The panel clicks.
‘Wonderful!’ Luca beams. ‘May I?’
I move aside. Luca pulls open the hatch, which unleashes a hideous stench like Davy Jones’s gym locker. Top wags his tail deliriously.
Luca reaches inside. He pulls out a large wad of gunk – algae, seaweed, crustacean poop? I don’t know.
‘You see?’ Luca holds up his prize like it’s a golden goose’s egg. Black slime coats his arm up to his elbow. ‘It’s a miracle the Nautilus still functions at all! Oh, Ana, imagine what she’ll be able to do once we get her cleaned up properly. You are the key to –’
FOOOOOOM!
The sound shakes the floor and rattles my eye sockets: a deep, resonant low E-flat, held for a whole note. Luca drops his goo. Top hides behind Ester’s legs. Nelinha widens her stance like she’s expecting a tidal wave. Ophelia braces herself against the wall.
The noise dies. I wait, but it does not repeat. ‘That sounded like –’
‘The pipe organ,’ Luca says in alarm.
‘It’s never done that before,’ Ophelia murmurs.
‘The what?’ I ask.
Luca and Ophelia look at each other. They seem to have a silent, anxious debate about what to do next.
‘I think,’ Ophelia says at last, ‘it is time to show Ana the bridge.’
The first thing you want to install in your high-tech super sub?
A pipe organ, of course.
The wonders of the Nautilus have already waged war on my sense of reality. When we reach the bridge, my mind simply runs up the white flag and surrenders. A pipe organ – now silent – does, in fact, take up the entire starboard side of the room, but that’s only one of the bridge’s oddities.
The prow’s ‘eyes’ dominate the front of the bridge. The bulging metal-laced domes provide a wide view of the cavern outside, making me feel like I’m in an aquatic conservatory … or maybe a fish tank.
‘The windows aren’t really glass,’ Luca assures me. ‘As near as we can figure out, the material is a transparent iron polymer created at extreme temperature and pressure.’
‘Like at the bottom of the sea,’ Nelinha guesses. ‘Near a volcanic vent.’
Luca taps his nose. ‘Just so, my dear. Perhaps Nemo forged his hull plating using a similar process. We’re not sure how he would have managed that. It’s yet another mystery to unravel. Of course, when Jules Verne wrote his novels, he didn’t know what to call that material, so he called it iron.’ He plinks a knuckle against the nearest nemonium girder. ‘Clearly not iron.’
Four control stations make a horseshoe curve along the front of the bridge. As in the engine room, each panel is Swiss-watch intricate, with dials and switches labelled in engraved calligraphy. LOCUS nodes, dormant, are mounted on top of each station. Artistic flourishes decorate the borders of the controls: dolphins, whales and flying fish.
The entire ship is a handcrafted, bespoke work of art. She could never be reproduced, much less mass-produced. I start to appreciate just how unique the Nautilus is and why her recovery was so important to HP and to Land Institute. Already on this tour, I have seen half a dozen technological advances that could change the world – if the Nautilus would let us take her apart and study her inner workings, which I don’t think she would agree to.
‘And here,’ Luca says, gripping the back of what is clearly the captain’s chair, ‘is where we found Nemo.’
‘Aah!’ Ophelia swats his arm. ‘They did not need to hear that!’
‘Well, I thought Ana might want to know he died at his station. We considered trying to extract some of his DNA, but, ah, ethical considerations aside, it soon became clear that the Nautilus would not tolerate any clever tricks to bypass her systems. She must choose her captain, and it must be a living Dakkar.’
Ophelia pinches her nose. ‘Ana, my dear, I am sorry. My husband has no sense of propriety.’
I look at the captain’s seat. It’s a monstrous metal L on a swivel pedestal, like an old-fashioned barber’s chair. Nested in each armrest is a hemispherical hand grip, like the DNA-reader on the Varuna. The seat’s upholstery appears to be gleaming black leather.
For some reason, the idea of my fourth great-grandfather’s body being found here doesn’t disturb me as much as I might have thought. In a way, the whole submarine already feels like his crypt, his earthly remains.
I trace my fingers across the supple leather seatback. ‘This material is new.’