It carries you for a while, then ejects you.
You travel northwards again at a depth of 800 metres. All the world's seas are fed by this circular Antarctic current. Some of the water flows into the subsurface South Atlantic current, some into the Indian Ocean, but most of it flows into the Pacific, and so do you. Hugging the western flank of South Africa you course towards the equator, where trade winds part the waters, and tropical heat warms you. You rise to the surface and are pulled to the west, right through the chaos of Indonesia with its islands and islets, currents, eddies, shallows and whirlpools. It seems impossible to pick your way through. Further south you're driven past the Philippines and through the Makassar Strait between Borneo and Sulawesi. Rather than squeeze through the Lombok Strait, you bypass it, flowing eastwards round Timor, a better route that takes you to the open waters of the Indian Ocean.
Now you head towards Africa.
The warm shallows of the Arabian Sea charge you with salt. Passing Mozambique, you travel south. You're in the Agulhas Current now, hurrying in anticipation of returning to the ocean of your origin, throwing yourself into an adventure that has cost so many sailors their lives. You reach the Cape of Good Hope, and it pitches you back. Too many currents collide here. The Antarctic Place de L'Etoile with its Friday-afternoon traffic is all too close. No matter how hard you try, you fail to make headway. Eventually you pinch off from the main current to form an eddy, and at last you're in the South Atlantic. You flow westwards with the Equatorial Current, spinning in vast eddies past Brazil and Venezuela, until you reach Florida and the ring of water tears apart.
You're in the Caribbean, the birthplace of the Gulf Stream. Fuelled by tropical sunshine you begin your passage up towards Newfoundland and on towards Iceland, drifting proudly on the surface and spreading your warmth magnanimously throughout Europe as though you could never run out. You barely notice that you're getting colder. At the same time, the waters of the North Atlantic are evaporating, saddling you with a burden of salt that weighs ever heavier. All of a sudden you find yourself back in the Greenland Basin where your journey began.
You've been travelling for a thousand years.
Ever since the Pacific was divided from the Atlantic by the Isthmus of Panama three million years ago, particles of water have been taking this route. Only another shift in the continents could interfere with the great ocean conveyor belt – or so we used to think. Now the equilibrium of the climate has been disrupted by mankind. And while the opposing factions continue to argue over whether global warming will lead to the icecaps melting and the Gulf Stream stopping, the current has stopped already. The yrr have put a stop to it. They've stopped the journey of the particles, put an end to Europe's warmth, called time on the future of the self-appointed chosen species. Yes, they know very well what will happen when the Gulf Stream stops, unlike their foes, who never see the consequences of their actions, unable to imagine the future because they lack genetic memory, incapable of seeing that in the logic of creation an end is a beginning and a beginning is also an end.
ONE THOUSAND YEARS, little particle. More than ten generations of humans, and you've circumnavigated the world.
One thousand trips like that, and the seabed will have renewed itself.
Hundreds of new seabeds and seas will have disappeared, continents will have grown together or pulled apart, new oceans will have been created, and the face of the world will have changed.
During one single second of your voyage, simple forms of life came into being and died. In nanoseconds, atoms vibrated. In a fraction of a nanosecond, chemical reactions took place.
And somewhere amid all this is man.
And above all this is the yrr.
The conscious ocean.
YOU'VE CIRCUMNAVIGATED the world, seen how it was and how it is, becoming part of the eternal cycle that knows no beginning and no end, only variation and continuation. From the moment it was born, this planet has been changing. Every single organism is part of its web, a web that covers its surface, inextricably linking all forms of life in a network of food chains. Simple beings exist alongside complex life-forms, many organisms have vanished forever, while others evolve, and some have always been here and will inhabit the Earth until it is swallowed by the sun.
Somewhere amid all this is man.
Somewhere within all this are the yrr.
What can you see?
WHAT CAN YOU SEE?
Weaver feels unbearably tired, as though she's been travelling for years. A tired little particle, sad and alone.
'Mum? Dad?'
She has to force herself to look at the display.
Cabin pressure: OK. Oxygen: OK.
Dive angle: ().
Zero?
The Deepflight is horizontal. Weaver stares. Suddenly she's wide awake again. The speedometer is showing zero too.
Depth: 3466 metres.
Darkness all around.
The boat's not sinking any more. It's reached the bottom of the Greenland Basin.
She hardly dares look at the clock for fear of what she might see – perhaps evidence that she's been there for hours already and is too low on oxygen to fly back. But the figures glow calmly on the digital display, announcing that her dive began only thirty-five minutes earlier. So she can't have blacked out. She just can't remember landing, although she seems to have followed procedure. The propellers have stopped, the systems are working. She could fly home now…
And then it starts.
COLLECTIVE
At first Weaver thinks she is hallucinating. She sees a faint blue glow in the distance. The apparition rises, swirling up like a scattering of dark-blue dust blown from an enormous palm, then fading into nothing.
The glow reappears, this time closer and more spread out. It doesn't vanish, but arches upwards, passing over the boat, obliging Weaver to crane her neck. What she sees reminds her of a cosmic cloud. It's impossible to say how far away or big it is, but it gives her the feeling of having reached the edge of a distant galaxy, not the bottom of the sea.
The blue light starts to blur. For a moment she thinks it's getting fainter, then she realises that it's an illusion: the glow isn't fading, it's becoming part of a far larger cloud that's sinking gently towards her boat.
Suddenly it dawns on her that she can't stay on the seabed if she wants to get rid of Rubin.
She angles the wings and starts the propeller. The Deepflight scrapes over the seabed, stirring up sediment, then lifts off. Lightning flashes in the vast night sky, and Weaver sees that the yrr are aggregating.
The collective is enormous.
From all sides the blue and white light is closing in. The Deepflight is caught in the middle of an aggregating cloud. Weaver knows that the jelly can contract into strong elastic tissue. She tries not to think what will happen if the muscle of amoebas closes round her boat. For a split second she pictures an egg being crushed by a fist.
She's ten metres above the seabed.
That should be enough.
It's time.
A push of a button on which everything depends. It would only take a moment of inattentiveness, a clumsy finger quivering with nerves or fear, and the wrong pod would open. She'd be dead within an instant. 3500 metres below the surface, the pressure is equivalent to 385 atmospheres. Her body might retain its shape, but she wouldn't be alive to see it.
She hits the right button.
The domed lid of the co-pilot's pod rises upright. Air shoots out explosively, lifting Rubin's body and dragging him partway out of the pod. With the lid open, the submersible is almost impossible to steer, but Weaver speeds forward, then plunges abruptly, ejecting Rubin from the boat. His dark silhouette hovers in front of the approaching storm of flashing light. The hostile environment squashes his organs and his flesh, crushing his skull, snapping his bones, and squeezing the fluid from his body.