Frank Schatzing - The Swarm

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.