Submergence (32 page)

He had watched lambs gambol on the hill by the jinn pit. It would be an ecological future, where even the gas from cremations would be captured for power generation. Yet his experience in Somalia – with darkness and deprivation, the famished condition of the Somali people, the desolation of the wadi, his clashing on behalf of the Enlightenment (so he persuaded himself) – would look like a buccaneering life to many in that future, to be envied above a world in which every infant
was to be registered at birth and tracked with implants drilled into bone.

In another of the letters Danny had written him, she had reported the unexpected pleasure of looking after a dog for a friend; taking the dog for walks, brushing its coat, trying to read its expressions in the evening, before moving continuously into thoughts about the new human beings that will be available within a few decades:

I wonder if we’ll have anything of Jenny in us. Her eyes, her wagging tail, her eagerness to please. Probably not. We’ll get new muscle and ligaments, new skin, new eyes and ears. What’s the Olympic motto? Faster, higher, stronger? It’s predatory. We’ll go for snakes, hawks and sharks. Some of it will be messing about with genes, splicing, but a lot is going to be technology. A metal exoskeleton, I should think. More bounce, better protection. We might find a way to link human memories to a mainframe …

The letter ventured off into talk of the town and holiday plans, then circled back.

People who say no to upgrades will end up in caravan parks and wild places. They will become slower and weaker relative to the others. In time they will turn into curiosities, human beasts, until curiosity dies like it did for Kafka’s hunger artist, who fasted to death in a cage and was replaced with a panther.

His brain was white stuff: spermaceti, galantine. The shapes that played on the inside of his eyelids were vivid, and when he retreated further into New Atlantis he saw the important horse race of the season was run on a course very like the racecourse in his town in northern England – a flat race that had been run since the reign of King George III – he sensed that the place names of the villages in New Atlantis were Anglo-Saxon, and that this was natural, because the Angles and Saxons
came from a landscape that was similar to that remote island – their language was sensitive to dips in the land, the culvert under a hill, the slopes and mounds, there were leas, dales, holts, slades and wolds in New Atlantis, as there were in England. Somalis must have similar words. The land he passed over on the lorry had glowered; it was waterless, unmarked and unnamed to him, just the wadis, the companionless trees, and the shadows in the cuts of the badlands.

There were days when the wind blew hard before the rain and he had to anchor his net with rocks. The creek turned to jade, crabs scuttled in greater numbers on the banks of putty mud from one settlement to another. The tide rose, and there was gunfire and shouting in the forest.

Almost all of his sober passages of thought involved people long ago dead. He wished he was in England, following the edges of a wood … God, enough. He wished he was with her. That was all. It didn’t matter where. It had been his training to push away thoughts of what might be but now he was in the place of martyrs and he was slipping away and there was no more space for death, there was only space for life, for her. She was so beautiful, to him, so strong, so true. He wanted more than anything to hold her. He could feel the embrace; her shirt, her shoulders, his head on her shoulder, her hands cradling him; him sobbing into her, crying the way you do in dreams, without any inhibition. He had recreated every word, every experience of her; tried to understand it. And the joy; the joy was that he was not making it up. She felt the same way. She said so in the letters she had sent him, always physical letters, handwritten, so he could never be at liberty to file her away, she said, or share her on a screen.

But death is remorseless. Death is the tide which sweeps away consciousness. It is the absolute zero which stops any acceleration. Poetry speaks of
the ocean as a tomb, whereas science reckons it to be a womb. If you must waste away or perish violently in the morning light then a burial at sea might resolve this conflicted view. Lash me in a hammock and drop me deep … Would you wish to be sunk to a great depth, or to be dropped a fathom down, on a reef, gently rocked, until your bones are of corals made and you suffer a sea change into something rich and strange?

A year or so before – it seemed a lifetime ago – he had been at a dinner party on a farm not far from Mount Kenya. It was well attended, very smart, but the mood was subdued: a European royal who had been a close friend to the hosts lay gravely ill in his palace overlooking the North Sea. This royal had promised – extravagantly or on a Jungian impulse – that were it possible, his soul would take the form of a daemon at the time of his passing and appear to his friends. During the main course, a bird with carmine breast feathers appeared on the veranda. No one at the table had seen such a bird before. It was remarked upon. The bird did not settle in the thatched roof with the weaverbirds, but sat forthrightly on a vase in front of the hostess. It looked at her, cocking its head to one side in the way birds do, then it hopped around and regarded the others at the table.

‘My God, it’s Bernhard,’ the hostess said.

Everyone fell silent.

‘Bernhard!’ she called out, at which the bird warbled, bowed, and flew off.

‘Excuse me,’ the hostess said, ‘I must call Europe.’

Sure enough, she was informed that the prince had died a few minutes before.

What form might he take in death? If he could appear to Danny, he would be a small African owl, fluttering at her porthole. If he could
only send a message, some sign of the afterlife, he would return to her the inscription she had written inside the cover of one of his books, from Job:

Have you entered the springs of the sea? Or have you walked in the depths? Have the gates of death been revealed to you? Or have you seen the door of the shadow of death? Have you comprehended the breadth of the Earth? Tell me if you know all this?

He would have messages for his family and friends, but the passage from Job would be his sign to her.

The Kaaba was the empty space to which all Muslims directed their prayers. He was sceptical – Catholic, English, he desired a New Atlantis, a windswept All Souls College – still the Kaaba caused him to shudder. If he were allowed a supernatural instruction, it would be for her to achieve a dispensation to study the microbial life inside it.

He was standing in the creek washing himself. Ablution, with no rhythm, no conviction. He saw it coming a few seconds before it hit. The colours on its snub nose were the same maroon as the flashes 1 Para wore on their right arm. It was his colour. It was coming for him.

How it twirled towards the ground. He was transfixed. He thought of a helter-skelter, circling down on hessian mats heavy with sand, those colours going round and round, ‘Helter Skelter, feare no colours, course him, trounce him!’

It glinted. It burned from its tail. It was an astonishing creation. Entirely human, wholly American. It had been fired over the curvature of the earth from a submarine off the coast of Somalia. The viscosity of seawater at so many fathoms, the loosening of rocket motors in flight, the load of explosives, the Coriolis effect as it applied at the
equator, all of these considerations had been accounted for by minds and machines, yet it was impossible in the final moment not to see the missile as something more.

Machine guns were fired.

‘I’m bleeding out,’ someone cried in Arabic.

‘
Allah u Akbar!
’ was the last utterance heard.

He dived into the creek. With all his strength, he kicked to the bottom. Addition, subtraction. His mind stopped like a roulette wheel. His last thought, peculiarly, blessedly, was of the wool markets in Langland’s
Piers the Ploughman
. The wine merchant calling out ‘Wine from Alsace! Wine from Gascony! Rhine wines!’

The surface exploded like a star. The sides of the creek were thrown up into the sky. The noise was so loud it became silence. Then there was that secondary platinum light that turns bodies to ash.

The sun went so fast, the stars faster, yet not as fast as young More’s body to the earth. He came up for air in bloody gaining waters, with cooked crabs, with martyrs. He looked at death, went under again, and swam away, towards the Boni, towards Kenya. In this sense, at least, his submergence was shallow.

3088 metres … 3120 …

‘There it is now, Danny,’ Étienne said, with feeling. ‘Your Enki.’ They went slowly towards a column the size of an office block. The chimneys on it billowed like so many Turks setting back their heads and expelling cigarette smoke through their nostrils.