The Swarm

by Frank Schätzing

  Beauty.

  She finds her parents in a vision of beauty.

  Weaver looks up. Above her is a shimmering blue bell of enormous proportions, high above her like a heavenly vault.

  Weaver doesn't believe in God, but she has to stop herself lapsing into prayer. She remembers Crowe's warning about the temptation to humanise aliens, about representations of otherness that are really mirror images, about the need to make room for bolder visions of alien life. Perhaps Crowe would have resented the purity of the light; perhaps she would have wished for something less symbolically charged than the sacred white of the feelers, but the light doesn't stand for anything but itself White is a common bioluminescent colour, like blue, red and green. The glow isn't a manifestation of the divine, just a host of stimulated yrr-cells. Besides, what God with any human affinity would choose to reveal itself in tentacular form?

  What overwhelms her is the knowledge that things have changed forever. The debate about whether a single-cell organism could develop intelligence. The question as to whether the ability of cells to organise themselves was evidence of conscious life or just an unusually well-developed form of mimicry. In the end the yrr had raised the stakes by breaking through the hull of the Independence as a tentacle-wielding monster of jelly, making H. G. Wells's Martians look harmless, and earning their place in the cabinet of horrors. But none of that is important in the face of this strange, yet sublime display. Weaver watches, and needs no further proof that she is seeing highly developed, unmistakably non-human intelligence.

  Her gaze wanders up the blue dome, climbing until she sees its apex, from which something is descending, the source of the tentacles, which hang down from beneath. It is almost perfectly round and big like the moon. Grey shadows flit beneath its white surface, casting complex patterns that vanish in a trice, shades of white upon white, symmetrical configurations of light, flashing combinations of lines and dots, a cryptic code – a semiotician's feast. To Weaver's eyes it looks like a living computer, whose innards and surface are processing calculations of staggering complexity. She watches as the being thinks. Then it occurs to her that it's thinking for everything around it, for the enormous mass of jelly, for the whole blue firmament, and finally she realises what it is.

  She has found the queen.

  THE QUEEN MAKES CONTACT.

  Weaver hardly dares to breathe. The immense pressure of the water has compressed the fluids in Rubin's body, at the same time causing them to spill out of the wreckage and disperse. From the site of the pheromonal injections, a chemical seeps out of the corpse, a chemical to which the yrr reacted immediately and instinctively. For one brief moment aggregation took place and ended abruptly. Weaver isn't certain that the plan wall work, but if her reasoning turns out to be right, the encounter with Rubin will have thrown the collective into Babylonian confusion – although in Babel there was recognition without understanding. Now the opposite is true. Never before has the pheromone-based message been sent or received by anything other than the yrr. The collective tries in vain to identify Rubin. His body tells them that he is the enemy, the species they have decided to wipe out, yet the enemy is saying, Aggregate!

  Rubin is saying: I am the yrr.

  What can the queen be thinking? Has she seen through the ruse? Does she know that Rubin is nothing like a yrr-collective, that his cells are locked together, that he doesn't have receptors? He is by no means the first human that the yrr have examined. Everything about him tells them that he is their enemy. According to yrr-logic, non-yrr should be disregarded or attacked. The question is: have yrr ever turned against yrr?

  Can she be sure?

  At least this is one point about which Weaver feels certain and she knows that Johanson, Anawak and all the others would agree. The yrr don't kill each other. Of course, diseased and defective cells are expelled from the collective, triggering their death, but the process is no different from a human body shedding dead skin, and no one could describe that as a battle of cells, since they all form one being. It's the same with the yrr – there are millions and billions of them, yet they're all one. Even individual collectives with individual queens belong to one vast being with one vast memory, a brain that encompasses the world, capable of making wrong-decisions, yet never knowing moral blame, permitting space for individual ideas, without allowing any one cell to gain preference. There can be no punishments and no wars within that single being. There are only normal and diseased cells, and the diseased cells die.

  A dead yrr could never emit a pheromonal signal like the one coming from this piece of flesh in human form. The message from the dead enemy tells the yrr that the corpse isn't hostile, that the corpse is alive.

  KAREN, LEAVE THE SPIDER ALONE.

  Karen is only little. She has picked up a book, and is about to kill a spider. The spider is only little too, but it has committed the terrible sin of being born a spider.

  Why kill it?

  The spider is ugly.

  Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. Why do you find the spider ugly?

  Stupid question. Why is a spider ugly? Because it is. It doesn't gaze up imploringly with puppy-dog eyes, it's not sweet, you can't love it, you can't even stroke it. It looks strange, and evil – as though it should he killed.

  The hook swishes down, splatting the spider.

  It isn't long before she regrets it. She sits down to watch The Adventures of Maya the Bee, of which previous episodes have taught her that honeybees are fine. This time there's a spider too, eight legs and a fixed stare, just demanding to be squished. Then the spider's lipless mouth opens and a squeaky childish voice comes out – not to utter terrifying threats of the kind that little girls expect to hear. Oh, no. This spider is as sweet as can be, a dear little thing.

  All of a sudden she can't imagine how she could ever kill a spider. Already she knows that the one she has murdered will haunt her in her dreams, reproaching her in its high-pitched voice. Just the thought of it is too horrible for her to bear, and Karen sobs.

  That was when she learned respect.

  Back then she learned something that years later, on board the Independence, gave rise to an idea. An idea as to how one highly intelligent species could outsmart another while bypassing its intellect. An idea that could buy them time, or maybe even mutual understanding. An idea that requires man, who is accustomed to seeing himself as the template for earthly intelligence, to humble himself and be yrr-like.

  What a comedown for creatures created in God's image.

  Whichever species that might be.

  HOVERING ABOVE HER is an intelligent white moon.

  It's descending.

  Rubin is reeled in by its tentacles, drawn into the light as a mummified torso swathed in jelly. They pull him inside. The queen is still sinking, descending towards the Deepflight, a mighty presence many times bigger than the boat. All of a sudden the depths are dark no longer. The moon starts to close round the submersible. There is nothing but light. White light pulsates round Weaver as the queen engulfs the boat, absorbing it into her thoughts.

  Weaver feels fear returning. She gasps for breath. She has to resist the impulse to start the propeller, even though she's desperate to escape. The enchantment has vanished, leaving her to face the threat. But she knows that a propeller can do nothing against the jelly. It's too resilient and strong. The movement might vex it, tickle it or leave it indifferent, but it certainly won't cause it to retreat. It's pointless to think of escaping.

  She feels the boat being lifted.

  Can the creature see her?

  How could it? Weaver doesn't have the least idea. The yrr-collective doesn't have eyes, but who's to say that it doesn't see?

  They hadn't had nearly enough time on board the Independence.

  She hopes with all her heart that the jelly can somehow perceive her through the dome. What if it succumbs to the temptation of opening the pod in an effort to touch her? The approach, no matter how well intentioned, would bring things t
o a deadly end.

  The queen won't do that. She's intelligent.

  She?

  The human mindset takes over so quickly.

  Weaver bursts out laughing. It's as though she's issued a signal, and the light around her thins. It seems to be retreating on all sides, and then it dawns on Weaver that the queen, as she's been calling her, is disbanding. The light melts away, billowing around her for the duration of one incredible second, as though showering her with Stardust from the universe when it was young. Small white dots dance in front of the view dome. If each one is a single amoeba, then they're big – almost the size of a pea.

  The Deepflight is set free, and the moon coalesces, hovering just beneath her, borne on a disc of blue light extending endlessly in all directions. The boat must have been lifted quite some distance through the water. Weaver looks down at the surface of the disc and can think of only one way to describe what she sees: a confusion of traffic. Multitudes of shimmering creatures swarm over the surface. Chimerical fish emerge from the jelly, bodies aglitter with intricate patterns. Swimming together, they slump back into the mass. Fireworks sparkle in the distance, then cascades of red dots flare up, appearing in ever-changing formations right in front of the submersible, too fast for the eye to keep up. As they sink back towards the white orb they slowly begin to take shape, but it's not until they reach the queen that the truth of their nature is revealed. Weaver gasps. They're not tiny fish, as she'd assumed, but one enormous being with ten arms and a long, slender body.

  A squid. A squid the size of a bus.

  The queen sends out a glowing tendril and touches the middle of the creature, and the dots of light come to rest.

  What's happening?

  Weaver can't stop staring. As she watches, swarms of plankton light up like glowing snow, falling upwards through the water. A squadron of gaudy green cuttlefish shoots past, eyes bulging on sticks. The infinite expanse of blue is shot through with flashes of light that fade into the distance where Weaver can't follow their glow.

  She stares and stares.

  Until suddenly it's too much.

  She can't bear it any longer. She notices that the submersible has started to sink again, dropping towards the glowing moon, and she fears that the next time she approaches this agonisingly beautiful, agonisingly alien world she may never be allowed to leave.

  No. No!

  Frantically she closes the open pod, pumping pressurised air inside it. The sonar tells her that she is a hundred metres above the seabed and sinking. Weaver checks the pod pressure, oxygen supply and fuel. She gets the all-clear. The systems are ready. She tilts the side wings and starts the propeller. Her underwater aeroplane starts to rise, slowly at first, then faster, escaping from the alien world at the bottom of the Greenland Sea and heading towards a more familiar sky.

  Soaring back to earth.

  Never in her life has Weaver experienced so many emotions in such a short time. Suddenly a thousand questions are racing through her mind. Do the yrr have cities? Where do they create their biotechnology? How is Scratch produced? What has she seen of their alien civilisation? How much have they allowed to see? Everything? Or nothing? Has she seen a mobile town?

  Or just an outpost?

  What can you see? What have you seen?

  I don't know.

  GHOSTS

  Rising and falling, up and down. Dreariness.

  The waves lift the Deepflight and let it fall. The submersible drifts on the surface. It's a long time since Weaver set off from the bottom of the sea. Now she feels as though she's trapped inside a schizophrenic elevator. Up and down, up and down. The waves are high, but evenly spaced. Their crests seldom break, like monotonous grey cliffs in constant motion.

  Opening the pods would be too risky. The Deepflight would fill within seconds. So she stays inside, staring out in the hope that the water will calm. She still has some fuel; not enough to get to Greenland or Svalbard, but at least to get her closer. Once the swell drops, she'll be able to resume her trip – wherever it might lead her.

  She still isn't sure what she's seen. Could she have convinced the creature at the bottom of the ocean that humans and yrr have something in common, even if that something is only a scent? If so, feeling will have triumphed over logic, and humanity will have been granted extra time – a loan to be repaid in goodwill, circumspection and action. One day the yrr will reach a new consensus, because their origin, evolution and survival demand it. And by then mankind will have played its part in determining what that consensus will be.

  Weaver doesn't want to think about any of the rest of it. Not about Sigur Johanson, or Sam Crowe and Murray Shankar, or any of those who have died – Sue Oliviera, Alicia Delaware, Jack Greywolf She doesn't want to think about Salomon Peak, Jack Vanderbilt, Luther Roscovitz. She doesn't want to think about anyone, not even Judith Li.

  She doesn't want to think about Leon, because thinking means fear.

  IT HAPPENS ALL THE SAME. One by one they join her, as though they were coming to a party, making themselves at home in her mind.

  'Well, our hostess is utterly charming,' says Johanson. 'It's just a shame she didn't think to buy some decent wine.'

  'What do you expect on a submersible?' Oliviera answers. 'It doesn't have a wine cellar.'

  'It's won't be much of a party without wine.'

  'Oh, Sigur.' Anawak smiles. 'You should be grateful. She's been saving the world.'

  'Very commendable.'

  'Uh-huh?' asks Crowe. 'The world, you say?'

  They fall silent as no one knows how to respond.

  'Well, if you ask me,' says Delaware, shifting her chewing-gum from one cheek to the other, 'I'd say the world couldn't care less. Mankind or no mankind, it carries on spinning through the universe. We can only save or destroy our world.'

  'Harrumph.' Greywolf clears his throat.

  Anawak joins in: 'It doesn't make the blindest bit of difference to the atmosphere whether the air is safe for us to breathe. If we humans were to disappear, we'd take our messed-up system of values with us. Then Tofino on a sunny day would be no more beautiful or ugly than a pool of boiling sulphur.'

  'Well said, Leon,' Johanson proclaims. 'Let's drink the wine of humility. It's plain to see that humanity is going down the drain. We used to be at the centre of the universe until Copernicus moved it. We were at the pinnacle of creation until Darwin pushed us off Then Freud claimed that our reason is in thrall to the unconscious. At least we were still the only civilised species on the planet – but now the yrr are trying to kill us.'

  'God has abandoned us,' Oliviera says fiercely.

  'Well, not entirely,' Anawak protests. 'Thanks to Karen's efforts, we've been granted an extension.'

  'But at what cost?' Johanson's face fell. 'Some of us had to die.'

  'Oh, no one's going to miss a little chaff,' Delaware teases.

  'Don't pretend you didn't mind.'

  'Well, what do you expect me to do? I thought I was brave. When you see that kind of thing in the movies, it's the old guys who die. The young survive.'

  'That's because we're just apes,' Oliviera says drily. 'Old genes have to make way for younger, healthier ones so that reproduction can be optimised. It wouldn't work the other way round.'

  'Not even in movies.' Crowe nods. 'There's always an uproar if the old survive and the young die. To most people, that's not a happy ending. Unbelievable, isn't it? Even all that romantic stuff about happy endings is just biological necessity. Who said anything about free will? Has anyone got a cigarette?'

  'Sorry. No wine, no cigarettes,' Johanson says maliciously.

  'You've got to look at it positively,' Shankar's gentle voice chimes in. 'The yrr are a wonder of nature, and that wonder has outlasted us. I mean, think of King Kong, Jaws and the rest of them. The mythical monsters always die. Humans get on their trail. They gaze at them in admiration and amazement, captivated by their strangeness, and promptly shoot them dead. Is that what we want? We were captiva
ted by Scratch. The yrr's strangeness and mystery fascinated us – but what were we aiming for? To wipe them from the planet? Why should we be allowed to keep killing the world's wonders?'

  'So that the hero and heroine can fall into each other's arms and produce a pack of screaming kids,' growls Greywolf.

  'That's right!' Johanson thumps his chest. 'Even the wise old scientist has to die in favour of unthinking conformists whose only virtue is to be young.'

  'Gee, thanks,' says Delaware.

  'I didn't mean you.'

  'Calm down, children.' Oliviera quells them with a gesture. 'Amoebas, apes, monsters, humans, wonders of nature – it makes no odds. They're all the same. Organic matter – nothing to get excited about. To see our species in a different light you only have to put us under the microscope or describe us in the language of biology. Men and women are just males and females, the individual's goal in life is to eat, we don't look after our kids, we rear them…'

  'Sex is merely reproduction,' Delaware says enthusiastically.

  'Precisely. Armed conflict decimates the biological population and – depending on the weaponry – can threaten the survival of the species. In short, we're all conveniently excused from taking responsibility for our moronic behaviour. We can blame it all on natural drives.'

  'Drives?' Greywolf puts his arm around Delaware. 'I've got nothing against drives.'

  There's a ripple of laughter, shared conspiratorially, then stowed away.

  Anawak hesitates. 'Well, to come back to that business about happy endings…'

  Everyone looks at him.

  'You could ask whether humanity deserves to stay alive. But there is no humanity, only people. Individuals. And there are plenty of individuals who could give you a stack of good reasons as to why they should live.'