The Swarm

by Frank Schätzing

  She stopped. It was the easiest thing in the world to encroach on someone's private space and earn yourself a reputation for interfering. She leaned against the bar and drew the bathrobe closer. There were two stools between them.

  'Hi,' said Anawak. His eyes shifted. At last he seemed to see her.

  She smiled. 'What. . . urn, what are you doing?' Stupid question. 'You disappeared this morning.'

  'Yeah, I'm sorry.'

  'Oh, no, don't apologise,' she said. 'I didn't want to disturb you. I just saw you sitting here and I thought-'

  Something was wrong. It would be wise to leave him to it.

  Anawak roused himself from his paralysis. He reached for his glass, picked it up and put it down again. His eyes moved to the stool beside him. 'Would you like a drink?' he asked.

  'Are you sure I'm not disturbing you?'

  'No, really, it's fine.' He hesitated. 'My name's Leon – Leon Anawak.'

  'I'm Karen. Bailey's on ice, please.'

  Anawak summoned the barman and ordered her drink. She took a step closer, but didn't sit down. Her wet hair sent droplets of cold water trickling down her neck and between her breasts. She should drink up and leave, she thought. 'So, how're things?' she asked, and sipped.

  Anawak's brow furrowed. 'I'm not sure.'

  'Not sure?'

  'No. My father died.'

  Shit. 'What was wrong with him?' she asked cautiously.

  'No idea.'

  'You mean the doctors don't know yet?'

  'I don't know yet' He shook his head. 'I'm not even sure I want to know.'

  He fell silent for a while. Then he said, 'I was in the woods this afternoon, walking. I was out there for hours, trying to… feel something. I thought, there has to be some kind of emotion that goes with a situation like this. But I just felt sorry for myself. He looked her in the eye. 'Do you ever get that feeling, like wherever you are you want to be somewhere else? And then suddenly you realise that it isn't you that wants to get away – the place you're in is pushing you away, telling you, you don't belong there. But it won't tell you where you do belong, so you have to keep running.'

  She ran a finger round the rim of her glass. 'I guess you didn't have a very good relationship with your father, then.'

  'I didn't have a relationship with him at all.'

  'Really?' Weaver frowned.

  Anawak shrugged. 'How about you?' he asked. 'What do your parents do?'

  'They're dead.'

  'Oh… I'm sorry.'

  'It's OK. You couldn't have known. They died when I was ten. A diving accident off the coast of Australia. I was in the hotel when it happened. They got caught in a rip. They were experienced divers, but, well… you can never tell with the sea.'

  'Did anyone ever find them?'

  'No.'

  'How did you cope?'

  'For a while it was pretty tough. I'd had an amazing childhood. My parents were teachers and loved the water. We went sailing in the Maldives, scuba-diving in the Red Sea, cave diving in the Yucatan. We even dived in Scotland and Iceland. Of course, they never went too deep when I was with them, but there was plenty for me to see. They only left me behind if the dive was going to be dangerous – and then, one day, they never came back.' She smiled. 'But, hey, I turned out OK in the end.'

  'True.' He smiled back.

  Then he slid off his stool. 'I should probably get some sleep. I'm flying out for the funeral tomorrow.' He hesitated. 'Good night. . . and thanks.'

  SHE SAT THERE, looking at her half-drunk Bailey's, remembering her parents and how the hotel staff had come to find her. She had to be brave, the manager had said.

  She swished the liquid in her glass. Anawak didn't know just how tough it had been. How her grandmother had tried to look after the disturbed, fearful little girl, whose sorrow had vented itself in rage. At school her grades went downhill, and so did her behaviour. Then there was the bunking off class and bumming around on the streets, smoking her first joint, hanging out with punks, drinking herself into a stupor, and sleeping with anyone who was interested – which they always were. Nicking stuff, being expelled from school, the backstreet abortion, hard drugs, the young offenders' institute. Six months in a home for problem kids. Then all the piercings, the shaved head, the scars. Her mind and her body had been a battleground.

  But the accident had done nothing to diminish her love for the sea. The water seemed to exercise a dark fascination, calling to her and summoning her to the depths. It beckoned to her so powerfully that one night she had hitched a lift to Brighton and swum away from the shore. Then, when the lights of the town were almost swallowed by the oily blackness of the moonlit water, she had allowed herself to sink beneath the surface.

  Drowning wasn't easy.

  She'd floated in the dark waters of the Channel, holding her breath as her heartbeats thundered in her ears. But instead of sapping the life from her body, the sea was showing her: look, see how strong your heart is. She'd shot up to the surface and out of the nightmare that had begun when she was ten years old. A cutter was sailing nearby and picked her up. She was taken to hospital with severe hypothermia. There, she began to make plans for the future. After she'd been discharged, she stared at her body in the mirror for an hour, and decided she never wanted to look like that again. She removed the piercings, stopped shaving her head, tried to do ten press-ups and collapsed. After a week she could do twenty.

  She put all her strength into trying to win back what she had lost. They allowed her to return to school on the condition that she saw a therapist. She agreed. She showed them that she was disciplined and eager to learn, and read everything she could lay hands on, especially if it was about the environment and the oceans. She jogged, swam, boxed and climbed, trying to eradicate the last traces of the lost time, until there was no sign of the scrawny, hollow-eyed girl she'd once been. She finished school at nineteen, a year older than her classmates but with perfect grades and a body like a sculpture of an ancient Greek athlete. She began a degree in biology and sport.

  Karen Weaver was a new person.

  With an ancient longing.

  In order to better understand the workings of the world, she took a course in computing. The idea of programming computers to model complex changes intrigued her, and she persisted until she knew how to model oceanic and atmospheric change. Her first big project was a comprehensive report on ocean currents. It didn't add anything to existing research, but it was an intelligent piece of work: a homage to two people she'd loved and lost. She set up her own media business deepbluesea, and wrote for Science and National Geographic. Popular science magazines gave her regular columns to fill, which attracted the attention of research institutes, whose scientists needed a voice to convey their ideas. She was invited along on expeditions. She dived to the Titanic in MIR, visited the hydrothermal vents in the depths of the Atlantic with Alvin, and took the Polarstern to visit the over-winterers in the Antarctic. She went everywhere, making the most of every opportunity, because since that night in the Channel she had never felt fear. She wasn't afraid of anyone or anything.

  Except of being alone. Sometimes.

  Now she looked at herself in the mirror on the wall of the bar, wrapped in a bathrobe, looking a little lost.

  She knocked back the Bailey's and made her way to bed.

  14 May

  Anawak

  His decision to make the trip hadn't come easily, and even then there'd been no guarantee that Li would let him leave. As it happened, she'd practically forced him to go. 'If you stay here, you'll never forgive yourself. Family comes first in life. It's the only thing you can count on. Make sure we can contact you, that's all I ask.'

  Now, sitting in the plane, he wondered why Li was so eager to sing the praises of kinship. He couldn't share her enthusiasm.

  The man sitting next to him, a climatologist from Massachusetts, began to snore. Anawak tilted back his seat and looked out of the window. He'd been alone with his thoughts for hours. From Van
couver he'd flown on one of Air Canada's Boeings to Toronto Pearson airport, where a long line of planes was waiting for takeoff. A violent storm had descended over Toronto, bringing air traffic to a temporary halt. To Anawak it had seemed like an omen. Waiting anxiously in the departure lounge, he'd watched as the planes were hooked up one by one to concertinaed walkways. Finally, after a two-hour delay, his flight had left for Montreal.

  From there, everything had gone smoothly. He'd stayed overnight at a Holiday Inn near Dorval airport, then returned first thing in the morning to the departure lounge. At last there were signs that he was entering a different world. A group of men with steaming coffee cups were standing by a plate-glass window, their overalls emblazoned with the logo of an oil company. Two had faces like Anawak's: wide cheekbones, dark skin and Mongolian eyes. Outside on the airfield, enormous pallets trussed with netting were being loaded into the belly of the Canadian North Airlines Boeing 737. The lifting ramp was still shunting them into the aeroplane when the boarding call went out. They crossed the airfield on foot and climbed the steps at the tail. The seating area was limited to the front third of the plane; the rest of the space was given over to storage.

  For more than two hours now Anawak had been in transit. From time to time the plane juddered. For most of the journey they'd been looking down on thick plains of cloud, but now, as they approached Hudson Strait, the grey mass of vapour parted to reveal the dark brown landscape of the tundra below, mountainous and jagged, with snow-fields and ice floes drifting on the lakes. Then the coast came into view. Hudson Strait passed beneath them, and Anawak knew he was crossing the frontier. A rush of emotions flooded through him, sweeping away his torpor. In every venture there was always a point of no return. Strictly speaking, that point had been Montreal, but symbolically it was Hudson Strait. Across the water was a world to which he'd sworn never to return.

  Anawak was on his way to the country of his birth, to his homeland on the edge of the Arctic Circle – to Nunavut.

  He stared out of the window, willing himself not to think. After thirty minutes the water gave way to land and then to a shiny frozen expanse, Frobisher Bay, cutting deep into the south-eastern tip of Baffin Island. The plane banked to the right, descending rapidly. A bright yellow building with a stumpy tower appeared in the window. It looked like a lone human outpost on an alien planet, although it was actually the airport, the way into Iqaluit, 'place of many fish', Nunavut's capital.

  The plane touched down and taxied slowly to a halt.

  It wasn't long before Anawak's luggage appeared. He hoisted the heavy rucksack on to his back and made his way through the terminal, passing a display of wall coverings and soapstone sculptures promoting Inuit art. In the middle of the building a giant figure, sturdily built, clad in boots and traditional attire, held a fiat drum above his head in one hand and a drumstick in the other. It exuded vigour and self-assurance. Anawak stopped to read the inscription: 'Throughout the Arctic there is drum dancing and throat singing when the people come together.' He went to the First Air ticket counter and checked in his rucksack for the flight to Cape Dorset. The woman at the desk informed him that it was delayed by an hour. 'Maybe you've still got some errands to run in town,' she said, with a smile.

  Anawak hesitated. 'Er, no, actually. I don't know my way around.'

  She looked surprised. She was clearly wondering how someone whose appearance identified him as an Inuk could be unfamiliar with the capital. 'There's plenty to see,' she suggested. 'You should wander into town. There's the Nunatta-Sunaqutangit Museum. It has a wonderful collection of traditional and contemporary art.'

  'Uh… sure.'

  'Or you could try the Unikkaarvik Visitor Center. And it's well worth stopping off at the Anglican church. It's the only church in the world to look like an igloo.'

  She was an Inuk, small with a black fringe and a ponytail. Her eyes shone as a smile spread over her face. 'I could have sworn you came from Iqaluit,' she said.

  'No.' For a moment he was tempted to say that he came from Cape Dorset 'Vancouver, actually.'

  'Oh, I love Vancouver,' she exclaimed.

  Anawak glanced round, worried that he was holding up the queue, but he seemed to be the only person on the onward flight that day. 'You've been there?'

  'No, but I've seen the pictures on the web. It's a beautiful city.' She laughed. 'A bit bigger than Iqaluit, I guess.'

  He smiled back. 'I'd say so.'

  'But Iqaluit's bigger than it used to be. We've got six thousand inhabitants and we're growing all the time. Soon we'll be the size of Vancouver – well, almost anyway. You'll have to excuse me.'

  A man and a woman had appeared behind him. He wouldn't be flying alone. He said goodbye and disappeared outside, in case she took it into her head to give him a tour of the city.

  Iqaluit.

  It was all so long ago. Some things looked familiar, but he had no recollection of most of what he saw. The clouds seemed to have stayed behind in Montreal, and now the sun shone down from a steel-blue sky, making it pleasantly warm. It was at least ten degrees, thought Anawak, and felt overdressed. He pulled off his down jacket and tied it round his waist, then trudged along the dusty road. There was a surprising amount of traffic. He couldn't remember there being so many four-by-fours and ATVs, small multi-axial buggies ridden like motorbikes. The street was lined with timber houses built in characteristic Arctic style with little stilts to raise them off the ground. Any building that rested directly on the tundra would melt the permafrost and start to sink.

  As Anawak made his way through the town, he couldn't help thinking that God's hand must have descended over Iqaluit, shaking a clutch of buildings like dice and scattering them at random. Gigantic edifices made of windowless harsh white panels loomed up like abstract cubist structures among olive-green or rusty-red barracks. The school resembled a marooned UFO. Some of the houses glowed in deep shades of petrol blue or aquamarine. Towards the centre of town he came across the Commissioner's House, a cross between a cosy country villa and a space dome for astronauts. He tried to remain detached from his surroundings, but since the seaplane accident he had lost the ability to cloak himself in indifference. The crazy architectural hotchpotch conveyed nonchalance, even merriment, that he couldn't shut out.

  The depressive Iqaluit of the seventies had vanished. People seemed friendly, greeting him in Inuktitut. He responded tersely. Without stopping he walked through the streets for an hour, popping in briefly to the Unikkaarvik Visitor Center, which boasted an even larger sculpture of a drum dancer.

  When he was a kid, there'd been plenty of drum dancing. But that was a long time ago, when things were still OK… if they ever had been.

  He went out on to the street where the glaring sunshine was oppressively hot. He passed to the right of the Anglican church – a stone igloo with a spire – then went back to the terminal where he sat down on a bench with a newspaper. With the exception of the couple, no one else was waiting for the flight. He held up the newspaper to cut himself off from the world and skimmed the articles without absorbing their content, then tossed it aside.

  Eventually the young woman from the ticket desk came to collect them. They filed out through a side door, then walked on to the aircraft manoeuvring area, where a small twin-engined propeller plane, a Piper, was waiting. Anawak and his fellow passengers climbed the two steps to the cramped interior. There were only six seats. All the baggage had been stashed under netting at the rear of the plane. The cockpit led straight in to the cabin without any partition. They taxied on to the runway, waited for another Piper to land, then took a short, fast run-up and lifted off shakily. The terminal shrank and vanished, Frobisher Bay glittering far below. They flew west over mountains carved by glaciers and capped with snowfields and ice sheets. To their left, rays of sunshine glistened on Hudson Strait, while to the right, they sparkled on a lake, whose name Anawak suddenly remembered: Amadjuak.

  They had gone there sometimes.

  It wa
s coming back to him at giddying speed. The memories appeared before him like silhouettes in a snowstorm, drawing him into the past, where he didn't want to go.

  The terrain levelled out, then gave way to water. The flight continued over the sea for twenty minutes, until Rigged land reappeared through the cockpit window. The seven islands of Tellik Inlet came into view. A thin line cut into one of the islands: Cape Dorset runway.

  They touched down.

  Anawak felt his heart spring forward. He was home. As the Piper taxied slowly towards the terminal, he felt loath to get out.

  Cape Dorset, capital of Inuit art and home to 1200 people: the New York of the north, as it was half jokingly, half admiringly called.

  That was the modern Cape Dorset.

  Back then things had been different.

  Cape Dorset: Kinngait, or 'high mountain' in the Inuit tongue, was situated in the Sikusiilaq region, 'where no ice ever forms on the sea', so-named because even in the harshest winter, temperate currents prevented the water freezing round Foxe Peninsula on the south-west extremity of Baffin Island. Names flooded back. Mallikjuaq, a tiny island near Cape Dorset, a nature reserve full of marvels – fox-traps from the nineteenth century, ruins from ancient Thule culture, burial sites that were the source of countless legends, and a romantic lake where they had camped. Anawak remembered the stone kayak-stands. He'd loved it there. Then he pictured his parents, and remembered what had driven him out of Nunavut, when it was still part of the Northwest Territories and didn't have its own name.

  He picked up his rucksack and clambered out of the plane.

  A man ran over to greet the couple. The reunion was effusive, but that was nearly always the way: the Inuit had any number of words for 'welcome', but none for 'farewell'. No one had bidden Anawak farewell when he'd taken his leave nineteen years previously, not even the weather-beaten old man who was left standing alone on the airfield as the trio of friends moved noisily away. For a moment Anawak had difficulty recognising him. Ijitsiaq Akesuk had aged noticeably and now sported a thin grey moustache on his once clean-shaven face. But it was him. The creased face widened into grin. He hurried towards Anawak and threw his arms round him. A stream of Inuktitut words spilled from his lips.