The Swarm: A Novel

by Frank Schätzing

  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 seabed 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 firs
t 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.

  Perhaps the oldest life-forms didn’t come into being on the surface but here, in the lightless depths. Perhaps, Karen, you’re seeing the real Garden of Eden as you travel along the bottom of the Atlantic. There can be no doubting that the yrr are the more ancient of the two intelligent species, one of which inherited firm ground and forfeited its cradle.

  Imagine if the yrr were the privileged species.

  God’s creatures.

  Time to check the display.

  Weaver retrieves her thoughts from their journey past Africa. She has to focus on the present. It feels as though she’s been travelling for a century already. A ghostly glow sweeps through the water some distance from the boat, but it’s not the yrr, just a swarm of tiny krill, although there’s no real way of telling - they might be cuttlefish instead.

  2500 metres.

  Another thousand metres to the seabed. All around her there is nothing but open water, yet the sonar is making frenzied clicks. Something large is approaching. No - not just approaching. It’s heading straight for her, and it’s vast. A solid expanse sinking down from above. Weaver’s latent fear turns to panic. She flies through the water, banking at 180 degrees, as the thing draws closer. The microphones pipe an empty, unearthly din inside the boat, an eerie wailing and droning that’s getting louder all the time. Weaver is tempted to flee, but curiosity prevails. She is far enough away from it and there’s no sign that it’s pursuing her.

  Perhaps it’s not a creature.

  Banking again, she glides back towards it. They’re at the same depth now, and the unknown thing is straight ahead. The Deepflight is rocked by turbulence.

  Turbulence?

  What could possibly be that big? A whale? But this thing is the size of ten whales, of a hundred whales, or even more…

  She turns on the floodlights.

  And at that moment she realises that she’s closer than she thought. At the very edge of the beam, the thing comes into view. For a second Weaver is thrown, incapable of identifying the smooth surface in front of her or what it might belong to. It drops past her, then something catches in the floodlights. Bold lines, metre-long uprights, followed by curves. They seem horribly familiar, morphing into letters that read: USS Inde…

  She cries out in shock.

  The sound dies without an echo, reminding her that she’s sealed inside her pod. On her own. With the sinking ship before her, she feels more alone than ever. Her thoughts turn to Anawak, Johanson, Crowe, Shankar and all the others.

  Leon!

  She is staring in disbelief.

  The side of the flight deck appears briefly, then vanishes. The rest is hidden in the darkness, leaving nothing but a furious flurry of escaping air.

  Then she feels the pull, and the Deepflight is tugged under.

  No!

  Feverishly she tries to stabilise the boat. It’s her own fault for being so nosy. Why couldn’t she have kept her distance? The boat’s in trouble, she can see that from the controls. Weaver fights against the pull, using maximum propulsion to get it to rise. The submersible struggles and spins, following the Independence to its grave. Suddenly the Deepflight demonstrates the true brilliance of her design: she escapes from the vessel’s wake and soars upwards.

  The next second it’s as though it never happened.

  Weaver can hear her heart pounding. It thunders in her ears. Like a piston, it pumps the blood into her head. She turns off the floodlights, lowers the nose of the Deepflight, and continues her flight to the bottom of the Greenland Sea.

  Time passes - maybe minutes or just seconds - and she sobs. She’d known that the Independence would sink - they all had - but so fast?

  Yes, they’d known it would be fast.

  But she doesn’t know if Leon is alive. Or whether Sigur has made it.

  She feels terribly alone.

  I want to turn back.

  I want to turn back.

  ‘I want to turn back!’

  Face awash with tears, lips quivering, she questions the sense of her mission. She’s nearing the ocean bottom, and there’s still no sign of the yrr. She checks the display. The onboard computer reassures her. She’s been travelling for thirty minutes, it tells her, and she’s 2700 metres deep.

  Thirty minutes. How long should she stay down?

  Do you want to see everything?

  What?

  Do you want to see everything, little particle?

  Weaver snuffles, an earthly snuffle in the night-time wonderland of thoughts. ‘Dad?’ she whimpers.

  Calm. You’ve got to stay calm.

  A particle doesn’t ask how long things take. A particle simply moves or stays still. It follows the rhythm of creation, an obedient servant to the whole. The obsession with duration is peculiar to humans, a doomed attempt to defy our own nature, to separate out the moments of our lives. The yrr aren’t interested in time. They carry time in their genome, from the very beginnings of cellular life. It’s all there: 200 million years ago, when oceanic plates joined with the land mass that is now North America; sixty-five million years ago, when Greenland began to detach itself from Europe; thirty-six million years ago, when the topographical features of the Atlantic were formed, and when Spain was still far away from Africa; then twenty million years ago, when the submarine ridges separating the Arctic from the Atlantic sank low enough for the waters to circulate, allowing you to make your journey from the Greenland Basin, leading onwards past Africa and further south towards Antarctica.

  You’re travelling towards the Circumpolar Current, the marshalling yard for ocean currents, towards the never-ending loop of water.

  You head out of the cold into the cold.

  You may only be a particle, but you’re part of a mass of water that’s eighty times bigger than the Amazon. You flow across the seabed, over the equator, crossing the southern Atlantic Basin towards the southernmost tip of South America. Until now you’ve been flowing evenly and calmly. But once you’ve passed Cape Horn you run into turbulence. Reeling and tumbling you’re pulled into a commotion resembling the lunch-time traffic around the Arc de Triomphe, but infinitely more violent. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current flows from west to east around the White Continent like a vast mixer, transporting and redistributing all the waters of the world. The circular current never stops, never hits land. It chases its tail, carrying enough water for eight hundred Amazons, pulling the planet’s water inside it, tearing currents apart and mixing them together, expunging all trace of their identity and origin. Near the Antarctic coast it washes you towards the surface, where you shiver with cold. Foaming breakers sweep you onwards, until you sink back slowly into the vast circumpolar carousel.

  It carries you for a while, then ejects you.

  You travel northwards again at a depth of 800 metres. All the world’s seas are fed by this circular Antarctic current. Some of the water flows into the subsurface South Atlantic current, some into the Indian Ocean, but most of it flows into the Pacific, and so do you. Hugging the western flank of South Africa you course towards the equator, where trade winds part the waters, and tropical heat warms you. You rise to the surface and are pulled to the west, right through the chaos of Indonesia with its islands and islets, currents, eddies, shallows and whirlpools. It seems impossible to pick your way through. Further south you’re dr
iven past the Philippines and through the Makassar Strait between Borneo and Sulawesi. Rather than squeeze through the Lombok Strait, you bypass it, flowing eastwards round Timor, a better route that takes you to the open waters of the Indian Ocean.

  Now you head towards Africa.

  The warm shallows of the Arabian Sea charge you with salt. Passing Mozambique, you travel south. You’re in the Agulhas Current now, hurrying in anticipation of returning to the ocean of your origin, throwing yourself into an adventure that has cost so many sailors their lives. You reach the Cape of Good Hope, and it pitches you back. Too many currents collide here. The Antarctic Place de L’Étoile with its Friday-afternoon traffic is all too close. No matter how hard you try, you fail to make headway. Eventually you pinch off from the main current to form an eddy, and at last you’re in the South Atlantic. You flow westwards with the Equatorial Current, spinning in vast eddies past Brazil and Venezuela, until you reach Florida and the ring of water tears apart.

  You’re in the Caribbean, the birthplace of the Gulf Stream. Fuelled by tropical sunshine you begin your passage up towards Newfoundland and on towards Iceland, drifting proudly on the surface and spreading your warmth magnanimously throughout Europe as though you could never run out. You barely notice that you’re getting colder. At the same time, the waters of the North Atlantic are evaporating, saddling you with a burden of salt that weighs ever heavier. All of a sudden you find yourself back in the Greenland Basin where your journey began.

  You’ve been travelling for a thousand years.

  Ever since the Pacific was divided from the Atlantic by the Isthmus of Panama three million years ago, particles of water have been taking this route. Only another shift in the continents could interfere with the great ocean conveyor belt - or so we used to think. Now the equilibrium of the climate has been disrupted by mankind. And while the opposing factions continue to argue over whether global warming will lead to the icecaps melting and the Gulf Stream stopping, the current has stopped already. The yrr have put a stop to it. They’ve stopped the journey of the particles, put an end to Europe’s warmth, called time on the future of the self-appointed chosen species. Yes, they know very well what will happen when the Gulf Stream stops, unlike their foes, who never see the consequences of their actions, unable to imagine the future because they lack genetic memory, incapable of seeing that in the logic of creation an end is a beginning and a beginning is also an end.