‘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!’
Jhutti fixed his eyes on the slowly turning gem. The words were waiting to be spoken. But would he get them out in time? It would be, Jhutti thought, like an old Wild West movie, like a gunfight on the dusty main street. He would attempt to pull out his six-shooter – two words – and his adversary would attempt to pull out his weapon, and pin a crystal needle through Jhutti’s windpipe.
His heart was pounding. He shut his eyes. He heard the Jewel say, ‘What is your answer, Amanpreet Jhutti?’
He spoke.
EPILOGUE
That the mind is in the world and at the same time the world is inside the mind. This is in the nature of infinite geometries, and these are the geometries with which we must deal. Take the example of a particular writer – say he lives in France. Say he carries the idea of France inside him. Each insulates each; and France exists within the world and is itself a world. And this world is subordinate to its more massive sun, which has captured it; and yet the world moves on its frictionless ellipses around and around, containing its sun in an invisible net of silk. The sun is part of a galaxy that surrounds a central black hole; and that black hole has broke the hymen of space-time itself and folded out, a point that is an infinite space in which the galaxy itself is nested. Thought and matter are each inside each other, and each flows without and within, and the principle of flow is the ocean.
You are dipped in this water, and it is with this water that you are baptised. Streaming, your head surfaces, like the head of somebody breaking the surface of an ocean of words. This ocean is glassy, and greeny, and we move towards it.
Jhutti opened his eyes. He felt as if he had been turned inside-out, or the reverse of that. ‘Where am I?’ he asked.
Also by Adam Roberts from Gollancz:
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By Light Alone
Jack Glass
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Adam Roberts 2014
Illustrations copyright © Mahendra Singh 2014
All rights reserved
The right of Adam Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2014 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 13444 7
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.adamroberts.com
www.orionbooks.co.uk
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Crew of the Plongeur
1 The Sinking of the Plongeur
2 The Captain’s Last Supper
3 The Disaster
4 After The Disaster
5 The Impossible Depths
6 The Infinite Ocean
7 Leaving the Plongeur
8 The Crack
9 The Light
10 An Interview with Captain Cloche
11 Council of War
12 The Light Below
13 Sub Oceanic Sun
14 Confinement
15 Court Martial
16 Sentence
17 Who’s in Command?
18 The Demons of the Sea
19 The Shield of Faith
20 The Fate of Lebret
21 The Childranha
22 The Fathomless Depths
23 The Hand
24 Dakkar
25 The Prodigious Emerald
26 Shaving the Beard
27 The Underwater Garden
28 The Arrival of the Plongeur
29 The Death of Lebret
30 The Tetragrammaton
31 The Jewel
32 Twenty Trillion Kilometres Under the Sea
Epilogue
Also by Adam Roberts from Gollancz
Copyright