Perhaps the oldest life-forms didn't come into being on the surface but here, in the lightless depths. Perhaps, Karen, you're seeing the real Garden of Eden as you travel along the bottom of the Atlantic. There can be no doubting that the yrr are the more ancient of the two intelligent species, one of which inherited firm ground and forfeited its cradle.
Imagine if the yrr were the privileged species.
God's creatures.
TIME TO CHECK THE DISPLAY.
Weaver retrieves her thoughts from their journey past Africa. She has to focus on the present. It feels as though she's been travelling for a century already. A ghostly glow sweeps through the water some distance from the boat, but it's not the yrr, just a swarm of tiny krill, although there's no real way of telling – they might be cuttlefish instead.
2500 metres.
Another thousand metres to the seabed. All around her there is nothing but open water, yet the sonar is making frenzied clicks. Something large is approaching. No – not just approaching. It's heading straight for her, and it's vast. A solid expanse sinking down from above. Weaver's latent fear turns to panic. She flies through the water, banking at 180 degrees, as the thing draws closer. The microphones pipe an empty, unearthly din inside the boat, an eerie wailing and droning that's getting louder all the time. Weaver is tempted to flee, but curiosity prevails. She is far enough away from it and there's no sign that it's pursuing her.
Perhaps it's not a creature.
Banking again, she glides back towards it. They're at the same depth now, and the unknown thing is straight ahead. The Deepflight is rocked by turbulence.
Turbulence?
What could possibly be that big? A whale? But this thing is the size of ten whales, of a hundred whales, or even more…
She turns on the floodlights.
And at that moment she realises that she's closer than she thought. At the very edge of the beam, the thing comes into view. For a second Weaver is thrown, incapable of identifying the smooth surface in front of her or what it might belong to. It drops past her, then something catches in the floodlights. Bold lines, metre-long uprights, followed by curves. They seem horribly familiar, morphing into letters that read: USS hide…
She cries out in shock.
The sound dies without an echo, reminding her that she's sealed inside her pod. On her own. With the sinking ship before her, she feels more alone than ever. Her thoughts turn to Anawak, Johanson, Crowe, Shankar and all the others.
Leon!
She is staring in disbelief.
The side of the flight deck appears briefly, then vanishes. The rest is hidden in the darkness, leaving nothing but a furious flurry of escaping air.
Then she feels the pull, and the Deepflight is tugged under.
No!
Feverishly she tries to stabilise the boat. It's her own fault for being so nosy. Why couldn't she have kept her distance? The boat's in trouble, she can see that from the controls. Weaver fights against the pull, using maximum propulsion to get it to rise. The submersible struggles and spins, following the Independence to its grave. Suddenly the Deepflight demonstrates the true brilliance of her design: she escapes from the vessel's wake and soars upwards.
The next second it's as though it never happened.
Weaver can hear her heart pounding. It thunders in her ears. Like a piston, it pumps the blood into her head. She turns off the floodlights, lowers the nose of the Deepflight, and continues her flight to the bottom of the Greenland Sea.
TIME PASSES – maybe minutes or just seconds – and she sobs. She'd known that the Independence would sink – they all had – but so fast?
Yes, they'd known it would be fast.
But she doesn't know if Leon is alive. Or whether Sigur has made it.
She feels terribly alone.
I want to turn back.
I want to turn back.
'I want to turn back!'
Face awash with tears, lips quivering, she questions the sense of her mission. She's nearing the ocean bottom, and there's still no sign of the yrr. She checks the display. The onboard computer reassures her. She's been travelling for thirty minutes, it tells her, and she's 2700 metres deep.
Thirty minutes. How long should she stay down?
Do you want to see everything?
What?
Do you want to see everything, little particle?
Weaver snuffles, an earthly snuffle in the night-time wonderland of thoughts. 'Dad?' she whimpers.
Calm. You've got to stay calm.
A particle doesn't ask how long things take. A particle simply moves or stays still. It follows the rhythm of creation, an obedient servant to the whole. The obsession with duration is peculiar to humans, a doomed attempt to defy our own nature, to separate out the moments of our lives. The yrr aren't interested in time. They carry time in their genome, from the very beginnings of cellular life. It's all there: 200 million years ago, when oceanic plates joined with the land mass that is now North America; sixty-five million years ago, when Greenland began to detach itself from Europe; thirty-six million years ago, when the topographical features of the Atlantic were formed, and when Spain was still far away from Africa; then twenty million years ago, when the submarine ridges separating the Arctic from the Atlantic sank low enough for the waters to circulate, allowing you to make your journey from the Greenland Basin, leading onwards past Africa and further south towards Antarctica.
You're travelling towards the Circumpolar Current, the marshalling yard for ocean currents, towards the never-ending loop of water.
You head out of the cold into the cold.
YOU MAY ONLY be a particle, but you're part of a mass of water that's eighty times bigger than the Amazon. You flow across the seabed, over the equator, crossing the southern Atlantic Basin towards the southernmost tip of South America. Until now you've been flowing evenly and calmly. But once you've passed Cape Horn you run into turbulence. Reeling and tumbling you're pulled into a commotion resembling the lunch-time traffic around the Arc de Triomphe, but infinitely more violent. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current flows from west to east around the White Continent like a vast mixer, transporting and redistributing all the waters of the world. The circular current never stops, never hits land. It chases its tail, carrying enough water for eight hundred Amazons, pulling the planet's water inside it, tearing currents apart and mixing them together, expunging all trace of their identity and origin. Near the Antarctic coast it washes you towards the surface, where you shiver with cold. Foaming breakers sweep you onwards, until you sink back slowly into the vast circumpolar carousel.