Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

by Adam Roberts

  But the port tank was full of water, and filling the starboard tank with air made the whole vessel pendulum and swing, as if suspended from its front-right. Lebret was thrown against the wall of the observation chamber. Avocat came tumbling back through the hatch, head over heels.

  The craft pendulumed round, bringing the observation porthole up. For a moment it hung there, and Lebret got a glimpse of a swarm of mermen. It looked like the feeding frenzy of a school of sharks, jerking and massing around the globular structures of the released air. The bubbles spread and roiled, but – crazily – did not rise through the water. Hundreds of the strange-looking cuttlemen darted at the bubbles, only to flinch sharply away.

  Then, still sinking, the Plongeur swung back around its own hinge of partial buoyancy and Lebret and Avocat were rattled around the observation chamber. By wedging his feet against the place where one of the room’s seats was bolted to the floor and grasping at the walls with both hands, Lebret was able to prevent himself being thrown through the air. Avocat was not so lucky – he cried out in pain as he was slammed hard against the wall a few yards to the right of Lebret.

  The light – bright and blue-white and evidently hot – came into view below them. Then the whole craft swung further about, the light slipped away right, and the swarm of mermen about the released air was visible again. The frenzy was further away now, a pattern of pulse and flow like sardines being pursued by a swordfish.

  ‘Brace!’ came Le Petomain’s voice. ‘Brace!’

  The Plongeur began to swing back, and a sound loud as a cannon report was added to the other clangs and drones. It was the vent to the starboard tank giving way. The vessel vomited out a giant bladderwrack mass of bubbling air, and fell hard away down.

  Robbed of all buoyancy, the Plongeur was falling now, nose down – directly towards the source of heat and light.

  13

  SUB OCEANIC SUN

  An alarm began to sound. After several ear-splitting seconds, somebody on the bridge shut it off. The whole craft rocked sickeningly, its metal flanks groaning under the torsion like a whale in mournful song.

  Lebret made his way across the obstacle course that the observation room had become towards Avocat. ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘My arm!’ cried the sailor. ‘Broken!’ His face behind his beard was the white of cooked fish flesh.

  ‘Let me see,’ said Lebret.

  ‘I heard the bone snap,’ Avocat gasped. ‘Like a stick burning in a fire!’

  Lebret tried to pull the sailor’s jacket off, as the Plongeur swayed and fell, but Avocat’s yelps of pain dissuaded him. ‘Give me a belt to bite upon at least, Monsieur, for pity of the Virgin Mother!’ he cried out. ‘Or fetch me some brandy!’

  The shouts of other men could be heard far away in other portions of the submarine. ‘Why didn’t those air bubbles float away?’ Lebret muttered to himself, unsnaking his belt from his trouser loops. ‘What’s the nature of this strange place?’

  ‘We’re going down,’ moaned Avocat. ‘I can feel it in my spine and guts – Christ have mercy. We’ll all die! Oh, Christ have mercy!’

  ‘Le Petomain!’ boomed a voice, from the bridge, echoing through the speaking tube. ‘Straighten her out!’ It was a moment before Lebret recognised it as Castor’s.

  ‘I’m trying, chief!’ called back the pilot.

  Lebret gave Avocat the belt, and the sailor fixed it between his teeth. The ends thrashed and flailed in the air like a snake. Then, as the vessel rocked back on its swing, Lebret wrenched the man’s jacket off him and quickly rolled back the shirtsleeve. The wound was revealed – a bad fracture. A triangle of bone broke the skin like a shark’s-fin poking above the surface of the sea. There was a great deal of bruising, with only a few trickles of blood. Under the electric light of the observation room these looked dark green and black.

  Lebret, despite himself, quailed at the sight. ‘Shall I try and reset the bone?’ he asked.

  ‘What are you asking me for, Vichy?’ muttered Avocat, speaking without relinquishing his teeth’s grip on the belt. He was staring furiously at a spot on the ceiling. ‘I daren’t even look at the thing. Don’t you know first aid?’

  ‘Only what they told us in basic training,’ said Lebret. He was fumbling for a cigarette with automatic hand. ‘Maybe it would be better to leave it alone?’

  ‘Oh Christ it hurts,’ Avocat hissed.

  A series of yells and shouts were audible from above: the words indistinct, but the mood of panic unmistakeable. ‘What’s going on?’

  Then, louder than the background cacophony, came Castor’s voice again. ‘We’re taking on water!’ he boomed.

  Avocat laughed a joyless little laugh. ‘I think the ocean will soon render your rudimentary knowledge of first aid irrelevant. May I have one?’

  ‘Eh?’

  Avocat nodded at the cigarette case Lebret was holding in his hand.

  ‘A dying man, a cigarette,’ said Avocat. ‘I apologise for the cliché.’

  Lebret fitted one into the sailor’s mouth, and held out his lighter to ignite it. As he did so, he noticed that his hand cast two, equally distinct shadows. One was from the room’s electric light; the other was cast by light streaming brightly through the observation portal itself.

  The circle of light was twice the size it had formerly been. ‘We’re falling towards it,’ Lebret said. ‘Even though we’re taking on water, I believe that hot light – whatever it is – will end us, before the ocean has a chance to drown us.’

  ‘Doubly doomed,’ laughed Avocat.

  ‘I can’t believe we’re about to die!’ said Lebret, shaking his head. ‘It seems so … unfair.’

  Avocat cradled his broken arm in his lap, and sucked hungrily on his cigarette. ‘A pitiful end,’ he agreed.

  ‘I’m going up the ladder to see if I can be of assistance,’ Lebret declared. ‘I will return.’

  ‘Then bring me something to drink,’ said the sailor. ‘And I don’t mean water – we’ll all have our fill of water very soon now. I mean something for the pain. Brandy!’

  Lebret took one last look through the observation porthole at the incandescing circle of white-blue light, twice the size of the sun in earthly skies. Its heat was palpable, literally so. When Lebret put his hand on the wall to steady himself, picking his way across the quaking space, he could feel the metal beneath the paint – warm as human flesh.

  He got up the sloping corridor with some difficulty, and found Le Petomain in the pilot’s seat. Billiard-Fanon, water flying from him, was peering at the temperature gauge. ‘Can I help?’ he asked.

  Billiard-Fanon glared at him. ‘Unless you can perform miracles, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘Then no, you cannot help. The temperature is rising at such a rate that we will all be baked to death within minutes.’

  ‘The cuttlemen wrenched our forward vanes clean away,’ gasped Le Petomain. ‘Far as I can tell, at any rate. We’ve no control! The port ballast tank is wrecked, the water can’t be expelled. The starboard is holding, but there’s been damage at various places, and we’re taking on water.’

  ‘Hot water!’ growled Billiard-Fanon. ‘I’ve just come from there – it’s scalding the men who are trying to fix the leaks.’

  ‘It’s a matter of minutes,’ said Le Petomain. ‘I can’t steer us away, and we’re falling directly into that – into whatever that is.’

  ‘Avocat has broken his arm,’ Lebret reported. Since this felt like trivial news after what Le Petomain and Billiard-Fanon had said, Lebret added: ‘a bad break – the bone has punctured the skin.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I said I’d fetch him some alcohol – for the pain,’ Lebret said.

  ‘Be my guest,’ said Billiard-Fanon. ‘Just get out of my face. It’s your fault we’re even down here.’

  Lebret clambered up and out of the bridge. As he struggled round the corner into the kitchen, he heard Pannier knocking at his door, and saying in a piteously sober-sounding voice. ‘Monsieur?
Monsieur? Whoever you are – let me out! I can hear what’s going on – don’t leave me to drown in my cabin like a cat in a bag!’

  ‘I haven’t the key,’ said Lebret. He coughed, and wiped his brow – oily with sweat. It was much hotter now.

  ‘Monsieur Collaborator-Vichy? It’s you? Get the key! I beg of you!’

  ‘I’ll come back,’ Lebret promised.

  There was a shudder, a great groan of metal, and the whole of the vessel tipped more steeply forward. The floors were now at forty degrees. Lebret almost lost his balance, nearly plunging straight back through the bridge – but he held on, scrabbled into the kitchen, and sat for a moment in the coign of floor and wall. Items were piled, higgledy-piggled into the V of the space, a heap of steel cans shifting like shingle as the Plongeur continued its slow swing. Lighter cardboard packets bounced through the air. A cupboard door had burst its lock, and swayed in time to the vessel’s motion like a blue flag being waved.

  Lebret laid his hand upon an unbroken bottle of rum, pulled the cork, took a fiery swig, and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. The air was uncomfortably hot, now.

  Lebret made his way out of the kitchen and down the corridor back into the bridge like descending a ladder. Billiard-Fanon was in the captain’s chair.

  ‘Where’s Le Petomain?’

  ‘I sent him fore,’ growled the ensign. ‘All hands to staunch the leaks. Though we’ll soon be cooked like a side of ham in an oven—’

  ‘And you—?’

  ‘Boucher is in his cabin, strapped to his bed, quite unconscious. He cracked his head hard against the side when the vessel was bouncing about. The captain is dead. I’m in command now. I choose to meet my death in the proper place.’

  Lebret picked a path down and across the bridge, and half-climbed, half-slipped down into the observation room. The circle of hot sub oceanic light was now so large that it filled more than half the window. Detail was nebulously visible in its disc: swirling patterns moving in tight tourbillons, like a pattern of writhing white bubbles against the background of blue-white glare. From time to time shadows, small and indistinct, danced across the disc of light: left-right, right-left – presumably marking the passage of cuttlemen.

  ‘I’ve brought you some rum,’ Lebret announced.

  Avocat did not reply. Lebret could see that he had passed out, presumably with the pain. The sailor was sprawled into the crook of floor and wall, his legs tucked underneath him. His head was turned a little to the side. The cigarette in his lips had burned to a slug of ash that was lying across his cheek. Lebret brushed this away and saw that it had left a puckered patch of burned skin beneath it. ‘That’s not good,’ he muttered, leaning forward to see if the fellow was still breathing. The background cacophony made it hard to hear, but when he slipped a hand beneath the man’s shirt he could feel the heart beating.

  The arm, however, did not look good. It was swollen, nearly twice as fat as its fellow limb. A blue-black colour had spread across the skin.

  Lebret looked again at the growing circle of white heat, through the porthole. He removed his own jacket – it was oppressively hot, now – and took another drink of the scalding rum. ‘I should take advantage of the fact that you are unconscious to set the arm, I suppose,’ he said, to the unresponsive body of Avocat. ‘Although it seems a fruitless gesture, in the circumstances. Still …’

  He got hold of the arm, holding it above the wrist with his left hand and grasping the elbow with his right. His fingers sank unpleasantly into the puffed-up flesh. Then, wincing, he pulled the break apart. Avocat moaned and shifted, but did not wake. Lebret put more pressure upon his grip, pulling the wrist towards him and pushing the elbow-end of the forearm away. The beak of bone disappeared beneath the skin; a little black blood flowed through the cut and then stopped.

  He manipulated the two ends of bone, feeling them grind and catch against each other. Avocat’s body twitched, and he moaned, as if in the middle of a nightmare.

  Never having done this sort of thing before, Lebret wasn’t sure what he was feeling for. Ought the two ends-of-bone to click together, like a buckle connecting? If so, Lebret was not succeeding. He shifted the two sections of the arm again, like an inexperienced driver grindingly shifting the gears of a car. Then, abruptly disgusted by the procedure, he let go.

  The finger marks, where he had grasped Avocat’s swollen flesh, were printed pale against the darkened skin. He watched, sweating, as bruising flowed back under the puffed skin and began to erase them.

  The whole arm looked monstrous – three times the proper size, now; lumpy and distorted as if with elephantiasis. ‘I ought to release the pressure,’ Lebret muttered to himself. ‘Ought I? Or ought I to let well alone?’

  He brought out his penknife, and flicked open the blade. It shone, reflecting the weird brightness of the sub oceanic sun. Every action seemed equally irrelevant. Locating what he looked like the place of greatest swelling, near the crook of Avocat’s elbow, Lebret jabbed the end of the knife in.

  The result was not as he expected. A jet of black-red liquid flew halfway across the room. Blood splashed up along Lebret’s arm, and he recoiled. Then, scrambling back to the unconscious man, he slipped and tumbled. ‘No,’ he gasped. ‘Oh no!’

  The spurt of blood throbbed and shook in air, but did not diminish in the force of its flow. It began to pool at the bottom of the observation chamber, sloshing as the Plongeur continued its heavy, slow sway.

  Using his knife, Lebret cut away the sleeve of Avocat’s shirt. By the time he was finished the cloth was blood-soaked and slippery, which made it harder to tie into a tourniquet. Lebret hands, greasy with blood, kept losing grip. Worse, the swelling in the arm made it impossible to get the tourniquet to dig deep enough into the flesh to stem the flow.

  The yelling from the other parts of the ship crescendoed and diminuendoed against the various other noises. Lebret sat back, despairing of his efforts. Avocat’s lifeblood was draining into the V of wall-and-floor.

  Then something strange happened. Lebret could feel the motion of descent in his belly; but with a nauseous shift in his gut he had the sense – only momentarily – that he was upside-down on the ceiling. He blinked, and blinked again; and his senses reoriented themselves. He was tucked into the space between floor and wall in a forward-tipped submarine as it sank through impossible waters.

  His shadow moved against the wall. Looking out, he saw the great disk of hot white light shifting. It slid to the side of the window, and then it slid out of sight altogether.

  The porthole threw a bright patch of oval light upon the wall of the observation room; and then slid it smoothly along and up. Like a searchlight beam the light picked out Avocat’s motionless body and passed on.

  Lebret gasped. It took him a moment to understand that the sensation in his gut meant they were still sinking straight down. They had not steered past the light; the light itself – whatever it was – had moved.

  ‘Billiard-Fanon!’ he called, his voice catching in his throat. He tried again with more force: ‘Billiard-Fanon! Ensign! Are we saved?’

  There was a pause, and then the ensign’s voice returned, ‘What?’

  ‘We are no longer sinking towards the sub oceanic sun!’ Lebret hollered. ‘Did you steer us past it?’

  ‘What? I’ve no control. What are you saying?’

  ‘Check the sonar! Or come down here and see,’ Lebret suggested.

  For several minutes Billiard-Fanon neither replied nor complied. But eventually he could be heard clangingly making his way down the linking corridor. His legs appeared, and then he did. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘The light – whatever it is,’ Lebret gasped. ‘It was right there, in the window. Then it just … slid away. We’re no longer headed towards it.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Billiard-Fanon. ‘I made no change to our trajectory. I’ve not been able to!’

  ‘In that case,’ said Lebret, ‘then the obstacle has moved itself out o
f our way. Or has been moved.’

  ‘Impossible!’

  ‘Only look!’ said Lebret. Now that the direct light of the sub oceanic sun was no longer blinding them, they could see that the waters all around them was swarming with wriggling cuttlemen. They filled the waters in the middle distances in their thousands; writhing and coiling in shifting flows like starlings massing in autumnal skies. Some few were closer by, and one slipped quicksilver past the window, no more than a few yards distant.

  ‘What have you done?’ cried Billiard-Fanon.

  ‘Me? I haven’t done it – I don’t know how it has happened. But at least we won’t be scorched to death. Now all we need do is staunch the leaks in …’

  ‘Not that!’ Billiard-Fanon snapped. ‘This.’

  The ensign was pointing at the body of Avocat. ‘What?’ said Lebret. ‘Yes. He fell badly when the Plongeur started sinking. His arm is broken, I’m sorry to say.’

  ‘The blood!’ Billiard-Fanon said. He scrambled over to the body.

  ‘His arm was horribly swollen,’ said Lebret, feeling dazed. He still had his penknife in his hand. ‘It was three times the proper size. At least that big. I thought I ought to relieve the pressure.’

  ‘So you severed an artery? What were you thinking? Look at this blood!’

  ‘I,’ Lebret began. ‘I didn’t mean.’ It occurred to him that he ought to have lied – said that it was splintered bone that had severed the artery, and that he had done nothing but try to staunch the accidental wound. But it was too late for that now. He folded his penknife. ‘The accidental …’ he started again. ‘I mean that in my attempts to …’

  ‘He’s dead,’ noted Billiard-Fanon.

  ‘I was trying to help him,’ said Lebret.

  ‘You killed him,’ said Billiard-Fanon, accusingly. ‘You brought us down here – you persuaded us all that we should descend to this hell-zone. And now you’ve stabbed Avocat to death!’

  ‘I was trying,’ Lebret repeated, in a stumbling voice, ‘to help him.’