The Swarm: A Novel

by Frank Schätzing

He went into the bathroom and inspected himself in the mirror. His beard needed trimming, he thought. It was at least two millimetres too long. Everything else was just right, though. His once-brown hair was thick and shiny, despite the strands of grey, and his eyes still twinkled beneath heavy brows. At times he found it hard to resist his own charisma. One of his female students had told him that he looked like the actor Maximilian Schell. Johanson had felt flattered - until he found out Schell was over seventy. He rummaged through his suitcase, pulled out a zip-neck sweater and put it on, then struggled to force his suit jacket over the top. He wrapped a scarf round his neck. He didn’t look well dressed, but that was how he liked it. He cultivated a scruffy look. It took him longer to achieve his dishevelled hairstyle than most people would spend on a respectable coiffure.

‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against fossil fuels per se, but I object to making the same mistake twice. When the oil industry took off, we erected our junk in the sea, without anyone thinking about how we could dispose of it. We emptied wastewater and chemicals into rivers and seas, as though they’d simply disperse. Radioactive material was dumped in the oceans. Natural resources and life-forms were exploited and destroyed. No one stopped to consider how complex the connections might be.’

Children in America drew six-legged chickens because drumsticks came in packs of six, while adults drank milk from a carton, and recoiled at the sight of an udder. Their experience of the world was stunted, but it only fuelled their arrogance.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kfc-mutant-chickens/

‘I studied the Bible once, you know. It’s full of ancient truths. Ask a Christian why the wood is burning, and he’ll tell you that God is in the flames. He’ll refer you to the ancient stories, and there you’ll find a burning bush. But is that how a Christian would explain a forest fire?’ ‘No, of course not.’ ‘Exactly - and yet any true Christian treasures those stories. Indians believe in their ancient stories too, but not because they think they’re real. Our stories don’t describe how such-and-such a thing actually is. They describe the idea of it. In our stories you’ll find everything and nothing, because you can’t take anything literally, yet it all makes sense.’

Of course they wouldn’t be the first to fall for America’s favourite invention, the conspiracy theory. Every fourth US citizen harboured some kind of paranoid suspicion. According to some, Clinton had worked for the Russian secret service, and plenty of people believed in UFOs.

author definitely doesn't like Americans

‘In Montauk. It’s a neat town. Took a trip there last year with the buddies, right after me and Sandy broke up. We were mostly drunk or stoned or whatever, but it was cool just lying there on the bluff, watching the sunset.

He drew his wife a little closer to him, and gazed out across the Atlantic. The sun was preparing to drop into the sea.

I looked at the map and Montauk beaches face SE - can you really see a sea sunset there?

Scientists had suspected that the oceans were never completely smooth, even in conditions of perfect calm, but Geosat’s images made the planet look like an enormous, lumpy potato. The oceans were full of dents, humps, bulges and troughs. For a long time scientists had assumed that the water in them was spread evenly across the globe, but the map offered a different picture. Off the south coast of India, for example, the sea level was 170 metres lower than it was in the waters around Iceland. To the north of Australia, on the other hand, it rose up to form a peak eighty-five metres above the mean sea level. The oceans were vast mountainscapes whose topography seemed to follow the lie of the underwater landscape. Towering underwater mountain ranges and deep ocean valleys replicated themselves on the surface with only a few metres’ difference in height. It all came down to variations in gravity. An underwater mountain gave the sea floor additional mass, so its gravitational field was stronger than that of a deep-sea valley. It pulled the surrounding water towards the mountain and made it pile up in a hump. The water surface bulged above a mountain - and dipped above a trench.

Geosat had revealed that powerful currents circled in the oceans, forming eddies that measured hundreds of kilometres across. Like coffee being stirred in a mug, the rotating masses of water formed a depression at the centre, while the outer rings rose upwards. It became apparent that these eddies also caused the ocean’s surface to rise and fall, independent of gravitational variations, and that they themselves were part of far larger rings of water - oceanic gyres. From the long-distance perspective of satellite mapping, it became clear that all the world’s oceans were rotating. In the northern hemisphere, enormous networks of rings spun in a clockwise direction, while in the southern hemisphere the flow was anti-clockwise. The speed of rotation increased with proximity to the poles.

‘This could take a while,’ said Akesuk. ‘Yep, we’ll lose some time.’ Anawak knew what it meant to drive a sled round cracks. Akesuk’s nose wrinkled. ‘I wouldn’t say that. Time stays the same whether we travel due east or take a detour further north. Out here it doesn’t matter when you arrive. Don’t you remember? Your life doesn’t stop unfolding because you take a longer route. No time is wasted.’ Anawak was silent. ‘You know,’ his uncle added, with a smile, ‘maybe the biggest problem we’ve had to face in the last hundred years was the qallunaat bringing us time. They believe that time spent waiting is time wasted - wasted lifetime.

suddenly saw the logic in the old Inuit story of why the polar bear padded mournfully over the ice. Its love for an Inuk woman had clouded its judgement. The bear had warned the woman not to tell her husband about their illicit meetings, but when the hunter returned after weeks of tracking in vain, she took pity on him and told him where her lover could be found. The bear heard her treachery, and while the hunter went to look for it, it crept to her igloo, intending to kill her. Raising its paw, it was overcome with sorrow. Not even her death could undo the betrayal. It trudged away. Anawak’s skin prickled with the cold. Whenever Nature had allowed man to approach, her trust had been betrayed. Since then, so the legend continued, man had been attacked by polar bears. This was the bears’ kingdom. They were stronger than man, but in the end mankind had defeated them and, in so doing, had defeated itself.

They preferred to call it “relocation.” A Cold War phenomenon. The politicians in Ottawa were scared that the Soviet Union or the United States would take it into their heads to lay claim to the uninhabited Canadian Arctic so they relocated the nomadic Inuit from their traditional territory in the southern Arctic to Resolute and Grise Fjord near the North Pole. They claimed that the hunting grounds were better there, but the opposite was true. The Inuit were forced to wear numbered dog-tags as though they were animals.

No matter who these beings are, you won’t achieve anything by trying to fight them.’ ‘So what do we do?’ ‘See them as a part of yourselves. The world is such a small place, or so they’re always telling us, but the truth is, we’re still aliens to each other. Make contact with them, just as you’re making contact with the alien world of the Inuit. Wouldn’t it be a good thing if the divisions were healed?’

Johanson looked at her. ‘What do you want, Jude?’ ‘To beat this crisis. And you?’ ‘Oh, ditto,’ said Johanson, ‘but I’m not sure I want to beat it in the same way as you. What are you hoping will be left when this is over?’ ‘The values of our society.’ ‘Human society? Or American society?’ Her blue eyes seemed to gleam ‘Is there a difference?’

What do you think the world would do without America? There’s only one enduring model of national and international order that works for every individual in every single society, and that’s the American one. We can’t allow the world to solve this problem. We can’t allow the UN to solve it. The yrr have inflicted untold damage on humanity, but their stock of knowledge and understanding could be even more deadly. Who would you like to see inherit that knowledge, Sigur?’ ‘Those most competent to deal with it.’ ‘Exactly.’ ‘But that’s what we were working towards, Jude. Don’t we want the same things? We could reach an agreement with the yrr. We could—’ ‘Don’t you get it? We don’t have that option. It’s against the interests of my country. That knowledge belongs to the United States of America, and we’re obliged to do everything in our power to prevent others attaining it. It leaves us with no choice: we have to liberate the planet from the yrr. Even agreeing to coexist would be an admission of failure - a sign of our defeat, the defeat of humanity, of our faith in God and the world’s faith in American supremacy.

‘What kind of a person are you, Li?’ ‘The kind who’s devoted to God and to—’ ‘The only thing you’re devoted to is your career. You’re power-crazy.’ ‘I believe in God and my country,’ Li yelled. ‘I believe that the United States has a calling to save humanity and to—’ ‘Put everyone else in their place once and for all.’ ‘So what? Everyone always wants America to do all the dirty work, and now we’re doing it. It’s only right. We can’t allow the world to share in the yrr’s knowledge, so we have to destroy them and preserve that knowledge for ourselves. Then there’ll be no doubt who controls the fate of the planet. Hostile regimes or dictators won’t stand a chance. No one will be capable of contesting our supremacy.’

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.