Soft Apocalypses (23 page)

Science, she mused, involved an awful lot of waiting and doing-over.

Her reverie was broken by the shouts of men. She stood. The
Southwind
had sailed into view … but she was too low in the sea, and listing so far to one side she looked in danger of capsizing. Had the ship broken its hull on a coral reef?

“She’s taking on water fast!” the stevedore shouted. “Every man with a boat, get out there! We need to get that cargo off!”

Two hours later, Thilini stood with her father as two deeply tanned dockworkers pulled the precious Swiss crates from the deck of a patamar that had been pressed into rescue duty. The crates were so waterlogged that she would not have been surprised to hear fish flopping inside them. The glass would be fine, provided it had not been mishandled, but she cringed at the corrosion the seawater would wreak on the delicate gears if they were not carefully rinsed, dried, and re-oiled.

“Please, get these back to my shop as quickly as you can,” he told the men of the hired wagon.

“Yes, Herr Rothschild.” They quickly set to loading up the crates.

The stevedore approached them, shaking his head. He was a small, wiry man who looked Tamil but he wore a Catholic rosary over his loose cotton shirt and had a slight Portuguese accent. “A third of the cargo lost, and five sailors sent to the Almighty. The ship can’t be repaired in the water, so we need to find some way to haul ‘er in to dry-dock before she sinks. And I ain’t convinced she won’t just sink.”

“Was it a reef?” Thilini asked.

“If only!” the stevedore replied. “We could dodge a reef, but this … well, come see. Perhaps your papa can make heads or tails of this deviltry.”

Further down, another boat had come in bearing a broken plank from the hull. Not broken, she realized. Something had bitten it in half! Imbedded in the stout English timber was a shark’s tooth of far greater size than any she’d imagined. The biggest one she’d seen until then was about the size of a gold sovereign coin.

“Mein gott,” her father breathed. He laid his hand beside the protruding tooth; it was larger than his palm and outstretched fingers. “What leviathan could grow such a fang? Some type of cachalot whale?”

“
Carcharodon carcharias
,” came a voice behind them.

Thilini turned. Trincomalee’s resident naturalist, the retired physician Edward Kelart, was gazing at the tooth with grave concern. He leaned heavily against his silver-filigreed cane, which he’d needed to use ever since a hard voyage to England had nearly killed him two decades before.

“That tooth’s far too large to come from a great white shark,” her father countered.

“Indeed,” Dr. Kelart said. “But the tooth shape is distinct, and unmistakable. If it is not some ancient great white grown to immense size, it is a close cousin.”

The imported glass was in fine shape, and Thilini and her father were able to clean all the gears they needed for their submersible prototype. In just a few months, they had his latest invention ready to test in the waters. The gleaming fifteen-foot submarine was skinned in copper and steel, courtesy of the fine craftsmanship of the local metal smiths. The sub was sleek as a dolphin, with round fore and aft windows and triangular fins for stability. Her father’s patented, self-contained steam engine powered the screw-shaped propellers at the rear of the sub and electric headlights.

“This is just a miniature version of what I propose to build later,” her father remarked to the stevedore, who helped them guide the sub down the wooden ramp into the water. “We must test every aspect of the craft, of course.”

“You’re letting the girl pilot this thing?” Astonishment was plain on the stevedore’s face.

Thilini ignored him and focused on buttoning up her black rubber suit. The feel of the tight material against her legs was strange; she was used to airy saris and sarongs, but skirts of course would drag her down in the water. She hoped the coolness of the sea would help counteract the heat from the steam engine. Otherwise, she’d be stewed like a whiting in a parchment bag before her three hours of air were depleted.

“She knows every rivet and gear of this craft, and she is a far better swimmer than I,” her father said. “Further, we had to build the sub at such a limited scale that I can scarcely fit in it myself!”

The men helped her squeeze through the top hatch of the sub.

“Don’t go out of the shallows at first, and if the craft is sound, don’t take her farther than Pigeon Island,” her father admonished.

“I won’t,” she promised.

They sealed the hatch above her, and moments later the sub lurched as the men pushed it into the water. Thilini said a quick prayer and pulled the lever to start the steam engine. The whole craft shook as the fire ignited in the belly of the sub and the boiler began to steam. She busied herself checking pressure and temperature gauges, then went around the inside of the craft, checking all the brass and copper pipe fittings and wall panels for leaks.

After a half-hour, she was certain the engine was operating as expected and the craft was watertight. She settled in the leather-padded pilot’s chair and cautiously steered the craft toward Pigeon Island.

The undersea coral reefs were breathtakingly beautiful; Thilini had seen plenty of brightly-colored fish pulled up by fishermen, but she had never imagined the coral itself would be such a gorgeous wonderland. She felt as though she had been transported to an entirely different world, and that she was not traveling through water but soaring above a dazzling forest on a planet lit by a foreign star.

A pod of curious porpoises swam along next to her craft. Their squeals and clicks echoed through the cabin. The sea mammals seemed to smile at her through the windows, and she could not help but smile back at them as they somersaulted and cavorted.

One porpoise paused and let out a squeal. She and her sisters swam together and huddled with their snouts pointed at each other for a moment; Thilini had the impression they were urgently discussing something. Then they broke away from the sub, swimming fast toward the shallows, all traces of playfulness gone.

What had alarmed them? She peered out through the front window into the deeper water beyond the island. And there swam a lone whale. Not a great blue whale, but a younger toothy orca she guessed was not much longer than the five yards of her submarine. No doubt he was what frightened off her cetacean friends.

I should like to see a whale up close
, she thought. She’d seen plenty of dead whales brought to the harbor, but that wasn’t nearly the same as seeing one in its natural world
. The engine is fine; a quick look won’t hurt anything.

She pushed the craft forward, gently, to prevent frightening the creature. It was certainly big enough to ram the submarine if it deemed her a threat. The orca turned and gazed at her curiously when she was about a hundred yards away. She stopped the craft, holding her breath, hoping the creature was not territorial.

Suddenly, a huge dark shape torpedoed up from the murky depths below the orca. Thilini saw a jagged maw as wide as her craft open in a flash, sucking the orca down into it, and close with a sickening crack of bone. The force of the bite cut the orca right in two. Blood stained the water in scarlet clouds.

The leviathan shark wolfed the orca down in two gulps, and then righted itself to face the submarine. It looked roughly like the great whites the fishermen had speared in the shallows, but this creature’s skin about its head and jaws was armored with thick denticle scales; its snout looked more like a medieval battering ram. And this monster was far, far larger than any sharks she’d ever seen. It was easily four times the length of her submarine.

The monstrous creature began to swim toward her.

Thilini shrieked and pulled the sub around, shoving the steam engine into full speed. She ignored the groaning of the boiler and the rattling of metal as she forced the sub faster and faster, convinced the dire monster was right behind, jaws opening, ready to snap the sub in two.

In her panic, she grounded the sub in the shallows several hundred yards north of the harbor. She killed the engine, got the hatch open with numb, shaking hands, and splashed to land where she collapsed on the sand and gave in to her desire to weep.

After a few minutes, she sat up, dried her eyes as best she could on her sandy rubber sleeves, and walked back to harbor to tell her papa what she’d seen.

Herr Rothschild believed his daughter’s story straight away. But since she was merely a girl and deemed subject to frivolous flights of fancy, most others were skeptical and, despite the evidence from the
Southwind
, claimed she’d been frightened by a common cachalot whale or even a mere barracuda.

But in the following week, an East India Company cargo ship was attacked and most of the crew drowned or eaten. And the week after that, they got word of similar disastrous attacks on ships near Colombo and Batticaloa. More and more people heard and believed Thilini’s account of the leviathan shark; townsfolk and visiting officials asked her to tell her story so many times that the repetition almost sapped the terror from her memory. Almost. The terrible shark swam through nightmarish seas in her mind when she tried to sleep, and she’d start awake, feeling herself drowning, feeling those awful teeth closing down on her body.

“Our family has lost three ships,” Uncle Martin fretted one day. “I cannot take my tea to Europe! The sailors fear this monster like nothing else. We must kill the beast, or drive it away, or else we will be paupers!”

“What would you have me do?” her father asked.

“I would have you build a mighty version of the submersible you tested. Something armed with a powerful harpoon, and a hull built to withstand the pressures of the depths. I would have you build a craft fit to hunt this leviathan down and kill it in its lair.”

“If it’s a harpoon you need, why not gird a whaling ship in iron and send her and her crew after the shark?”

Uncle Martin shook his head. “The Bombay and British navies have tried that very thing, to no avail. I read survivor’s reports; only the head of the shark is visible during its attack, and that part is so well-armored that even harpoons fired from cannons cannot harm it.”

“What about a harpoon down its gullet?” her father asked.

“No man who has tried such a shot has lived. The naturalists speculate that the shark may have a softer underbelly that is vulnerable, but there is no way to reach it from the surface of the sea.”

“What about explosives?” Thilini asked.

“That, too, has been tried,” her uncle replied gravely, “with no better result.”

He turned to her father. “We need a working version of your machine.”

Her father paused, chewing on a corner of his moustache thoughtfully. “I could build a submarine such as you describe, but I haven’t the materials or craftsmen to attempt it.”

“I will get you anything you need. Anything at all. I have spoken to officers in the British Navy, and they have agreed to fund your enterprise. Glass, metals, workers ... tell me what you need and I shall get it to you even if I have to strip every estate in Kandy for materials and manpower. We can bring in specialists from Europe by airship.”

“All right, then,” her father replied. “If it’s a fearsome submersible you want, then that’s what you shall get.”

Thilini and her father put their heads together for several days to figure out what they’d need to build the new craft. Herr Rothschild presented their list to his brother; within days carpenters, welders and masons arrived by balloon to Trincomalee from all around Ceylon to build a fabrication complex at the northern end of the harbor.

Her father hired foremen from a group of engineers his brother recruited, and everyone went to work. Once the construction was underway, it was non-stop. Thilini feared that her father might abandon her now that he had so many educated men at his beck and call, but he kept her close, showing her every engineering novelty his new staff had to show him and every interesting failure.

Further, he introduced her to a brilliant young Serbian engineer named Nikola Tesla, fresh from Edison’s laboratory, who helped her solve the problems with their wireless telegraph within a month. She went home to bathe, bolt down quick meals and catch naps away from the noise of the machinery, but otherwise she stayed in the factory and worked and studied and listened and worked some more.

Nine months after Martin Rothschild demanded her construction, the
HMS Makara
was ready. The completed submarine measured 120 feet in length and weighed over 80 tons. The cabin was equipped with compressed air and chemical scrubbers to enable the craft to stay under for up to five days at a time, though they hoped the shark could be found much sooner than that.

Thilini’s mother was dead-set against her daughter joining the crew and scolded her husband mightily when she found out about the plan to include the girl as the sub’s telegraph operator.

“Isn’t it bad enough you let her go out into the water in the first place by herself?” her mother asked.

“She’s a brave girl, and she’s fine,” her father replied.

“Fine? She’s not fine! She’s barely slept since she saw that monster! I can hear her cry out at night.”

“Mama, listen –” Thilini began.

But her mother carried on: “I will not have you take my daughter to her death in that metal casket of yours!”

“We have tested it, over and over. The submarine is as safe as any seagoing vessel.”

“She’s too young for such things!”

“Too young?” her father replied. “Girls her age are celebrating their weddings; I saw a procession for one girl just this afternoon! How many of them will soon be pregnant, and dying in childbirth next year? Or strangled or beaten by raging drunken husbands who have forgotten their wedding vows? There are so many ways for a girl to die in this world, my dear, and you have seen them all. How many friends did you lose, eh?”

Her mother was silent at that, her eyes downcast. “I lost far too many.”