The Swarm

EPILOGUE

Nothing is the way it used to be.

A year to this day the Independence sank. I've decided to keep a diary, one year on. It seems we humans need the symbolism of dates to start something new or end it. Sure, the events of the past few months will he chronicled by a host of other people, but they won't be recording my thoughts. I'd like to be able to look back some day and reassure myself that I haven't misremembered.

I called Leon in the early hours of this morning. Back then we had the choice of burning, drowning or freezing. He saved my life twice. After the Independence went down, I was as close to death as ever: drenched to the bone in Arctic water, with a broken ankle and no real prospect of being fished out of the sea. The Zodiac had a survival kit on board, but I would never have managed to use it on my own. To add to our problems, I blacked out almost as soon as we escaped. My brain still refuses to replay that final sequence. I remember tumbling down the ramp and the last thing I see is water. I woke up in hospital, with hypothermia, pneumonia, concussion and a craving for nicotine.

Leon's doing well. He and Karen are in London at present. We talked about the dead: Sigur Johanson, who never made it back to Norway and his house by the lake, Sue Oliviera, Murray Shankar, Alicia Delaware and Greywolf Leon misses his friends, especially on a day like today. That's humans for you. Even in our mourning we rely on fixed dates, temporal anchors where we can deposit our grief. When it's time to unlock our pain, it seems smaller than we remembered. Death is best left to the dead. The talk soon turned to the living. I met Gerhard Bohrmann recently. A nice man, affable and relaxed. After his experience, I'm not sure I'd ever want to go near the water again, but he takes the view that nothing could top La Palma. He's making lots of dive trips in an effort to assess the damage to the continental slopes. Yes, humans can venture under water again.

The attacks came to a halt soon after the Independence sank. At around that time the SOSUS arrays picked up some Scratch signals that were audible from one end of the ocean to the other. A few hours later, a rescue squad arrived at the seamount to liberate Bohrmann from his underwater cave, only to find that the sharks had disappeared. Overnight the whales returned to their normal routine. The worms vanished, as did the armies of jellies and all the other toxic creatures: crabs stopped invading the coast. Little by little the oceanic pump has eased back into action, in time to save us from an ice age. Even the hydrates are stabilising, or so Bohrmann tells me. To this day Karen doesn't know what she saw at the bottom of the Greenland Sea, but her idea must have worked. The Scratch signals coincide with her encounter with the queen. The Deepflight's computer logged the time at which she opened the pod to release Rubin's body, and not long afterwards the terror ceased.

Or was it merely suspended?

Are we using our reprieve?

I don't know. Europe is slowly recovering from the chaos left by the tsunami. Epidemics still plague the east coast of America, though the devastation is decreasing, and the serums have started to work. That's the good news. On the downside, the world is still reeling in confusion. How can mankind begin to heal its wounds when its identity is in pieces? The established religions can't offer any answers. Christianity is a case in point. Adam and Eve had long since handed over to the building blocks of evolution. The Church had no choice but to accept that mankind was born of proteins and amino acids, and not the archetypal human couple. Christianity could cope with that. What counted was God's intention to create us. It didn't especially matter how He did it, provided it happened in accordance with His plan. God does not play dice, as Einstein put it. Plans devised by God were inherently guaranteed to succeed. His infallibility was by definition a priori!

Even when speculation started about intelligence on other planets, Christianity managed to keep pace. After all, wasn't God at liberty to replicate creation as often as He liked? There was nothing to say that alien life-forms had to resemble humans to be part of God's plan. Mankind was called into being as the perfect species for the specific environment created on God's Earth. Other planets had different environments, so it was reasonable to expect that alien life-forms wouldn't be the same. In any event, God created each different life-form in His image, which wasn't a contradiction, but a metaphorical turn of phrase. God's creatures didn't literally conform to His appearance, but to the vision in His mind's eye when He called them into being.

Yet there was a hitch. If it were true that the cosmos was populated with intelligent life-forms created by God, wouldn't the Son of God have come down to every planet? Wouldn't each of those alien races have sinned and been saved by the Messiah?

Naturally you could argue that a race created by God wouldn't necessarily sin. It might develop differently. An alien species on some faraway planet might adhere to God's laws and never need to be redeemed. But that was precisely the problem. In the eyes of the Lord, wouldn't a species living in accordance with His precepts be fundamentally better than humanity? Such a species would prove itself worthier of His love, and God would have to give it preference. With its history of misbehaviour, mankind would be relegated to the rank of a second-rate creation, having been flooded once already for its sins. Put more bluntly: mankind was no masterpiece. God had messed up. Having failed to prevent humans succumbing to sin, he had been forced to sacrifice His only son to expiate their guilt. Mankind gained free credit, which God paid for with Christ's blood. That wasn't the sort of decision a father would take lightly. God must have arrived at the conclusion that humanity was a mistake.

Soon scientists were postulating the existence of tens of thousands of civilisations in space. On balance, it seemed unlikely that all of those species would be paragons of virtue. Surely at least some would have fallen from grace and required a redeemer. When it came to the question of sin, Christianity knew no shades of grey, just dogma and principles. What mattered wasn't how much an individual had sinned, but that they had sinned in the first place. God didn't strike deals, so to speak. A transgression of whatever kind was always a transgression. Punishment was punishment, and redemption, redemption.

It seemed reasonable to suppose that the story of deliverance wasn't a one-off. But what if God had found alternative means for redeeming the sins of creation? Could He have developed a new method of atonement that bypassed the death of His Son? Christian doctrine was faced with a problem. Christ's death had been agonising, but necessary, because God had chosen it as the only viable path. But what if there were other paths elsewhere? What did it say about God's infallibility if He sacrificed his son to wash away the sins of creation in one world and not in all the rest? Had He regretted the Passion and sought to avoid a recurrence? Why would anyone worship a God who didn't appear to be entirely on the ball?

The fact was, Christianity could only contemplate the existence of alien civilisations if every single one experienced the Passion. Any other scenario made either God or humanity look bad. But even the guardians of Christian orthodoxy could scarcely postulate the existence of a universe bursting with innumerable Passions of Christ. What other options remained?

Mankind's singularity on Earth.

God created this planet for humans, for God's own people, whom He entrusted with the task of subduing the Earth. Even if the universe were riddled with civilisations, and other intelligent beings came down to Earth, it wouldn't change a thing. Earth belonged to mankind, and the alien species had their dominion elsewhere. At home on their planet, each of God's species was God's chosen race.

But now the last bastion has fallen. The yrr have destroyed Christianity's last remaining big claim. It's not just the supremacy of mankind that's in question: it's the nature of God's plan. But suppose we were to resign ourselves to the idea that God created two equal races on Earth: the yrr would either have had to experience the Passion or live according to God's laws. Failing that, they must have sinned without redemption – but then they should have felt the fury of God's wrath.

Needless to say, the yrr don't live within God's tenets. For reasons of biology, they break the Fifth Commandment all the time. That leaves three possible explanations: (a.) God doesn't exist: (b.) He's not in control; or (c.) He approves of the yrr – which would mean that we've been labouring under a delusion that's as ancient as mankind. We weren't the ones who were chosen after all.

These are the kind of paroxysms that are shaking Christianity – not to mention Judaism and Islam. Each religion is trying to define, analyse and interpret what has happened, yet at the same time their very basis is collapsing, taking with it our crumbling economies, which relied on God's capital more heavily than we thought. At the same time, Buddhism and Hinduism, whose teachings have always accepted man's co-existence with other life-forms, are attracting people in their droves. Esoteric practices are booming, new religious movements are emerging, and traditional tribal religions are flourishing. Of all the old sects Mormonism is proving the most resilient, for the Mormon God provides for many different worlds. But even the Mormons can't explain why God raised two children within the same nursery.

In one recent development, a Catholic bishop has set sail with a delegation from Rome, sprinkling the waves with holy water and ordering the devil to depart. It's extraordinary: the very species that has systematically scorned God's principles and defiled His creation sends a so-called representative of the faith to take the enemy to task. We've got the cheek to cast ourselves as the prosecuting counsel for a Creator whose instructions we ignored. It's as though we're trying to preach the Gospel to our Maker in the hope that He might spare us.

The world is collapsing.

The UN has revoked the United States of America's leadership mandate. A futile gesture. Anarchy has broken out in many states. Wherever you turn, marauding masses are roaming the Earth. Armed conflicts are spreading. The weak are attacking the weaker. As creatures of animal instinct, it's not in our nature to take pity on others. Those who stumble are preyed on, and the plunder continues unchecked. The yrr didn't merely destroy our cities: they laid waste to us internally. We roam the Earth with nothing to believe in, abandoned savage children in search of a new beginning, but regressing all the time.

Yet there is also hope, the first signs that we're starting to reevaluate the role of mankind on this planet. People are learning to grasp the diversity of nature, to understand its unifying principles and to sweep away the hierarchies and see the real connections. After all, the connections are what are keeping us alive. Has mankind ever considered the psychological impact of an impoverished planet on future generations? For all we know, the health of our psyche may depend on the existence of other animal species. Our minds yearn for forests, coral reefs, seas full of fish, fresh air, clean rivers and oceans. If we continue to damage the Earth and destroy the diversity of nature, we'll he destroying a complex system that we can't explain, let alone replace. What mankind separates can never be rejoined. Is there any part of the vast web of nature that we could live without? Who can tell? The secret of nature's connections depends on them staying intact. Humanity has overstepped the mark once already, and was almost excluded from the web of life. For the moment there's a mice. Whatever conclusions the yrr may be coming to, we'd do well to make their decision as straightforward as possible. They won't fall for Karen's trick a second time.

Today, a year after the vessel sank; I open the newspaper and read: 'The yrr have changed the world forever.'

Have they?

They played a decisive role in our fate, yet we know virtually nothing about them. We think that we understand their biochemical make-up, but is that really knowledge? We haven't seen them since. Their signals still echo through the oceans, although we can't understand them as they're not meant for human ears. How does a mass of jelly create noise? How does it receive it? Just two among millions of futile questions. Only we can provide the answers. The onus lies with us.

Perhaps it's time for humanity to enter a new phase of evolution and finally reconcile our primordial genetic inheritance with our development as a civilised race. If we want to prove ourselves worthy of the gift that is the Earth, it isn't the yrr we should be studying but ourselves. Amid our skyscrapers and computers we've learned to disavow our nature, but the path to a better future lies in knowing our origins.

No, the yrr haven't changed the world. They've shown us how it really is.

Nothing is as it was. Although, come to think of it, I haven't stopped smoking.

We all need continuity of some kind, don't you think?