Submergence (28 page)

In the white night of the fourth day out of Iceland, the
Pourquoi Pas?
dropped anchor over the underworld they sought. Enki was the northernmost hydrothermal vent field yet discovered, with some of the largest recorded sulphide deposits. The water that poured from its chimneys was 399 degrees Celsius. There was proof of a chemosynthetic life cycle, with acid-feeding bacteria at its foundation, working up to tube worms, white clams, and other bivalves. It was extraordinarily large and ancient. More than that was unclear. The 2011 expedition had discovered the field near where the Knipovich and Mohn undersea ridges joined after weeks of dragging a CTD (where C was conductivity, T was temperature and D was depth) sensor behind the boat in sawtooth patterns. The sensor looked for anomalies. When it found them, it took a sample of vent water, which could then be analysed for telltale levels of dissolved hydrogen and methane oxidised in the water column by microorganisms. Her challenge for 2012 was to scrape from a fissure some richer material, of mathematical consequence.

The first scheduled dives to Enki were for orientation and mapping. The next were for the geologists. The dives for the biologists and mathematicians were to take place close to the end of the cruise. There were various teams of biologists. The evolutionary group were working towards extracting DNA. Another was looking at viruses; they wanted to know how they in their sickness spread from one vent field to another. The French and Swiss astrobiologists Danny and Thumbs were working closely with were gathering samples on behalf of the European Space Agency. The hope was to identify new microorganisms. Claude, the French leader of their team, had placed a bet that life would be found in the methane oceans of Titan in his lifetime. He felt that the search for extraterrestial life was compromised by surface chauvinism:
it looked only on the outside of planets, moons and rocks, not deep in the cracks where it was more likely to be. She agreed. Man’s fixation with façades, with outward appearances, was another reason why there was not more interest in oceanography.

She took a bullish view. Microbial life was tenacious. It swarmed even in mineshafts and caves. Seen from up close, the cracks in the sea floor were like the cross-hatching on a metal-plate engraving. She believed that some of them went down 8 kilometres into the mantle, and were carpeted with a density of microbial life that, taken together with the deep biota, was more than all the photosynthetic life on the surface of the planet combined. To prove her thesis she had to come up with methods of counting the methanogens, the hyperthermophilic autotrophic iron reducers, and the peculiar states and leagues of archaea and bacteria. She had also tried to identify the boundary which separated the living part from where there was no life and to understand the percolation between existence and non-existence.

What they were doing at sea was the start. Once she and Thumbs were back in London, they would assemble the data and send problems – mathematical complexity, the levels of hierarchy which bridged a microbe to the ecosystem – to teams of biomathematicians in Spain and America.

The
Nautile
was prepared at night. It dived in the morning. A bell was rung on the boat in the afternoon, when it was on its way back to the surface. People went out onto the deck. They guessed on where the pregnancy in the waters would be. The
Nautile
looked both small and dramatic from a distance. White and blue, a piece of china. Frogmen sped out on ribbed inflatables to it. They dived in and secured it so that it could be towed back. When the checks were done, the crew of three emerged weary and triumphant through the hatch. Their initial success was less a scientific one than a human one; they had returned. There was often an expression of wonderment. Some of the scientists shook their heads: they had ascended
like Orpheus from the soup which contained the magnitude of species, and which would be the sanctuary of life on earth for as long as it kept spinning, primitive, consistent, constant, offering protection from solar flares, nuclear radiation, comets and other yet unknown human crimes.

An Ogadeni knelt on the other side of the netting, poking him with a stick like a zoo animal and watching him intently. He glared back. He saw the desert in the man’s eyes. They were the kidney-damaged pair of a camel herder, not pellucid and darting, but cloudy, rheumy and bloodshot from years of drinking muddy water, camel milk and urine.

He turned over. He could not sleep for more than an hour at a time. Sometimes the sky revolved. He was nauseous. He was forever crawling out of the shadow of the baobab. He thought it was falling on him.

They had been there for months by then. The days had run together. The rot in his netting was making him sick and there was such a heat and outside there were the moving dots of mosquitoes whining at night. He could find no resolution to his anger. He was losing resolve, losing his sense of himself, of his story. His capacity for solving problems was diminishing. He was unloved.

He really was a dog. He was ordered out each day for his meal. Depending on the mood of the fighters he was helped across the encampment or hit and shouted at. He had learned to identify body language and when any of them approached him quickly he curled himself up for protection. During one kicking a line from a song repeated:

Like some cat from Japan.

She held an open house in the lab one evening. Thumbs selected the vinyl records and placed them on his turntable; classic rock, then funk. She ground the coffee beans.

Colleagues wandered in and traded freshly baked pastries for cups of coffee. The conversation was mostly about music, to begin with. There was no discussion of politics; scientists seem to exist slightly out of time in that way. When the alcohol came out there was a general commentary about microbial metabolism, the hydrogen shitters, and what that might mean for a new generation of fuel cells and the grail of clean energy. There was talk of the abyss itself, its carbon sinks of salp, and whether pollution could be taken from the air and injected into it. It often came back to climate change, because there was research money available for it, and tenure for any bright young academic who could make of the vasty deep an engine or rubbish bin. To the backing of funk, another turn in the conversation concerned vertical transport in the global ocean, VERTIGO. Specifically, how to track ocean currents using elements like thorium, which stuck to marine snow and decayed at a stable rate.

Then Thumbs held the floor.

‘Put yourself in the future,’ he said. ‘Out in space. You’re property developers. You’ve found a planet a decent distance from a sun. You buy the place. Now you have to animate it. You put in air, water and microbial life. How to give it a lived-in look? You need to get back to the basics; dig in ponds, marshes; turf the hills, plant oaks, lay out groves, vineyards; introduce deer and foxes.

‘What kind of house would we build?’

Thumbs raised his hand and gulped down some liquor. ‘Roman, definitely. A villa of the kind found in third-century England; mosaic floors, baths, fireplaces. You’d have space-age fittings too, of course, land sloping down to a stream, and stables filled with horses.’

‘No cars?’

‘No. This would be marketed as a planet you come to slow down. You arrive out of hyperspace, steady yourself, get your transfusion or whatever, then swap your spacesuit for a toga and ride home along a cobbled Roman road through woods and across fields under twin moons. The autumn effect, the frost, and the rest of it would just be climate control.’

She was very happy in evenings like this one, when science seemed a shared enterprise, not a jigsaw of vanities. Thumbs kept changing the records, slowing them down. When they got to acid jazz they abandoned conversation.

They worked through the night with lab assistants. The
Pourquoi Pas
? had set anchor north of Jan Mayen, directly over the Enki field. It was a stormy night. It rained and sleeted through the midnight sun. They were thrown about, but the instruments and computers were screwed down into the wooden counters and fastened with bungee rope and not a dial moved except of its own accord.

They took turns to prepare the samples gathered by the
Nautile
. The treatment was mechanical. The scrapings were soft, whitish and stank of rotten eggs. The vent fluids were gathered using titanium bottles, which did not corrode. Each bottle had a snorkel and a trigger, which could be released from inside the submersible.

They used a spectrophotometer to test light absorption in the sulphides and a microscope showed up the teeming yellow cities on the glass slides. They did their own quantitative culturing and made use of the microscopy, microprobes and spectroscopies the astrobiologists undertook. It was the embodied end of mathematics.

She finished work at three o’clock. She slept a few hours and then ran and punched in the gym. She had a brunch of toast, pasta and an apple, then went to a meeting with the other senior scientists on the bridge to specify the scientific payload for each dive.

She was distracted; there was something like a hair-drier blowing out hot air by the door where she was standing. She kept looking out of the windows at the sea.

When the meeting was over she stayed on the bridge and studied the undersea charts for the Greenland Sea. They were fictitious. The soundings were off. Even with its clumped lines of reversed contours, the charts failed to capture the depth of the ocean, the day spent sinking into it.

Odile
is an early novella by the French writer Raymond Queneau. Odile waits for her husband Travy at the docks in Marseilles when he returns from Greece. Travy looks out from the deck of his ship at all the piled-up pieces of the port and sees her at last at the barricade behind the customs shed, among the hustlers and porters.

Living in 1920s France as Travy and Odile lived was harder than chasing your own tail or balancing on a pinhead. People often went to bed hungry. Yet Travy fell properly in love with Odile. The story ended and the boy started to live. Or rather, he started to live again.

The scene at the docks in Marseilles would be very different if Queneau wrote it today. Indeed, he could not write it in the same way. It would be a flight from Athens to Paris. A budget airline, not a proper one. There would be less tension and a diminished sense of arrival. Travy would come out of arrivals at Charles de Gaulle. Ignoring the minicab drivers and the policemen, he would follow the directions she had texted him, and they would embrace at a newsstand beyond.