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.
PART FIVE
CONTACT
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.
Carl Sagan
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 horn 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 cult
ures. 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 atone 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.
You watch as the Earth brings itself into being.
Your path takes you along the Atlantic Ridge, one in a chain of mid-ocean ridges that extend across the oceans. With a mass as large as all the continents put together, they form a network covering sixty thousand kilometres, tipped with peak upon peak of periodically erupting volcanoes. Towering three thousand metres above the seabed, and sometimes separated from the surface by just as much water again, the ridges are evidence of cracks in the Earth. Where their crest is riven, magma rises from underground reservoirs. In the high pressure of the deep-sea, the molten rock doesn't shoot out explosively, but oozes in leisurely bulges. The pillows of lava push their way through the middle of the ridge, forcing it apart with the persistence and impertinence of chubby children, newly born seabed that has yet to find its form. Slowly, incredibly slowly, the ridge moves apart. The sea
bed is hot where the lava meanders through the darkness of the depths. Earthquakes shake the chasm and the crests on either side. Towards the edges of the rift, the lava cools. Beyond the crests, the topography consists of older stone; the further away from the ridge-crest, the older, colder and denser the rock, until the old, cold, heavy seabed slopes into the abyss. Creeping over the deep-sea plains, studded with mountains and covered with layers of loose sediment, it moves west towards America and east towards Europe and Africa, a conveyor-belt of past ages, until one day it pushes itself under the continents and plunges deep into the mantle of the Earth to melt in the furnaces of the asthenosphere, reappearing millions of years later as red-hot magma in oceanic rifts.
It's an extraordinary cycle. The sea floor moves tirelessly round the globe, fractured by pressure from within and pulled by the weight of its sinking boundaries. A continual straining, pulling and tugging of geolithic labour pains and burial rites shapes the face of the Earth. In time, Africa will unite with Europe. Will reunite with Europe. The continents are moving, not like icebreakers ploughing through brittle crust, but being dragged impassively on top of it, kept in constant motion ever since Rodinia, the first supercontinent, was torn apart in the Precambrian. Even now her fragments still strive to reassemble, as they did when they formed Pannotia and finally Pangaea, before they, too, broke apart. A divided family with a 165-million-year memory of the last complete landmass with a single ocean round it, now dependent on the flow rate of viscous mantle rock, and consigned to wandering the surface of the planet until they reunite.
You're a particle.
You only experience a heartbeat of all that. The Atlantic seabed shifts by five centimetres, and you've already been flowing for a year. Your journey takes you to places where there is life without sunlight. The lava cools rapidly, forming faults and cracks. Seawater pours into the porous new seabed. It streams down for kilometres, stopping just before it reaches the hot magma chambers inside the Earth, then returns, rich with life-giving minerals and warmth. Blackened with sulphide, the water spurts out of chimney-like rock formations as tall as houses, boiling hot, yet never boiling. At that depth, water heated to 350 degrees doesn't boil, it just flows up, dispersing its wealth of nutrients, supplying a hundredfold of what the surrounding waters have to offer. You voyage through the unknown universe has led you to the first outpost of an alien world in which living creatures survive without light. It is home to bushy clumps of metre-long tubeworms, mussels the length of a human arm, hordes of blind white crabs, fish and, most important of all, bacteria. They're primary producers, equivalent to the green plants on the Earth's surface that nourish themselves from sunlight and provide all living creatures with the energy to survive. But these bacteria don't need sunlight: they oxidise hydrogen sulphide. Their source of life comes from deep inside the Earth. They cover the seabed in vast bacterial mats, living in symbiosis with worms, mussels and crabs, while other crabs and fish live in symbiosis with mussels and worms – and all without the need for a ray of sunshine.
The Swarm Page 97