Submergence (33 page)
Authors: J. M. Ledgard
It was in the style of Gaudi; pitted, knobbly, rust-coloured from oxidation, black in places, in others mottled white with mats of bacteria. Amphipod danced at the edge of the vents. Tubeworms swayed like heavy cocks. There were mussels and other bivalves. Blind fish circled. The Turks sat very still, smoking, regarding them.
After some time at the base of the column Étienne lifted the
Nautile
and piloted it to where the floor of the earth was cracked. There was no fire, no hearth. The magma was glassy and cool. The light broke against heavy drifts of marine snow; it was useless to think the abyss could be illuminated by thallium iodide. She was excited, intent, but at the same time thought, the places we will have to dwell as a species are terrible. We will have to accommodate ourselves to realms for which we are not evolved, to lodge ourselves in them, to articulate our bodies from inside a suit of titanium and the other materials. She felt the metal hollow inside the submersible acutely – the stale air, the sweat of Peter and Étienne, the smell of vomit, bleach …
With great care Étienne set the
Nautile
down at the edge of a crack. They extended the robot arm to scrape bacteria from its interior. She adjusted her weight on the bench and the craft in turn settled on the fine silica mud, on the diatomaceous ooze of dead creatures that on land was used as scouring powder.
Étienne turned off the spotlights.
‘Testing systems.’
They did not speak. There was just the sound of their breathing. She touched her forehead to the quartz. Outside, viscous black flowed into black. My God, it was a trance, it was the most consuming painting. A powerful sense of vertigo overcame her, of a kind she had not experienced since the day she tried to follow James into the wood on the grounds of the Hotel Atlantic. She felt the
Nautile
was too close to the edge, that they were teetering, and would fall into the underworld, the true underworld. She felt that the
Nautile
would break apart, the three of them would fall out, and she herself would tumble down, like Alice, but not into Wonderland. Her body would be a puff of life, gone, instantly, with no possibility of ascent, and the same for Peter and Étienne; each of them cartwheeling into a chemical soup.
You lift off to heaven, you sink into hell. You rocket into space, you drown on a slave ship. The encompassing sea of Abzu made more
sense than any astral plane put forward by the great religions. Why not a sea behind the universe, making fast the stars?
She admired the musculature of ballet dancers, but understood that they were liquid beings, trailing tendril lives. The gas bladders of fish burst and filled their mouths when the net was winched up. Salp lost structure, died and became indefinable at the surface. All living creatures were at some point disassembled. It was only a question of where the parts ended up and were made into something new. The volume of life in the deep, its complexity and self-organisation, would over millions of years take in the disassembled from the land as it crumbled into the sea and was washed away by rivers and rains. It was too dramatic to say damned souls cooked in agony while satanic whores scored them with fingernails and others with flaccid and scaly bodies dashed them against the shiny obsidian …
It was tranquil, in a way. There were no storms, no swells, the water was very calm. Did the abyss sing of itself? Seen from below, the surface looked like heaven. Seen from heaven, she thought, it was a roiling sea, a darksome air infernal. Human beings were between worlds, they were inbetweeners, who did not know where light dwelt or where darkness had its place.
Her eyes adjusted. There were again the soft glowing switches, like the smoking signs on old airliners at night; the association with seamless life, the comfort of collective awareness, common nostalgia. She could make out Étienne, leaning forward. Her sense of vertigo left her. She felt that she more clearly belonged to the present.
‘All right,’ said Étienne. ‘Let’s take her up.’
1
Benedicite, aquae omnes, quae caelos sunt, Domino, benedicat omnis Virtutis Domino
.
2
Charcot’s boat, the original
Pourquoi Pas?,
sank off the coast of Iceland in 1936, drowning him together with many of his crew
.
Another epitaph would be from the Roman poet Horace:
‘Plunge it in deep water: it comes up more beautiful.’
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to remember:
The French DSGE secret agent Denis Allex, who was captured by an al-Qaeda-linked faction of the Shabab in Mogadishu on 14 July 2009. At the time of writing he is still being held hostage.
The hundreds of sailors and yachtsmen captured at sea by Somali pirates and held at gunpoint off the coast of Somalia.
Asho Duhulow, who was stoned to death in Kismayo on 27 October 2008. She was thirteen years old.
The tens of thousands of victims of the 2011 Somali famine, presaged in the book.
In the autumn of 2011, some months after the first edition of
Submergence
was published, missiles were fired into the mangrove swamps around Ras Kamboni. Dozens of jihadists were killed. At the time of writing Kenya has invaded south Somalia and its troops are advancing on Kismayo. Jihadists there remain defiant, telling the people: ‘Every one of you who dies here is a mujahid and will enter paradise’.
Thanks to:
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Columbia University and ETH Zurich, whose scientists patiently and brilliantly introduced me to the world of oceanography.
My friends in the mighty nation of Somalia, who welcomed me in a time of distress.
The Economist
, for allowing me to follow the story.
The Tasmanian Writers Centre, for generously providing space to write.
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446496831
Published by Jonathan Cape 2011
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Copyright © J. M. Ledgard 2011
J. M. Ledgard has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Jonathan Cape
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ISBN 9780224091374