The Swarm (116 page)

She'd done it.

Refuge

Johanson was sitting by the lake. The water lay still before him, covered with stars. He'd been longing to return there. He looked at the landscape of his soul and was filled with joy and awe. He felt strangely disembodied, with no sensation of warmth or cold. Something had changed. He felt as though
he
were the lake, the small house beside it, the silent dark forest all around him, the noises in the undergrowth, the dappled moon…He was everything, and everything was in him.

Tina Lund.

It was a pity that she couldn't be here too. He would have liked to grant her this restfulness, this peace. But she was dead, killed by nature's violent protest against the rot of civilisation that had spread along the coasts. Wiped away, like everything else, leaving nothing but the image in front of his eyes. The lake was eternal. This night would never end. And the solitude would give way to soothing nothingness, the final pleasure of the egotist.

Was that what he wanted?

Solitude had undeniable advantages. Time was precious, and being alone meant that you could spend it with yourself. If you listened, you could hear the most extraordinary things.

But when did solitude become loneliness?

Suddenly he felt fear.

Fear, like a pain spreading through him, eating at his chest and stealing his breath. A chill crept over him and he shivered. The stars in the lake expanded into red and green lights and buzzed with electricity. The landscape blurred, becoming shiny and rectangular. He was lying in a tunnel, a pipe or a tube.

In a flash he was conscious.

You're dead, he told himself.

No, he wasn't quite dead. But he knew he had only seconds. He was lying in a submersible bound for the depths, laden with radioactive pheromone to repay the yrr's crimes, if that was what they were, with an even worse transgression.

There were no stars in front of him; just the control panel of the Deeplight. The lights were on. He raised his eyes in time to see the well deck disappear.

They were in the sluice.

In a tremendous act of will-power he swivelled his head to the side. In the body pod next to him he saw the beautiful profile of Judith Li.

Li.

She had killed him.

Almost.

The boat sank. Steel plates and rivets flashed past. Soon the submersible would be out of the vessel. Then nothing and no one would be able to prevent Li emptying her murderous cargo into the sea.

He couldn't let it happen.

Sweating with effort he pushed his hands from under his body and stretched out his fingers. He nearly blacked out. The instruments were in front of him. He was lying in the pilot's pod. Li had transferred the controls, and was steering with the co-pilot's instruments - but that could be changed.

One push of a button and the controls would switch to him.

Which one?

Roscovitz's chief technician, Kate Ann Browning, had shown him how to use the boat. She'd been thorough, and he'd listened attentively. He was interested in that kind of thing. The invention of the Deepflight heralded a new era of deep-sea exploration, and Johanson had always been fascinated by the future. He knew where the button was. And he knew how to use the other instruments and how to achieve what he intended. All he had to do was retrieve it from his memory.

Think.

Like dying spiders his fingers crawled over the control panel, smearing it with blood. His blood.

Think.

There it was. And next to it…

He couldn't do much now. The life was ebbing from his body, but he still had a last reserve of strength. And that would suffice.

Go to hell, Judith Li.

Li

Judith Li stared out of the view dome. A few metres in front of her she could see the steel wall of the sluice. The boat was sinking leisurely towards the depths. One more metre, and she'd start up the propeller.
Then a steep course downwards and to the side. If the
Independence
was going to sink within the next few minutes, she wanted to be as far away from it as possible.

When would she encounter the first collective? A large one might pose a problem, she was aware of that, and she had no idea how large a collective could be. There was also the danger of running into orcas, but whatever happened she could blast her way free. She had nothing to fear.

She had to wait for the blue cloud. The right moment to release the pheromone was when the yrr-cells were on the point of aggregation.

Those goddamn amoebas were about to get the shock of their lives.

Such an odd thought. Did amoebas feel shock?

She did a double-take. A change had taken place on the control panel. One of the display lights had gone out, telling her that the controls had been…

The controls!

She was no longer in charge of the submersible. The controls had been switched to the pilot. On the monitor a display screen appeared, showing a diagram of four torpedoes; two slim ones and two larger ones.

One of the heavyweight torpedoes lit up.

Li gasped in horror. She banged on the control panel, trying to regain the use of the instruments, but the command to launch the missile couldn't be reversed. The figures on the display reflected in her deep blue eyes, running backwards in an inexorable countdown:

00.03…00.02…00.01…

‘No!'

00.00

Her face froze.

Torpedo

The torpedo that Johanson had launched left its tube and shot forwards. It got less than three metres through the water before it hit a steel wall and exploded.

An enormous pressure wave took hold of the Deepflight. It slammed backwards into the sluice. A fountain of water shot out. While it was still spinning through the water, the second torpedo launched. With a deafening bang the well deck exploded. The Deepflight, its two
passengers and its deadly cargo went up in a ferocious ball of flames that consumed all evidence that they'd ever existed. Flying debris bored its way through the decks and bulkheads, piercing the ballast tanks at the stern, allowing water to gush in. Thousands of tonnes of seawater poured into the crater that had once been the basin.

The stern plunged.

The vessel was sinking at an incredible speed.

Exit

Anawak and Crowe had just reached the top of the ramp when the shockwave from the explosion shook the vessel. Anawak was flung through the air. He saw the smoke-wreathed walls of the tunnel spinning round him, then plummeted head first inside the black maw. Crowe tumbled through the air beside him, then disappeared. The ridged steel scraped his shoulders, back, chest and butt, tearing at his skin. He sat up, flipped over and was seized by another shockwave, which catapulted him so violently that he seemed to fly back into the hangar. There was an incredible din all around him, as though the whole ship had been blown to smithereens. Plummeting downwards, he curved through the air towards the water, and vanished beneath the surface.

He kicked out with his arms and legs, fighting the current, with no idea which way was up or down. Hadn't the
Independence
been sinking bow first? Why was the stern full of water?

The well deck had exploded.

Johanson!

Something smacked him in the face. An arm. He seized it, gripping it tightly as he pushed off with his feet. He didn't seem to be getting anywhere. He was thrown on to his side and pushed back, as the water tugged him in all directions. His lungs felt as though he were breathing liquid fire. He needed to cough and felt nausea rising as the watery rollercoaster plunged him down again.

Suddenly he surfaced.

Dim light.

Crowe bobbed up next to him. He was still gripping her arm. Eyes closed, she retched and spat, then her head disappeared below the surface. Anawak pulled her up. The water was foaming around them. He
realised that they were at the bottom of the tunnel. In place of the lab and the well deck he was in a fearsome flood tide.

The water was rising, and it was bitterly cold. Icy water straight from the ocean. His neoprene wetsuit would protect him for a while, but Crowe didn't have one.

We're going to drown, he thought. Or freeze to death. Either way, it's over. We're trapped in the bowels of this nightmarish ship, and it's filling with water. We're going down with the
Independence
.

We're going to die.

I'm going to die.

He was overwhelmed with fear. He didn't want to die. He didn't want it all to be over. He loved life, and there was too much to catch up on. He couldn't die now. He didn't have time. This wasn't the moment.

Agonising fear.

He was dunked under water. Something had pushed itself over his head. It hadn't knocked him very hard, but it was heavy enough to force him under. Anawak kicked out and freed himself. Gasping, he surfaced and saw what had hit him. His heart leaped.

One of the Zodiacs had been swept up by the current. The pressure wave from the explosion must have wrenched it from its mooring on the well deck. It was drifting, spinning on the foaming water, as it climbed up through the tunnel. A perfectly good inflatable with an outboard motor and a cabin. It was built for eight, so it was certainly big enough for two, and it was filled with emergency equipment.

‘Sam!' he shouted.

He couldn't see her. Just dark water. No, he thought. She was here just a second ago. ‘Sam!'

The water was still rising. Half of the tunnel was already submerged. He stretched up, grabbed the Zodiac, pulled himself out of the water and looked around. Crowe had disappeared. ‘No,' he howled. ‘No, for Christ's sake, no!'

Crawling on all fours he dragged himself to the other side of the boat and looked down into the water.

There she was! She was drifting, eyes half closed, beside the boat. Water flowed over her face. Her hands paddled weakly. Anawak leaned out, grabbed her wrists and pulled.

‘Sam!' he screamed.

Crowe's eyelids fluttered. Then she coughed, releasing a fountain of
water. Anawak dug his feet against the side and pulled. The pain in his arms was so excruciating that he was sure he would let go, but he had to save her. Abandon her, and you may as well stay behind too, he thought.

Groaning and whimpering, he pulled and tugged until all of a sudden she was with him in the boat.

Anawak's legs folded.

His strength was gone.

Don't stop now, his inner voice told him. Sitting in a Zodiac won't get you anywhere. You've got to get out of the
Independence
before she pulls you into the depths.

The Zodiac was dancing on top of the rising column of water as it surged towards the hangar bay. There was only a short distance to go before they were swept on to the deck. Anawak stood up and fell down again. Fine, he thought. I'll crawl. On his hands and knees he went to the cabin and hauled himself up. He cast his eye over the instruments. They were distributed around the wheel in a pattern he knew from the
Blue Shark
. He could handle that.

They were shooting up the last few metres of the ramp now. Clinging, he waited until the time was right.

Suddenly they were out of the tunnel. The wave washed them into the hangar bay, which had started to fill with water.

Anawak tried to start the outboard motor.

Nothing.

Come on, he thought. Don't play around, you piece of shit. Start, goddamn it!

Still nothing.

Start
, goddamn it!

All of a sudden the motor roared and the Zodiac sped away. Anawak closed his hands around the wheel. Speeding through the hangar, they veered around and shot towards the starboard elevator.

The gateway was shrinking before his eyes.

Its height was decreasing even as they raced towards it. It was unbelievable how quickly the deck was filling. Water streamed in from the sides in jagged grey waves. Within seconds the eight-metre-high gateway was just four metres high.

Less than four.

Three.

The outboard motor screamed.

Less than three.

Now!

 

Like a cannonball they shot into the open. The roof of the cabin scraped against the top of the gateway, then the Zodiac flew along the crest of a wave, hovered momentarily in the air, and splashed down hard.

The swell was high. Watery grey monsters rose towards them. Anawak was clinging so tightly to the wheel that his knuckles blanched. He raced up the next wave, fell into the trough, rose again and plummeted. Then he cut the speed. It was safer to go slower. Now he could see that the waves were big, but not steep. He turned the Zodiac by 180 degrees, allowed the boat to be lifted on the next wave, pulled back on the throttle and looked around.

It was an eerie sight.

The
Independence
's island towered out of the slate-grey sea in a cloud of dark smoke. It looked as though a volcano had erupted in the middle of the ocean. The flight deck was almost totally submerged, with only a few burning ruins defying their fate. He'd managed to get a fair distance away from the sinking ship, but the noise of the flames was still clearly audible.

He stared out breathlessly.

‘Intelligent life-forms.' Crowe appeared next to him, deathly pale, with blue lips, and shaking all over. She clung to his jacket, keeping the weight off her injured leg. ‘They cause nothing but trouble.'

Anawak was silent.

Together they watched the
Independence
go down.

Dreams

Wake up!

I am awake.

How can you tell? There's nothing but darkness around you. You're flying to the bottom of the world. What can you see?

Nothing.

What can you see?

I see the red and green lights of the flight controls in front of me. I see the gauges that tell me about the pressure inside and outside the boat. I see how much oxygen I'm using, how much fuel I have left, how fast I'm travelling and how steeply the Deepflight is diving. It tests the water composition, and I see the results in statistics and charts. The temperature is monitored by sensors, and I see a number.

What else can you see?

I see particles swirling in the water, flurries of snow in the floodlights, tiny scraps of organic matter sinking to the depths. The water is saturated with organic compounds. It looks murky. No - wait. It looks very murky.

You still see too much. Don't you want to see everything?

Everything?

 

Nearly one kilometre stretches between Weaver and the surface. Nothing has tried to attack her. Her path has been clear of orcas and yrr. Everything in the Deepflight is in perfect working order. The submersible winds its way down in a sweeping ellipsoidal spiral. Every now and then small fish swim into the lights, then dart away. Detritus tumbles through the water. Krill are caught in the beam, each tiny crustacean a speck of white matter. The shower of particles reflects the light back to its source.

For ten minutes she has been peering into the dirty-grey cocoon of
light that the Deepflight casts before it. Artificially lit darkness: light that illuminates nothing. Ten minutes in which she has lost all sense of up and down. Every few seconds she checks the display for information that can't be gleaned from the view: how fast she's travelling, how steeply she's diving, how much time has elapsed…

She can depend on the computer.

Of course she knows that it's her own voice she's beginning to converse with. It's the quintessence of all experience, of knowledge that comes from learning and observation, of nascent understanding. Yet at the same time something is talking from inside her, talking to her; something of which she was previously unaware. It is asking questions, making suggestions, bewildering her.

What can you see?

Not much.

Even that is an exaggeration. Only humans would come up with the absurd idea of sticking with a sensory organ when the external conditions mean it inevitably fails. No disrespect to your gadgets, Karen, but a beam of light won't help you. Your lights are just a narrow tunnel. A prison. Free your mind. Do you want to see everything?

Yes.

Then turn out the lights.

Weaver hesitates. She knows she'll have to switch them off to see the blue glow. When? It surprises her how dependent she has become on a pathetic beam of light. She has been clinging to it for too long. Using it like a torch under the bedclothes. One by one she turns off the powerful floodlights. Now only the control panel is still glowing. The shower of particles has disappeared.

Perfect darkness surrounds her.

 

Polar waters are blue. In the Arctic, the north Pacific and parts of the Antarctic, there isn't enough chlorophyll-containing life to colour the water green. A few metres below the surface, the blue takes on the aspect of a sky. Just as an astronaut in a spaceship sees the familiar sky darken as he travels away from the Earth until the blackness of outer space engulfs him, so the submersible travels in the opposite direction through an
inner space
, the unknown reaches of a lightless universe. Up or down, the direction makes no difference: in either case, the passing of familiar landscapes is accompanied by a loss of familiar perceptions, of the
feelings derived from human senses - of sight, and then gravity. The laws of gravity may still apply in the oceans, but a thousand metres below the surface there is no way of telling whether you're rising or falling. You have to put your trust in the depth gauge. Neither your inner ear nor your vision is of any use.

Weaver is now travelling at the maximum rate of descent. It took no time for the Deepflight to pass through the topsy-turvy polar sky, and the light faded quickly. When the depth gauge showed sixty metres, the sensors could still detect four per cent of the light that was shining on the surface - but by then she had already turned on the floodlights, an astronaut trying to illuminate the universe with the help of a torch.

Wake up, Karen.

 

I am awake.

Sure, you're awake and your mind is focused, but you're dreaming the wrong dream. All mankind is trapped within a waking dream of a world that doesn't exist. We live in an imaginary cosmos of taxonomic tables and norms, incapable of perceiving nature as it really is. Unable to comprehend how everything is interwoven, interlinked and irretrievably connected, we grade it and rank it, and set ourselves at the head. To make sense of things, we need symbols and idols, and we pronounce them real. We invent hierarchies and gradations that distort time and place. We have to see things in order to comprehend them, but in the act of picturing them we fail to understand. Our eyes are wide open, and yet we are blind. Look into the darkness, Karen. Look at what lies at the heart of the Earth. It's dark.

The darkness is threatening.

Why should it be? It deprives us of the co-ordinates of visible existence, but is that so terrible? Nature exists independent of our eyes, and it's bursting with variety. It's only through the lens of prejudice that it appears impoverished - because we judge it in terms of what we find pleasing. We always see ourselves, even in the flickering of a screen. Do any of the pictures on our computers and televisions show the world as it is? Can our perceptions allow us to see variety, when we always need prototypes - ‘the cat' or ‘the colour yellow' - to grasp anything? Oh, it's amazing how the human brain wrests these norms from such infinite variety. It allows us to comprehend the incomprehensible through an ingenious trick, but it comes at a price. Life becomes abstract. The end
result is an idealised world, in which ten supermodels provide the templates for millions of women, families produce 1.2 children, Chinese men are five foot seven and live until the age of sixty-three. We're so obsessed with norms that we forget that normality is born of abnormality, of divergence. The history of statistics is a history of misunderstandings. They provide us with an overview, but they blot out variation. They've estranged us from the world.

Yet they bring us closer together.

Is that what you think?

Well, we tried to communicate with the yrr, didn't we? We even succeeded. We had mathematics as our common ground.

Hold on. That's different. There's no room for variation in Pythagoras' theorem. The speed of light is always the same. Within a defined environment, mathematical formulae are unerringly valid. Maths doesn't ascribe values. A mathematical formula can't live in a burrow or in a tree. It's not something that can be stroked or that bares its teeth when threatened. You can't have an average law of gravity: there's only one law that applies. Sure, maths allowed us to communicate with the yrr, but do we understand each other any better for it? Has maths ever brought humanity closer? The way we label the world is determined by the evolution of our cultures. Different cultural groups see the world differently. The Inuit have no word for snow, only hundreds of words for all of its different kinds. The Dani people of Papua New Guinea have none for different colours.

What can you see?

Weaver stares into the darkness. The submersible continues its silent descent, travelling at an angle of sixty degrees and a rate of twelve knots. She is 1500 metres from the surface already. The submersible moves noiselessly, without so much as a creak or a groan from the hull. Mick Rubin is lying in the neighbouring pod. She tries not to think about him. It's a funny feeling, flying through the night in the company of a corpse.

A dead messenger, the bearer of their hopes.

Lights flare.

Yrr?

No, she's flying through a shoal of cuttlefish. From one moment to the next she finds herself in an underwater Las Vegas. In the eternal night of the depths, neither garish clothes nor funky dancing will help attract a mate, so single males in search of a companion do all their showing off
with lights. Their photophores, small transparent pouches, open and close to reveal luminescing bacteria, allowing the cuttlefish's organs to pulse with light in a ballet of winks, a noiseless deep-sea clamour. But they're not trying to court Weaver's boat: the flashes are designed to frighten it. Back off, they tell it. When that doesn't work, they throw open their photophores, surrounding the submersible and shimmering with light. Among them are smaller organisms, pale creatures with red and blue cores: jellyfish.

Weaver can't see it, but something has joined them; her sonar tells her so. A large dense mass. Weaver's initial thought is that it must be a collective, but yrr-collectives glow, and this thing is as dark as the water round it. Its form is elongated, bulky at one end, tapering off at the other. Weaver's flight path takes her straight towards it. Adjusting the angle, she soars through the water above it. As she passes overhead, it dawns on her what it might be.

Whales have to drink water to survive. It seems incredible, given their habitat, but a whale runs the same risk of dehydration as a human abandoned on a raft. Jellyfish are made of almost nothing but water - fresh water. Cuttlefish are another source of life-sustaining fluid, so the quest for drinking water draws sperm whales to the depths. Plunging vertically they descend a thousand, two thousand, sometimes even three thousand metres below the surface, linger for more than an hour, then come up to breathe for ten minutes, and dive again.

Weaver has encountered a sperm whale. A motionless predator, equipped with good eyes. In the realm of darkness, the creatures have good eyes. At this depth, they all have good vision.

 

What can you see? What can't you?

You're walking along the street. Some distance ahead, a man is coming towards you. A few steps in front of him is a woman with a dog. Click, you take a picture. How many living organisms are there in the street? How far away is each creature from the other?

There are four.

No, wait…There are three birds in the trees, so that makes seven. The man is eighteen metres away. There are fifteen metres from me to the woman. Her dog is only thirteen metres away–it's scampering in front of her, straining at the leash. The birds are ten metres above the ground, each sitting fifty centimetres from the next. Wrong! What you
don't see is that billions of organisms are swarming all over the street. Only three are human. One is a dog. In addition to the three birds you counted, there are fifty-seven that you haven't seen. The trees are living organisms, and in their bark and foliage live hordes of tiny insects. Mites infest the birds' plumage and the pores of your skin. Fifty or so fleas, fourteen ticks and two flies are buried in the dog's coat, while thousands of tiny worms inhabit its stomach. Its saliva is full of bacteria. The three human bodies are covered with microbes, and the distance between all these organisms is practically nil. Floating above the street are spores, bacteria and viruses that form chains of organic matter - chains of which humans are a part - knitting us together in one super-organism. In the sea it's no different.

What are you, Karen Weaver?

I'm the only human life-form for miles around - unless you count Rubin, who's not a life-form any more.

 

You're a particle.

One among countless different particles. In the same way as no cell is identical to another, no other human is identical to you. There is always a difference somewhere. That's how you should see the world. As a spectrum of diverging similarities. It's comforting to see yourself as a particle, isn't it, once you know you're unique?

A particle moving in space and time.

 

The depth gauge flashes.

2000 metres.

I've been diving for seventeen minutes.

Is that what your display is telling you?

Yes.

To understand the world, you need to find a different way of seeing time. You need to be able to remember - but you can't. Mankind has been short-sighted for two million years now. Most of
Homo sapiens
' evolution has been spent hunting and gathering, and that's what shaped our brains. For our forefathers the future was never more than the next moment in time. Anything beyond that seemed as vague and hazy as the distant past. We used to live for the moment, driven by an urge to reproduce. Disasters were forgotten or laid down in myth. Forgetting was once a gift of evolution, but now it's a curse. Our minds are still
bounded by a temporal horizon that prevents us seeing any further than a few years in either direction. Generations pass, and we forget, repress and ignore. Unable to remember and learn from the past, we're incapable of considering the future. Humans aren't designed to see the whole and the role they play within it. We don't share the world's memory.

Rubbish! The world has no memory. People have memories, but not the world. All that stuff about the planet's memory is esoteric crap.

Do you think so? The yrr remember everything. The yrr
are
memory.

Weaver feels dizzy.

She checks the oxygen supply. Ideas are tumbling through her mind. The dive seems to be turning into a hallucinogenic trip. Her thoughts disperse in all directions through the darkness of the Greenland Sea.

Where have the yrr got to?

They're here.

Where?

You'll see them.

 

You're a particle moving through time.

You sink through the silent depths with countless others of your kind, a cold salt-laden particle of water, heavy and weary from the heat-draining journey north from the tropics to the inhospitable Arctic reaches. You've gathered in the Greenland Basin, forming an enormous pool of incredibly cold and heavy water. From there you flow over the submarine ridges that lie between Greenland, Iceland and Scotland, and into the Atlantic Basin. On and on you go, over the mounds of lava and deposits of sediment, into the abyss. You're a powerful current, you and the other particles, and near the coast of Newfoundland you're joined by water from the Labrador Sea. It isn't as cold or as heavy as you are. You continue towards Bermuda, and circular UFOs spin across the ocean to meet you, warm, salty Mediterranean eddies from the Strait of Gibraltar. The Greenland Sea, the Labrador Sea, the Mediterranean - all the waters mingle, and you push southwards, flowing through the depths.