The light is everywhere.
Rubin's reeling body is seized by the jelly and thrust against the submersible as Weaver tries to flee. The organism is coming at her from both sides, from all directions simultaneously, above and below. It pushes up to the boat, wrapping itself round Rubin, solidifying, and Weaver screams-
The boat has been released.
The jelly withdraws as fast as it approached. It backs right off. If any human emotion could be used to approximate the collective's reaction, it would be dismay.
Weaver realises that she's whimpering.
The blue glow still surrounds her. Blurred lightning scuds through the mass of jelly, which walls in the boat like an enormous rampart, stretching up as far as she can see. She turns her head and looks into Rubin's crushed face, faintly illuminated by the lights on the control panel. The contracting jelly has squashed him against the side of the view dome, and he stares at her through two dark holes. Hydrostatic pressure has forced out his eyeballs. Dark fluid seeps out of the cavities, then the body detaches itself slowly from the boat and falls into the night. Now he is just a shadow against the illuminated backdrop, body spinning in curious movements as though he were dancing slowly and awkwardly in honour of some heathen God.
Weaver is hyperventilating. She has to force herself to stay calm. Under any other circumstances she would have felt sick, but she can't afford feelings now.
The ring continues to retreat, bulging upwards at the edges. Darkness emerges beneath it. Ripples run through its sides, as the organism gathers itself in rising waves of jelly. The biologist's corpse disappears into the night. Almost immediately tentacles stretch down from above; long tapering feelers, slender like jungle lianas. Moving in concert and with evident purpose, they find Rubin and sweep over his corpse. Weaver can't see the body, but it shows up on the sonar. The careful groping movements of the feelers trace the outlines of a human form.
From the tips of the tentacles grow delicate tendrils that home in on individual body parts before feeling their way onwards. Sometimes they hover without moving or branch off Every now and then they glide under and over each other as though conferring without sound. Until now Weaver has only ever seen blue yrr, but these feelers are an iridescent white. It would be easy to believe that their movements were choreographed, like a ballet unfolding in the silence. Suddenly in the distance Weaver hears music from her childhood: Debussy's 'La plus que lente', the slower-than-slow waltz that her father loved. It surprises and delights her, and her fear falls away. Of course there is no one in the ocean to play 'La plus que lente', but it is wonderfully appropriate. The rising and falling music is almost unbearably exquisite, and all that Weaver can discern at this moment is…
Beauty.
She finds her parents in a vision of beauty.
Weaver looks up. Above her is a shimmering blue bell of enormous proportions, high above her like a heavenly vault.
Weaver doesn't believe in God, but she has to stop herself lapsing into prayer. She remembers Crowe's warning about the temptation to humanise aliens, about representations of otherness that are really mirror images, about the need to make room for bolder visions of alien life. Perhaps Crowe would have resented the purity of the light; perhaps she would have wished for something less symbolically charged than the sacred white of the feelers, but the light doesn't stand for anything but itself White is a common bioluminescent colour, like blue, red and green. The glow isn't a manifestation of the divine, just a host of stimulated yrr-cells. Besides, what God with any human affinity would choose to reveal itself in tentacular form?
What overwhelms her is the knowledge that things have changed forever. The debate about whether a single-cell organism could develop intelligence. The question as to whether the ability of cells to organise themselves was evidence of conscious life or just an unusually well-developed form of mimicry. In the end the yrr had raised the stakes by breaking through the hull of the Independence as a tentacle-wielding monster of jelly, making H. G. Wells's Martians look harmless, and earning their place in the cabinet of horrors. But none of that is important in the face of this strange, yet sublime display. Weaver watches, and needs no further proof that she is seeing highly developed, unmistakably non-human intelligence.
Her gaze wanders up the blue dome, climbing until she sees its apex, from which something is descending, the source of the tentacles, which hang down from beneath. It is almost perfectly round and big like the moon. Grey shadows flit beneath its white surface, casting complex patterns that vanish in a trice, shades of white upon white, symmetrical configurations of light, flashing combinations of lines and dots, a cryptic code – a semiotician's feast. To Weaver's eyes it looks like a living computer, whose innards and surface are processing calculations of staggering complexity. She watches as the being thinks. Then it occurs to her that it's thinking for everything around it, for the enormous mass of jelly, for the whole blue firmament, and finally she realises what it is.
She has found the queen.
THE QUEEN MAKES CONTACT.
Weaver hardly dares to breathe. The immense pressure of the water has compressed the fluids in Rubin's body, at the same time causing them to spill out of the wreckage and disperse. From the site of the pheromonal injections, a chemical seeps out of the corpse, a chemical to which the yrr reacted immediately and instinctively. For one brief moment aggregation took place and ended abruptly. Weaver isn't certain that the plan wall work, but if her reasoning turns out to be right, the encounter with Rubin will have thrown the collective into Babylonian confusion – although in Babel there was recognition without understanding. Now the opposite is true. Never before has the pheromone-based message been sent or received by anything other than the yrr. The collective tries in vain to identify Rubin. His body tells them that he is the enemy, the species they have decided to wipe out, yet the enemy is saying, Aggregate!
Rubin is saying: I am the yrr.
What can the queen be thinking? Has she seen through the ruse? Does she know that Rubin is nothing like a yrr-collective, that his cells are locked together, that he doesn't have receptors? He is by no means the first human that the yrr have examined. Everything about him tells them that he is their enemy. According to yrr-logic, non-yrr should be disregarded or attacked. The question is: have yrr ever turned against yrr?
Can she be sure?
At least this is one point about which Weaver feels certain and she knows that Johanson, Anawak and all the others would agree. The yrr don't kill each other. Of course, diseased and defective cells are expelled from the collective, triggering their death, but the process is no different from a human body shedding dead skin, and no one could describe that as a battle of cells, since they all form one being. It's the same with the yrr – there are millions and billions of them, yet they're all one. Even individual collectives with individual queens belong to one vast being with one vast memory, a brain that encompasses the world, capable of making wrong-decisions, yet never knowing moral blame, permitting space for individual ideas, without allowing any one cell to gain preference. There can be no punishments and no wars within that single being. There are only normal and diseased cells, and the diseased cells die.