by Adam Roberts
The corridor was longer than it had appeared from outside; but eventually Lebret came to the end, and passed through into a large, bulb-shaped chamber.
It was approximately the size of a two-storey house, without internal walls or divisions but with shelves, oriented variously, and with diverse items of mechanical or technological cast upon them. The space, like the corridor, was white-coloured and clean; and on the far side a large circular bulge shimmered dark-grey – water, Lebret assumed. But he took hardly any of this in, because the room’s occupant so startled and alarmed him.
That occupant was a human head, three or four times the conventional proportions. So monstrous was this apparition, indeed, that Lebret stared for a long time before registering the entity’s body at all – a regular-sized body, with a plump stomach, but with four legs in addition to the conventional two arms. At the end of each of the four legs was flat and broad appendage, more like a paddle than a human foot.
The being’s face was unmistakably human: dark brown of skin, with a nose so large and pronouncedly aquiline it almost resembled a shark’s fin. The eyes, though comparatively small in the broad face, were bright and alert. They were old eyes. There was no mistaking that about them. The forehead was smooth and broad, the black hair slicked back into a queue. The oddest thing about this individual – his size aside – was his beard. It looked like a regular beard, although unusually bushy and capacious, the strands of hair coiling and twisting in the zero-gravity of that strange place. But Lebret looked again and saw that the individual strands of the being’s beard were not hair, but rather twisting tentacular filaments, moving not with any random action but purposefully, deliberately. The beard coiled and moved before the strange being’s face.
This person (for I suppose we must call him a person) looked at Lebret. The beard shifted, opening a gap through which a wide mouth and little peg-like, wide-set teeth were visible.
‘My dear fellow,’ said the being, in flawless French. ‘What on earth has happened to you?’
‘Dakkar?’ gasped Lebret, feeling woozy.
‘Good gracious, your leg! And your face! What has happened to your face? And where – and where is everybody else?’ He floated towards Lebret, accompanied by little squirting noises. The beard folded its myriad fronds about the mouth. Lebret, unable to prevent himself flinching away, noticed that the tentacles were all covered in tiny beads of water.
‘I’m sorry, Monsieur,’ said Lebret, tears springing in at his eyes. ‘You are too – repulsive to – too repulsive to—’
‘Come!’ insisted Dakkar. His voice was high-pitched, even squeaky, and at odds with the over-sized head through which it emerged. ‘You must have medical attention for your wounds!’
24
DAKKAR
Dakkar led him to the other side of the chamber, and dived into the bubble of water. Lebret was shuddering. There was something unpleasantly insectile about the fellow’s motion – quite apart from his hideous appearance. The urge to flee was strong within him; but where would he go? Back onto the corridor to wear again the breathing apparatus (surely out of air, now) and into the black sea? His leg was raw with pain; at a dozen places his body ached and stung – most of all, he was exhausted.
Soon enough Dakkar reappeared. Shedding beads of water to float weightlessly in the air, his beard twisting monstrously, he scuttled over to where Lebret waited. ‘Here,’ he offered. ‘It is the best I can offer by way of analgesic.’
He passed over a small, squishy object, like a marshmallow or a child’s sweet. Lebret did not even pause. Why should he? He chewed the thing – it was sweet to taste – and then spoke. ‘Can I have a drink?’
‘The entire universe here is potable!’ Dakkar replied. ‘Surely you have discovered that? If you are thirsty, drink from the pool.’ He gestured to the bulge of water through which he had recently emerged. Though Dakkar’s arm was normal size, and the head disproportionate, the lack of any other visual clues kept tricking Lebret into seeing him as a normal man with a hideously wizened and shrunken body.
‘In a moment,’ Lebret gasped.
‘What is your name?’
‘Lebret.’
‘Well, Monsieur Lebret. Let me examine you,’ Dakkar said, bringing his enormous face close. His beard smelled strange; not excessively unpleasant, but unusual – an oily, or sour smell. Lebret was simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the ghastly motion of its component strands.
‘You are Dakkar?’ he asked.
‘Call me that, by all means,’ replied Dakkar. ‘What happened to your mouth?’
‘A man called Billiard-Fanon,’ Lebret said, wincing at the plosives, ‘shot me.’
‘Shot you? With a gun?’ Dakkar asked. Lebret nodded. ‘Shot you with a gun in the mouth? Why then, you are a lucky individual! Such a thing should have been fatal.’
‘Your beard,’ Lebret gasped.
‘It is strange to you,’ Dakkar said, distractedly, angling his giant face left and right. ‘Permit me?’ He touched the outside of Lebret’s wounded jaw with his hands – an old man’s hands, wrinkled and spotted, not in keeping with the stretched, smooth appearance of the skin of his face. ‘There is a crack in the bone of the jaw, I think,’ he said. ‘And several teeth have been knocked out. Well, well, I will heal it, as well as I can … the crack, I mean. The teeth are gone. Not milk teeth either! They’ll not grow back, on their own!’
‘I did not think you a dentist,’ Lebret muttered.
‘Oh, don’t misunderstand me – I can fix your teeth. But with a cartilaginous material, not with bone. It would be easy, but you might not like the results. From a cosmetic perspective, I mean.’
‘I can live without a few teeth,’ said Lebret, wondering what on earth Dakkar meant.
‘Let me look at the leg. Please – take off this diving suit. It is so tattered and ripped it will fall apart soon, anyway.’
‘I am,’ said Lebret, pausing, ‘reluctant.’
‘This is no place for your pudeur!’ declared Dakkar. ‘Look at me! You think I care for appearances, or for bourgeois convention? Unless you mean to say that it is too cold in here?’
As a matter of fact, it was exactly the right temperature. Lebret said, ‘It is not that. Only …’
‘Come! Think of me as a doctor.’
Slowly, Lebret began to peel off his shredded suit. Dakkar examined his leg. ‘The flesh of the calf should present no problem; but there are some scraps gouged from the bones of your right foot.’
‘It was – bitten.’
Dakkar smiled. The strands of his beard parted to reveal a satchel of some kind, slung across his chest. From this he brought out two oval shapes of a fabric Lebret did not recognise. He applied one to each of the two larger wounds on Lebret’s leg. They felt slimier and more substantial than bandage cloth. He did not enquire more closely.
The pain was shrinking within him. ‘Your analgesic is very effective,’ he reported.
‘Yes. You must not move your jaw unnecessarily, however. You will need to rest it, for the normal healing processes to work. It will take some time.’
Lebret stared at him. ‘What happened,’ he asked, ‘to your head? You were not born so?’
At this Dakkar laughed aloud. ‘Certainly not! I would have been displayed in every freak show from Abbottabad to Kerala! No, no, this has grown over the last several decades.’
‘Why?’
‘Partly to allow for the increased density and number of cellular connections, as is required by my greatly enhanced capacity for mentation. Although, partly, it is a function of other enhancements. You are fascinated by my beard?’
‘Repelled,’ groaned Lebret. ‘But – yes, fascinated too.’
‘The actual component tendrils are wired-in, if you permit the metaphor, to my frontal cortex – the nerve bundles run up here,’ he touched his temples, beside his eyes, with both hands.
‘Why?’
‘It helps with both future planning and memory. Wh
en you get to my age, M’sieur, you need as much help as you can get! But the beard has other functions. It is a large surface area, which is easy to saturate with water, which in turn keeps my mouth and lungs moist when I am, as I now am, in air.’
‘Air is no longer your natural element?’
‘I am perfectly comfortable in air,’ Dakkar insisted. ‘But consider the nature of the universe we currently inhabit! Water is ubiquitous.’
‘You undertook these … alterations yourself?’
‘I have acquired many skills,’ said Dakkar, evasively. ‘Many skills. Although I am not so talented as to—’ He trailed off.
‘It is monstrous,’ Lebret moaned, looking away.
‘You’ll soon get used to it. Now, tell me. Where is everybody else?’
‘Everybody else?’
‘You will not tell me,’ insisted Dakkar, ‘that you swam all the way down here in that raggedy diving suit?’
‘The Plongeur you mean?’
‘Is that the name you have given the submarine?’
‘What do you know about the submarine?’
‘I didn’t know its name!’ Dakkar laughed again. ‘I could tell you its mass however, to the last gram.’
The pain had almost entirely gone from Lebret’s face and leg, now. He was aware only very distantly of an achy tinge to the right side of jaw. He rubbed his eyes. ‘I don’t understand,’ he confessed.
‘You disappoint me,’ said Dakkar, shaking his huge head slowly. He floated a little further off, and said. ‘You must have known – all of you, inside the Plongeur, that you had passed beyond the limit of terrestrial oceans? You must have determined that you were inside a cosmos of water?’
‘We,’ said Lebret. ‘Or I presumed so.’
‘Well then! How was it that you still had weight? How was it that the Plongeur continued – plunging? Eh?’
‘I don’t know. We did not know.’
‘It is a simple matter of deduction,’ said Dakkar, rebukingly. ‘Clearly something was drawing you onward. Down, if you wish to call it that.’
Lebret forced himself to look again at Dakkar’s huge face. ‘You,’ he said.
‘Indeed.’
Something was teeter-tottering inside Lebret’s consciousness. He felt as if were about to swoon. ‘How?’ he asked.
‘As to how,’ said Dakkar, ‘it is a little complicated. I fastened onto calcium with a draw of a certain force; and at the same time I fastened onto iron – in the vessel’s hull and fittings – with a slightly lesser force. Take the latter away from the former and you have the simulated gravity that enabled you to walk about the decks of your submarine craft.’
‘But,’ Lebret said again. ‘How?’
‘Not with any direct connection, obviously,’ said Dakkar. ‘Not after the manner of a radio signal, or anything like that. When you first emerged here, you were many hundreds of thousands of kilometres away. Have you heard of infraspace?’
‘No.’
‘It may be a matter of terminology. Well, well. Things that happen in material space, the four dimensions we all inhabit – here, or back on earth. But equal-and-opposite things happen on the other side of the dividing line, in infraspace. It is dimensional, but configured according to a rather different logic. Anyway, anyway, let me not lecture you. The drawing-down force I applied to you operates via infraspace, at any rate. I isolated calcium on the one hand, since it is very rare in this place – except, of course, in your skeletons! Iron is rare too. I created traction and drew those elements to me. That would bring you soon enough down to me.’
‘But why?’
‘Why? My dear fellow! Without it, you’d have been drifting around aimlessly for immemorial ages! How would you have found me? Although –’ Dakkar floated a little closer, and looked again at Lebret’s jaw, ‘– it must have tugged most painfully upon your broken bone. I am sorry! I had no notion.’
‘Calcium?’
‘Yes, metals are rare here. The heavy elements, generally speaking, are rare. In the vacuum cosmos they are formed inside supernovae, you know. But there is not an equivalent phenomenon here. Hence, iron too … there’s precious little of that.’
Lebret’s temper sparked. ‘You nearly dragged us into one of these strange sub oceanic suns!’ he complained.
‘Yes,’ agreed Dakkar, nodding slowly. ‘I am sorry about that. There were two stars between here and where you were – and though small, they both exerted a distorting effect within infraspace. Equal and opposite, you see. It means that the geometrical connection between the scallop shell and the metals it was tuned-to became … a little twisted about. I hope you didn’t become too overheated? There isn’t a way of threading the connection entirely past the stars, I’m afraid.’
‘We were attacked,’ Lebret said. ‘I was attacked!’
‘Ah, the life forms, the ecosystems, yes, I can well believe it. They did that to your leg and foot, I suppose? Yes, yes, I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can, ah, do about them, I’m afraid. Even the Great Jewel has more or less abandoned them to themselves.’
‘I do not understand,’ Lebret complained.
‘The lines of force of this suction ray tangled a little with the profiles of the two stars – the profiles in infraspace, I mean.’
‘So you are drawing the crew – and the vessel itself – here?’
‘To the platform outside. That’s why I constructed it … well, I grew it. A lot of the technology down here is grown.’
‘When will it arrive?’
‘More force was focused on the calcium – on you – to give you the experience of gravity within your vessel. When you left the craft, you accordingly “fell” more rapidly. But why did you leave the vessel? It was surely a very foolhardy thing to do!’
‘I didn’t know!’ said Lebret. ‘How could I?’
‘But you must have realised that something like this was going on?’
‘Something like what?’ gasped Lebret.
‘You must have understood that some force was being applied to your vessel!’
‘Understand?’ Lebret retorted, angrily. ‘How could we possibly understand?’
But his irritation was matched, abruptly, by Dakkar’s. ‘You’re scientists, aren’t you? Couldn’t you deduce it? What did you think was happening?’
‘We,’ Lebret snapped back, but with that syllable all his ersatz-anger vanished. Tiredness sloshed within him. ‘We didn’t know,’ he concluded, feeling ashamed.
‘It was only calcium that was being drawn down. Calcium and iron – the iron to a measurably lesser extent – was being drawn down. The rest of the materials inside your submarine must have floated – must have flown around! What did you think?’
‘Some people,’ Lebret confessed, ‘suggested poltergeists.’
‘Poltergeists!’ Dakkar’s huge face registered astonishment. ‘Are you all idiots?’
‘It was a chaotic time,’ said Lebret, weakly.
‘Poltergeists!’ repeated Dakkar, disbelievingly. ‘I was certain it would be scientists who responded to my message! Instead they have sent down a clutch of gullible mystics and table-rappers!’ He sounded genuinely disgusted.
‘The—the shock,’ said Lebret. ‘Of entering this place. The … strangeness of it.’
‘Strangeness? Surely you were expecting strangeness?’
‘The voyage was—’ Lebret said. ‘Look. Look, I must be honest with you.’
‘Indeed you must!’ said the gigantic head, in a thunderous voice, his tentacular beard writhing like a Medusa’s tangle.
‘The situation on, on earth is complicated.’
‘You mean politics?’ Dakkar spat the word, with immeasurable contempt.
‘Indeed. Since you were there, events have – it is complicated.’ Lebret ran the fingers of his right hand over his broken jaw. ‘Your painkillers have worked extremely well, but presumably they will not work forever. And forming words is – difficult, with the swelling.’
‘I ca
n comprehend you very well,’ Dakkar said.
‘I am only saying, I must be brief. There was a world war. This would have been after you left – a cataclysmic war, dozens of millions were killed. It dealt a terrible blow to France, in particular.’
‘There is always war,’ said Dakkar, coldly. ‘There will always be war, whilst empires oppress and distort human potential.’
Lebret leapt at this. ‘Exactly! These are exactly my beliefs! This is why I have done what I have done. You see, out of that war, the First World War as history now calls it, came one great thing. A revolution, in Russia; the overthrow of the Czar and a new form of government based on principles of human co-operation and equality, inspired by the teachings of Karl Marx!’
‘Marx,’ said Dakkar. ‘I met him, once.’
‘You did?’
‘He struck me as a conservative thinker.’
Lebret opened his eyes very wide. ‘On the contrary!’ he said. ‘He is the most forward-looking of …’
‘If he is forward-looking,’ interrupted Dakkar, ‘then why can he only conceptualise revolution in terms of the tools of history? I read his book. His plan was to replicate the uprising of Spartacus.’
‘A mass rising, yes,’ said Lebret. ‘But their, I mean our populousness is the great weapon of the proletariat! As the Swedish poet Per Sitchelli wrote, rise like lions after slumber, you are many, they are few.’
‘The future cannot be won with the weapons of the past,’ insisted Dakkar. ‘To rise up like Spartacus will only lead to millions of ordinary people being crucified, and the Caesars – and Czars – retaining an even tighter grip on power. No, no, the future must be won for justice and equality with the weapons of the future.’
‘Ah!’ said Lebret. ‘Such as this suction ray, that can draw metals to it over immense distances?’
‘That? That is nothing. One of the Jewel’s precious toys, that is all. Of very limited use, down here, I might add, with metals so scarce.’
‘You mentioned him before. Who is this Precious Jewel?’