tipping his head back, and ignoring the twinges the motion sent along his wounded jaw, he could make out the sub oceanic sun as a smudgy dot of brightness. But all around was murky. The dark material of the diving suit merged with the surrounding blackness, and his pale skin, visible through rents in the cloth, gleaming faintly, gave back the impression of a disconnected spread of oddly shaped items. As if his body had been metamorphosed into a shoal.
He thought back to the Plongeur, far above him now. How were they faring aboard that submarine? Billiard-Fanon had the pistol. He had probably shot Ghatwala by now, and possibly Jhutti too – poor, blameless Amanpreet Jhutti, who knew nothing about the message, or the real agenda behind Lebret and Ghatwala’s involvement in the voyage. Still, everybody aboard that particular experimental French Naval Vessel would be dead soon, so their murders were almost inconsequential.
His mind drifted. Without sensory inputs he found his mind defocusing. Random memories spilled-in. A sensory deprivation tank – the KGB had showed him one of those, in Termez. They said: Moscow colleagues still favour the old Cossack brutalities: beatings and fingernail-wrenchings and the judicious application of electrical shocks. But – (Lebret could picture him now; a corpulent KGB officer called Seleznyov, with an oriental cast to his features, a fat black beard and bald brow with conch-like wrinkles curving upon it) – but, Seleznyov said, down here we have discovered that this simple box works better. Not for everyone. Mystics and Chinese are hardly touched by it. But Westerners (and here, Seleznyov eyed Lebret saucily) can’t bear it. Left alone with nothing but their decadent thoughts! They break. After a couple of days, bring them back out of the box and they’ll answer any question rather than go back inside.
Am I in such a box? Lebret wondered. The blackness was deeper now; the glimmers became fainter, and then were swallowed by the crow-coloured water. But sensory deprivation was impossible – the pain in his jaw, and to a slightly lesser extent in his left leg, kept agitating his mind, and refused to let him settle.
He was conscious, or not, or he was on some borderline between the two states of mind. It hardly mattered any more. He was sinking down and down. He fantasised about finally arriving at the ocean floor of this alien sea, and standing upon it. But there was no bottom. He would soon die, and then his corpse would sink forever through this infinite body of black water.
He thought about the native life forms. The disturbingly human quality they betrayed. A random chance, thrown up by a different evolutionary line? Uncanny, certainly. Were they terrestrial forms of life that had slipped through the same crack that had brought the Plongeur here? It was possible.
His mind wandered. He did not sleep, but hung for a long time conscious of nothing but the acid sensation of pain within his own body. He was grimly impressed by his own nervous system’s persistence. He felt like crying out: ‘Alright! You have made your point! I understand! Torn skin – broken bones – yes, yes, I get it! There is no need to go on so!’ But the body does not listen to such entreaty.
The sun above him had become only a faint star, casting no illumination. Then he lost sight of it altogether. He was in perfect blackness.
Down and down and down.
How would he know that the air was going bad? Would he begin to hallucinate? Would he last long enough to drift into the ambit of a third sub oceanic sun, with who knows what horrific native fishy monsters circling it like planets in outer space? Surely not! He tried, for a while, breathing shallowly, to conserve such air supply as he had. But then he thought, what is the point in postponing the inevitable? Then he considered simply taking charge of his destiny, putting an end to his physical torment and committing suicide. But something held him back. A residual Catholicism? It hardly mattered. He did not believe that God was here, about to scoop him into his giant hand and press him to his tender breast. That could never be. Whether he acted or did not act was equally irrelevant.
Below him something was glimmering, very faint but definitely there. A monster of the deep? Lebret’s heart began to thud in his breast. The shape loomed closer, acquired definition.
It was a gigantic hand, glowing faintly. It was a hundred metres long – twice a hundred metres, the fingers pressed together, reaching beneath him to catch.
Lebret felt a flash of panic. He couldn’t have explained why – except the thought that a human form of titanic proportions (if that was his hand, then how big must the whole body be!) was somehow here, in this fantastically distant and alien sea – that this entity was reaching out to catch him, Alain Lebret, out of all the morsels falling through the water … Somehow this terrified him.
He began to wriggle, to struggle. It hurt to kick out with his left leg, but he thrashed with his right and crawled at the water with his arms. Perhaps he could swim so as to miss the giant hand.
He was closer to it now. Then, with a rush, he was level with it – it horizoned him, gleaming pink-white, and he landed upon it, actually touched down. The substance was hard, but not wholly unyielding; something dense and packed, like coral. Whatever it was, it was not flesh.
Lebret hit the surface like a parachutist reaching the ground. It jarred through his wounded foot, and sent a shock of pain up his spine; but he rolled with the blow and sprawled sideways upon it.
23
THE HAND
Fear had nested inside Lebret now. He was not acting rationally. You might think he would be grateful to have found a platform – somewhere to stand, instead of continuing to fall through infinite water forever. But he was not thinking in any logical way about his situation. He felt a grip of certainty that the hand was about to fold over, to close into a fist with him in the middle – that it was going to crush him. In that moment such a fate scared him more profoundly than being burnt to death in a suboceanic sun, or devoured by the childranha.
He got to his feet, and ran towards the edge of the hand. It was that comical, slow-motion underwater running – yet, he did move, his feet striking the platform below him and gaining a degree of traction. It did not take him long to get to the edge, and then he hurled himself free of the shape, to sink once again through the infinite depths. Better that, than …
Than what?
He did not sink.
The glimmering shape of the gigantic, outstretched hand hovered a couple of metres away and a metre above him. At first he assumed it was falling with him; but the tug in his gut was absent. More, the pain in his jaw was markedly less than it had been.
He floated in the water for a little. Though there was very little light, it was possible to see the underside of the hand. This was enough to see that it wasn’t a hand at all. It was, on the contrary, a huge conch shell – improbably massive, but recognisably marine, nevertheless.
Cautiously kicking out with his good leg, Lebret swam up through the water. Once he was above the level of the giant spread-out scallop he felt the tug resume, and in a moment he was drawn back down onto the platform.
He stood up, feeling calmer. Regarding it now, he was surprised he had ever thought that this structure was a hand: its fan-shape and the broad, shallow flutes all leading towards its tapering end – all this said ‘shell’ very clearly. Yet it did not appear to be made of shell-stuff. Crouching down, Lebret poked at the substance with his bare fingers. It felt firm, with only a slightly spongy give to it, as if constructed of close-packed fibres. It had a consistency somewhere between stone and plastic.
He stood up again. He felt light-headed. Perhaps his air was finally running out. Perhaps all this was a hallucination – a dying man’s vision. If so, Lebret thought, then I might as well explore it.
He made his way along the length of the gigantic scallop shape, towards its narrow end. The light grew a little brighter, and soon enough he saw why – in at the stem
of the giant shell was a circle of light, a metre or so wide. Bending down, he looked into this.
It was a window.
On the far side was a circular corridor leading down, a clean white colour, lit with lamps inset into its walls. There was no ladder, and the corridor stretched many metres before opening out into – Lebret peered, trying to make out – a larger chamber.
He felt around the rim of this window with his fingers, and, as in a dream, found a catch. It pulled easily, and the window slid away. Lebret reached inside, through a wall of standing water and into air.
There seemed little point in delaying. Lebret thrust his head through the hole, out of water and into the air. The rest of his body followed and his sense of up-and-down deserted him. He was floating head down, except that it didn’t feel that way. It felt as if the corridor had swung about. There was plenty of room to bring his legs about, and look back where he had come – the water was a membrane, bleeding spits and dribbles into the corridor, but otherwise not penetrating. There was a little red-button in by the rim. Lebret pushed this and the window slid back into place.
He pulled off his mask, and sniffed the air cautiously. It seemed breathable. Indeed, it tasted a good deal sweeter than the stuff in his tank.
The pain in his jaw was much reduced; although, as if following some pitiless cosmic logic of the balance of pain, the wounds in his leg and foot seemed sharper and more defined.
He wriggled free of the triple tank, and pressed his wet hair against his scalp. Droplets of water floated all around him.
‘Hello?’ he called, wincing as his jaw complained at the movement. ‘Who is there?’
There was no reply. Well, there was no point in coming this far and then loitering in the corridor. Lebret put his palms on the smooth white sides, pressed with his good foot on the other side, and propelled himself along.