Frank Schatzing - The Swarm

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.