Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (38 page)

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 though 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; and 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!’

‘You will not reach the trigger,’ said the Jewel. ‘You must accept the inevitability. You are mine. All of you were always mine.’

‘If I might be permitted to correct you,’ Jhutti said, looking around him to see if there were some projectile he could throw.

‘You are looking for a weapon,’ said the Jewel. ‘Or you are hoping to throw something and set off the trigger. You see that I am able to manifest materially in your space. If you move towards anything, I shall manifest crystal pegs through your bones, and incapacitate you. I need what is in your mind. I do not need your consent to reach it.’

‘If,’ Jhutti repeated, letting his arms go slack, ‘I may be permitted to correct you. It would be more correct to say
je ne vais pas
…’

‘You think I cannot speak French,’ said the Jewel in a monotone. And in that instant, Jhutti realised. The words appeared inside his mind, round and sweet as an apple. And at the same time Jhutti thought to himself,
Will he sense that I am about to say those words? Will he detect the motion of my diaphragm, the contraction of my vocal chords, and make appear a crystal splinter in my throat to choke me off? Dare I risk it?

‘There need be no unpleasantness,’ said the Jewel. ‘If you help me. What I want – it is the common good! This is
my
cosmos. I know what is right for it!’