The Swarm

PART FIVE CONTACT

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 cultures. 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 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 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.

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 hide…

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 driven 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'Etoile 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.

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 forever, 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: ().

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 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 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 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 captivated 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.'

'Why do you want to live, Leon?' asks Crowe.

'Because…' Anawak shrugs. 'That's easy, really. There's someone I'd like to live for.'

'A happy ending.' Johanson sighs. 'I knew it.'

Crowe smiles at Anawak. 'Don't tell me it all ends up with you falling in love?'

'Ends up?' Anawak thinks. 'Yes. I guess in the end that I've fallen in love.'

The conversation continues, voices echoing in Weaver's head until they fade in the noise of the waves.

You dreamer, she tells herself, you hopeless dreamer.

She's alone again.

WEAVER IS CRYING.

After an hour or so the sea starts to calm. After another hour the wind has dropped sufficiently for the towering peaks to flatten into rolling hills.

Three hours later she dares to open the pod.

The lock releases with a click, lid humming as it rises. She is wrapped in freezing air. She stares out and sees a hump lift in the distance and disappear beneath the waves. It's not an orca: it's bigger than that. The next time it surfaces, it's already much closer, and a powerful fluke lifts out of the water.

A humpback.

For a moment she thinks about closing the pods. But what good will that do against the immense weight of a humpback? She can lie prone in the pod or sit up – if the whale doesn't want her to survive beyond the next few minutes, she won't.

The hump rises again through the ruffled grey water. It's enormous. It lingers on the surface, close to the boat. It swims so close that Weaver would only have to stretch out a hand to touch the barnacle-encrusted head. The whale turns on its side, and for a few seconds its left eye watches the small frame of the woman in the machine.

Weaver returns its gaze.

It discharges its blow with a bang, then dives down without creating a wave.

Weaver clings to the side of the pod.

It hasn't attacked her.

She can scarcely believe it. Her whole head is throbbing. There's a buzzing in her ears. As she stares into the water, the buzzing and throbbing get louder, and they're not inside her head. The noise is coming from above, deafeningly loud and directly overhead. Weaver looks up.

The helicopter is hovering just above the water.

People are crowded in the open doorway. Soldiers in uniform and one person who's waving at her with both arms. His mouth is wide open in a forlorn attempt to drown the rattling rotors.

Eventually he'll manage it, but for now the helicopter wins.

Weaver is crying and laughing.

It's Leon Anawak.