by Adam Roberts
Cloche’s eyes widened again as he felt the metal touch him. He gave another convulsive kick with his right leg, and tried wriggling his whole body away from his assailant’s hold. It did no good.
Lebret was waiting, his head slightly inclined. In his eye was the same perfect blankness you see in a heron’s eye, as it holds the fish against the unflinching riverside rock, drowning its prey in air. And then—
Thud, thud, thud went Pannier. And tucked in the middle, another sound, almost exactly timed to coincide with the middle thud: a sharper-edged cracking sound.
Cloche’s head twitched upward. A thread of scarlet was picked out, suddenly, in the white of the left eye.
The force drained from his double grip on Lebret’s arm. The other man released his hold on Cloche’s throat, and brushed the captain’s hands away. They fell, nerveless, to flop against the mattress.
Lebret began to untangle his right hand, as if unpacking a present from a mess of white packing straw. He brought out two things: his small pistol in his hand, but also a long thread of grey wool. Lebret regarded this. It wasn’t wool – it was an upwards trailing thread of smoke.
It took a moment for Lebret to understand. He snatched his hand away at almost exactly the same time that the smoke kindled into a flash of flame, and the whole beard began to burn. A potent reek of singed hair filled the cabin. Flame tickled upwards.
Lebret stepped back.
Cloche’s body slumped slowly backwards, the back of his head striking the wall, his spine bowing out. His entire beard was alight now, myriad little orange-white flames shimmering across his chest and black smoke gushing upwards. This veil did not obscure the sight of the old man’s cheeks blackening and blistering.
Lebret pocketed his pistol, opened the captain’s door, checked the corridor and stepped into it. He had just reached his own door and opened it when the sound of a klaxon split the air.
He put one foot inside his room, in time to be able to make it look as though he was stepping out of his cabin – drawing the door shut behind him – as Le Petomain and Billiard-Fanon hurried into the corridor.
‘Fire alarm!’ called Billiard-Fanon.
‘Is that what it is?’ replied Lebret coolly. ‘I did wonder.’
‘Smoke – seeping around the captain’s door!’ cried Le Banquier.
‘Is it locked? Is the door locked?’ Billiard-Fanon demanded.
But Le Petomain had already opened the door. He recoiled as a billow of foul-smelling smoke burlied out. Then he covered his mouth with the crook of his arm, and dived in. Billiard-Fanon followed, and Lebret came to stand at the door.
‘Shall I fetch water?’ Lebret called. He could see what was happening inside the cabin – Le Petomain hauling the blanket from the captain’s bunk and wrapping it around the burning skull.
The alarm sounded, a hammer-drill din. Pannier’s banging at the door redoubled in intensity.
Le Petomain wrestled the captain from his bunk and onto the floor so as to be able to fold the blanket the whole way around. But it was all too obvious that Cloche was dead.
Coughing, Le Petomain piled the rest of the blanket about the site of the fire. The flames were stifled, but smoke filled the room. Billiard-Fanon was weeping, either at the shock and tragedy of his captain’s death, or else from the stinging, foul smoke.
The alarm stopped abruptly, leaving only Pannier’s rhythmic thumping at his cabin door. Boucher emerged into the corridor. ‘Where’s the fire?’
Lebret gestured into Cloche’s cabin. ‘Too late, I fear,’ he added, as the lieutenant peered around the door.
‘Good God!’ he exclaimed. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ gasped Billiard-Fanon, rubbing his eyes on the sleeves of his shirt.
‘He—he caught fire,’ said Le Petomain, between coughs. ‘He was on his bunk, and somehow – he caught fire!’
‘But how?’ demanded Boucher.
‘Spontaneous human combustion!’ said the ensign, in a scared voice. ‘I read about it in a novel – an English novel. A devilish thing!’
‘Unlikely,’ observed Lebret, drily.
Le Petomain stepped out of the cabin. His face was streaked with smuts, and his eyes were watering. ‘He was on his bunk. Did he—did he light a cigarette, and fall asleep? Did his cigarette fall into his beard and set it alight?’
‘It must be that,’ said Boucher.
Thud-thud, thud-thud, thud-thud went Pannier.
‘It must be that,’ the lieutenant repeated. ‘What a tragic accident!’
‘Are you sure he is dead?’ asked Lebret.
Le Petomain looked at the prone figure, his head wrapped in blanket. ‘Do you want me to … look? To check? I have been trained in First Aid.’
‘I will do it,’ said Boucher. ‘I’m—God of the depths, I suppose I’m in command now! It’s my duty.’
Thud-thud, thud-thud, thud-thud went Pannier. Boucher hollered, ‘Be quiet, Pannier!’
The banging stopped. ‘What’s happening?’ came Pannier’s voice. He sounded less drunk, although it was hard to tell through the door. ‘I heard the fire alarm.’
‘There’s been an … accident,’ said Billiard-Fanon. ‘God, first de Chante and now this! There’s a curse – upon this boat, a curse …’
‘Such talk,’ Lebret offered, ‘is surely not helpful.’
‘What’s going on?’ cried Pannier, inside his cabin.
‘The fire’s out now, don’t worry,’ Boucher called to the imprisoned cook. He turned his head away, took a deep breath, and then stepped into the captain’s berth. Going down onto his haunches beside Cloche’s body, he picked away the blanket. Scorched sheets, blue on one side and carbonised black on the other, came away in yard-wide flakes and flapped about the room. The last of the blanket unfolded in a great scorched crumple to reveal the top of Cloche’s captain’s jacket (weirdly untouched by flame) and the charcoal lump that had once been his head. Soot and smut swirled through the smoky air.
With a heave of his right arm Boucher turned the corpse over. Yellow teeth glinted in a scowl of black ashes. ‘Yes, gentlemen,’ said the lieutenant, standing up. ‘I think it’s fair to say – he is dead.’
Castor had appeared in the corridor. ‘What is it?’
‘The captain is dead,’ said Boucher, stepping back out from the scorched cabin.
‘He fell asleep in his bunk smoking a cigarette!’ said Billiard-Fanon, excitedly. ‘He set fire to his beard – burnt his whole head!’
‘Dead?’ called Pannier, from inside his cabin. ‘How? What’s that? What’s happened?’
‘No!’ said Castor, his face falling.
‘He cannot be,’ said Pannier.
‘He was a hero of the Republic!’ said Castor, in a desolated voice. ‘One of the finest naval officers France ever had! To die – like that? It’s … appalling.’
‘It is certainly that,’ said Lebret.
‘I can’t believe it!’ announced Boucher. ‘He set his beard on fire?’
‘Hard to credit,’ agreed Lebret. ‘Yet, here we are.’ He brought out his own silver cigarette case, and flipped it open; but then he noticed Boucher glowering at him. ‘Oh,’ he said, nodding. He folded away the case. ‘Insensitive of me – in the circumstances.’
11
COUNCIL OF WAR
The first order of business was to tidy away the captain’s body. Castor fetched a tarpaulin from the storeroom, and carefully wrapped Cloche’s corpse in it. Then, since there was nowhere better to stow it, he laid it back on its couch, and shut the door.
‘Isn’t burial at sea the usual procedure?’ Lebret drawled.
‘I refuse to kick Captain Cloche’s body out of the airlock, like so much rubbish,’ said Boucher. ‘Especially as we are not sailing the waters of any known ocean.’
‘I take the force of what you say,’ Lebret agreed. ‘Only – the captain’s cabin is no refrigerator. Shortly the body will start to decay.’
‘We are o
nly four days into our,’ Boucher returned, stumbling over the correct word. ‘Our,’ he said, casting about, ‘our extraordinary voyage – a mere four days. We must hope that this means we are no more than four days away from home.’
‘Hope is a splendid thing,’ was Lebret’s opinion.
The next thing was that Boucher decided to release Capot and Avocat from the brig. The situation was explained to them, and they were both visibly shaken to hear of Cloche’s death. Pannier began banging again at the inside of his door, like an ape in a cage. ‘If we let him out,’ Billiard-Fanon noted, ‘we won’t be able to keep him from the bottle.’
‘Let him sober up a little longer,’ Boucher agreed. ‘Everybody else: please join me in the mess. We must discuss the situation in which we find ourselves.’
*
With Pannier still locked up, and the captain dead, only nine men gathered in the mess. The mood was as you would expect it to be.
‘I’m in command now,’ said Boucher. ‘I’m not happy about that fact, but this is the way things are. And I will say this. Naturally we are all shocked by the horrible eventuality of the captain’s accidental demise. But there will be time to mourn correctly later – now is not the time to sink into depression.’
‘Sink,’ repeated Lebret in a low voice, smiling, as if the lieutenant had said something amusing. He looked around at the dour faces of the others, and breathed noisily in through his nose.
‘Our duty is to follow the captain’s last orders,’ went on Boucher, neither rebuking Lebret, nor meeting his eye. ‘He instructed us to repair the Plongeur, and to return home.’
‘An excellent idea!’ said Lebret in a loud voice. ‘Surely we are unanimous in our desire to return home.’ He looked around the mess. ‘The captain was quite correct to say that we are not equipped, even if we were in a fit state of repair, to explore this strange new realm into which we have – somehow – strayed.’
‘Moniseur Lebret,’ said Boucher, in a weak voice. ‘May I be permitted to … ?’
‘Please, Lieutenant. I am seeking only to support your authority, as the new commanding officer of this vessel. More, I may have been the last person with whom the captain spoke, before he had his … unfortunate accident.’
‘You?’
‘Yes, yes. He and I exchanged words in the corridor, before he went into his cabin and I to mine.’
‘Why was he in the corridor?’ snapped Billiard-Fanon.
‘I believe he had stepped out to order Pannier to cease his banging and yelling. I was in the corridor for the same reason.’
‘And what,’ Billiard-Fanon asked, with a degree of hostility, ‘did he say to you?’
‘He asked my opinion on the best way to get home.’
‘He asked your opinion?’ scoffed the ensign.
‘Indeed. It is possible,’ Lebret went on, reaching into his own jacket pocket to retrieve his cigarette case, ‘that he retired to his bunk precisely to contemplate the best way forward.’ He raised the case to his face, occluding it, and when he lowered it he had plucked out a cigarette with his mouth. His left hand was ready with the lighter. Nobody objected.
‘What is there to contemplate?’ demanded Castor, in a rough voice. ‘We mend the vanes, pump air fully into the tanks and float back up. We came here by sinking down, we go home by rising up.’
‘That would be one possible route,’ agreed Lebret, surrounding his head with spectral wraps of white smoke. ‘But there is another. Two ways home. The question – the question we must all now ponder – is: which is the less dangerous of the two?’
‘What other route?’ asked Lieutenant Boucher.
‘Let me say this,’ said Lebret, folding his arms with his smoking cigarette tucked in-between the little-finger and ring-finger of his left hand. ‘We must all acknowledge that we have passed through some crack in reality – some portal, some undersea gateway. We are no longer upon the earth.’
‘That is,’ growled Billiard-Fanon, ‘bizarre! Impossible to conceive of it.’
‘I do not pretend, messieurs,’ Lebret went on, ‘that I can entirely explain it. But certain features cannot be ignored. Clearly we are in a vast body of water, wheresoever we are. We know nothing about the portal by which we entered – what size it is, whether it permits only one-way traffic, and so on. Imagine that we spend three days floating upwards. Very well. Now ask yourself this – what are the chances we will locate exactly the right spot in an infinite ocean of dark water? And even if we happened to chance upon it – where would we re-emerge, in the earth? Why, at the bottom of the Atlantic! Descending slowly through those terrestrial waters, the pressure gradually building, almost crushed us! To return from these lesser pressures to those massive ones, abruptly, would certainly destroy us!’
‘We survived coming down,’ Billiard-Fanon pointed out. ‘We can survive going back up.’
‘But coming down the pressure gradually increased before suddenly relenting,’ said Lebret. ‘To return the same way would be to suddenly apply the pressures of the bottom of the Atlantic to our already battered vessel. It would destroy us.’
‘You have not yet said, Monsieur,’ pointed Le Petomain, ‘what our second route might be.’
‘I am not certain there is one,’ conceded Lebret. ‘But consider this – how can there be light, seemingly below us? What could possibly be shining, down there?’
Nobody answered at first. Finally Boucher said: ‘it is a mystery, I agree. But surely we all agree with Captain Cloche’s words – that it is not our business to investigate. Let the Institute of Marine Science send a specially prepared craft to follow our tracks – when we are home.’
Lebret held up his cigarette, like a miniature baton. ‘Permit me, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘How we get home is precisely the question we are discussing. With your permission, I will enumerate the possibilities – the light could be a phosphorescent phenomena, of a sort not previously encountered. Or it could, I suppose, be an artificial light source – created by the lamps of other sub oceanic vessels, or structures. Although I feel the range and extent of the brightness makes this unlikely. Or there is another possible explanation – and this is what made our esteemed captain pause for thought. It could be the sky.’
‘Pff!’ snorted Castor.
‘Attend,’ said Lebret, severely. ‘For what I shall say next, though complex, is of the utmost significance for our predicament. Among the many things we must explain is this one – how can the water pressure around us be so low? Evidently we are surrounded by a vast body of fluid! We have sunk through thousands of kilometres of water, so we are deeper than any earthly ocean. The pressure should, by now, be so immense as to crush us to shards. Why does it not? Because – perhaps – we are now in an infinite ocean!’
‘You must explain further,’ said Lieutenant Boucher.
‘Think of it as an analogue of the cosmos with which we are familiar: of infinite extent but filled almost entirely with empty space. What if there were another cosmos, likewise infinite, but filled instead with water?’
‘A strange hypothesis,’ said Boucher. ‘Although I concede that much that has happened over these last few days has been strange.’
‘Exactly! I ask – what would the pressure be inside an infinite ocean of water? Perhaps it would itself be infinite – or perhaps it would be zero, since any number divided by infinity (and the equations for water pressure require us to divide by the size of the body of water) must be as near zero as makes no odds. But how could the pressure be zero? We are, after all, surrounded by water molecules.’ He put his cigarette to his lips, breathed in, and pushed out a large, misty lozenge of smoke before going on. ‘I believe the pressure would be merely the standard pressure of the medium, its mass rather than its weight. Now, what follows? If we are within an infinite body of water?’
‘Monsieur,’ said Billiard-Fanon. ‘This is the realm of Alice in Wonderland, I think.’
‘Very well said!’ laughed Lebret. ‘Precisely so! Walki
ng backwards to go forwards, running as fast as you can to stay still – the geometry of an infinite ocean, its topography, would embody strange features. Perhaps to rise up towards the sky we must – peculiar though it sounds – sink down? Perhaps the light we can see apparently below us is the sky, shining through the intervening waters?’
‘But if the water we are in is infinite …’
‘Infinite, yet co-existent with the infinite universe from which we have come! Two such infinites would interpenetrate themselves. Perhaps we passed through one such overlap – and perhaps the light we can see below is another such. The skies of the Oceanus Australis! Descend to it, and we can emerge once again in our home world!’
Everybody was silent for a while. ‘It sounds – insane,’ Boucher offered, in a tentative voice.
‘I agree,’ said Lebret, expansively. ‘But perhaps it is the truth nonetheless! Monsieur Ghatwala,’ he gestured with his cigarette in the direction of the scientist, who was sitting holding a cup of coffee in both hands, ‘you are scientifically trained. Is anything I have said incompatible with the dimensions of an infinite geometry.’
Ghatwala looked surprised to be invoked as an authority; but he said, ‘No, no, I suppose not.’
‘So?’ prompted the lieutenant.
‘I offer this only as a suggestion,’ said Lebret, stubbing his cigarette out. ‘And as a tribute to the honoured memory of our captain. Of course the final decision must be yours, Lieutenant. We could attempt to retrace our path, and float upwards for many days. Or we could spend a few hours descending towards the light, to determine whether it truly is a more direct route to the surface. If it is not – well then, we have lost only some few hours, and can inflate the tanks and go backwards. But if it is! Think only of that!’
12
THE LIGHT BELOW
There was some desultory discussion of the plausibility of Lebret’s account; and some toing and froing about the best course of action. But with the implacable stubbornness of Cloche removed, Lebret was much better able to manipulate the mood of the group. Besides, as he himself insisted – his request was reasonable. After such an epic, impossible descent, what were a few more hundred leagues downward?
