The Swarm: A Novel

by Frank Schätzing

  By the time he reached the Wick he was feeling better for his walk. Now that the sky was clearing he could sit on the beach and work in peace. It wouldn’t get dark for a while yet. Maybe, he thought, as he descended the wooden steps that zigzagged down from the hotel; I should treat myself to dinner. The food at the Wick was always excellent.

  Armed with his notebook and laptop he made himself comfortable on an upturned tree-trunk, but he’d been there barely ten minutes when someone came down the steps and wandered along the beach. It was low tide and the evening sunshine lit the driftwood-strewn shore. The figure kept close to the silvery-blue water. Whoever it was didn’t seem to be in any hurry; but all the same it was obvious that their meandering path would eventually lead to Anawak’s tree. He frowned and tried to look as busy as possible. After a while he heard the soft, gravelly crunch of approaching footsteps.

  ‘Hello.’

  Anawak glanced up.

  A woman in her late fifties was standing in front of him, cigarette in hand. Her face was tanned, and criss-crossed with lines. Barefoot, she wore jeans and a dark windcheater.

  ‘Hello.’ He sounded less brusque than he’d intended - as soon as he’d looked up, his irritation at the interruption had dissipated. Her deep-blue eyes sparkled with curiosity. She must have been stunning in her youth.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

  Under normal circumstances he would have given a non-committal answer, but instead he heard himself say. ‘I’m working on a paper about beluga whales. You?’

  The woman sat down beside him. He looked at her profile, the delicate nose and high cheekbones - and knew, suddenly, that he’d seen her somewhere before.

  ‘I’m working on a paper too,’ she said, ‘but I don’t expect anyone will read it when it’s published.’ She paused. ‘I was on your boat today.’

  The small woman wearing sunglasses and a hood, he remembered.

  ‘What’s up with the whales?’ she asked.

  ‘There aren’t any.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘That’s what I keep asking myself.’

  The woman nodded. My lot haven’t shown up either, but at least I know why. ‘Maybe you should stop waiting and start searching.’

  ‘But we are.’ He put down his notebook. We’ve got satellite tags - telemetry. And sonar. We can track down pods.’

  ‘But they’ve slipped the net.’

  ‘There were some sightings in early March off the coast of Los Angeles, but since then, nothing.’

  ‘So they’ve all just vanished?’

  ‘Not all of them.’ Anawak sighed. ‘It’s complicated. Are you sure you want to hear it?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You can see twenty-three different types of whale from Vancouver Island. Some are just passing through - grey whales, humpbacks, minke and so on - but others live here. We’ve got three different types of orca, for example.’

  ‘Killer whales?’

  ‘I guess,’ Anawak said irritably. ‘But orcas have never been known to attack humans in the wild. Pliny set them up, though, in his Natural History. He called them, “A mightie masse and lumpe of flesh without all fashion, armed with most terrible, sharpe, and cutting teeth.” And Cousteau described them as our number-one enemy. What nonsense!’

  ‘OK, point taken…so what does orca actually mean?’

  ‘Orcinus orca, their full scientific name, means from the realm of the dead. I’ve no idea were it came from.’

  ‘You said there were three types of orca here.’

  Anawak pointed out to sea. ‘Offshore orcas. We don’t know much about them but they come and go, mostly in big groups, and tend to live a long way out. Transient orcas are nomadic and live in smaller pods. They come closest to your idea of a killer whale. They’ll eat anything they can get their teeth into - seals, sea-lions, dolphins and birds. They’ll even attack blue whales. In areas like this, where the coast is rocky, they stay in the water, but in South America they’ll haul themselves on to the beach to hunt seals and other animals. It’s amazing to watch.’

  He paused, but she didn’t speak so he went on: ‘The third type lives in the waters around the island in large family groups. How well do you know the island?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘To the east there’s the Johnstone Strait, a channel of water separating it from the mainland. Resident orcas live there all year round. They only eat salmon. We’ve been monitoring their social behaviour since the 1970s—’ He stopped. ‘Why am I telling you all this?’

  She laughed. ‘I’m sorry, I got you sidetracked. And I’m curious. You were trying to explain which whales have vanished and which are still here.’

  ‘That’s right. But—’

  ‘You’re busy.’

  Anawak glanced at his notebook and laptop. His paper had to be finished by tomorrow but…‘Are you staying at the Wickaninnish Inn?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have plans for the evening?’

  ‘Oh!’ She grinned. ‘The last time anyone asked me that was ten years ago.’

  He grinned back. ‘I was thinking of my belly. I thought we could talk more over dinner.’

  ‘Good plan.’ She slid off the tree-trunk, stubbed out her cigarette and dropped the butt into her pocket. ‘I warn you, I always talk with my mouth full. By the way,’ she held out her hand, ‘I’m Samantha Crowe. Call me Sam.’

  ‘Leon Anawak.’

  Situated on a rocky promontory at the front of the hotel, the restaurant commanded an impressive view of Clayoquot Sound and the islands, with the bay and the temperate rainforest behind it. Anawak and Crowe sat at a table by the window - which would have been perfect for whale-watching, if there’d been anything to see.

  ‘The problem,’ Anawak said, ‘is that the transients and the offshore orcas haven’t shown up. There are still large numbers of residents, but they don’t like the west of the island, even though living in the Johnstone Strait is starting to get uncomfortable for them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘How would you feel if you had to share your home with ferries, cargo ships, liners and sport-fishing vessels? Besides, the region lives off the timber industry and entire forests are being transported to Asia. Once the trees are gone, the rivers fill with silt, the salmon lose their spawning grounds and the resident orcas have nothing to eat.’

  ‘It’s not just the orcas you’re worried about, though, is it?’

  ‘The grey whales and humpbacks are a major headache. They usually reach Vancouver at the beginning of March by which stage they won’t have eaten for months. During the winter, in Baja California, they live off their blubber, but they can’t do that for ever. It’s only when they get here that they eat again.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve gone further out to sea.’

  ‘There’s not enough for them to eat out there either. Here in Wickaninnish Bay, for instance, the grey whales find a key source of nutrition that they can’t get in the ocean. Onuphis elegans.’

  ‘Elegans? Sounds lovely.’

  Anawak smiled.

  ‘It’s a long, thin worm. The bay is nice and sandy, which suits the worms, and the grey whales love them. Without little snacks like that they’d never make it to the Arctic.’ He took a sip of his water. ‘In the mid-1980s things were so bad that the whales didn’t stop here. But that was because hardly any were left - they’d been hunted almost to extinction. Since then we’ve managed to raise their numbers but there are only about twenty thousand grey whales in the world, and you should find most of them here.’

  ‘But this year they haven’t come?’

  ‘The residents are here, but they’re just a minority.’

  ‘And the humpbacks?’

  ‘Same story.’

  ‘You said you were writing a paper on beluga whales.?’

  ‘Isn’t it time you told me something about yourself?’ Anawak asked.

  ‘You already know the most important stuff - that I’m an
old busybody who asks too many questions,’ she said.

  The waiter appeared with their main course: grilled king prawns on saffron risotto.

  ‘OK, but what kind of questions, to whom and why?’

  Crowe started peeling a garlicky prawn. ‘It’s simple, really. I ask, “Is anybody out there?”’

  ‘And what’s the response?’

  ‘I’ve never had one.’

  ‘Maybe you should ask a bit louder,’ said Anawak.

  ‘I’d love to,’ said Crowe, between mouthfuls, ‘but right now our technological capacity limits me to a period of about two hundred light years. It didn’t stop us analysing sixty billion signals during the mid-1990s. We narrowed them down to just thirty-seven that couldn’t be matched with any natural phenomenon. Thirty-seven signals that might have been someone saying hello.’

  Anawak stared at her. ‘You work for SETI,’ he said.

  ‘Yep. The Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence. Project Phoenix, to be exact.’

  ‘And you’re listening to signals from space?’

  ‘We target stars similar to our sun - a thousand of them, each more than three billion years old. There are other projects like it, but ours is the crucial one.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’

  ‘It’s not that amazing. You analyse whalesong and try to figure out what they’re telling each other. We listen to noises from space because we’re convinced that the universe is packed with civilizations. I expect you’re having more luck with your whales.’

  ‘I’m dealing with a few oceans. You’ve got the universe.’

  ‘It’s on a different scale, but I’m always being told that we know less about the oceans than we do about space.’

  ‘And you’ve intercepted signals that indicate the presence of intelligent life?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. We’ve found signals we can’t place. The chance of making contact is remote, almost beyond all probability. So, I should really throw myself off the next bridge in frustration. But the signals are my obsession. Like you and your whales.’

  ‘At least I know they exist.’

  ‘Not right now you don’t.’ Crowe smiled.

  Anawak had always been interested in SETI. The institute’s research had begun in the early 1990s when NASA had funded a targeted search for extra-terrestrial life on nearby stars - timed to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. As a result, the world’s largest radio telescope, in the Puerto Rican town of Arecibo, had embarked on a new kind of observation programme. Thanks to generous private sponsorship, SETI had since been able to set up other projects across the globe, but Phoenix was probably the best known.

  ‘Are you the woman Jodie Foster plays in Contact?’

  ‘I’m the woman who’d like to take a ride in her spaceship and meet the aliens. You know what, Leon? I don’t usually tell this stuff to anyone - I want to run away screaming when people ask me what I do. I can’t bear having to explain myself.’

  ‘I know the feeling.’

  ‘Anyway, you told me what you do, so now it’s my turn. What do you want to know?’

  Anawak didn’t take long to consider. ‘Why hasn’t it worked?’

  The question seemed to amuse her. ‘What makes you think it hasn’t? The Milky Way is made up of roughly a hundred billion stars. Trying to establish whether any of them is anything like the Earth is tricky because they don’t emit enough light. We can only find out about them by using scientific tricks. Theoretically they’re everywhere. But you try listening for signals from a hundred billion stars!’

  ‘I get the picture.’ Anawak grinned. ‘Tracking twenty thousand whales is easy by comparison.’

  ‘Do you see now how a job like mine can make you old and grey? It’s like trying to prove the existence of a teeny-weeny fish by straining the ocean litre by litre. And, remember, fish don’t keep still. There’s a good chance that you’ll strain for ever and decide in the end that the fish was never there. Yet all the while it was swimming along with thousands of others - just always somewhere else. Phoenix can strain several litres at once, but it’s still limited to, say, the Georgia Strait. Do you see what I’m getting at? There are civilizations out there, but I can’t prove it. The universe is big, maybe infinite - the observatory’s drinks dispenser can brew coffee stronger than our chances.’

  Anawak thought for a moment. ‘Didn’t NASA send a message into space?’

  ‘Oh, that.’ Her eyes flashed. ‘You mean, why don’t we get off our butts and start making some noise of our own? Well, you’re right. In 1974 NASA sent a binary message from Arecibo to M13, a globular star cluster a mere twenty-one thousand light years away. But the essential problem remains the same: whether a signal comes from us or from somebody else, all it can do is wander through interstellar space. It would take an amazing coincidence for someone to intercept it. Besides, it’s cheaper for us to listen than transmit.’

  ‘Even so, it would improve your chances.’

  ‘Maybe we don’t want that.’

  ‘Why not?’ Anawak was bewildered.

  ‘Well, at SETI we want to, but plenty of folk would rather we didn’t draw attention to ourselves. If other civilizations knew we were here, they might rob us of our planet. God help us, they might even eat us for breakfast.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Is it? If they’re clever enough to manage interstellar travel, they’re probably not interested in fisticuffs. On the other hand, it’s not something we can rule out. In my view, we’d be better off thinking about how we could be drawing attention to ourselves unintentionally, otherwise we could make the wrong impression.’

  Anawak was silent. Eventually he said, ‘Don’t you ever feel like giving up?’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’

  ‘And what if you achieve your goal?’

  ‘Good question.’ Briefly Crowe was lost in thought. ‘For years now I’ve been wondering what our goal really is. I think if I knew the answer I’d probably quit - an answer is always the end of a search. Maybe we’re tortured by the loneliness of our existence, by the idea that we’re just a freak of nature, the only ones of our kind. Or maybe we want to prove that there’s no one else out there so we have the right to occupy a privileged position. I don’t know. Why do you study whales and dolphins?’

  ‘I’m just…interested.’ But that’s not quite true, he thought. It’s more than an interest…So what am I looking for?

  Crowe was right. They were doing much the same thing, listening for signals and hoping for answers. They both had a deep-seated longing for the company of intelligent beings other than humans.

  She seemed to know what he was thinking. ‘Let’s not con ourselves,’ she said. ‘We’re not really interested in other forms of intelligent life. We want to know what their existence might mean for us.’ She leaned back and smiled. ‘I guess we’re just looking for meaning.’

  It was nearly half past ten when they said goodbye after a drink in the lounge - bourbon for Crowe and water for Anawak. Outside, the clouds had dispersed and the sky was scattered with myriad twinkling stars. For a while they gazed up at it.

  ‘I hope you find your whales,’ she said at last.

  ‘I’ll let you know, Sam.’

  ‘They’re lucky to have you as a friend. You’ve a good heart.’

  ‘You can’t know that!’

  ‘In my line of work, knowing and believing share a wavelength.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘Maybe we’ll meet again as orcas,’ Anawak joked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The Kwakiutl Indians believe that if you lead a good life you’ll return as an orca.’

  I like the sound of that.’ Crowe grinned. ‘Do you believe it?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But I thought…’

  ‘You thought?’ he said, although he knew without asking.

  ‘That you were Indian.’

  Anawak
felt himself stiffen. Then he saw himself through her eyes: a man of medium height and stocky build, with wide cheekbones, copper skin, almond eyes and thick, shiny black hair that fell across his forehead. ‘Something like that,’ he said awkwardly.

  Crowe glanced at him. Then she pulled out a packet of cigarettes, lit one and took a long drag. ‘Another of my obsessions,’ she remarked, blowing smoke. ‘Look after yourself, Leon.’

  13 March

  Norwegian Coast and North Sea

  Sigur Johanson heard nothing from Tina Lund for a week, during which he stood in for another professor, who’d been taken ill, and wrote an article for National Geographic. He also contacted an acquaintance who worked for the distinguished wine producers Hugel & Fils in Riquewihr, Alsace, and arranged to be sent a few vintage bottles. In the meantime, he tracked down a 1959 vinyl recording of the Ring Cycle, conducted by Sir Georg Solti, which, with the wine, pushed his study of Lund’s worms to the back of his mind.

  It was nine days after their meeting when Lund finally called. She was in good spirits.

  ‘You sound laid-back,’ said Johanson. ‘I hope that’s not affecting your scientific judgement.’

  ‘Highly likely,’ she said.

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘All in good time. Now, listen: the Thorvaldson sets sail for the continental slope tomorrow. We’ll be sending down a dive robot. Do you want to come?’

  Johanson ran through a mental checklist of his commitments. ‘In the morning I have to familiarise students with the sex appeal of sulphur bacteria.’

  ‘That’s no good. The boat leaves at the crack of dawn.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Kristiansund.’

  ‘It was a good hour away by car on a wind-blown, wave-battered stretch of rocky coast to the south-west of Trondheim. There was an airport nearby, from which helicopters flew out to the many oil rigs crammed along the North Sea continental shelf and the Norwegian Trench.

  ‘Can I join you later?’ he asked.