The Swarm: A Novel

by Frank Schätzing

  One thousand years, little particle. More than ten generations of humans, and you’ve circumnavigated the world.

  One thousand trips like that, and the seabed will have renewed itself.

  Hundreds of new seabeds and seas will have disappeared, continents will have grown together or pulled apart, new oceans will have been created, and the face of the world will have changed.

  During one single second of your voyage, simple forms of life came into being and died. In nanoseconds, atoms vibrated. In a fraction of a nanosecond, chemical reactions took place.

  And somewhere amid all this is man.

  And above all this is the yrr.

  The conscious ocean.

  You’ve circumnavigated the world, seen how it was and how it is, becoming part of the eternal cycle that knows no beginning and no end, only variation and continuation. From the moment it was born, this planet has been changing. Every single organism is part of its web, a web that covers its surface, inextricably linking all forms of life in a network of food chains. Simple beings exist alongside complex life-forms, many organisms have vanished for ever, while others evolve, and some have always been here and will inhabit the Earth until it is swallowed by the sun.

  Somewhere amid all this is man.

  Somewhere within all this are the yrr.

  What can you see?

  What can you see?

  Weaver feels unbearably tired, as though she’s been travelling for years. A tired little particle, sad and alone.

  ‘Mum? Dad?’

  She has to force herself to look at the display.

  Cabin pressure: OK. Oxygen: OK.

  Dive angle: O.

  Zero?

  The Deepflight is horizontal. Weaver stares. Suddenly she’s wide awake again. The speedometer is showing zero too.

  Depth: 3466 metres.

  Darkness all around.

  The boat’s not sinking any more. It’s reached the bottom of the Greenland Basin.

  She hardly dares look at the clock for fear of what she might see - perhaps evidence that she’s been there for hours already and is too low on oxygen to fly back. But the figures glow calmly on the digital display, announcing that her dive began only thirty-five minutes earlier. So she can’t have blacked out. She just can’t remember landing, although she seems to have followed procedure. The propellers have stopped, the systems are working. She could fly home now…

  And then it starts.

  Collective

  At first Weaver thinks she is hallucinating. She sees a faint blue glow in the distance. The apparition rises, swirling up like a scattering of dark-blue dust blown from an enormous palm, then fading into nothing.

  The glow reappears, this time closer and more spread out. It doesn’t vanish, but arches upwards, passing over the boat, obliging Weaver to crane her neck. What she sees reminds her of a cosmic cloud. It’s impossible to say how far away or big it is, but it gives her the feeling of having reached the edge of a distant galaxy, not the bottom of the sea.

  The blue light starts to blur. For a moment she thinks it’s getting fainter, then she realises that it’s an illusion: the glow isn’t fading, it’s becoming part of a far larger cloud that’s sinking gently towards her boat.

  Suddenly it dawns on her that she can’t stay on the seabed if she wants to get rid of Rubin.

  She angles the wings and starts the propeller. The Deepflight scrapes over the seabed, stirring up sediment, then lifts off. Lightning flashes in the vast night sky, and Weaver sees that the yrr are aggregating.

  The collective is enormous.

  From all sides the blue and white light is closing in. The Deepflight is caught in the middle of an aggregating cloud. Weaver knows that the jelly can contract into strong elastic tissue. She tries not to think what will happen if the muscle of amoebas closes round her boat. For a split second she pictures an egg being crushed by a fist.

  She’s ten metres above the seabed.

  That should be enough.

  It’s time.

  A push of a button on which everything depends. It would only take a moment of inattentiveness, a clumsy finger quivering with nerves or fear, and the wrong pod would open. She’d be dead within an instant. 3500 metres below the surface, the pressure is equivalent to 385 atmospheres. Her body might retain its shape, but she wouldn’t be alive to see it.

  She hits the right button.

  The domed lid of the co-pilot’s pod rises upright. Air shoots out explosively, lifting Rubin’s body and dragging him partway out of the pod. With the lid open, the submersible is almost impossible to steer, but Weaver speeds forward, then plunges abruptly, ejecting Rubin from the boat. His dark silhouette hovers in front of the approaching storm of flashing light. The hostile environment squashes his organs and his flesh, crushing his skull, snapping his bones, and squeezing the fluid from his body.

  The light is everywhere.

  Rubin’s reeling body is seized by the jelly and thrust against the submersible as Weaver tries to flee. The organism is coming at her from both sides, from all directions simultaneously, above and below. It pushes up to the boat, wrapping itself round Rubin, solidifying, and Weaver screams—

  The boat has been released.

  The jelly withdraws as fast as it approached. It backs right off. If any human emotion could be used to approximate the collective’s reaction, it would be dismay.

  Weaver realises that she’s whimpering.

  The blue glow still surrounds her. Blurred lightning scuds through the mass of jelly, which walls in the boat like an enormous rampart, stretching up as far as she can see. She turns her head and looks into Rubin’s crushed face, faintly illuminated by the lights on the control panel. The contracting jelly has squashed him against the side of the view dome, and he stares at her through two dark holes. Hydrostatic pressure has forced out his eyeballs. Dark fluid seeps out of the cavities, then the body detaches itself slowly from the boat and falls into the night. Now he is just a shadow against the illuminated backdrop, body spinning in curious movements as though he were dancing slowly and awkwardly in honour of some heathen God.

  Weaver is hyperventilating. She has to force herself to stay calm. Under any other circumstances she would have felt sick, but she can’t afford feelings now.

  The ring continues to retreat, bulging upwards at the edges. Darkness emerges beneath it. Ripples run through its sides, as the organism gathers itself in rising waves of jelly. The biologist’s corpse disappears into the night. Almost immediately tentacles stretch down from above; long tapering feelers, slender like jungle lianas. Moving in concert and with evident purpose, they find Rubin and sweep over his corpse. Weaver can’t see the body, but it shows up on the sonar. The careful groping movements of the feelers trace the outlines of a human form.

  From the tips of the tentacles grow delicate tendrils that home in on individual body parts before feeling their way onwards. Sometimes they hover without moving or branch off. Every now and then they glide under and over each other as though conferring without sound. Until now Weaver has only ever seen blue yrr, but these feelers are an iridescent white. It would be easy to believe that their movements were choreographed, like a ballet unfolding in the silence. Suddenly in the distance Weaver hears music from her childhood: Debussy’s ‘La plus que lente’, the slower-than-slow waltz that her father loved. It surprises and delights her, and her fear falls away. Of course there is no one in the ocean to play ‘La plus que lente’, but it is wonderfully appropriate. The rising and falling music is almost unbearably exquisite, and all that Weaver can discern at this moment is…

  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 t
hat 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 for ever. 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 will 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 be killed.

  The book 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 to 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 s
he’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.