World of Water (34 page)

Soon the light had leaked away altogether, and there was nothing but blackness.

Still the manta descended, its pace not slackening. The rush of water within the eye socket was just about the only evidence Dev had that the creature was moving. Visually, there were no clues. Everything outside was like ink, pure unfathomable void.

Then he glimpsed lights.

It was the same firework-display illumination he had seen during his nocturnal swim from the URIB to Llyr. It seemed more distant than he remembered, deeper down. He assumed the marine fauna responsible for it took refuge in lower strata of the ocean during daytime, rising after sunset when the ambient light from above dwindled almost to nil. To them, a surrounding darkness was comfort. It was what they were used to. Home.

As the lights brightened and enlarged, Dev felt a twinge in his ears which developed rapidly into pain. How far down was the manta sub? And how much further did Ethel intend to take it?

The water began to feel sluggish as it passed through his gills, not to mention cold, as numbingly cold as an arctic wind. It was like breathing iced soup. Every inhalation and exhalation became laborious, an effort.

And the pain in his ears only increased, until it was a bone-drilling, temple-tormenting agony.

The water pressure was now intense, a hundred atmospheres or more, and the temperature many degrees below zero. Dev could endure it for the time being, but not for much longer, not if they kept on going.

Yet they kept on going. The manta did not slow. Ethel drove the sub relentlessly down towards the scintillating patterns of living light, deeper and deeper. Now Dev could hear cracking sounds coming from his skull, the bones of his cranium grinding together along their suture lines. His head felt as though it was going to implode. He knew he was beyond the point where a human diver could safely venture even in a pressurised aluminium-alloy exosuit. No one should be this far down, unprotected.

They came to the place where the benthic creatures dwelled, the abyssal realm.

Here, at last, Ethel reduced speed and levelled the manta out. The sub hovered, not quite at rest, and Dev recovered his bearings and peered outside, squinting through his haze of head pain.

It was like something out of a dream.

The worst dream imaginable.

A phantasmagorical cavalcade of sea creatures swept past the cockpit’s corneal membrane, things that didn’t belong in any bestiary, things that had no place in a sane and ordered universe. They seemed like evolutionary castoffs, abortions of nature that had been consigned to this oceanic dungeon because there was nowhere else to put them and they were better left where no one could see them. Lit from within by their own garish bioluminescence, they teemed back and forth, prowling and clashing.

One was like a bundle of balloons, pallid gas-filled sacs that swelled and shrivelled at different times, inflating and deflating in accordance with some indefinable pattern.

Another was a ribbed hexagon of skin several metres wide that moved through the water by folding itself into complex geometric shapes.

There was a largish armoured fish that at first glance seemed to be giving a smaller fish a piggyback ride, until Dev realised that the hanger-on was attached by tentacles which pierced the larger fish just behind the head through a chink in its plated hide. The hitchhiking fish was a parasite, feeding off and controlling the other, using it as a combined larder and transportation. A horrid symbiosis.

A colony of hydrozoa split into its hundreds of component parts to overwhelm its chosen prey, a doughy, lumpen thing with a face like a clown in a police mugshot. The tiny anemone-like creatures swarmed over their quarry, stung it to death, sawed off a chunk each with minuscule corkscrew teeth, then coalesced back together in a clump to dine, while the chewed, riddled corpse they left behind sank from sight.

Something a bit like a coelacanth sauntered by, ancient and unhurried, with what appeared to be a dozen tumours dangling from its belly. These were in fact semi-transparent egg sacs, and a developing foetus nestled in each, suckling on pre-digested food piped to it from its mother’s intestinal tract.

Something revoltingly phallic throbbed along with peristaltic convulsions of its body. When a potential aggressor wandered near, the rubbery tube of meat started everting, prolapsing its intestines through its anal orifice and sucking them back in. It rolled itself inside out like this, over and over, confusing its foe and probably, if Dev’s own reaction was anything to go by, nauseating it too. Eventually the predator, deterred, decided to turn elsewhere for a meal, alighting on a tiny shrimp, which looked as though it would be a delicious mouthful – except that it wasn’t a shrimp at all but a decoy, a shrimp-shaped growth perched on the proboscis of a megamouthed carnivore who promptly swallowed the hapless, bamboozled mark in a single gulp. The trickster didn’t last long enough to enjoy its ill-gotten gains, however, as it was harpooned from below by a spiny projection shot from the snout of a broad, flat crustacean, which reeled the victim in. The crustacean gnawed on the flexing, still living body in a leisurely manner, until...

But Dev had had enough. Disgust overcame fascination. There was only so much of this grotesque, hallucinatory spectacle he could take. He had done psychedelics in his youth, not often but often enough to know the slippery, lurid delusions a mind could come up with. This was worse; it didn’t have the consolation of being imaginary.

The manta sub was profoundly uneasy in the midst of the milling crowd of deep-sea horrors. It shied away whenever any of them swam close, and Dev could feel distinct tremors of anxiety running through it. It yearned to be back up in the warm, friendly waters of the photic zone – if perhaps not as much as Dev did.

Especially when a blobby, spongy animal resembling a brain with fins began nudging through the rip in the cockpit cornea. Dev lashed out with a foot, and the brain blob oozed away, disgruntled.

He decided he would prefer the security of an intact cockpit, and so he wriggled along the duct to the other eye socket. Movement, physical effort, made his head hurt worse. The pain almost blinded him. Nonetheless he persevered and struggled on through to the other side, slithering down beside Ethel, who looked to be in as much discomfort as he was.

How long –?
he began, but she interrupted.

Shhh
, she said. She pointed upward.

Something was moving about above them.

Something enormous.

The Ice King.

It had followed them all the way down and it was hunting for them in the dark, looking for them amid the throngs of benthic wildlife. The kicks of its hind legs, the force of its immense bulk pushing through the water, generated powerful currents that rocked the manta. What Dev had taken for fits of trembling was the turbulence set up by the Ice King as it cruised to and fro, roving, searching.

The glowing, ghastly fauna outside reacted to the Ice King’s presence with a weird apathy. They were too busy preying on one another, caught up in their endless cycle of kill-or-be-killed, to care much about this new arrival, however abundantly vast it was. In a carnage-filled arena, what was one more gladiator?

Are we supposed to not talk at all?
Dev asked, trying to keep his ‘voice’ as muted as he could.
In case the Ice King spots us?

Ethel answered in equally subdued tones,
It’s not the Ice King I’m worried about. It’s everything else. Down here, light is all. Light attracts, repels, communicates, misleads...

So keep it low, that’s what you’re telling me. If we don’t want to draw unwelcome attention from the freak show out there.

Speak only when necessary. If they can’t see us, they won’t notice us. As long as we’re silent and the manta stays stationary, we’re invisible.

Really? One of those things was trying to get into the other cockpit a moment ago.

It must have bumped up against the manta by accident, that’s all.

If you say so. Can I ask why we’re hiding out here?

It was the only place I could think of to go. Somewhere where we could pause. Regroup. Where, if we’re lucky, the Ice King won’t be able to find us.

Too many other creatures. Too many lights. Interference. I get it. Losing ourselves in a crowd. But the pressure is...

Unpleasant, yes.

Mistress of understatement
, Dev thought.

You’ll just have to put up with it
, Ethel went on.

How long do you reckon the Ice King will go on looking before it gives up?

Your guess is as good as mine. Once he moves off, we’ll resume following him as before, stealthily.

Okay, but –

Ethel covered his face with her hands.

Outside the cockpit, a subaquatic spider was staring in.

It might not have been a spider in the strict taxonomic sense, but it was sufficiently arachnid to merit the comparison. Big as a limousine, it had a smattering of eyes, a profusion of thin spines that looked like hairs, and a pair of pedipalps set below its mouth. With these long, spindly forelimbs it began gently touching the cornea of the eye, exploring its outline, getting a sense of its shape and texture.

The manta sub recoiled, which only increased the sea spider’s inquisitiveness. Ethel laid a steadying hand on the steering stalks, and the manta obediently went stock still.

The sea spider spent a couple more minutes investigating the source of the lights it had caught sight of: Dev’s and Ethel’s conversation. It appeared not to understand why there was a barrier separating it from them. The pedipalps quested over the cornea like the hands of a sculptor over a block of raw marble, assessing it for strengths and weaknesses.

Dev had never been as repulsed by any living being as he was at this one. The feeling intensified when the sea spider’s mouth parts opened and a pair of fangs extruded from within. A seam of fluorescent yellow venom was visible through the translucent material of each fang, running down the middle. It didn’t help that the fangs themselves were the size of his forearm.

The manta sub remained immobile, and Dev could only admire its self-restraint. If the sea spider had been touching
him
like that, he could never have endured it the way the manta was.

All the same, the manta was starting to quiver, and this time it wasn’t a result of the commotion caused by the Ice King passing overhead. The creature was becoming fractious, unstable.

Delicately, ever so delicately, Ethel tugged on the steering stalks. The manta shrank back from the sea spider, centimetre by centimetre, with the tiniest wafts of its wings.

The sea spider was all set to head after it, still curious. Then a ribbed hexagon-of-skin animal, possibly the one Dev had spied earlier, flopped onto it from above like a dropped carpet.

A battle ensued, sea spider and skin hexagon wrapping themselves around each other, all legs and triangles, fangs and umbrella folds. Dev didn’t much care which of them won the fight. If they both killed each other, so much the better.

The manta sub found a volume of clear water, a hollow among the shimmering multitudes, and halted.

Above, the Ice King continued to search.

50

T
IME PASSED.
D
EV’S
head pulsed. Now and then the manta sub shook as the Ice King swam by.

Sometimes the gargantuan crab got close, alarmingly so. The water became a mass of sweeps and swirls, rumbling like a rock slide.

The Ice King was being thorough, no question. The chase, as far as it was concerned, was anything but over. Manta was still dish of the day. It just needed to find it.

An hour ticked by in the abyssal fathoms, two hours, three, with distant flashes and crackles of light erupting all around and every now and then an animal appearing directly outside the cockpit, supple, lugubrious, ghostly, grim. Each seemed more repugnant than the last, as though there was an Ugliest Organism Alive contest under way and the winners were being announced in reverse order.

After a while, though, Dev became used to the deep-sea creatures’ universal unloveliness. Grace and beauty weren’t advantages down here. To survive in this ruthlessly Darwinian environment it was best to be tough and mean, to be the sum of your offensive and defensive capabilities and no more.

The kid.

Suddenly, with a start, Dev remembered that the Tritonian kid was still aboard, trussed up in the sleeping chamber. The poor bastard would be experiencing the same pressure pains as he and Ethel were. It wasn’t fair just to leave him there, alone and suffering, without at least checking up on him.

Dev scooted back along the manta’s dorsal duct.

The kid lay listless, groans trickling across his face in thin pink rivulets.

Dev felt his first real pang of compassion for the young Tritonian since discovering him in the tank at Llyr. Almost on a whim, he decided to untie him.