The Swarm

by Frank Schätzing

  Perhaps the oldest life-forms didn't come into being on the surface but here, in the lightless depths. Perhaps, Karen, you're seeing the real Garden of Eden as you travel along the bottom of the Atlantic. There can be no doubting that the yrr are the more ancient of the two intelligent species, one of which inherited firm ground and forfeited its cradle.

  Imagine if the yrr were the privileged species.

  God's creatures.

  TIME TO CHECK THE DISPLAY.

  Weaver retrieves her thoughts from their journey past Africa. She has to focus on the present. It feels as though she's been travelling for a century already. A ghostly glow sweeps through the water some distance from the boat, but it's not the yrr, just a swarm of tiny krill, although there's no real way of telling – they might be cuttlefish instead.

  2500 metres.

  Another thousand metres to the seabed. All around her there is nothing but open water, yet the sonar is making frenzied clicks. Something large is approaching. No – not just approaching. It's heading straight for her, and it's vast. A solid expanse sinking down from above. Weaver's latent fear turns to panic. She flies through the water, banking at 180 degrees, as the thing draws closer. The microphones pipe an empty, unearthly din inside the boat, an eerie wailing and droning that's getting louder all the time. Weaver is tempted to flee, but curiosity prevails. She is far enough away from it and there's no sign that it's pursuing her.

  Perhaps it's not a creature.

  Banking again, she glides back towards it. They're at the same depth now, and the unknown thing is straight ahead. The Deepflight is rocked by turbulence.

  Turbulence?

  What could possibly be that big? A whale? But this thing is the size of ten whales, of a hundred whales, or even more…

  She turns on the floodlights.

  And at that moment she realises that she's closer than she thought. At the very edge of the beam, the thing comes into view. For a second Weaver is thrown, incapable of identifying the smooth surface in front of her or what it might belong to. It drops past her, then something catches in the floodlights. Bold lines, metre-long uprights, followed by curves. They seem horribly familiar, morphing into letters that read: USS hide…

  She cries out in shock.

  The sound dies without an echo, reminding her that she's sealed inside her pod. On her own. With the sinking ship before her, she feels more alone than ever. Her thoughts turn to Anawak, Johanson, Crowe, Shankar and all the others.

  Leon!

  She is staring in disbelief.

  The side of the flight deck appears briefly, then vanishes. The rest is hidden in the darkness, leaving nothing but a furious flurry of escaping air.

  Then she feels the pull, and the Deepflight is tugged under.

  No!

  Feverishly she tries to stabilise the boat. It's her own fault for being so nosy. Why couldn't she have kept her distance? The boat's in trouble, she can see that from the controls. Weaver fights against the pull, using maximum propulsion to get it to rise. The submersible struggles and spins, following the Independence to its grave. Suddenly the Deepflight demonstrates the true brilliance of her design: she escapes from the vessel's wake and soars upwards.

  The next second it's as though it never happened.

  Weaver can hear her heart pounding. It thunders in her ears. Like a piston, it pumps the blood into her head. She turns off the floodlights, lowers the nose of the Deepflight, and continues her flight to the bottom of the Greenland Sea.

  TIME PASSES – maybe minutes or just seconds – and she sobs. She'd known that the Independence would sink – they all had – but so fast?

  Yes, they'd known it would be fast.

  But she doesn't know if Leon is alive. Or whether Sigur has made it.

  She feels terribly alone.

  I want to turn back.

  I want to turn back.

  'I want to turn back!'

  Face awash with tears, lips quivering, she questions the sense of her mission. She's nearing the ocean bottom, and there's still no sign of the yrr. She checks the display. The onboard computer reassures her. She's been travelling for thirty minutes, it tells her, and she's 2700 metres deep.

  Thirty minutes. How long should she stay down?

  Do you want to see everything?

  What?

  Do you want to see everything, little particle?

  Weaver snuffles, an earthly snuffle in the night-time wonderland of thoughts. 'Dad?' she whimpers.

  Calm. You've got to stay calm.

  A particle doesn't ask how long things take. A particle simply moves or stays still. It follows the rhythm of creation, an obedient servant to the whole. The obsession with duration is peculiar to humans, a doomed attempt to defy our own nature, to separate out the moments of our lives. The yrr aren't interested in time. They carry time in their genome, from the very beginnings of cellular life. It's all there: 200 million years ago, when oceanic plates joined with the land mass that is now North America; sixty-five million years ago, when Greenland began to detach itself from Europe; thirty-six million years ago, when the topographical features of the Atlantic were formed, and when Spain was still far away from Africa; then twenty million years ago, when the submarine ridges separating the Arctic from the Atlantic sank low enough for the waters to circulate, allowing you to make your journey from the Greenland Basin, leading onwards past Africa and further south towards Antarctica.

  You're travelling towards the Circumpolar Current, the marshalling yard for ocean currents, towards the never-ending loop of water.

  You head out of the cold into the cold.

  YOU MAY ONLY be a particle, but you're part of a mass of water that's eighty times bigger than the Amazon. You flow across the seabed, over the equator, crossing the southern Atlantic Basin towards the southernmost tip of South America. Until now you've been flowing evenly and calmly. But once you've passed Cape Horn you run into turbulence. Reeling and tumbling you're pulled into a commotion resembling the lunch-time traffic around the Arc de Triomphe, but infinitely more violent. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current flows from west to east around the White Continent like a vast mixer, transporting and redistributing all the waters of the world. The circular current never stops, never hits land. It chases its tail, carrying enough water for eight hundred Amazons, pulling the planet's water inside it, tearing currents apart and mixing them together, expunging all trace of their identity and origin. Near the Antarctic coast it washes you towards the surface, where you shiver with cold. Foaming breakers sweep you onwards, until you sink back slowly into the vast circumpolar carousel.

  It carries you for a while, then ejects you.

  You travel northwards again at a depth of 800 metres. All the world's seas are fed by this circular Antarctic current. Some of the water flows into the subsurface South Atlantic current, some into the Indian Ocean, but most of it flows into the Pacific, and so do you. Hugging the western flank of South Africa you course towards the equator, where trade winds part the waters, and tropical heat warms you. You rise to the surface and are pulled to the west, right through the chaos of Indonesia with its islands and islets, currents, eddies, shallows and whirlpools. It seems impossible to pick your way through. Further south you're driven past the Philippines and through the Makassar Strait between Borneo and Sulawesi. Rather than squeeze through the Lombok Strait, you bypass it, flowing eastwards round Timor, a better route that takes you to the open waters of the Indian Ocean.

  Now you head towards Africa.

  The warm shallows of the Arabian Sea charge you with salt. Passing Mozambique, you travel south. You're in the Agulhas Current now, hurrying in anticipation of returning to the ocean of your origin, throwing yourself into an adventure that has cost so many sailors their lives. You reach the Cape of Good Hope, and it pitches you back. Too many currents collide here. The Antarctic Place de L'Etoile with its Friday-afternoon traffic is all too close. No matter how hard you try, you fail to make headway. Eventually you pin
ch off from the main current to form an eddy, and at last you're in the South Atlantic. You flow westwards with the Equatorial Current, spinning in vast eddies past Brazil and Venezuela, until you reach Florida and the ring of water tears apart.

  You're in the Caribbean, the birthplace of the Gulf Stream. Fuelled by tropical sunshine you begin your passage up towards Newfoundland and on towards Iceland, drifting proudly on the surface and spreading your warmth magnanimously throughout Europe as though you could never run out. You barely notice that you're getting colder. At the same time, the waters of the North Atlantic are evaporating, saddling you with a burden of salt that weighs ever heavier. All of a sudden you find yourself back in the Greenland Basin where your journey began.

  You've been travelling for a thousand years.

  Ever since the Pacific was divided from the Atlantic by the Isthmus of Panama three million years ago, particles of water have been taking this route. Only another shift in the continents could interfere with the great ocean conveyor belt – or so we used to think. Now the equilibrium of the climate has been disrupted by mankind. And while the opposing factions continue to argue over whether global warming will lead to the icecaps melting and the Gulf Stream stopping, the current has stopped already. The yrr have put a stop to it. They've stopped the journey of the particles, put an end to Europe's warmth, called time on the future of the self-appointed chosen species. Yes, they know very well what will happen when the Gulf Stream stops, unlike their foes, who never see the consequences of their actions, unable to imagine the future because they lack genetic memory, incapable of seeing that in the logic of creation an end is a beginning and a beginning is also an end.

  ONE THOUSAND YEARS, little particle. More than ten generations of humans, and you've circumnavigated the world.

  One thousand trips like that, and the seabed will have renewed itself.

  Hundreds of new seabeds and seas will have disappeared, continents will have grown together or pulled apart, new oceans will have been created, and the face of the world will have changed.

  During one single second of your voyage, simple forms of life came into being and died. In nanoseconds, atoms vibrated. In a fraction of a nanosecond, chemical reactions took place.

  And somewhere amid all this is man.

  And above all this is the yrr.

  The conscious ocean.

  YOU'VE CIRCUMNAVIGATED the world, seen how it was and how it is, becoming part of the eternal cycle that knows no beginning and no end, only variation and continuation. From the moment it was born, this planet has been changing. Every single organism is part of its web, a web that covers its surface, inextricably linking all forms of life in a network of food chains. Simple beings exist alongside complex life-forms, many organisms have vanished forever, while others evolve, and some have always been here and will inhabit the Earth until it is swallowed by the sun.

  Somewhere amid all this is man.

  Somewhere within all this are the yrr.

  What can you see?

  WHAT CAN YOU SEE?

  Weaver feels unbearably tired, as though she's been travelling for years. A tired little particle, sad and alone.

  'Mum? Dad?'

  She has to force herself to look at the display.

  Cabin pressure: OK. Oxygen: OK.

  Dive angle: ().

  Zero?

  The Deepflight is horizontal. Weaver stares. Suddenly she's wide awake again. The speedometer is showing zero too.

  Depth: 3466 metres.

  Darkness all around.

  The boat's not sinking any more. It's reached the bottom of the Greenland Basin.

  She hardly dares look at the clock for fear of what she might see – perhaps evidence that she's been there for hours already and is too low on oxygen to fly back. But the figures glow calmly on the digital display, announcing that her dive began only thirty-five minutes earlier. So she can't have blacked out. She just can't remember landing, although she seems to have followed procedure. The propellers have stopped, the systems are working. She could fly home now…

  And then it starts.

  COLLECTIVE

  At first Weaver thinks she is hallucinating. She sees a faint blue glow in the distance. The apparition rises, swirling up like a scattering of dark-blue dust blown from an enormous palm, then fading into nothing.

  The glow reappears, this time closer and more spread out. It doesn't vanish, but arches upwards, passing over the boat, obliging Weaver to crane her neck. What she sees reminds her of a cosmic cloud. It's impossible to say how far away or big it is, but it gives her the feeling of having reached the edge of a distant galaxy, not the bottom of the sea.

  The blue light starts to blur. For a moment she thinks it's getting fainter, then she realises that it's an illusion: the glow isn't fading, it's becoming part of a far larger cloud that's sinking gently towards her boat.

  Suddenly it dawns on her that she can't stay on the seabed if she wants to get rid of Rubin.

  She angles the wings and starts the propeller. The Deepflight scrapes over the seabed, stirring up sediment, then lifts off. Lightning flashes in the vast night sky, and Weaver sees that the yrr are aggregating.

  The collective is enormous.

  From all sides the blue and white light is closing in. The Deepflight is caught in the middle of an aggregating cloud. Weaver knows that the jelly can contract into strong elastic tissue. She tries not to think what will happen if the muscle of amoebas closes round her boat. For a split second she pictures an egg being crushed by a fist.

  She's ten metres above the seabed.

  That should be enough.

  It's time.

  A push of a button on which everything depends. It would only take a moment of inattentiveness, a clumsy finger quivering with nerves or fear, and the wrong pod would open. She'd be dead within an instant. 3500 metres below the surface, the pressure is equivalent to 385 atmospheres. Her body might retain its shape, but she wouldn't be alive to see it.

  She hits the right button.

  The domed lid of the co-pilot's pod rises upright. Air shoots out explosively, lifting Rubin's body and dragging him partway out of the pod. With the lid open, the submersible is almost impossible to steer, but Weaver speeds forward, then plunges abruptly, ejecting Rubin from the boat. His dark silhouette hovers in front of the approaching storm of flashing light. The hostile environment squashes his organs and his flesh, crushing his skull, snapping his bones, and squeezing the fluid from his body.

  The light is everywhere.

  Rubin's reeling body is seized by the jelly and thrust against the submersible as Weaver tries to flee. The organism is coming at her from both sides, from all directions simultaneously, above and below. It pushes up to the boat, wrapping itself round Rubin, solidifying, and Weaver screams-

  The boat has been released.

  The jelly withdraws as fast as it approached. It backs right off. If any human emotion could be used to approximate the collective's reaction, it would be dismay.

  Weaver realises that she's whimpering.

  The blue glow still surrounds her. Blurred lightning scuds through the mass of jelly, which walls in the boat like an enormous rampart, stretching up as far as she can see. She turns her head and looks into Rubin's crushed face, faintly illuminated by the lights on the control panel. The contracting jelly has squashed him against the side of the view dome, and he stares at her through two dark holes. Hydrostatic pressure has forced out his eyeballs. Dark fluid seeps out of the cavities, then the body detaches itself slowly from the boat and falls into the night. Now he is just a shadow against the illuminated backdrop, body spinning in curious movements as though he were dancing slowly and awkwardly in honour of some heathen God.

  Weaver is hyperventilating. She has to force herself to stay calm. Under any other circumstances she would have felt sick, but she can't afford feelings now.

  The ring continues to retreat, bulging upwards at the edges. Darkness emerges beneath it. Rip
ples run through its sides, as the organism gathers itself in rising waves of jelly. The biologist's corpse disappears into the night. Almost immediately tentacles stretch down from above; long tapering feelers, slender like jungle lianas. Moving in concert and with evident purpose, they find Rubin and sweep over his corpse. Weaver can't see the body, but it shows up on the sonar. The careful groping movements of the feelers trace the outlines of a human form.

  From the tips of the tentacles grow delicate tendrils that home in on individual body parts before feeling their way onwards. Sometimes they hover without moving or branch off Every now and then they glide under and over each other as though conferring without sound. Until now Weaver has only ever seen blue yrr, but these feelers are an iridescent white. It would be easy to believe that their movements were choreographed, like a ballet unfolding in the silence. Suddenly in the distance Weaver hears music from her childhood: Debussy's 'La plus que lente', the slower-than-slow waltz that her father loved. It surprises and delights her, and her fear falls away. Of course there is no one in the ocean to play 'La plus que lente', but it is wonderfully appropriate. The rising and falling music is almost unbearably exquisite, and all that Weaver can discern at this moment is…