Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (27 page)

And then, as suddenly as he had entered the school, he dropped below it. The fish swarmed above him, a shimmering dark ceiling of living creatures an arm’s length above – and then ten metres above him – and then twenty. One beast remained, its teeth sunk agonisingly into Lebret’s left foot. Gasping, he stabbed at it, cutting it in several places before it let go to lollop off through the water, upwards, to join its fellows.

Lebret hardly had time to take stock. He could still breathe, that was one thing – it was a miracle none of the monsters had severed his air-line. But he ached in a dozen places, and his left leg was the site, at calf and foot, of two raging foci of pain that rivalled his broken jaw in their intensity.

The water around him was now very hot. He was sweating inside the face-plate; and his suit, now shredded and tattered, offered little protection against the scalding water. At least it was – evidently – too hot for the childranha; although that was meagre enough comfort. The sub oceanic sun was large and very bright, directly below him. There was no doubt that he was falling directly towards it.

‘Should I pray?’ he said aloud. Thoughts of his first communion returned to him – childhood Sundays in church, the old familiar words. But that would be a betrayal of the dialectical materialism that had subsequently converted him. And even the superstitious core of his mind, the part that rationality and maturity can never quite eradicate – even that remnant of his childish belief could not accept that the God of Abraham and Jesus was present
down here
. Wherever
here
was, he had travelled very far from the sites holy to that Deity. Maybe he should pray to a new god? Some alien Neptune?

But how would he know which was the true suboceanic power?

Lebret grew still hotter. He became aware that he was very thirsty, and then he considered how strange to be so thirsty whilst surrounded by water. ‘But a man cannot drink brine,’ he muttered to himself, his jaw creaking and sparking with pain as he moved
it. Then he remembered – this was no terrestrial ocean – this was another body of water altogether, and not salty. He
could
drink it, if he wished to. All he needed to do was remove his face-plate; but if he did that, then he would drown. And anyway, this water was too hot. What he wanted was a cold glass, with ice-cubes in it. Or a beer! A cold beer, transparent pimples of moisture on the outside of the bottle, that little exhalation of visible gas, like breath, when the lid was prised off.

His eyes were closing of their own accord. He had to will himself to keep them open. But why was he bothering to do that? There was nothing to see, now, but brightness. His mouth was dry, although his face was runny with sweat.

And then he became aware of a new sensation, deep in his gut. It was like driving a car in a straight line, and then cornering. He felt tugged from true.

It was weird, but undeniable. His whole body thrummed, his limbs trembled.

Slowly, like a blimp banking and drifting through the air, the sun moved.

‘Galileo Galilei!’ gasped Lebret. But there was no mistaking it – the sun was hauling itself away to the right. The water was desperately hot. Lebret squeezed his eyes shut – for an intense moment he wanted, more than anything in the world, to be able to pull off his face-mask, to rub his face with a towel. It itched almost unbearably. But he resisted the impulse to fiddle with his mask, and shortly the urge passed.

Slowly, very slowly, the sun swung about until it was away to his right. He knew he was still dropping through the water, but it was difficult to grasp the passage of time. Maybe he slept, or passed out, or something.

The next thing he knew was the flicker of movement below him. Somehow he had fallen past the sun – and that meant that he would soon fall back into the sphere occupied by the childranha.

But he felt a little more alert. The water was still hot, but less so. He looked down upon his own body, the diving suit ripped and
torn in two dozen places. At least, he thought, I have descended further than de Chante managed, the poor fellow.

An idea occurred to him. He tucked his knife back into its little pocket, and used both hands to scoop air bubbles and smooth them over his skin. Little patches and pearls of air caught in the folds and rips of his suit and stayed there, glinting like silver. He worked carefully, like a cat grooming itself, and managed to spread a layer of air over most of his body. It was not a continuous covering, and it might prove useless in protecting him against the creatures – but perhaps it was better than nothing.

He brought out his knife again. For a while he amused himself by holding it down by his knees, letting go of the blade and watching it float up his body before grabbing it again. As if it were made of wood instead of iron! There must be some explanation for this mystery.

The motion below him was intermittent; no great swarms of the creatures moved below him – there being, he supposed, no great feast of dead leviathan flesh to draw them. Perhaps the bulk of the population of childranha has swum round and above, to where the food was. But there were still some down there. Lebret readied himself.

Time passed. The water began to cool. He could feel it.

A single fish lurched up at him, teeth flashing. He swept the knife in an arc in front of his chest, but the beast seemed to misjudge Lebret’s location in the water, and swept past him. He twisted his head, his jaw complaining at the action. He could
hear
as well as see the scissory snip-snap of the thing’s jaws in the water. It was biting at his blood, a scarf-life dissipating trail which was accompanying his descent. Why should his blood sink through the water faster than an iron knife-blade?

Lebret wriggled in the water, and rotated his position, to bring his blade to bear. But the fish was out of range, and seemed uninterested in him.

A line of three childranha snaked up at him from his left; he thrashed out with his boot and connected with one’s snout – the odd little button protrusion in the middle of its circular face. It
didn’t like that, reeled away. But another swerved in and fixed its teeth in at the open wound in Lebret’s calf. He swore, and slashed out with the knife.

The blade cut deep into the beast’s back, severing its spine. This had the unfortunate effect of clamping the creature’s teeth into Lebret’s flesh in a death-rictus. He howled again, and tried to get the knife blade in to prise the jaws open. Other childranha were zeroing in on him, swimming up from the left and right.

One of the creatures swept up towards Lebret’s face, but was forced away by the air. Three or four more went for his wounded leg and foot; but two of these bit into the body of the dead fish already attached there. They began worrying at the corpse, which shook Lebret’s limbs and body painfully. The others darted off.

He slashed out again, and with two deep jabs he cut away the bulk of the body of the dead beast. The decapitated chunk slipped upwards past him, trailing black blood into the water, and the childranha all went after it. Only one remained, nipping at the diving-suit fabric, and Lebret was able to dislodge it.

Soon enough he was sinking into cooler, darker water, and the unwanted attentions of the childranha were behind him – or above him.

He pulled up his hurt left leg, tucked it into his stomach, the better to be able to work into the attached head of the fish with his knife blade. Trying to lever the teeth from their grip had little effect, apart, that is, from sending stabs of agony up and down his limb. He changed tack, and dug into the side of the creature’s jaw, gouging out chunks of matter that slipped up past him. Soon enough he exposed the cartilaginous skull of the thing, and with a few quick stabs he broke open the hinge of the jaw. Then, stowing the knife carefully in its pouch, he prised the two portions apart, and pulled the teeth from their puncture wounds. It was unpleasant work, and sent sparkles of sharper pain shooting over the backdrop of more general agony.

Blood seeped from the leg. But there was nothing he could do about that, and the exsanguination was not too severe.

Lebret looked around him. Craning his head back, he could
see the suboceanic sun above him, and the glittery shimmer of its attendant life forms swirling and swimming. Below, though, was only darkness.

It occurred to Lebret that he had escaped two very unpleasant deaths – being torn to pieces and being boiled alive – only to encounter a third: asphyxiation. Eventually the air in his tank would run out, and he would choke. He could simply wait for that grim eventuality. Or he could simply pull the mask from his face and drown.

He smiled.

It was not possible to know how long he sank through those waters. It felt like days, but he doubted the three narrow tanks on his back contained so much air. Incrementally the water darkened around him, and chilled. There was a period when this was pleasant, after the scorching water above; but soon enough he was shivering. He was weak with thirst and prolonged pain, and presumably from blood-loss too; but he was also wholly and completely alone.

Down he went, eternally. His whole body was in pain. Soon enough the thirst grew so intense that he decided to risk removing his face mask.

He took a breath, pushed the mouthpiece out with his tongue and mask up just a little. The weird physics of this ocean meant that the air inside the mask did not bubble and gush away as he did this. In fact almost no water got inside the mask. Still holding his breath, Lebret gulped one, two, three mouthfuls of water. It was cold, and piqued pain from his hurt jaw, but it tasted clean, unsalty – even delicious. He was able to replace the mask and start breathing again without hiccough.

Assuaging his thirst provided only temporary respite, however. It allowed the many other aches and agonies of his battered body to press upon his consciousness. His jaw raged; his left leg was a string of separate little agonies; there were nicks and bruises all over his body.

It was darker still, and colder. Down, further down, and deeper …

Lebret dozed. He was not aware of falling asleep; and only knew that he had because he dreamt of monster-fish swarming up at him, and woke with a start to find himself scrabbling for his knife. But there were no fish, and he recognised the sensation – of sudden awakening – for what it was.

Soon enough his heart settled.

He pondered his situation. Was there any way he could work it exactly how much air he had? He tried wriggling to look over his own shoulder at the tanks, but the valves and dials were not accessible. He hung in the nothingness for a while, and a sensation of despondency stirred inside him. Surely it was demeaning merely to wait, passively, for his fate? But what else could he do?

His leg had stopped bleeding, at any rate. This was hard to see, for the light had dimmed almost to total black, but he could just about see detail in his own shadowy limbs. Tipping his head back, and ignoring the twinges the motion sent along his wounded jaw, he could make out the sub oceanic sun as a smudgy dot of brightness. But all around was murky. The dark material of the diving suit merged with the surrounding blackness, and his pale skin, visible through rents in the cloth, gleaming faintly, gave back the impression of a disconnected spread of oddly shaped items. As if his body had been metamorphosed into a shoal.

He thought back to the
Plongeur
, far above him now. How were they faring aboard that submarine? Billiard-Fanon had the pistol. He had probably shot Ghatwala by now, and possibly Jhutti too – poor, blameless Amanpreet Jhutti, who knew nothing about the message, or the real agenda behind Lebret and Ghatwala’s involvement in the voyage. Still, everybody aboard that particular experimental French Naval Vessel would be dead soon, so their murders were almost inconsequential.

His mind drifted. Without sensory inputs he found his mind defocusing. Random memories spilled-in. A sensory deprivation tank – the KGB had showed him one of those, in Termez. They said: Moscow colleagues still favour the old Cossack brutalities: beatings and fingernail-wrenchings and the judicious application
of electrical shocks. But – (Lebret could picture him now; a corpulent KGB officer called Seleznyov, with an oriental cast to his features, a fat black beard and bald brow with conch-like wrinkles curving upon it) – but, Seleznyov said, down here we have discovered that this simple box works better. Not for everyone. Mystics and Chinese are hardly touched by it. But Westerners (and here, Seleznyov eyed Lebret saucily) can’t bear it. Left alone with nothing but their decadent thoughts! They break. After a couple of days, bring them back out of the box and they’ll answer any question rather than go back inside.

Am I in such a box?
Lebret wondered. The blackness was deeper now; the glimmers became fainter, and then were swallowed by the crow-coloured water. But sensory deprivation was impossible – the pain in his jaw, and to a slightly lesser extent in his left leg, kept agitating his mind, and refused to let him settle.

He was conscious, or not, or he was on some borderline between the two states of mind. It hardly mattered any more. He was sinking down and down. He fantasised about finally arriving at the ocean floor of this alien sea, and standing upon it. But there was no bottom. He would soon die, and then his corpse would sink forever through this infinite body of black water.

He thought about the native life forms. The disturbingly
human
quality they betrayed. A random chance, thrown up by a different evolutionary line? Uncanny, certainly. Were they terrestrial forms of life that had slipped through the same crack that had brought the
Plongeur
here? It was possible.

His mind wandered. He did not sleep, but hung for a long time conscious of nothing but the acid sensation of pain within his own body. He was grimly impressed by his own nervous system’s persistence. He felt like crying out: ‘Alright! You have made your point! I understand! Torn skin – broken bones – yes, yes,
I get it
! There is no need to go on so!’ But the body does not listen to such entreaty.