Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

by Adam Roberts

  Lebret pondered these words for a long time. The Jewel was now spinning very rapidly, an ovoid blue-green blur. Something occurred to him, ‘What if you are lying?’

  ‘It makes no difference,’ said the Jewel. ‘I am drawing the structure you currently inhabit through the waterverse. It will take time, but eventually I will have direct access to you – and your companions. I do not need you to believe me.’

  Lebret felt a painful twist of the awareness of his impotence, and the indigestible perspective of sudden cosmic perspectives he had been granted. But he could not close his eyes, or move any part of his body. His mind was awake.

  ‘I will have your iron craft,’ the Jewel said. ‘I will have new examples of your kind, these homo sapiens sapiens who play such a dominant role in your world. I will have your nuclear-power engine. I have learnt a great deal since my last experimentations upon mankind. I will be able to control you, and I will have your device. It will be a simple matter, thereupon, to break through into your planet, and put a stop to your species and their meddling.’

  Lebret’s spirit quailed within him; but he existed in a state of perfect passivity. There was nothing he could do.

  Years passed, or perhaps they did. Lebret had the sense of a great deal of time passing, but he had that perception, as it were, from an external source. It is difficult to explain how this felt for him. Ten trillion kilometres. Fifteen trillions kilometres. If his consciousness now only worked when the Jewel stimulated the quasi-crystalline pattern of neurones in his brain, how could he gauge the passing of time? Perhaps the Jewel switched him off (as it were) for decades at a time.

  ‘Stop him,’ somebody said.

  Lebret could not be sure where this other voice originated, or who it was. It might have been Dakkar – although Dakkar was dead, and (unlike Lebret) beardless.

  The Jewel was rotating so fast now it had lost its sharp-edged and pointed features, and resembled a blurry skull. Lebret might even fancy a face upon it.

  ‘How can I stop him?’

  ‘Name him,’ said the other. Who was this other?

  What name to utter?

  And Lebret could not name him, because the entity was alien, and he did not know the name, and Lebret was altogether powerless. Dead, and, anyway – and anyway – what power did names have? Lebret did not know the name. There was no conceivable way that he could find out the name. He did not even know whether the Jewel had a name, beyond Jewel – whether his manner of life-form had any use for names. Names, Lebret thought, are a strange business, really. Animals don’t need them – why should men and women? Yet we do; and names possess legal and religious and social and symbolic power. And then, with a little spurt of inspiration, the name arrived in Lebret’s consciousness. He couldn’t have told you from whence, but he sensed the rightness of it.

  He had died twice; twice he had been brought back from death. He would die a third time. That was the potent death, that third. And the name was there. ‘I understand,’ he said.

  ‘Understand what?’ demanded the Jewel, suddenly, unaccountably furious.

  ‘I know your name.’

  ‘You cannot know my name! You do not know my name!’ the Jewel shrieked, spinning so fast that the water around it was twisted into muscular flows and pulses. The edges were no longer visible – the Jewel was an elongated sphere, blurred at the edges.

  ‘I know your name,’ Lebret repeated.

  This reiteration, oddly, appeared to calm the entity. The shrieking stopped; and for a while the structure simply span. ‘And what is my name?’ hummed the Jewel.

  ‘Verne,’ said Lebret. And everything went black.

  32

  TWENTY TRILLION

  KILOMETRES UNDER THE SEA

  Fifty years had passed – more than fifty years. Closer to sixty. Back in his home, the calendar would be well into the twenty-first century by now. To be honest, Jhutti had long since lost track of the time. Mostly this was because of the sleeping – it was impossible to know what proportion of his life was swallowed by sleep, but it was evidently the majority. This, he had long since realised, was the Jewel’s doing. It was clear that working at a distance, even through this ‘infraspace’ of which Lebret spoke, was limiting for the Jewel. He could do certain things: manifest a three-dimensional avatar of himself (although he had not done that since Lebret named him); draw the material substance of the base towards him, and even influence Jhutti’s body chemistry, flooding it with narcotic hormones. If it were in any sense possible, Jhutti did not doubt that the Jewel would put him to sleep for the whole length of the journey – a coma. But he could not, of course – Jhutti would die of thirst and hunger. So, instead, the overwhelming wave of sleepiness swept over Jhutti’s brain in a tide-like pattern; days and days in dreamless sleep, to wake – groggily, his head throbbing with migraine – for half a hour, just enough time to relieve himself, to drink like a dog at the hatch and nibble what food he could reach. Then the sleep would come like a wave, and he would slip under again.

  Jhutti met this assault (for an assault is most assuredly what it was) with what defences he could. Pricking himself with sharp points only postponed the sleepiness for a short time. Immersing himself in water worked rather better, but only because he woke choking and coughing, and spent long minutes recovering, with burning lungs and thundering heart. After a time, Jhutti became more adept at holding off the sleepiness by sheer willpower, but these small victories lasted half an hour or more; and as he explored the space, and brought his considerable intellect to bear upon the various technical gee-gaws it contained, attempting to make them work – all the time he was having to fight off sleep. Eventually he always succumbed.

  And then one day, Jhutti woke up. He could sense at once that something had changed; that the Jewel’s power over him had diminished. And even, later, after he had been able briefly to communicate with his former shipmate it remained obscure to him why this naming had the effect it did. But he could not quarrel with the freedom it gave him.

  He explored his space. The length of his own beard suggested that many years had passed since he had enjoyed uninterrupted periods of consciousness, but he could not be certain. That Lebret’s body was entirely uncorrupted suggested that relatively little time had passed; but the other bodies – the corpses of Dakkar and Billiard-Fanon – had entirely disappeared. Jhutti pondered whether they had been in some sense transported away, or had rotted to nothing over many years. But in that case where were their skeletons? After going to the upper hatch and attempting to swim to the Plongeur he developed a new theory. Of the school of childranha only one remained – large, malignant looking, and lurking in the gashed side of the submarine. When Jhutti first poked his head through, it darted forth and rushed at him; he only managed to get his head back inside just in time.

  Assuming that the lower chamber was open at some point to the larger ocean, a circumstance Jhutti thought likely (although he was unable to test it), it seemed that this one remaining beast had devoured both bodies, and also all its fellows. As to why it hadn’t also eaten Lebret’s body, Jhutti could not say; but he postulated that the tentacles embedded in Lebret’s chin, which were evidently alive even though Lebret lacked pulse or breath, produced some chemical signal that kept the childranha away.

  At any rate, Jhutti could not hope to cross to the submarine with that monster in the water. A thorough search of the space showed up a small knife, amongst other things, and Jhutti carefully sharpened this, and tied it to a pole with cut-up strips of wetsuit. As he did this, he thought of the book he had been reading immediately before embarking aboard the Plongeur – a short novel by the American writer Hemingway, concerning an old man and the sea. ‘Man,’ he said aloud, his voice croaky in the white space, ‘is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.’ It heartened him.

  He went up top with his makeshift lance, took a series of deep breaths, and put his head into the water. The fish came at him again straight away, and thou
gh Jhutti jabbed it several times in its devil-face, it did not back away. It occurred to Jhutti, thinking back on the encounter later, that it might be mad with hunger. Who knew how long it had lurked, with nothing to eat, waiting, like a pike in the mud of an immemorial pond?

  Three times Jhutti pulled himself back into the safety of the air, gasping; and three times he pushed his head and torso back into the water. The creature never gave up, until a final stroke severed its spine, and it went limp.

  After that Jhutti rested, ate, and readied himself. Swimming out upon the shell surface, he kicked the body of the last childranha away, and breast-stroked his way to the airlock. The mechanism was stiff, but still opened; and in minutes he was inside.

  He was expecting a bad smell, but the air, though musty, was breathable. The engines were clearly still working, pumping oxygen about. He made his way about the deserted craft as if through a dream landscape. In Boucher’s cabin he found the lieutenant’s body, mummified and lying on its front. This, clearly, had taken a long time. But, miraculously, the atomic pile still hummed and functioned, unattended for however long.

  Over the months that followed Jhutti returned to the Plongeur several times. The structural damage was beyond his power to repair, working alone; but he was at least able to swim through the flooded mess and retrieve food from the kitchens, and so vary his otherwise monotonous diet.

  Back inside the white space, he tried every way he could think of to make the various technological gadgets operate. His only success, however, was with the communication slate. After a long period of fiddling, he opened a channel to Lebret. This in itself was so startling and unsettling a thing that he refused to believe it at first. It was made harder to believe, at least initially, by the incoherence of Lebret’s communications – he spoke very slowly, with long pauses between words, and not everything he said made sense. But after several days of interaction, Jhutti came to the conclusion that it was truly him. ‘Your body is in the next chamber,’ he told the Frenchman. ‘It is not breathing, your heart is not beating – how can there be brain activity?’

  ‘The,’ came Lebret’s voice, croakily, from the white slate. ‘Beard! Tentacles, tentacles, thinking fibres!’

  ‘Can you be fully revived?’

  ‘I – don’t – know.’

  ‘Do you wish me to try?’

  Nothing. Half an hour of hiss. Then, so abruptly that it made Jhutti twitch, ‘The Jewel!’

  ‘What of him?’

  ‘He is,’ creaked Lebret. ‘Drawing the structure. Towards him.’

  ‘Why?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Are you still there? Lebret, I felt him in my head. He was forcing me to sleep – I don’t know how. But he was managing it; keeping me effectively comatose until we reach the destination I suppose.’

  ‘I – named – him.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘I named him – and reduced his power – and …’

  ‘How?’

  Nothing. Jhutti persevered for a while. ‘What is his name? And what does he want with us? What does he want with me?’ But there was no reply.

  Jhutti waited. He became hungry, and so harvested some mallows and augmented the meal with a tin salvaged from the Plongeur. Then he slept, a short nap. Since the communications slate appeared to be waterproof, he took it with him and swam down to where Lebret’s body was. Only the swaying motion of the tentacular beard, moving through the still waters, showed any signs of life. Jhutti debated with himself about dragging Lebret back into the air, but decided it would probably be best to leave him where he was.

  Days passed. Jhutti returned several times to the Plongeur, like Robinson Crusoe salvaging what he could from the wreck of his ship. He rigged up a rudimentary exercise device with springs from the vessel, and initiated a regime to stretch and thus stress his muscles and bones. There was no way of knowing how long he would have to live in zero-g, but he was aware of the theories that predicted muscle wastage and bone loss for future astronauts. He would do what he could.

  ‘The Jewel!’ said Lebret, over the slate. His voice was weaker, more elderly-sounding.

  Jhutti scrambled to the slate. ‘Lebret? Lebret – are you alright?’

  ‘He is the demiurge!’ Lebret hissed. ‘This is his world. But there are – rules. He must abide by his rules. Or break apart the whole thing!’

  ‘Lebret, what are you talking about?’

  ‘You can – defeat – him,’ whispered Lebret

  Jhutti had to put his ear to the slate. ‘How? Tell me how?’

  ‘Know – his – name—’

  ‘What is it?’

  There was a long pause. Then, gasping repeatedly as if saying the words caused him pain, Lebret said, ‘His name is green, for he is the green man, and though we cut him down he will grow again! His name is glass, and his name is green, and he is the glass-green sea!’

  ‘You’re not making sense—’ Jhutti said.

  ‘He is the sea, he is its glass, he is its green, he is the emerald—’

  ‘Is that his name? Emerald?’

  ‘Enough!’ cried Lebret, through the slate. ‘Or – too much.’

  There was, then, a period of two weeks or more (Jhutti was keeping a slate of sleep periods, but he suspected that his ‘days’ were several hours shorter than terrestrial days) when Lebret was silent. Indeed, Jhutti only had two further exchanges with him. In one he was fairly comprehensible, and talked about the Jewel’s plans. ‘Invasion!’ Jhutti asked him. ‘Are you sure? And why does he want me? What use to him can I be?’

  ‘Atomic power,’ Lebret said, haltingly. ‘He understands fusion and fission, but only theoretically … this cosmos is not hospitable to it. No great stars, no heavy elements … but in ours – but in ours – but …’

  ‘But the sub oceanic suns?’

  ‘Mere fires, burning hot but not, hot but not an atomic torch … candles lit in infraspace …’

  ‘What? What is that?’

  ‘Never mind! The Jewel! Think of him!’

  ‘And tell me about his name,’ Jhutti pressed. ‘You suggested that it had some form of talismanic power …’

  Lebret’s did not reply for a long time, and when he eventually spoke he sounded scared. ‘His name? His name?’

  ‘Yes – what is it?’

  ‘I cannot!’ shrieked Lebret. ‘It pains me to try and think … to try and think of …’

  He broke off, and did not speak for many days. Jhutti decided that, somehow, the Jewel was trying to block off Lebret’s ability to articulate the name; perhaps triggering some sort of short-circuit whenever he tried to do so.

  He made a series of trips to the Plongeur, and ran cables from its engine room through to the white space. Inside the submarine, he swam through the flooded mess and retrieved explosives from the armoury, setting these in selected locations about the pile. He could not hope to create a Hiroshima-style explosion, he knew; but he could create a fairly impressive bang. It remained to be seen whether he had the wherewithal to destroy the Jewel; but at least he could prevent the atomic pile – and himself – from falling into the entity’s hands.

  But should he? Suicide seemed an extreme action. Could he deduce the creature’s Rumplestiltskin-style name? He ran through possibilities – a tyrant’s name, a Caesar moniker? Or something angelic, God’s right-hand? What had Lebret called the Jewel? A demiurge? Green, glass, water, sea, ocean, emerald. Was that it? Emerald?

  And ice, mast-high, came floating by

  As green as emerald …

  ‘Monsieur,’ croaked the communications tablet. ‘Monsieur!’

  ‘Lebret? Is that you?’

  ‘We are deeper than thought. We are Prospero’s books. We are Oort, Oort, Oort.’

  ‘What? I don’t understand!’

  ‘You cannot destroy him,’ Lebret hissed. ‘You must destroy him! You cannot do it. But you can name him, and …’

  That was the last thing Lebret said. Days passed in silence; a
nd when Jhutti swam down to look again at his body the tendrils had all detached themselves from his face. Whither they had vanished he could not say; but they were gone. Over the following week, signs of physical decay began to manifest in the Frenchman’s flesh, and Jhutti was forced to push his body through the chambers and out into the larger ocean, for fear that his corpse would poison his supply of drinking water.

  The Jewel had removed whatever strange organic-machinery he had been using to keep Lebret’s body from corruption, and to work the neural network of his brain. But why now?

  Another week passed. There was a time when Jhutti slept, and dreamt that the Plongeur had exploded, silently but with a light brighter than a galaxy of suns.

  He woke with a start. There was a light shining; it was beaming from the corridor that lead up to the hatch. Worrying that something was wrong with the submarine, Jhutti flew upwards, and poked his head through into the water.

  There was a structure in the water – spherical, huge, much larger than the sub oceanic suns, though gleaming with so much lesser a light, that Jhutti was able to look directly at it. It was a million-faceted jewel – thousands of kilometres across; and it gleamed from some inner light source oceanic greens and blues.

  Jhutti, his heart pounding, ducked back into the corridor to snatch a breath. When he put his head out again, the huge structure was even larger. They must be hurtling towards it with extraordinary celerity!

  The voice clanged in his head, like a hammer blow. In French it boomed I AM THAT I AM! And then, with a less idiomatic expression it added I GO NOT!

  Jhutti hauled himself back into the air. ‘Je suis que je suis, je vais ne,’ he muttered to himself, wiping water from his beard and long hair. ‘Can it be that the demiurge speaks French less fluently than an Indian?’

  But the trigger was below him, in the white space, and panicking suddenly that he would be prevented from reaching it he pulled himself down the corridor and shot into the room like a cork from a pop-gun. Between himself and his makeshift trigger was a faintly gleaming dodecahedral jewel, three metres long, hanging in mid-air, and rotating very slowly. It cast sliding, glassy blue-green patches of colour upon the white walls. ‘It’s you!’ Jhutti gasped. ‘The demiurge himself!’