Weaver has encountered a sperm whale. A motionless predator, equipped with good eyes. In the realm of darkness, the creatures have good eyes. At this depth, they all have good vision.
WHAT CAN YOU SEE? What can't you?
You're walking along the street. Some distance ahead, a man is coming towards you. A few steps in front of him is a woman with a dog. Click, you take a picture. How many living organisms are there in the street? How far away is each creature from the other?
There are four.
No, wait. . . There are three birds in the trees, so that makes seven. The man is eighteen metres away. There are fifteen metres from me to the woman. Her dog is only thirteen metres away – it's scampering in front of her, straining at the leash. The birds are ten metres above the ground, each sitting fifty centimetres from the next. Wrong! What you don't see is that billions of organisms are swarming all over the street. Only three are human. One is a dog. In addition to the three birds you counted, there are fifty-seven that you haven't seen. The trees are living organisms, and in their bark and foliage live hordes of tiny insects. Mites infest the birds' plumage and the pores of your skin. Fifty or so fleas, fourteen ticks and two flies are buried in the dog's coat, while thousands of tiny worms inhabit its stomach. Its saliva is full of bacteria. The three human bodies are covered with microbes, and the distance between all these organisms is practically nil. Floating above the street are spores, bacteria and viruses that form chains of organic matter – chains of which humans are a part – knitting us together in one super-organism. In the sea it's no different.
What are you, Karen Weaver?
I'm the only human life-form for miles around – unless you count Rubin, who's not a life-form any more.
YOU'RE A PARTICLE.
One among countless different particles. In the same way as no cell is identical to another, no other human is identical to you. There is always a difference somewhere. That's how you should see the world. As a spectrum of diverging similarities. It's comforting to see yourself as a particle, isn't it, once you know you're unique?
A particle moving in space and time.
THE DEPTH GAUGE FLASHES.
2000 metres.
I've been diving for seventeen minutes.
Is that what your display is telling you?
Yes.
To understand the world, you need to find a different way of seeing time. You need to be able to remember – but you can't. Mankind has been short-sighted for two million years now. Most of Homo sapiens evolution has been spent hunting and gathering, and that's what shaped our brains. For our forefathers the future was never more than the next moment in time. Anything beyond that seemed as vague and hazy as the distant past. We used to live for the moment, driven by an urge to reproduce. Disasters were forgotten or laid down in myth. Forgetting was once a gift of evolution, but now it's a curse. Our minds are still bounded by a temporal horizon that prevents us seeing any further than a few years in either direction. Generations pass, and we forget, repress and ignore. Unable to remember and learn from the past, we're incapable of considering the future. Humans aren't designed to see the whole and the role they play within it. We don't share the world's memory.
Rubbish! The world has no memory. People have memories, but not the world. All that stuff about the planet's memory is esoteric crap.
Do you think so? The yrr remember everything. The yrr are memory.
Weaver feels dizzy.
She checks the oxygen supply. Ideas are tumbling through her mind. The dive seems to be turning into a hallucinogenic trip. Her thoughts disperse in all directions through the darkness of the Greenland Sea.
Where have the yrr got to?
They're here.
Where?
You'll see them.
YOU'RE A PARTICLE moving through time.
You sink through the silent depths with countless others of your kind, a cold salt-laden particle of water, heavy and weary from the heat-draining journey north from the tropics to the inhospitable Arctic reaches. You've gathered in the Greenland Basin, forming an enormous pool of incredibly cold and heavy water. From there you flow over the submarine ridges that lie between Greenland, Iceland and Scotland, and into the Atlantic Basin. On and on you go, over the mounds of lava and deposits of sediment, into the abyss. You're a powerful current, you and the other particles, and near the coast of Newfoundland you're joined by water from the Labrador Sea. It isn't as cold or as heavy as you are. You continue towards Bermuda, and circular UFOs spin across the ocean to meet you, warm, salty Mediterranean eddies from the Strait of Gibraltar. The Greenland Sea, the Labrador Sea, the Mediterranean – all the waters mingle, and you push southwards, flowing through the depths.
You watch as the Earth brings itself into being.
Your path takes you along the Atlantic Ridge, one in a chain of mid-ocean ridges that extend across the oceans. With a mass as large as all the continents put together, they form a network covering sixty thousand kilometres, tipped with peak upon peak of periodically erupting volcanoes. Towering three thousand metres above the seabed, and sometimes separated from the surface by just as much water again, the ridges are evidence of cracks in the Earth. Where their crest is riven, magma rises from underground reservoirs. In the high pressure of the deep-sea, the molten rock doesn't shoot out explosively, but oozes in leisurely bulges. The pillows of lava push their way through the middle of the ridge, forcing it apart with the persistence and impertinence of chubby children, newly born seabed that has yet to find its form. Slowly, incredibly slowly, the ridge moves apart. The seabed is hot where the lava meanders through the darkness of the depths. Earthquakes shake the chasm and the crests on either side. Towards the edges of the rift, the lava cools. Beyond the crests, the topography consists of older stone; the further away from the ridge-crest, the older, colder and denser the rock, until the old, cold, heavy seabed slopes into the abyss. Creeping over the deep-sea plains, studded with mountains and covered with layers of loose sediment, it moves west towards America and east towards Europe and Africa, a conveyor-belt of past ages, until one day it pushes itself under the continents and plunges deep into the mantle of the Earth to melt in the furnaces of the asthenosphere, reappearing millions of years later as red-hot magma in oceanic rifts.
It's an extraordinary cycle. The sea floor moves tirelessly round the globe, fractured by pressure from within and pulled by the weight of its sinking boundaries. A continual straining, pulling and tugging of geolithic labour pains and burial rites shapes the face of the Earth. In time, Africa will unite with Europe. Will reunite with Europe. The continents are moving, not like icebreakers ploughing through brittle crust, but being dragged impassively on top of it, kept in constant motion ever since Rodinia, the first supercontinent, was torn apart in the Precambrian. Even now her fragments still strive to reassemble, as they did when they formed Pannotia and finally Pangaea, before they, too, broke apart. A divided family with a 165-million-year memory of the last complete landmass with a single ocean round it, now dependent on the flow rate of viscous mantle rock, and consigned to wandering the surface of the planet until they reunite.
You're a particle.
You only experience a heartbeat of all that. The Atlantic seabed shifts by five centimetres, and you've already been flowing for a year. Your journey takes you to places where there is life without sunlight. The lava cools rapidly, forming faults and cracks. Seawater pours into the porous new seabed. It streams down for kilometres, stopping just before it reaches the hot magma chambers inside the Earth, then returns, rich with life-giving minerals and warmth. Blackened with sulphide, the water spurts out of chimney-like rock formations as tall as houses, boiling hot, yet never boiling. At that depth, water heated to 350 degrees doesn't boil, it just flows up, dispersing its wealth of nutrients, supplying a hundredfold of what the surrounding waters have to offer. You voyage through the unknown universe has led you to the first outpost of an alien world in which living creatures survive without light. It is home to bushy clumps of metre-long tubeworms, mussels the length of a human arm, hordes of blind white crabs, fish and, most important of all, bacteria. They're primary producers, equivalent to the green plants on the Earth's surface that nourish themselves from sunlight and provide all living creatures with the energy to survive. But these bacteria don't need sunlight: they oxidise hydrogen sulphide. Their source of life comes from deep inside the Earth. They cover the seabed in vast bacterial mats, living in symbiosis with worms, mussels and crabs, while other crabs and fish live in symbiosis with mussels and worms – and all without the need for a ray of sunshine.