The Swarm

by Frank Schätzing

  'I don't drink.'

  'Of course.' Akesuk looked at the bottle mournfully. 'Are you sure? I packed it specially. I was waiting for the right occasion. And the occasion… Well, you've come home, so I thought…'

  'I don't want to lose control, Iji.'

  'Control of what? Of your life or of this moment?' He stowed the bottle away. 'No problem. There'll be other occasions. Maybe we'll catch something big. Who knows? We might get a beluga or a walrus. How about a walk before we turn in?'

  'Good idea.'

  They strolled down to the floe-edge. Anawak let his uncle take the lead. The old man had a better sense of where the ice was stable and where it might break. The Inuit had hundreds of words for every possible kind of snow or ice, but not one that meant 'snow' or 'ice' in general. Right now they were walking on elastic ice. Salt separated from water as it froze, so icebergs were formed entirely of fresh water. Pack ice and drift ice contained traces of salt – the faster the water froze, the greater the salinity of the ice. That increased its elasticity, which was good in winter because it prevented it cracking too easily, but problematic in spring when it heightened the risk of break-up. The mere shock of falling into the cold water was enough to kill someone, but the greater danger was of being swept beneath the ice.

  They found a spot near the floe-edge and leaned up against a block of pack ice. The silvery sea stretched in front of them. Anawak spotted the steel-blue bodies of graylings flitting just beneath the surface. For a while they let the minutes tick by, and suddenly, as though Nature had decided to reward them for their patience, two spiral-ridged tusks rose out of the water like a pair of crossed swords. A couple of male narwhal appeared a few metres from the floe-edge. Their rounded mottled heads came into view, then the dark grey bodies dived down. In less than fifteen minutes they'd be back. That was their rhythm.

  Anawak watched in fascination. Narwhal were hardly ever seen off the coast of Vancouver Island. For years they'd been threatened with extinction. Their tusks, which were actually modified teeth, were pure ivory, condemning them to centuries of slaughter. They were still on the list of endangered species, but the narwhal population in Nunavut and Greenland had crept back up to ten thousand.

  The ice made soft creaking and groaning noises as the water rose and fell. Birds were still squawking around the remains of the dead narwhal. A gentle light bathed the mountains and glaciers of Bylot Island, casting shadows on the frozen sea. The sun hugged the horizon, pale and icy.

  'You asked whether I'd missed this,' said Anawak.

  Akesuk stayed silent.

  'I hated it, Iji. I hated it, and I despised it. You wanted an answer. Now you know.'

  His uncle sighed. 'You despised your father,' he said.

  'Maybe. But you try explaining the difference to a twelve-year-old, whose father and people seem as wretched as each other. My father was weak and constantly drunk. All he did was whine and drag my mother down till she put an end to it all – she couldn't see any other way. Everyone was killing themselves back then. Name one family that wasn't in mourning for someone who'd taken their own life. All those stories about the proud Inuit, the self-sufficient Inuit – well, there wasn't much evidence of it back then.' He faced Akesuk. 'If your parents are reduced to wrecks in the space of a few years, get addicted to drugs, lose the will to live, how do you cope? What do you do when your mother hangs herself and all your father can do is get drunk. I told him to stop. I told him that I could get a job, that I'd do anything if he stopped drinking, but he just stared at me and went on as usual.'

  'I know. He wasn't himself any more.'

  'He gave me up for adoption,' said Anawak. The bitterness that had built up over the years was on the point of spilling out 'I wanted to stay with him, and he gave me up for adoption.'

  'He wanted to protect you.'

  'Oh, really? Did he ever wonder how I might cope? Like hell he did. Ma died of depression, he knocked himself out with liquor. They both threw me out of their lives. Did anyone bother to help me? No. They were too busy staring into the snow and bewailing the fate of the Inuit. Oh, yeah, and that reminds me, Uncle Iji. You always told good stories, but you never changed anything. That was all you could ever think of- fairytales about the free spirit of the Inuit. A noble people. A proud people.'

  'That's right.' Akesuk nodded. 'We were a proud people.'

  'When would that have been?'

  He waited for Akesuk to lose his temper, but the old man merely stroked his moustache. 'Before you were born,' he said. 'People of my generation came into the world in igloos at a time when everyone knew how to build them. Back then we used flints and not matches to light fires. Caribou weren't shot, they were hunted with bows and arrows. We didn't hitch skidoos to our qamutiks, we had huskies. Sounds romantic, doesn't it? Like the long-lost past. . .' Akesuk mused. 'It was barely fifty years ago. Look around you, boy. Look at our lifestyle. I mean, there are good things too. Hardly anyone on Earth knows as much about what's going on in the world as we do. Every second household has a computer with a modem, including ours. We've got our own country now too.' He chuckled. 'The other day there was a question posted on nunavut.com. On the face of it, it seemed harmless enough. Do you remember those old Canadian two-dollar notes? Queen Elizabeth was on the front, with a group of Inuit on the back. One of the men was positioned beside a kayak with a harpoon in his hand. It all looked idyllic. The question was, "What does the scene really show?" What do you think?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Well, I do. It's the image of an expulsion. The government in Ottawa had a more palatable term for it. They preferred to call it "relocation." A Cold War phenomenon. The politicians in Ottawa were scared that the Soviet Union or the United States would take it into their heads to lay claim to the uninhabited Canadian Arctic so they relocated the nomadic Inuit from their traditional territory in the southern Arctic to Resolute and Grise Fjord near the North Pole. They claimed that the hunting grounds were better there, but the opposite was true. The Inuit were forced to wear numbered dog-tags as though they were animals. Did you know that?'

  'I can't remember.'

  Tour generation and the kids growing up today have no idea what their parents had to live through. And it started long before that, with the white trappers in the 1920s who came here with guns. The seal and caribou populations were decimated – and not just because of the qallunaat. The Inuit killed them off too. That's what happens when you exchange your bow and arrows for a gun. Anyway, the Inuit people were plunged into poverty. They'd never had much trouble with disease, but now there were outbreaks of polio, tuberculosis, measles and diphtheria, so they left the land and moved into settlements. By the end of the 1950s our people were dying of starvation and infectious disease, and the government did nothing about it. Then the military got interested in the Northwest Territories and secret radar stations were erected on traditional Inuit hunting grounds. The Inuit who lived there were in the way, so at the instigation of the Canadian government they were packed into aeroplanes and deposited hundreds of kilometres further north – without their tents, kayaks, canoes or sleds. When I was a young man, I was relocated too. So were your parents. Back then the authorities justified it by claiming that the chances of survival for the impoverished Inuit were better in the north than in the vicinity of the military bases. But the new settlements were nowhere near the caribou trails or any of the summer breeding grounds.'

  There was a lengthy silence. Every now and then the two narwhal reappeared. Anawak watched the clash of swords, waiting for his uncle to resume his story.

  'After our relocation, they bulldozed our hunting grounds. Everything that might remind us of our old lives here was razed to the ground to stop us returning. And, of course, the caribou didn't change their habits to suit us. We had nothing to eat, no clothes. What use is all the courage in the world, if all you can hunt are a few siksiks, hares and fish? People could be as determined and strong as they liked, but there was nothing they could
do to stop their kinsmen dying. I won't go into the details. Within a few decades we were reliant on welfare. Our old way of life had been destroyed, and we didn't know any other. Around the time you were born, the Canadian government started to feel bad about us again, so they built us some houses – boxes. It was the obvious thing for the qallunaat. They live in boxes. If they want to take a trip somewhere, they get into a box with wheels. They eat in public boxes, their dogs live in boxes, and the boxes they sleep in are surrounded by other types of boxes that they call walls and fences. That was their way of life, not ours, but now we live in boxes too. Losing your identity comes at a price. Alcohol, drug abuse, suicide.'

  'Did my father ever fight for his people?' Anawak asked softly.

  'We all did. I was still a young man when we were driven out. I campaigned for compensation. For thirty years we struggled for our rights and went through the courts. Your father campaigned with us, but it broke his spirit. Since 1999 we've had our own state, Nunavut, "our land". No one can tell us what to do any more, and no one can force us to move. But our way of life, the only way of life that was truly ours, has been lost forever.'

  'You'll have to find yourselves a new one.'

  'I expect you're right. Self-pity never helped anyone. We were nomads, free to come and go as we pleased, but we've come to terms with the idea of our territory being limited. A few decades ago, our only social structure was the family. We didn't have chiefs or leaders, and now the Inuit are governed by the Inuit, as in any civil state. The concept of property was alien to us, but now we're going the way of every modern industrial nation. We're starting to revive our traditions – people are using dog-sleds again, the young are being taught how to build igloos and start a fire with flints – and that's good, but it won't stop the march of time. You know, boy, I'm not dissatisfied. The world moves on. These days we're nomads in the Internet, wandering through the web of data highways, tracking and collecting information. We can roam all over the world. Young people chat with friends from different countries and tell them about Nunavut. But too many of our people still kill themselves. We're coming to terms with a profound trauma. We need time. The hopes of the living shouldn't be sacrificed to the dead.'

  Anawak watched the sun hover on the horizon. 'You're right,' he said.

  And then, impulsively, he told Akesuk everything that they'd been told at the Chateau, about what they were working on and what they suspected about the intelligent beings in the sea. He knew he was breaking Li's instructions, but he didn't care. He'd been silent all his life. Akesuk was all the family he had left.

  His uncle listened. 'Would you like to hear the advice of a shaman?' he asked finally.

  'I don't believe in shamans.'

  'Who does? But this isn't a problem you can solve with science. A shaman would tell you that you're dealing with spirits, the spirits of the once-living that now inhabit the Earth's creatures. The qalhinaat started destroying life. They angered the spirits, the spirit of the sea, Sedna. No matter who these beings are, you won't achieve anything by trying to fight them.'

  'So what do we do?'

  'See them as a part of yourselves. The world is such a small place, or so they're always telling us, but the truth is, we're still aliens to each other. Make contact with them, just as you're making contact with the alien world of the Inuit. Wouldn't it be a good thing if the divisions were healed?'

  'They're not people, Iji.'

  'That's not the point. They're part of our world, just as your hands and feet are part of your body. No one can ever win the struggle for mastery. Battles only ever end in death. Who cares how many species there are on the planet and which is more intelligent than the rest? Learn to understand them instead of fighting them.'

  'Sounds fairly Christian to me. Turn the other cheek and all that.'

  'Oh, no,' chuckled Akesuk. 'It's the advice of a shaman. There are still plenty of shamans around. We just don't make a big deal of it.'

  'Which shaman would…' Anawak raised his eyebrows. 'You're not saying that… ?'

  Akesuk grinned. 'Well, someone has to provide spiritual counsel.' He paused. 'Look!'

  A short distance away an enormous polar bear was tucking into the narwhal carcass, scaring away the birds, which scattered into the air or scuttled over the ice at a respectful distance. A petrel launched an airborne assault, but the bear scarcely noticed. It wasn't close enough to the camp for the sentry to sound the alarm, but the man had cocked his gun, his eyes trained on the site.

  'Nanuq,' said Akesuk. 'The polar bear smells everything, including us.'

  Anawak watched the bear. He wasn't afraid. After a while the enormous creature lost interest and moved away majestically. It turned its head and cast an inquisitive look at the camp, then disappeared behind a wall of pack ice.

  'See how sedately it moves,' his uncle whispered. 'But that bear can run, my boy. You bet it can run.' He chuckled, then reached into his anorak and pulled out a little sculpture that he placed on Anawak's lap. 'I've been waiting to give this to you. There's a right time for every present and maybe this is the right moment for you to have this.'

  Anawak picked up the carving. A human face with feathers for hair, mounted on the body of a bird. 'A bird spirit?'

  'Yes.' Akesuk nodded. 'Toonoo Sharky, one of our neighbours, made it. He's famous now. The Museum of Modern Art has bought his work. Take it. There are challenges ahead of you. You're going to need it. It will guide your thoughts in the right direction when it's time.'

  'Time for what?'

  'Your consciousness will soar.' Akesuk's hands became wings 'But you've been away for a long time. You're out of practice. Maybe you need someone to tell you what the bird spirit sees.'

  'You're talking in riddles.'

  'That's the privilege of the shaman.'

  A bird crossed the sky above them.

  'A Ross's gull,' said Akesuk. 'Now you're really lucky, Leon. Did you know that thousands of birdwatchers come here every year to see a gull like that? That's how rare they are. Well, you've got nothing to worry about. The spirits have sent you a sign.'

  Later, in his sleeping-bag, Anawak lay awake for a while. The midnight sun shone through the fabric of the tent. He heard the sentry shout, 'Nanuq, nanuq!' He thought of the Arctic Ocean and imagined the unknown world below. He drifted until he came to the top of an iceberg that had been formed by a glacier in Greenland before the current had swept it towards the east coast of Bylot Island, where it had frozen into position. Eventually the wind and waves had freed it from the ice and sent it further south. In his dream Anawak climbed a narrow snow-covered path to the summit of the iceberg. A lake of emerald-green meltwater had formed there. Everywhere he looked, he saw the smooth, blue sea. In time the iceberg would melt, sending him to the bottom of the calm water and the source of all life, where a puzzle waited to be solved.

  Perhaps a shaman would be there to help him.

  24 May

  Frost

  Dr Stanley Frost had his own take on the situation. Surveys carried out by the energy industry located the main marine deposits of methane hydrate in the Pacific, along the west coast of North America and near Japan. More reserves had been found in the Sea of Okhotsk, the Bering Sea and further north in the Beaufort Sea. In the Atlantic, America had the bulk of the deposits right on her doorstep. Sizeable areas were known to exist in the Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela, while the seabed around Drake Passage, stretching between South America and the Antarctic, was also rich in hydrates. Before the collapse of the slope, the deposits off the coast of Norway had been charted, as had the hydrates in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

  But methane deposits seemed thin on the ground off the northwestern coast of Africa, particularly in the vicinity of the Canary Islands.

  And, in Frost's view, that didn't make sense.

  The Canary Islands were in an up-welling zone, where cold, nutrient-rich water rose from the depths, stimulating the growth of plankton, which i
n turn encouraged fish stocks. On that basis, the seabed surrounding the Canary Islands should have been covered with hydrates since methane collected in the depths wherever organic life filled the sea.

  The difference in the Canaries was that the decaying matter had nowhere to settle. The islands had formed millions of years ago as a result of volcanic eruptions, and they rose steeply from the seabed like towers. Tenerife, Gran Canaria, La Palma, Gomera, El Hierro – the pinnacles of volcanic rock loomed up from the ocean floor from depths of 3000-3500 metres. Sediment and organic matter swirled down their sheer sides without settling. That was why conventional charts didn't indicate the presence of methane deposits in the Canaries, and that – in Frost's estimation – was the first miscalculation.

  He suspected that the seamounts, of which the Canary Islands formed the visible peaks, weren't as sheer as had generally been supposed. There was no denying that they were steep, but they were by no means smooth and vertical. Frost had studied the formation of volcanoes for long enough to know that even the most precipitous strato-volcanoes were scarred with ridges and terraces. It was his firm opinion that large quantities of hydrates were present in the Canaries, and that people hadn't found them because they hadn't looked properly. In this instance, the hydrates wouldn't be lying in chunks on the seabed: they'd be running through the rock in thin veins. And Frost was in no doubt that they'd be found on the terraces too, wherever sediment had settled.

  Since Frost was a volcanologist and not a hydrates expert, he'd called on Bohrmann for help. Frost had drawn up a list of islands that were potentially at risk: La Palma, then Hawaii and Cape Verde, followed by Tristan da Cunha further south, and Reunion in the Indian Ocean. They were all potential time-bombs, but La Palma posed by far the biggest threat. If Frost's fears turned out to be justified then the Cumbre Vieja ridge on La Palma was a Sword of Damocles, hanging over the lives of millions of people, from a height of two thousand metres.