CHAPTER 7
THE CHAMBER UNDER KIDNEY REEF
Larry Monkey was sure his lungs were about to burst. He clung tightly to the Golden Turtle’s shell and kicked to speed its progress as it spiralled into the dark ocean depths beside the reef wall. He would soon be out of air.
The strange bright blue opening grew larger as they approached. Levelling out, they passed through and into a tunnel lined with glowing squares, smooth and flat. His chest burned like fire and every instinct told him to let go and swim to the surface or risk drowning. Larry held on, hoping that Golden Turtles did bring good luck and that there was breathable air ahead.
Eyes straining and heart pounding, Larry stared wide-eyed. The tunnel ahead came to an abrupt end. In shock, he let go of the turtle’s smooth shell and spun round to locate the black ocean at the other end of the tunnel of light. It was too far to swim back and he was out of air. Unbidden words and images flowed into Larry’s mind.
Air: the name given to the mixture of gases used for breathing and the process of photosynthesis. By volume, dry air contains roughly 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% Argon...
He cut off the flow of information and looked for the turtle, arms desperately flailing. It was slowly rising at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel had no ceiling and the water above shimmered as if he was just under the surface.
With the last of his breath, he pushed up and broke the surface, gasping. There was air here! He breathed deeply, treading water. The air was strangely warm and fresh. He was deep under the ocean but also on its surface.
Larry looked around. He was in a large rectangular chamber cut into the reef, everything perfectly symmetrical and lined up in rows. It was a made-place, ancient but looking strangely new. The walls and ceiling were covered in the same glowing squares he had seen in the tunnel, but these were white, not blue. They glowed with their own light, each like a square moon. Each tile must have its own flame cleverly hidden behind.
The Golden Turtle glided through the water to a ramp. Treading water, Larry cautiously followed.
The turtle waddled out of the water. Larry did too, crouching low to stay out of sight. The place was well cared for so there must be people about. Would they welcome him or see him as a threat? What kind of animals would they be? Perhaps this was where the owls lived. No one would think to look for them under the ocean. But why would they go to so much trouble to hide? And having gone to so much trouble, would they take badly to being discovered?
The turtle stopped when it reached the level floor above the ramp. Larry risked looking around. There didn’t seem to be anyone about. There was just a quiet, almost imperceptible, hum, a bit like a beehive. The chamber was large and long and brightly lit by ‘moon tiles’. It was light enough to be midday under a cloudy sky, but it was cool. The moon tiles didn’t seem to throw off any heat, just like the moon. Perhaps the people who had built this place had worked out how to capture moonlight. Or perhaps they had mined the moon, like elephants mine the glaciers, and brought back some of its glowing surface. That seemed more likely.
He came up beside the turtle and risked standing so as to better see. The chamber was filled with regularly spaced boxes growing from the floor like square mushrooms. Arranged in long rows, they stretched all the way back to the far wall. They were shiny black and perfectly formed, like the polished black marble used in Port Isabel’s public buildings but without visible imperfections. There were no climbing veins of grey rock marring their perfectly flat surfaces, and no chipped edges or corners either. These boxes were perfectly black, too black to be made from naturally formed stone, and they were different sizes. Some stood taller than him, other lay flat like tables. They seemed to have a purpose too, like humming machine bee-hives continuously working.
Larry nearly jumped when the air came on. Warm air blasted up from holes in the floor. The air was not only warm but dry and seemed to suck the water from his fur. He closed his eyes and willed the delicious warmth to penetrate to his icy core. It was like standing downwind of a Heat Tree reef on a windy winter’s morning.
When Larry opened his eyes, the air had stopped and he was perfectly warm and dry. Ahead of him, the Golden Turtle was slap-waddling between the shiny black towers, flippers better suited to swimming than walking. Its clumsy movements and crusty barnacle hitchhikers made it seem out of place amongst the perfect black towers and the clinically bright moon tiles.
Larry followed, curious. When he reached the first black tower he pressed his hand against its surface. It was warm and vibrated gently. It was darkly transparent, like Harry’s sunglasses. Inside, tiny coloured lights danced and flickered, and there were thousands of thin strings gathered together in wide flat ribbons joining together rows of tall boards standing on their ends in tight slots. The boards were covered with tiny black rectangles each with a dozen silvery legs, like infinitely patient spiders lined up in neat rows. Despite seeing no gears or springs, Larry knew he was looking at a machine. But what it did and who built it was a mystery. To the best of his knowledge, nothing like this had even been pulled from the melting glaciers of the Northern Escarpment.
Hearing a noise nearby, Larry turned to see the Golden Turtle dragging itself onto one of the table-like black boxes adjoining the chamber’s left wall. He cautiously approached to watch.
The wall above the table opened like a flower so suddenly that Larry jumped back and ducked behind one of the towers. Peering around the corner, Larry watched as an arm darted from the hole. It had more joints than an animal’s arm, had no skin or muscle and was made of dull silver metal. Sliding rods hissed and gears whirred as it moved. There were ribbon-like strings woven in and out of its bones like nerves. The arm darted about with the speed of a striking snake as it cleaned the barnacles from the Golden Turtle’s shell with a spinning tool attached to one of its three fingers. They were coming away easily and it didn’t appear like the shell was harmed in the process. The barnacles fell, bounced and clattered noisily to the floor.
Larry slowly approached the open wall. There were more machine arms inside. They were packed tight with rods and struts and ribbon-pipes. He wondered what they were for.
The machine arm finished removing the barnacles and retracted back into the wall. Another arm unfolded, splitting into two at the elbow. Instead of fingers, each arm ended in a metal cylinder glowing with its own intense ruby light. The light was directed at the turtle’s shell, which glowed red-hot under the narrow beam. The arms moved down the length of the shell, one each side. When they reached its tail the lights winked out and the arms retracted.
There was a smell that made Larry think of lightning. At school, Mr Elephant once said that if anyone was fortunate enough to be near a lightning strike they would smell ‘ozone’. Someone asked how being near a lightning strike could be considered fortunate. They had all laughed, even Mr Elephant. ‘It would be a dull animal indeed,’ he had said seriously, ‘who would narrowly survive nature’s most powerful force and not realise how fortunate they were.’ He had explained that lightening always took the shortest route from the clouds to the ground and relished a moving target. ‘I once found myself high on a treeless hill in a thunderstorm. The hairs on my trunk bristled, a sure sign lightening was about to strike so I lay flat as a pancake—quite an achievement for an elephant, I should say—and prayed for a miracle. I felt a thump as lighting hit the ground beside me and smelt the metal-tang of ozone fizzing in the air. I was showered with dirt and my ears rang for half-an-hour but as you can see I was otherwise unharmed. Now, was I fortunate or was I not?’
With a click and a whir, another machine-arm extended from the wall. Larry moved a little closer to see. This one was heavier looking and had fewer joints, reminding him more of a lifting crane than an arm. Hooks flicked out and attached with a solid clunk to slots in the shell. The crane-arm then tipped back with a hiss, lifting the shell clean off and releasing the smell of rubber and stagnant, salty water.
There was machinery inside the turtle
, just as he’d guessed, but more complex and stranger than he could have imagined. There were rods, levers, pumps, wheels, gears and colourful ribbon-pipes connecting together translucent boards printed with a labyrinth of golden tracks and studded with small spider-like rectangles. There were little star-lights twinkling red, green and blue; like the ones in the black beehive towers, but brighter. The metal-tang of ozone still hung in the air. Perhaps the turtle used lightening rather than springs to make it move. He would have thought the idea fanciful before he saw inside, now it seemed plausible, if not likely. Someone had used the most powerful force in the world to animate a mechanical turtle.
Another arm extended from the wall, this one hung with a coil of bundled glass string ending inside a purple cube. The arm deftly plugged the cube into a perfectly matched hole inside the turtle. A second arm reached out, twisted and removed a glass canister. A third reached out and inserted a new canister to replace the one removed. Still more arms came out removing and replacing canisters. Inside the canisters Larry could see small fish, crustaceans, ocean plants, the tentacle of an octopus and other things from the sea. He thought of the kelp he’d seen the Golden Turtle cut and swallow without chewing. That was how the canisters were filled. He thought of Mr Elephant’s school science experiments involving specimens stored in test tubes. Realisation struck him like lightening. The Golden Turtle was harvesting plant and animal specimens from the sea and bringing them back here where they could be studied! The arms were removing the specimens. The turtle was a machine for sampling life in the sea.
Larry looked around but aside from the whirring and hissing arms, there was only the gentle beehive hum of the black towers. Why had nobody noticed him? The machines were as complex as living things but had failed to notice him, let alone react in any way to his presence.
He reached out and ran a long finger down the moon tile wall then jumped back in surprise. The tile had changed from white to blue-green. Then the tile adjoining the first did the same and so on. Blue-green spread across the wall from floor to ceiling like a ripple in a pond. But there was movement on the tiles and some were coloured differently to others.
Larry stepped back so he could see the whole wall. The tiles showed a picture of the ocean as it would be seen by a flying bird. There were shallow waves rippling across the surface and light clouds drifting below him. He felt confused and dizzy seeing the ocean on a wall, as if he might fall into it or it on him. The entire wall was alive with movement, each tile forming part of an enormous mosaic of the ocean as seen from above. Had Kidney Reef taken off without him noticing? If it had it would be tipped on its side, the floor becoming the wall and the wall a giant window looking down, so why wasn’t he falling? It didn’t make sense.
One of the tiles near him had a flashing green dot inside a blue rectangle. He looked more closely. The rectangle was in the middle of a dark patch surrounded by shimmering sea. The shape of the patch looked familiar. It was Kidney Reef, from above! Larry remembered the shape of the reef from Flossy’s map. The blue rectangle was an outline of the chamber in which he stood, the green circle was him! Somehow the wall had become an enormous map. But instead of being just a rough drawing on parchment, it was a window looking down from above the ocean. Impossible as it seemed, he was looking at what was happening right now. Larry followed the outline of the dark reef until he found the wreck of the Interloper. He could see tiny dots and a long wriggly line, Iscariot Snake, moving about on the deck. He reached out and touched them.
Suddenly he was falling.
But he didn’t fall. The reef and the Interloper just got suddenly closer to the window, like he was looking down through a very powerful spyglass, one that could even see through thick fog, at night. Now that the reef took up most of the moon tile wall he could see animals milling on the tilted deck of the wrecked ship. The unmistakable shadowy form of Iscariot Snake slithered onto the Fat Crab moored beside the wreck. They were still preparing the boat for departure.
The blue rectangle that was the chamber deep under the reef had grown larger along with everything else. He noticed that the flashing green dot inside the rectangle was now moving. He turned to find that the turtle was no longer on the black table. The silver machine arms were smoothly retracting back into the wall recess and the wall was folding closed like tulip petals at dusk. The flashing green dot wasn’t him; it was the Golden Turtle. And the turtle was slap-waddling between the humming black towers towards the water exit. It was already two thirds of the way down the length of the chamber. He was so distracted by trying to unravel the mystery of the moon tile wall that he hadn’t noticed.
Looking back at the moon tile wall, Larry found that the reef and the Interloper had shrunk again and now took up no more than a single moon tile. The dark living ocean stretched in all directions right to the end of the chamber. Perhaps he could use the wall to find the Windrush, and Flossy. Maybe he could even find his parents!
He noticed, some distance from the reef, another flashing green dot. It was another Golden Turtle, this one swimming.
Larry loped along the wall between the humming black towers. By the time he reached the far end of the chamber he had found two more Golden Turtles, each moving slowly, purposefully. The wall was tracking their location. If there were four, there would probably be more. He wondered if there were more chambers like this one buried deep under other reefs.
The moon tiles lining the back wall of the chamber suddenly went dark. Then a whole row of moon tiles on the adjoining wall and roof went dark. Then another row went dark. The marching row of darkness soon cast him deep in shadow.
As the last of the moon tiles went dark, Larry looked for the water exit at the far end of the chamber. He could just make out the Golden Turtle as it slipped down the ramp.