The Swarm: A Novel

  Something must have swum into the net. Something big and heavy. A swordfish, perhaps. But swordfish were faster than that. A swordfish would have sped off, taking the caballito with it. Whatever was trapped in the net seemed determined to dive to the seabed.

  Ucañan made a grab for the rope. The boat jolted again, pitching him into the waves. Spluttering, he rose to the surface–in time to see the caballito disappear underwater, its bow pointing upright into the air. The bonitos drifted into the sea. He seethed with rage - he couldn’t even dive after them. He had to save himself and his boat.

  The morning’s catch, all wasted.

  The paddle was floating a short distance away from him, but Ucañan didn’t have time to go after it now - he could fetch it later. He flung himself over the prow but the boat was being pulled inexorably into the depths. In a frenzy he hauled himself towards the stern. With his right hand he fumbled for what he needed. Blessed St Peter - his knife hadn’t been washed away and neither had his diving mask, his most precious possession, apart from the calcal.

  He sliced through the rope, and the caballito shot to the surface, spinning giddily. Ucañan saw the sky circle above him and his head plunged back into the water. Then he lay coughing on the little reed craft. The boat rocked gently in the waves as though nothing had happened.

  He sat up in confusion. The buoy was nowhere to be seen, but the paddle was drifting nearby. With his hands he steered the caballito towards it, hauled it on board and laid it in front of him. Then he looked around him.

  There they were: light patches of lava in the crystal water.

  He’d drifted too close to the underwater rocks, and his calcal had snagged. No wonder he’d gone under - he shouldn’t have been day-dreaming. Now he knew where the net and the buoy were: they were tied together, so if the net was caught on the lava, the buoy couldn’t rise to the surface. Yes, that was what had happened. Still, Ucañan was shocked by how violently he’d been pulled underwater - he was lucky to have survived. But he’d lost his net.

  Paddling swiftly, he steered the caballito to the site of his accident. He peered into the depths, straining to see the net through the clear blue water. There was no sign of it or the buoy.

  Was this really the right spot?

  Ucañan had the sea in his bones - he’d spent all his life on the ocean - and even without technical equipment he knew that this was the place. This was where he’d cut the rope to save his boat from being ripped apart. His net was down there somewhere.

  He had to go after it.

  The thought of diving filled him with trepidation. He was an excellent swimmer but, like most fishermen, he had a deep-seated fear of the water. Few fishermen loved the sea, even though they took to it every morning. Some had fished all their lives and couldn’t live without it - yet they had trouble living with it too. The sea sapped their strength - making them pay with their lifeblood for every catch they brought home - and leaving them washed up in the ports, withered figures hunched silently at bars, with nothing left to hope for.

  But Ucañan had his mask. It had been a present from a tourist he’d taken out on his caballito last year. He leaned back and pulled it out, spat on the lens and rubbed it carefully so that it wouldn’t cloud over. Then he dipped it into the water, pressed it over his face and pulled the strap round the back of his head. It must have cost a lot of money: the fittings were made of soft latex that moulded to his face. He didn’t have any breathing equipment but he wouldn’t need it. He could hold his breath for long enough to dive down and untangle the net from the rocks.

  The sharks in these waters weren’t usually a threat. Hammerheads, shortfin makos and porbeagles occasionally plundered fishing nets, but that was much further out. It was almost unhead of to sight a great white. Besides, he wouldn’t be swimming in the open: he’d be near the rocks and the reef, which offered some protection. In any case, whatever had ruined his net, it hadn’t been a shark, he thought.

  It was his own fault for not being more careful.

  He filled his lungs, dived into the water and sped away from the surface, body vertical, arms pressed to his sides. From the boat the water had looked forbidding, but now a welcoming bright world opened up around him. He had a clear view of the volcanic reef, which stretched into the distance, dappled with sun. There were few fish, but he wasn’t looking for them. He scanned the reef for the calcal. He couldn’t stay down too long or his caballito might drift away. He’d give himself a few more seconds, then go up and try again.

  He’d make ten trips if he had to. He didn’t mind if it took all day. He wasn’t going back without his net.

  Then he spotted the buoy.

  It was hanging ten to fifteen metres below the surface, suspended over a tip of jagged rock, the net directly below it. It seemed to be caught in several places. Tiny reef fish were swarming around the mesh, but they dispersed as he swam over. He straightened up, treading water as he tried to free it, his shirt billowing in the current.

  The net was in tatters and he stared at it in disbelief. It had taken more than the rocks to do that. Something had been on the rampage. What, in God’s name, had been here?

  And where was it now?

  Ucañan felt uneasy as he fumbled with the net. It would take days to repair. Now he needed to breathe. He would go back up, check on the caballito, then dive again.

  Before he could move, a change took place around him. At first he thought the sun had disappeared behind a cloud. The light stopped dancing over the rocks; the reef and weeds no longer cast a shadow…

  His hands, the net, everything around him was losing its colour and turning a murky grey. He dropped the calcal and looked up.

  Gathered just beneath the surface of the water was a shoal of shimmering fish, each as long as his arm, stretching as far as he could see. The shock made him gasp and bubbles rose from his mouth. Where had a shoal of that size come from? He’d never seen anything like it. It seemed almost stationary, but now and then he saw the flick of a tail-fin or a flash of silver as a fish darted forward. Then, as a unit, the shoal changed course by a few degrees. The gaps between the bodies closed.

  It was normal shoaling behaviour, but something wasn’t right. It wasn’t so much what they were doing that unnerved Ucañan: it was the fish themselves.

  There were too many of them.

  Ucañan swivelled round. Wherever he looked there were fish. He craned his neck. Through a chink in the mass of bodies he saw the outline of his caballito, a dark shadow on the rippling waves. The darkness thickened and his lungs began to burn.

  Dorado! he thought in astonishment.

  Everyone had given up hoping that they’d ever return. He should have been pleased to see them. They fetched a good price in the market, and a net packed full of dorado would feed a fisherman and his family for a long time.

  But fear surged through Ucañan.

  A shoal of that size was unreal. It filled his view. Had they destroyed his net? But how?

  You’ve got to get out of here, he told himself.

  He pushed off from the rocks. Trying to keep calm he ascended slowly and carefully, exhaling continuously. He was rising straight towards the expanse of fish that separated him from the sunlight and his boat. The shoal was motionless. A wall of indifference stared back at him through bulbous eyes. It was as though he’d conjured them out of nowhere. As though they’d been waiting for him.

  They want to trap me. They’re trying to cut me off from my boat.

  Terror swept through him. His heart was racing. He forgot about controlling his speed, about the ruined net and the little red buoy. He even forgot his caballito. All he could think of was breaking through the dense mass of fish and reaching the surface, seeing the light, going back to where he belonged, finding safety.

  The shoal parted.

  From its midst something writhed towards Ucañan.

  After a while the wind got up.

  It was still a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky. The swel
l had risen, but it was nothing a man in a boat couldn’t handle.

  But there was no one for miles.

  Only the caballito, one of the last of its kind, drifted on the open sea.

  PART ONE

  ANOMALIES

  And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea. And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood. And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous…

  Revelation 16:2-5

  Last week a huge unidentified carcass washed up on the coast of Chile. According to statements made by the Chilean Coast Guard, the shapeless blob, which decomposed rapidly on land, was only a small part of a much larger mass of flesh previously seen floating on the water. Chilean scientists have found no trace of a skeleton, ruling out the possibility that the remains could be those of a mammal. The mound was too big to be whale skin and is said to have a different smell. Test results so far reveal astonishing parallels to the so-called ‘globsters’ - gelatinous blobs that wash up periodically on coastlines around the world. Speculation continues as to what type of creature these corpses belong to.

  CNN, 17th April 2003

  4 March

  Trondheim, Norwegian coast

  On the face of it, the city was too cosy for a university or a research institute. In districts like Bakklandet or Møllenberg it seemed almost inconceivable that Trondheim could be a capital of technology. Its old timber houses, parks, rustic churches, colourful water warehouses on stilts, picturesque gardens and courtyards belied the advance of time and knowledge, but the NTNU, Norway’s principal university for the sciences, was just round the corner.

  Few cities combined past and future as harmoniously as Trondheim, which was why Sigur Johanson felt privileged to live there. His apartment was in old-fashioned Møllenberg, in Kirkegata Street, on the ground floor of an ochre-coloured house whose pitched roof, white steps and lintel would have captured the heart of any Hollywood director. Johanson was a marine biologist and a thoroughly modern scientist, but nothing could persuade him of the merits of his times. He was a visionary and, like most visionaries, he combined his love for the radically new with an attachment to the ideals of the past. His life was defined by the spirit of Jules Verne, whom he admired for his old-fashioned chivalry, his passion for the seemingly impossible and his celebration of technology. But as for the present…the present was a snail, its shell piled high with practical problems and the vulgar business of everyday life. There was no real place for it in Sigur Johanson’s universe. He served it, knew what it expected from him, enriched its store of knowledge, and despised it for the uses that it put it to.

  It was late morning by the time he steered his jeep along the wintry Bakklandet road, past the shimmering waters of the Nid towards the university campus. He was on his way back from a weekend spent deep within the forest, visiting isolated villages where time had stood still. In summer he would have taken the Jaguar, with a picnic hamper in the boot: freshly baked bread, goose-liver pâté wrapped in silver foil from the deli, and a bottle of Gewürztraminer - a 1985, if he could find one. Since he had moved from Oslo to Trondheim, Johanson had hunted out the quiet spots, far from the hordes of tourists and day-trippers. Two years ago he’d come across a secluded lake, and beside it, to his delight, a country house in need of renovation. It had taken a while to track down the owner - he worked in a managerial capacity for Statoil, Norway’s state-run oil company, and had moved to Stavanger - but when Johanson finally found him, the deal was quickly done. Pleased to be rid of the place, the owner had sold it for a fraction of its value. A few weeks later a team of Russian immigrants had restored the dilapidated house. They didn’t charge much, but transformed it into Johanson’s ideal of a proper country residence - a nineteenth-century bon vivant’s retreat.

  During long summer evenings he sat on the veranda, which looked out over the lake, reading visionary writers like Thomas More, Jonathan Swift or H. G. Wells, and daydreaming to Mahler or Sibelius. The house had a well-stocked library. He owned nearly all of his favourite books and CDs in duplicate - he wanted them with him wherever he was.

  Johanson drove on to the NTNU campus. The main university building lay straight ahead, covered with a dusting of snow. It was an imposing, castle-style edifice, dating to the turn of the twentieth century, and behind it lay lecture halls and laboratories. With ten thousand students, the campus was almost a town in itself. It hummed with activity. Johanson sighed in contentment. He had enjoyed his time at the lake. Last summer he’d spent a few weekends there with a research assistant from the cardiology department, an old acquaintance from various conferences. Things had moved swiftly, but he’d ended the relationship. He hadn’t been in it for the long term - and anyway, he had to face facts: he was fifty-six, and she was thirty years younger. Great for a few weeks, but unthinkable for a lifetime. In any case, Johanson didn’t allow many to get close to him. He never had.

  He left the jeep in its bay and headed for the Faculty of Natural Sciences. As he entered his office, Tina Lund was standing by the window. She turned as he walked in. ‘You’re late,’ she teased him. ‘Let me guess - too much red wine last night, or was someone reluctant to let you go?’

  Johanson grinned. Lund worked for Statoil and seemed to have spent most of her time lately at one or other of the SINTEF institutes. The SINTEF Group was one of the biggest independent research organisations in Europe, and the Norwegian oil industry in particular had benefited from its groundbreaking innovations. The close links between SINTEF and the NTNU had helped to establish Trondheim as a centre of technological excellence, and SINTEF centres were dotted throughout the region. Lund had risen swiftly through the Statoil ranks and was now deputy director of exploration and production. She had recently set up camp at Marintek, the SINTEF centre for marine technology.

  Johanson surveyed her tall slim figure as he took off his coat. He liked Tina Lund. A few years ago they’d nearly got together, but instead they’d decided to stay friends. Now they just picked each other’s brains and went out for the occasional meal. ‘An old man like me needs his sleep,’ he said. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He popped into the adjoining office, where he found a fresh pot. His secretary was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Milk, no sugar,’ Lund called.

  ‘I know.’ Johanson poured the coffee into two mugs, added a splash of milk to one, and returned to his office. ‘I know all about you, remember?’

  ‘You didn’t get that far.’

  ‘Heaven forbid! Now, take a seat. What brings you here?’

  Lund picked up her mug, but remained standing. ‘A worm, I think.’

  Johanson raised his eyebrows and took a gulp of his coffee. ‘What do you mean, you think?’

  She picked up a small steel container from the windowsill and placed it in front of him on the desk. ‘See for yourself.’

  Johanson opened it. The container was half filled with water. Something long and hairy was writhing inside. He examined it carefully.

  ‘Any idea what it is?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Worms. Two big ones.’

  ‘We’d worked that out, but what species?’

  ‘Ah! So that’s why you need a biologist. They’re polychaetes - bristleworms.’

  ‘I’m familiar with polychaetes…’ she hesitated ‘but could you take a proper look and classify them?’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Johanson peered into the container. ‘As I said, they’re bristleworms. Nice ones too. The ocean floor is covered with creatures like them. No idea what species, though. What’s the problem with them?’

  ‘If only we knew.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘We found them on the continental slope, seven hundred metres down.’

  Johanson scratched his chin. They must be hungry, he thought. He was surprised they were still alive: most organisms didn’t take k
indly to being hauled up from the depths.

  He glanced up. ‘There’s no harm in taking a look at them. I’ll be in touch tomorrow.’

  ‘Great.’ She paused. ‘You’ve noticed something odd about them, haven’t you? I can tell by the way you’re looking at them.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I can’t say for sure. Taxonomy isn’t my speciality. Bristleworms come in all shapes and colours and I’m not familiar with them all, but these…’

  Lund flashed him a smile. ‘Why don’t you look at them now? You could tell me your findings over lunch.’

  ‘I do have a job to get on with, you know.’

  ‘Well, you can’t be too pushed at the moment - judging by the time you rolled up this morning.’

  How irritating; she was right.

  ‘OK.’ He sighed. ‘We’ll meet at one in the cafeteria. Were you planning on a long-term friendship with them, or can I cut them up?’

  ‘Do whatever it takes, Sigur. I’ll see you later.’

  She hurried out. Johanson watched her go. Perhaps the two of them could have made a go of it, he thought. But Tina Lund lived life at a sprint. She was much too hectic for someone like him.

  He sorted his post and caught up on some phone calls. Then he picked up the container and carried it into the lab. There was no doubt that they were polychaetes, members of the Annelida phylum. Segmented worms, like the common earthworm. They weren’t complex, as far as organisms went, but they fascinated zoologists: polychaetes were among the oldest known organisms. Fossil records showed that they’d survived, practically unchanged, since the Middle Cambrian era, more than 500 million years ago. A few species were found in fresh water or on marshy ground, but the seas and oceans teemed with them. They aerated the sediment and provided fish and crabs with a rich source of nutrition. Most people found them repellent, but Johanson saw them as the survivors of a lost world: he found them exceptionally beautiful.