A tide of water swept over Anawak’s feet.
‘Leon!’ Delaware beamed up at him. ‘Come and join us.’
‘Excellent idea,’ said Greywolf. ‘I’d like to see you do something useful.’
‘I have been,’ Anawak protested.
‘I bet.’ Greywolf stroked one of the dolphins, as it nuzzled up to him and made chattering noises. ‘Grab yourself a suit.’
‘I only wanted to see how you are.’
‘Very kind of you.’ Greywolf patted the dolphin and watched it speed away.
‘Any news?’
‘We’re about to send out MK7,’ said Delaware. ‘MK6 haven’t noticed anything unusual since this morning when they warned us of the orcas.’
‘And that was before any of the sensors noticed they were there,’ Greywolf added with pride.
‘Yeah, their sonar is—’
Anawak got another soaking, this time from one of the dolphins, as it shot out of the water like a torpedo and showered him with spray. It seemed to be enjoying itself. It squeaked, poking its beak out of the water.
‘I wouldn’t bother if I were you,’ said Delaware to the dolphin. ‘Leon won’t come in. He’s not prepared to freeze his butt off because he’s not a real Inuk. He’s just a show-off. If he was a real Inuk he’d have—’
‘OK, OK!’ Anawak made a gesture of defeat. ‘Where’s the damn suit?’
Five minutes later he was helping Delaware and Greywolf fit the second fleet with cameras and tags when he remembered something. ‘Why did you think I was a Makah?’ he asked Delaware.
‘I knew you had to be some kind of Indian - you’re not exactly blond and blue-eyed. But now I know the truth, well…’ she beamed at him ‘…I’ve got something for you.’ She fastened the strap round the dolphin’s chest. ‘I found it on the web. I thought you might be pleased. I learned it by heart. It’s the history of your world.’ She said it with a flourish.
‘Wow.’
‘Not interested?’
‘Oh, he is,’ said Greywolf. ‘Leon’s dying to hear about his beloved homeland. He just hates to admit it.’ He swam towards them, flanked by two dolphins. In his padded suit he looked like a sea monster. ‘He’d rather be taken for a Makah.’
‘You can talk!’ Anawak protested.
‘Don’t argue, boys!’ Delaware lay on her back and drifted. ‘Do you know where whales, dolphins and seals really come from? Shall I tell you?’
‘The suspense is killing me.’
‘Well, it all started when people and animals were still one. Many years ago, a girl lived near Arviat.’
Now she had Anawak’s attention.
‘Where’s Arviat?’ asked Greywolf.
‘It’s the southernmost settlement of Nunavut,’ Anawak replied. ‘Was the girl called Talilajuk?’
‘Yes,’ Delaware said. ‘She had beautiful hair, and all the men courted her, but the only one who could win her heart was a dogman. Soon Talilajuk became pregnant, and bore all kinds of children, Inuit and canine. One day, while the dogman was out hunting, a dashing birdman arrived in his kayak at Talilajuk’s camp. He invited her to climb into his boat and, to cut a long story short, they eloped.’
‘The usual.’ Greywolf was inspecting the lens of one of the cameras. ‘And when do the whales come into it?’
‘All in good time. One day Talilajuk’s father came to visit them, only to find the dogman howling because Talilajuk had gone. The old man paddled back and forth across the ocean until he found the birdman’s camp. While he was still out to sea, he spotted his daughter sitting outside her tent. Well, he ordered her to go home, so she followed her father dutifully to the kayak, and they set off. It wasn’t long before they noticed that the ocean swell was rising. The waves grew steadily higher, and a fearsome storm broke out. The waves washed over the boat, and the old man worried that they might drown. It was the revenge of the birdman, but Talilajuk’s father had no desire to die. Since he was furious with his daughter, he reached over, grabbed her and flung her overboard. Talilajuk clung to the side of the kayak, but her father told her to let go. She held on all the more tightly. The old man went crazy with fear. He picked up his axe, swung it and chopped off her fingertips. They had barely touched the water when they turned into narwhal, her nails forming their tusks. Talilajuk still refused to let go, so the old man hacked her fingers down to the joints, and they turned into white whales - belugas. Still his daughter clung to the side. She paid for her stubbornness with the last of her fingers, and a pod of seals appeared. Talilajuk wouldn’t give in. Even though her hands were stumps, she clung to the kayak, which was filling with water. The old man was terrified. He struck her in the face with the paddle, and she lost her left eye. She let go slowly, and sank beneath the waves.’
‘Brutal customs they had back then.’
‘But Talilajuk didn’t die or, at least, not a normal death. She was transformed into Sedna, the spirit of the sea, and since then she’s ruled the creatures of her realm. Stretching her mutilated arms in front of her, she glides through the water with only one eye. Her hair is as beautiful as ever, but she has no hands to comb it. That’s why it gets tangled, and you can tell that she’s angry. But anyone who manages to comb and plait her hair is granted the freedom to hunt the creatures of her kingdom.’
‘I remember that story from long winter nights when I was little,’ Anawak said softly. ‘I heard it countless times, and it was never exactly the same.’ He wondered what had made her dig up the ancient legend of Sedna for him. It seemed to him that she hadn’t stumbled on it by chance. She’d been on the look-out for a story of the sea. It was a present, proof of their friendship. He was touched.
‘Rubbish.’ Greywolf summoned the last dolphin with a whistle, and started to attach the hydrophones and cameras. ‘Leon’s a scientist. You can’t tell him stories about the spirit of the sea.’
‘You two and your feud,’ said Delaware.
‘Besides, the story’s all wrong. Do you want to know how it really started? There wasn’t any land. There was only a chief who lived under water in his cabin. He was a lazy so-and-so who never got up - he just lay on the seabed with his back to the fire, which was kept alight with crystals. He lived on his own, and his name was Wonderful Creator. One day his attendant rushed in and told him that the spirits and supernatural beings couldn’t find any land to settle on. They wanted the chief to do something about it, and be worthy of his name. The chief lifted two rocks from the seabed and gave them to his attendant with the instruction to cast them into the water. He did as he was told, and the rocks formed the Queen Charlotte Islands and the mainland.’
‘Well,’ said Anawak, ‘it’s good to hear a scientific explanation.’
‘The story comes from an old Haida myth cycle: Hoyá Káganus, the travels of Raven,’ said Greywolf. ‘The Nootka tell similar stories. Lots of the myths are related to the sea - either you come from it or it destroys you.’
‘Maybe we should pay more attention to them,’ said Delaware, ‘if science can’t get us any further.’
‘Since when have you been interested in myths?’ said Anawak. ‘you’re even more of an empiricist than I am.’
‘So? At least they tell us how to live in harmony with nature. Who cares if none of it’s true? You take something and give something back. That’s all you need to know.’
Greywolf grinned and petted the dolphin. ‘Then there wouldn’t be any problems in the world, would there, Licia? Well, as a woman, you’ll be pleased to know you can help.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I happen to know a few customs from the Bering Sea. And they had a different way of doing things. Before the hunters set to sea, the harpooner had to sleep with the captain’s daughter to acquire her scent. That was the only way of attracting the whale to the boat and calming it enough so that they could kill it.’
‘Trust men to think up something like that,’ said Delaware.
‘Men, women, whales…’ laughed Gr
eywolf. ‘Hishuk ish ts’awalk - everything is one.’
‘OK,’ said Delaware. ‘In that case I think we should dive to the bottom of the ocean and comb Sedna’s hair.’
Everything is one. Anawak remembered what Akesuk had told him.
This isn’t a problem you can solve with science. A shaman would tell you that you’re dealing with spirits, the spirits of the once-living that now inhabit the Earth’s creatures. The qallunaat started destroying life. They angered the spirits, the spirit of the sea, Sedna. No matter who these beings are, you won’t achieve anything by trying to fight them. Destroy them, and you’ll destroy yourselves. See them as apart of yourselves, and you’ll be able to share the same world. No one can ever win the struggle for mastery.
While Roscovitz and Browning were repairing the Deepflight, the three of them had been swimming with dolphins and telling each other legends about spirits of the sea. As they had paddled around, they had got cold even though the water had been heated and they were wearing suits.
How were they supposed to comb the sea spirit’s hair?
Until now humanity had pelted Sedna with toxins and nuclear waste. One oil slick after another had collected in her hair. Without asking her permission they’d hunted her creatures until some were extinct.
Anawak’s heart was pounding and he was shivering. A dull sense of foreboding told him that this moment of happiness wouldn’t last, that something was ending. They’d never be together like this again.
Greywolf checked that the harness was sitting correctly on the sixth and final dolphin. ‘All OK,’ he said. ‘We can send them out to sea.’
Biohazard Containment Facility
‘Oh, God, how stupid can you get? I must be blind!’ She stared at the magnified image from the fluorescence microscope on the screen. In Nanaimo they’d analysed various batches of the jelly - or, at least, what had been left of it after they’d scraped it out of the whales’ brains. They’d also taken a good look at the blob of matter Anawak had brought back on his knife after his inspection of the Barrier Queen. But not once had it occurred to her that the disintegrating substance could be a dissociating conglomerate of single-cell organisms.
How embarrassing.
She should have worked it out ages ago, but what with all the Pfiesteria-induced panic, they’d had killer algae on the brain. Even Roche hadn’t noticed that the jelly-like substance was still clearly visible through the microscope, even after it had apparently dispersed. Countless single-cell organisms lay dead or dying on the slide. All the various components had been there from the start, mixed up inside the lobsters and the crabs: killer algae, jelly - and seawater.
Seawater!
Maybe Roche would have cottoned on to the nature of the mysterious substance if it hadn’t been for the fact that one single drop of it contained a universe of life. For centuries people had been too distracted by all the fish, marine mammals and crabs in the oceans to see the other ninety-nine per cent of life. The oceans weren’t ruled by sharks, whales or giant squid, but by legions of microscopic organisms. Every litre of surface water teemed with a colourful mix of microbes: tens of billions of viruses, a billion bacteria, five million protozoa and a million algae. Even water samples taken from depths below 6000 metres contained millions of viruses and bacteria. Trying to keep track of the turmoil was practically impossible. The more insight science gained into the cosmos of Earth’s tiniest life-forms, the more bewilderingly detailed the picture became. What was seawater anyway? If you looked at it closely through a modern fluorescence microscope, it seemed to be made of a thin gel. A chain of interconnected macromolecules ran through every drop like joined-up suspension bridges. Countless bacteria made their watery homes on the sheets and films that stretched over bundles of transparent fibres. To obtain two kilometres of DNA molecules, 310 kilometres of proteins and 5600 kilometres of polysaccharides, you needed only to untangle and line up the contents of a single millilitre of seawater. And somewhere within that mix were organisms that might be intelligent. They were hidden only in so far as they were interspersed with all the other microbes. The jelly had remarkable properties, but it wasn’t composed of exotic life-forms, just ordinary deep-sea amoebas.
Oliviera groaned.
It was obvious why no-one had spotted them. It hadn’t occurred to anyone that deep-sea amoebas could aggregate to form collectives capable of controlling crabs and whales.
‘It’s impossible,’ Oliviera decided.
The words sounded feeble. She examined the taxonomic results again, but it didn’t change what she knew already. The jelly was evidently made up of an existing amoeba species. It was known to exist mainly at depths of 3000 metres or below, and there were huge numbers of them.
‘Nonsense,’ hissed Oliviera. ‘Come on, you’ve got to be kidding. You’ve disguised yourself, trying to pretend you’re an ordinary amoeba. Well, you can’t fool me. But what the hell are you?’
DNA
Once Johanson had joined her, they set to work isolating individual cells from the jelly. Mercilessly they froze and heated the amoebas until their cell walls burst. Proteinase was used to break down the protein molecules into chains of amino acids. Then phenol was added and the samples were centrifuged in a slow and laborious process to separate the solution from the scraps of protein and remains of cell wall. Finally they had a small quantity of clear watery fluid; the key to understanding the enigmatic organism.
Pure DNA.
The second step required even more patience. To unravel the DNA, they had to isolate and replicate sections of it. The genome was far too complex to be read as a whole, so they set about trying to analyse diagnostic sequences.
It was a hard slog, and Rubin was supposedly ill.
‘Asshole,’ moaned Oliviera. ‘This was his chance to do something useful. What’s the matter with him anyway?’
‘Migraine,’ said Johanson.
‘Well, that’s something. Migraines are painful.’
Oliviera transferred the samples via pipette to the sequencer. The machine would take a few hours to analyse them all. For the time being there was nothing they could do so they underwent the obligatory peracetic shower and walked out into the open, breathing freely once more. Oliviera suggested a cigarette break on the hangar deck while they waited for the sequencer to finish, but Johanson had a better idea. He disappeared into his cabin and returned five minutes later with two glasses and a bottle of Bordeaux. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
‘Where did you find that?’ marvelled Oliviera, as they walked up the ramp.
‘You don’t find wine like this.’ Johanson smirked. ‘You have to bring it with you. I’m an expert at smuggling contraband goods.’
‘Is it a good one? I don’t know much about wines.’
‘It’s a Château Clinet from Pomerol, 1990 vintage. Lightens the wallet and the mood.’ Johanson spotted a metal crate next to one of the booths between the ship’s ribs. They headed over to it and sat down. The deck was deserted. The gateway to the starboard-side elevator gave them a clear view of the sea. The water lay calm and smooth in the half-light of the polar night, ice-free but wreathed in frosty mist. It was cold in the hangar bay, but they were in need of fresh air after hours in the containment lab. Johanson opened the bottle, poured some wine, and clinked glasses with Oliviera, a bright pinging sound.
‘Lovely,’ she said.
‘I packed a few bottles for special occasions. And I’d say this is one of them.’
‘Do you think we’re on their scent?’
‘We could be very nearly there.’
‘So we’ve found the yrr?’
‘Well, that’s the question. We don’t know what we’ve got inside that tank. Is it possible for single-cell organisms, for amoebas, to be intelligent?’
‘When I look at humanity, I sometimes wonder whether we’re much different from them.’
‘We’re more complex.’
‘Is that an advantage?’
‘What would you sa
y?’
Oliviera shrugged. ‘What kind of answer do you expect from someone who’s spent the last God-knows-how-long doing nothing but microbiology? It’s not like your job: there’s no teaching involved. I never speak to a wider public, and I definitely suffer from acute lack of distance to myself. I’m a lab rat in human guise. I guess I tend to look at the world through my own specific lens, but I see micro-organisms wherever I go. We live in an age of bacteria. For over three billion years they’ve existed in their present form. Humanity is just a passing fashion, but even when the sun explodes, somewhere, somehow, a few of those microbes are bound to survive. They’re the planet’s real success story, not humans. I don’t know if humans have any advantages over bacteria, but one thing’s for certain: if we end up proving that microbes are intelligent, we’ll be in more shit than they are.’
Johanson took a sip of wine. ‘Just think of the embarrassment. Imagine the Church having to tell the faithful that God created his pièce de résistance on the fifth day and not the seventh.’
‘How are you managing to cope with all this?’
‘So long as I’ve got a few bottles of vintage Bordeaux to hand, I don’t see any major problems.’
‘Aren’t you angry?’
‘With whom?’
‘With those beings.’
‘How would anger solve anything?’
‘It wouldn’t, Socrates.’ Oliviera gave a wry smile. ‘But I’m serious. I mean, they took away your home.’
‘Part of it.’
‘Don’t you miss your house in Trondheim?’
Johanson swirled the wine in his glass. ‘Not as much as I’d expected,’ he said, after a moment’s silence. ‘It was a beautiful house, - but my life wasn’t kept there. I have another a house by a lake in the middle of nowhere. You can sit on the veranda, look out at the water, listen to Sibelius and Brahms, and drink good wine. There’s nothing like it.’
Johanson reached for the bottle and topped up their glasses. ‘You’d understand if you’d been there. Watching the night sky reflected on the water - you can’t forget a moment like that. Your whole existence seems to be concentrated in the stars. They’re like pinpoints of light perforating the universe above and below. It’s an incredible feeling, but you have to experience it for yourself.’
The Swarm: A Novel Page 75