The Swarm: A Novel

by Frank Schätzing

  In the north of Vancouver Island the big chiefs called themselves taayii Haw’ilH, but in the south they were called taayii chaachaabat. George Frank, he guessed, was more likely to be a taa’yii chaabat. Maybe he’d avoid Indian words.

  He could easily visit the chief - he lived a short distance from the Wickaninnish Inn. The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. Instead of waiting for Ford’s call, he could break the cycle and see where it took him. He found Frank’s number in the phone book and called him.

  ‘So you’re here to ask about the whales,’ said Frank, thirty minutes later, as they wound their way past towering trees with densely clad branches.

  Anawak had explained why he had come. The chief scratched his chin. He was a small man with a wrinkled face and friendly eyes. His hair was as dark as Anawak’s. Underneath his windcheater he was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Salmon Coming Home.’

  ‘I hope you’re not expecting me to come up with an ancient Indian proverb.’

  ‘No.’ Anawak was pleased with this. ‘It was John Ford’s idea.’

  ‘Which one?’ Frank smiled. ‘Ford the movie director, or Ford the director of the aquarium?’

  ‘The movie director’s dead, I think. We’re trying any angle we can think of. Even if it’s just a tip-off from an old story. Maybe something similar happened in the past.’

  Frank pointed to the river they were following. The water gurgled past, taking twigs and foliage with it. Its source was in the mountains, but in places its path was blocked with silt. ‘Your answer’s right here.’

  ‘In the river?’

  Frank grinned. ‘Hishuk ish ts’awalk.’

  ‘I thought Indian folklore was out?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m done now. Actually, I assumed you’d know it.’

  ‘I never learned your language. Sure, I picked up a few phrases here and there, but no more.’

  Frank looked at him intently. ‘Well, it’s the central teaching of just about all Indian culture. The Nootka like to claim it for themselves, but I expect others say the same thing in different words. “Everything is one”. If anything happens to the river, it affects humans, animals and the sea…If one thing changes, everything else does too.’

  ‘Ecology, in other words.’

  Frank bent to free a branch caught in the tangle of roots obstructing the river. ‘I don’t know what to say, Leon. We don’t know any more than you do. I can listen out for you, and I’ll make a few calls. We’ve got plenty of songs and stories, but none that might help you. You’ll find what you’re looking for in all our stories, and that’s the problem.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Our notion of animals is different to yours. The Nootka have never taken the life of a whale. Whales give their lives to the Nootka, and that’s different - it’s a conscious act, do you see? In the belief system of the Nootka, all nature is conscious - it’s one big interconnected consciousness.’ He turned down a boggy path. Anawak followed. The forest cleared into a large, barren space, empty of trees. ‘Just look at the state of it. Shameful. The wood’s gone, the soil’s being eroded, and now the river’s no better than a sewer. You only need to see this to know what’s wrong with the whales. Hishuk ish ts’awalk.’

  ‘Have I ever told you what my research is about?’

  ‘You’re looking for consciousness, aren’t you?’

  ‘Self-consciousness.’

  ‘You told me last year. We had a good chat that evening. I drank beer and you drank water.’

  ‘I don’t like alcohol.’

  ‘Never drunk it?’

  ‘As good as.’

  Frank stopped. ‘Hmm, alcohol. You’re a good Indian, Leon, keeping away from alcohol and coming to me because you think we might have some secret native knowledge.’ He sighed. ‘When will people ever stop treating each other like clichés? The Indians used to have an alcohol problem and some still do, but most of us just like the occasional drink. Yet as soon as a white guy sees an Indian with a beer, he thinks, Oh, how tragic, we drove these people to drink. On the one hand we’re stray lambs, and on the other we’re custodians of ancient wisdom. But how about you Leon? What are you? A Christian?’

  Anawak wasn’t too taken aback. The few times he’d talked to George Frank in the past, the conversation had meandered freely. The taayii Haw’ilh jumped like a squirrel from one topic to the next, ostensibly at random. ‘I don’t belong to any church.’

  ‘I studied the Bible once, you know. It’s full of ancient truths. Ask a Christian why the wood is burning, and he’ll tell you that God is in the flames. He’ll refer you to the ancient stories, and there you’ll find a burning bush. But is that how a Christian would explain a forest fire?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Exactly - and yet any true Christian treasures those stories. Indians believe in their ancient stories too, but not because they think they’re real. Our stories don’t describe how such-and-such a thing actually is. They describe the idea of it. In our stories you’ll find everything and nothing, because you can’t take anything literally, yet it all makes sense.’

  ‘I know, George. It’s just that we don’t seem to be making any progress. The whales have gone mad, and we’re tying ourselves in knots trying to figure out why.’

  ‘And you think science can’t help.’

  ‘That’s how it looks.’

  ‘There’ll be a way. Science is a marvellous thing and people work wonders with it. But it’s a question of finding your focus. So far you’ve been looking at the whales. All of a sudden your old friends are enemies. Why? Could it be something we’ve done to them or to their world? What you need to realise is that their world is our world. If you look for things that affect the whales directly, there’s no shortage - pointless slaughter, chemicals in the water, tourism gone mad…We’re destroying the food chain and polluting the oceans with noise. We’ve even depriving them of the places they raise their young. Aren’t there plans to build a salt plant in the Baja California?’

  Anawak nodded. In 1993 the San Ignacio lagoon had been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was the last undeveloped nursery and breeding ground in the world for the Pacific grey whale, and it was home to a multitude of endangered plant and animal species. But in spite of that the Mitsubishi Corporation was planning to build a salt-evaporation plant that would pump twenty thousand litres of salt water out of the lagoon per second, creating 116 square miles of salt ponds. The water would flow back as waste water. No one knew what effect it would have on the whales. Countless scientists, environmentalists and a host of Noble Prize winners were protesting against the proposal, which threatened to set a disastrous precedent.

  ‘So you see,’ continued Frank, ‘that’s the whales’ world, as you know it. They live in this world and it’s so much more than just a chain of conditions that are straightforwardly good or bad for their survival. Maybe the whales aren’t the problem, Leon. They might be just part of the problem - the only part we can see.’

  Aquarium, Vancouver

  While Anawak was listening to the taayii Haw’ilh, John Ford was seeing double. For hours he’d been monitoring two screens at once. The URA’s footage of Lucy and the pod of greys was on one screen while the other showed a 3-D grid of lines in which a dozen green pinpricks were suspended. As the pod changed location and formation, the pinpricks shifted, moving through the virtual space. Almost immediately after splashdown, the robot had matched Lucy’s tail flukes to the sounds she was making, enabling it to use the noises to identify her and determine her position, which flashed green on the screen. Even if she had dived to the darkest depths, the robot wouldn’t have lost her.

  A stream of data flowed across the second screen from the tag still buried in Lucy’s blubber: heart-rate, depth of dive, positional data, temperature, pressure and light. The combined information from the tag and the URA provided a comprehensive picture of what Lucy had been doing over twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours in
the life of a rampaging whale.

  There was room in the observation lab for four people to monitor the output. Ford and two assistants were sitting in semi-darkness. The fourth work station was empty. A stomach bug had reduced the team to three, condemning them all to a night shift.

  Ford reached to one side, keeping his eyes on the screens, and stuck his hand into a carton. A handful of congealed chips disappeared into his mouth.

  Lucy didn’t give the impression that she was rampaging.

  Over the past few hours she’d been doing what benthic feeders did best - grazing, with half a dozen adult greys and two adolescents. At regular intervals she’d pushed her way through curtains of seaweed towards the bottom, raising clouds of sediment as she ploughed through sandy silt, catching worms and amphipods. Lying on her side, she’d tilled long furrows with her narrow bow-shaped head. In the beginning he’d been fascinated. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen pictures of grey whales feeding, but the URA swam with the pod. Its footage was in a different league. He could even see much of the detail. Following a sperm whale to its feeding grounds would have meant sinking to the depths of the ocean, but grey whales loved the shallows. So for hours Ford had been watching an alternating picture of light and dusk. Lucy bobbed along the surface for a few minutes, filtered out the silt through her baleen, filled her lungs with air, then returned to the bottom. She came so close to the shore that most of the pictures had been taken at depths of less than thirty metres.

  Ford watched as the scarred and mottled body slid over the sediment, swirling up the silt. The robot found it easy to follow the whales because they barely left the spot, swimming just a few metres in one direction, then a short distance in the other, shuttling back and forth, up and down, feeding, returning to the surface and plunging under water. Ford liked to compare Vancouver Island to a service station where whales hung out and snacked - which was what the pod was doing now.

  Up to the surface, down to the sea floor, feeding, swimming.

  After a while it got boring.

  At one point a group of orcas appeared in the distance, but it didn’t stick around. Most of the time, encounters like that passed without incident, although orcas were the only creatures apart from humans to prey on large whales. Not even blue whales were safe. When orcas went for the kill, it was a ferocious group attack. They took bites of their victim’s lips and tongue, leaving behind a gigantic, mutilated corpse that sank slowly to the bottom.

  Down to the sea floor, up to the surface, diving, feeding.

  Lucy fell asleep. At least Ford assumed that she was sleeping. With his assistants he watched the picture darken, as daylight turned to dusk. A shadow was visible against the black background: Lucy’s body, suspended upright in the water, sinking slowly towards the bottom, then creeping up again. Several marine mammals rested in that way. Every few minutes they rose to the surface in their half-sleep, breathed and sank down, still slumbering. Remarkably, they never slept longer than five or six minutes at a time, yet the short naps added up to a rest.

  Eventually the screens went black. Only the green lights betrayed the position of the pack.

  It was night.

  Nothing to see, still he had to watch–the tedium was hard to bear. Now and then something flashed across the screen; a jellyfish or a squid. Otherwise it was blacker than black. A stream of data continued to flow across the second monitor - details of Lucy’s metabolism and her physical surroundings. The green lights moved lethargically through the virtual space. Not all of the animals in the pod would sleep at night. Whales slept irregularly, at different times of day or night. From the screen he could tell that Lucy and the other greys had stopped diving and feeding. From time to time the temperature changed by half a degree, depending on the depth. Everything else stayed constant. The grey whale’s heart was beating steadily, sometimes speeding up a little, sometimes slowing down. The URA’s hydrophone picked up all kinds of underwater noise: swooshing and bubbling, orca calls and the song of the humpbacks, bellowing and growling, the distant whir of a ship’s propeller, but nothing out of the ordinary.

  Ford sat in front of the pitch-black screen and yawned until his jaw clicked.

  He gathered up the last few chips. His fingers stiffened. He squinted at the screen. Something was happening to the data.

  From the moment the probe had started to record, it had registered a depth of between nought and thirty metres. Now it was registering forty, then fifty. Lucy was on the move. She was swimming towards the open sea and diving deeper all the time. The other whales followed rapidly. There was no hanging about now. This was migration speed.

  What’s the hurry? thought Ford.

  Lucy’s heartrate slowed. She was still diving, gliding rapidly downwards. Now her lungs would contain only ten per cent of the oxygen she was carrying, maybe less. The rest was stored in her blood and muscles.

  Lucy was over a hundred metres below the surface. The blood supply to her non-vital body parts had already shut down. A tangled network of capillaries absorbed the diverted blood. Muscle movement and metabolism proceeded anaerobically. Over millions of years a series of astonishing changes had enabled the former land-dwellers to move effortlessly between the surface and the depths; to most fish, a change in pressure of just a hundred metres posed mortal danger. Lucy continued to sink, 150 metres, 200, moving steadily from the shore.

  ‘Bill? Jackie?’ Ford called. His eyes were fixed on the screen. ‘Come and look at this.’

  They crowded round the monitors.

  ‘She’s diving.’

  ‘At a fair pace, too. She’s three kilometres from the shore already. The whole pod’s heading out to sea.’

  ‘Maybe it’s time for them to get going again.’

  ‘But why would they dive so deep?’

  ‘Plankton sinks at night, doesn’t it?

  ‘No.’ Ford shook his head. ‘That makes sense for other species, but not for benthic feeders. They’ve got no reason to—’

  ‘Look! Three hundred metres.’

  Ford leaned back. Grey whales weren’t especially fast. If need be, they could put on a spurt, but ten kilometres an hour was as fast as they usually travelled, unless they were migrating or fleeing from a predator.

  What had got into them?

  He was sure now that he was observing anomalous behaviour. Grey whales fed almost exclusively on benthic organisms. When they migrated, they never strayed further than two kilometres from the coast. Ford wasn’t sure how they’d cope at a depth of 300 metres. Ordinarily they never ventured below 120 metres.

  Suddenly something lit up at the bottom edge of the grid: a green flash that shone for a moment before it was extinguished.

  A spectrogram! The visual representation of a sound wave.

  Then another.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Some kind of sound. The signal’s pretty strong.’

  Ford stopped the tape and rewound. They watched the sequence again. ‘It’s an incredibly loud signal,’ he said. ‘Like an explosion.’

  ‘But there haven’t been any explosions near here. We’d hear an explosion. This is infrasound.’

  ‘I know. I only said it was like an explo—’

  ‘There it is again!’

  The green dots on the screen had stopped. The loud noise appeared a third time, then vanished.

  ‘How deep are they?’

  ‘Three hundred and sixty metres.’

  ‘Unbelievable! What are they doing down there?’

  Ford’s gaze shifted to the left-hand screen, showing the footage from the camera. The black screen. His mouth dropped open. ‘Look at that,’ he whispered.

  The screen wasn’t black any more.

  Vancouver Island

  Frank’s company was just what Anawak had needed. They had strolled along the beach towards the Wickaninnish Inn, discussing the environmental project with which Frank was involved. He came from a long line of fishermen, and now ran a restaurant, but recently the T
la-o-qui-aht had begun an initiative to combat the damage caused by logging. ‘Salmon Coming Home’ stood for their attempt to restore the complex ecosystem of Clayoquot Sound. The timber industry had devastated the area. No one was naïve enough to think that the forest could be restored, but plenty could be done. Clear-cut logging was to blame for the forest floor drying out in the sun and washing away in the rain. The topsoil flushed into lakes and rivers, adding to the congestion caused by stones and abandoned timber and depriving the salmon of their spawning grounds. With its disappearance, an important food source had been lost to other animals. The restoration project helped to train volunteers to clear the rivers and cut a path through disused roads where water used to flow. Protective walls of organic debris were constructed along drainage channels, while the banks were planted with fast-growing alder. Slowly the environmentalists were restoring some of the balance to the relationship between forest, humans and animals. It took constant energy and drive, and there was little prospect of speedy results.

  ‘You know, if you take up whaling you’ll make a lot of enemies,’ said Anawak, after a while.

  ‘And how do you see it?’ asked Frank.

  ‘If you want my opinion, it’s not wise.’

  ‘I expect you’re right. They’re a protected species, why hunt them? Not all of us are in favour of resuming whaling. For a start, does anyone know how to hunt any more? And what about the spiritual preparation? It’s hard to imagine people submitting to the 7uusimch, these days. But, that said, our people haven’t hunted whales for nearly a century, and in real terms we’re talking five or six creatures per year - a truly insignificant number. There aren’t many of us left, you know. Our forefathers lived off whales. The hunters observed rituals that lasted months and even years. Before they set out they purified their spirit in readiness for the gift of life that the whale would make to them. It wasn’t a question of harpooning the first animal they set eyes on. They were drawn to a particular whale by unknowable forces, in a kind of vision uniting hunters and whale. It’s that spirituality we want to preserve.’