Far From The Sea We Know (48 page)

Chiffrey looked down and stared into the
palms of his hands, then looked up at Penny and simply asked, “Is
that what you’re trying to say? And how long ago?”

“How long ago, now?”

“When, dammit, when did it first leave here?
Leave the earth?”

Unfazed by Chiffrey’s tone, Penny said, “The
sense of time I used to possess troubles me now like a foreign
language where I know the words, but no longer the grammar.”

“What?” Chiffrey asked. “Look, I apologize,
it’s just…” He stopped for a moment then started to speak again,
directly to her but slowly, as if he were talking to a small child.
“You’re saying that thing is from here? And it’s some kind of
advanced life form that evolved on earth but left here at some
point in the past. Can you expand on that a little?”

She closed her eyes. “I see a long ship…a
single sail with a red dragon. Men. Rowing at oars…”

When she tried to continue, a tear ran down
her cheek. “Why do we hold everything so…small?” She started to
shake a little, and her connection with the dome became more
tenuous.

“Are you okay?” Chiffrey said.

“You are all…” She stopped and was quiet.
She looked at them, her face a picture of joy tempered by
sadness.

“I’ll need some time now,” she finally said.
“Of my own.”

“Another minute, please,” Chiffrey said.
“You haven’t even told us where Matthew went and why, let alone
what he was doing inside that pod thing we had in the tank.”

But to Penny, the words Chiffrey spoke
drifted further and further apart, the space between each syllable
widening into vast chasms of silence. In the deepening night, every
detail around her again shone bright and shimmering in the
afterglow of the dome’s departure. Every particle of matter around
her seemed to dance away towards some long forgotten ecstasy.

Chiffrey’s voice came back from far away.
“Wasn’t sure what you meant is all. You look tired. Maybe some
coffee?”

“I need to rest,” she said, and then without
ceremony or preamble, she curled up on the deck in front of them.
Her breathing became deep and slow. The hardness of the deck did
not reach her. Instead it was as if she was melting into the ship,
as if it had become a great cradle that would protect her and give
her the rest she had so greatly needed her whole life. All cares
gone, she soon drifted off.

No one moved at first. Then, one by one,
those who had blankets laid them over and around her. Chiffrey had
abruptly left, but soon returned.

“Haven’t used a pillow in years,” he said to
Becka, “so she might as well use mine. It’s fresh. I’m sorry if I
pushed too hard.”

Becka nodded. “Someone had to, I suppose,”
she whispered with a trace of regret. She gently placed the pillow
under Penny’s head. “I’ll watch over her for now.”

It was early morning. At Chiffrey’s
insistence, they had scanned the area for signs of Matthew and the
dome, all through the night and now into the day. Nothing. Chiffrey
stood by Doctor Bell near the holding tank on the aft deck. Bell
couldn’t help glancing down at the spot where his daughter had
spent the night.

“How is she?” Chiffrey asked.

“Sleeping again, in the women’s quarters.
She woke up early and headed over there with a little help from
Becka and me. She’ll be fine, I’m sure.”

“Did she say anything about Matthew when she
woke?”

He shook his head.

“We need to know more, Doctor Bell.”

Penny’s father smiled. “
You
need to
know more.”

“True enough,” Chiffrey said with a rueful
laugh, “but you’ve made some good guesses before, and I could use
your help. Anything.”

“If you insist, but what I say is only how
it seems to me at the moment. Understand?”

“Perfectly.”

“Then hear this. I believe the dome is
nothing like us, nothing at all. Nothing like any other life we
know on earth, but it is of our earth. My best sense of it is that
it can only know the world
through
the world. It uses life
on the outside to know life on the outside. Hence the whale.

“Something like a mobile probe?”

“Yes, but take care not to venture that
analogy too far. Again, we are dealing with a consciousness that is
nothing like our own, so as well as giving the dome sensory
information and a means to act, the whale also may have given it a
means to experience and process that information! And most likely
it is the same with Matthew. Do you understand? To it, a mode of
consciousness, in our case, our sense of individuality and how we
experience our life, may simply be like another color or shade. Not
what we think of as the person. Our intrinsic sense of identity may
be just another faculty to the dome, like the ability to walk. If
I’m even near the truth, the implications are staggering.”

“Why Matthew?”

“Many were called, perhaps, but Matthew
seems to have been chosen for some special role.”

“Or maybe he was simply the first to meet
the specs so to speak.

“‘Something rich and strange,’ yes?
Sea-changed.”

Chiffrey smiled. “You know, as crazy as all
that sounds, it’s starting to make some sense to me. Thing is, my
superiors need to find out why it is here.”

“Threat assessment.”

“It’s our job. Quoting Shakespeare won’t be
enough. We need to know where all this is going.”

Doctor Bell nodded. “I can assure you, that
is a question I am also interested in.” He took a few paces around
the aft deck and leaned against the gunwale, gazing out at a now
calm sea. Chiffrey joined him at the rail, but remained silent.

“I’m sure Matthew has a purpose,” Doctor
Bell said after a while, “but even he may not know what it is. How
humanity fits into the purpose of what we encountered is another
question entirely. We may not even have the capacity to discern it,
let alone comprehend it. We may not even be important enough to be
a part of it. For that matter, it may not even be a ‘purpose’ or
‘intent’ in the way we would usually understand one. Not at
all.”

“If you’re right in any of that, Matthew is
still our only link. We have to find him.”

“He’s gone, at least for now, and the dome
as well. I’m fairly certain you won’t see either of them soon.”

“I can’t go back empty-handed.”

“Back?” Doctor Bell smiled and put a hand on
Chiffrey’s shoulder. “There’s no going back to the world as we once
believed it to be. Not for any of us. Including you.”

After a dreamless sleep, Andrew Thorssen
awoke in the early morning hours to stand his watch on the bridge.
The sky was already coming light with dawn. It was the summer
solstice, and in these latitudes, the mornings came early and the
evenings late. From his bunk, he could see a faint beacon on the
shores of British Columbia, one he had passed many times before,
and a light he could count on. It had been there when he had gone
to sleep, and it was still there now. Good. As he had ordered, they
hadn’t moved during the night.

His gaze came to rest on the photo of his
wife mounted on the cabin wall. As always, he found himself
remembering Valentina as if he had only just been with her….

This time, it was when they had first been
at her mother’s place in Rosario. As it was where she had grown up,
she had wanted him to see her home and, of course, meet her mother.
They had been together less than three months. The ferry had taken
them all the way up the river from Buenos Aires, but the day had
been rainy, so visibility was limited. As it was, they had spent
most of the journey inside, sipping maté and talking.

The skies had cleared on their arrival and
now, at the end of the day, they were out on the patio of her
mother’s guest suite high above the city. The tiles still gleamed
from the rain, and the potted palms were vibrant enough to attract
a few birds in spite of being twelve stories up. This was the top
floor, so there was plenty of space. The laundry, just hung up in
the warm breeze, waved gently to all the other towels and shirts
that blossomed across the rooftops. Cooking smells from everywhere
mixed together and wafted up from below.

There were buildings like this one all
around. Just boxes, some higher, some lower, all a warm off-white,
but somehow no two the same shade. The overall effect was
unexpectedly soft, the complementary shapes like baked bread in the
lowering sun. Buildings and streets, with only the occasional bit
of vegetation, covered the land up to the river, so it was
startling to look across the other side and see nothing but a flat
green expanse of marshy wildness with some low hills in the
distance. Not a bridge in sight. The city just stopped, as if to
say ‘enough.’

Valentina pointed to a man fishing with a
pole down on the causeway by the River Paraná. People strolled by
him in the late afternoon, as the river flowed to the east. It was
then that she told him the story of what inspired her to begin her
study of the great whales.

As a child, she had been walking one day
down by this river. It was her ninth birthday. And it was on this
day that she had received a gift she still had, and it was the one
that even now she held most dear.

Sola, her nanny, had been with her. She was
an older woman with hair long gone gray, but who still seemed as
beautiful in Valentina’s eyes as she was kind. After some of her
mother’s friends had made comments that Valentina didn’t
understand, her mother had tried to explain to her about Sola being
an Indian, what that meant in their history, and then showed her
pictures in a book, but Valentina only knew that she loved Sola.
Years later, her mother told her that they had had misgivings about
Sola at first, but in spite of them they had taken her on to care
for Valentina because she had been recommended by the Father of the
little church they went to every Sunday.

On this day, when she had just turned nine,
Valentina and Sola were walking along the causeway by the water.
There they came across a man fishing, not unlike the man she and
Andrew were watching now. This man had been straining at the line,
however, and just when they went by, a fish, huge and grotesque,
emerged as if pulled from a dream. A girl on the arm of a boy
coming the other way looked aghast at the sight of the bony
monstrosity, but her young man was pleased, as he now had an excuse
to hug her more closely. Valentina, however, was fascinated by this
fish and, in a way, fell in love with this creature as if by some
fairy tale enchantment. Everything about this fish was of another
world, and she wanted to know that world.

“Sola, I wish the man would let him go.”

“Then you ask him.”

Valentina glanced up, but Sola’s face
betrayed nothing, yet there was something in the way she had spoken
the words.

“Señor?” Valentina said to the man.

“Si, Senorita?”

“I would like to buy your fish.”

“Ah, would you?”

“Yes. I have this.” She took out the pesos
her uncle had given her for her birthday.

“Hmm. I’m not sure that is enough. This fish
will feed many.”

“I don’t want to eat him, I want to let him
go.”

“I can’t do that.”

“It’s my birthday!”

“Oh, I see a tear coming. Well, if this is
because of me, a price too high to pay! So, here, off he goes.” And
the man tossed back his catch, the fish flipping back and forth in
the air before hitting the water. With one surge of his tail, he
immediately vanished from sight. She pushed the pesos toward the
man.

“No, no, he’s a fish for free today. But I
hope he learned something, or he’ll taste the grill soon enough.
Hey, a joke.” He frowned suddenly. “What a stupid thing. You best
be off.”

But it was he who turned, gathered up his
gear, and walked away along the causeway toward the war
memorial.

Valentina and Sola continued in the opposite
direction, going in silence among the strollers.

“Sola,” Valentina finally asked, “how does
such a fish come out of our river?”

Sola said nothing for a
moment, but then bent down and looked closely into the eyes of
Valentina. “Not from our river, little one. From the sea.
Where
these
came from.” Sola lifted
out the necklace she always wore, a string of silver and small
translucent shells. “These have a power for us, we who come from
deep in the land. A shell is like your bones, like the stone of the
land we come from, the home you will leave someday.”

She took the necklace off and rolled the
shells gently in her hand.

“Sometimes my people are called and make the
journey to the sea before they die. My grandfather brought these
back to me when I was your age. They connect to everything through
your bones. Here.” She placed the necklace around Valentina’s neck.
“It is yours now. You have been called. You will never be truly
happy until you go.”

“To the sea?”

“Si.”

“Now?”

“Oh no, not now. Another day, when you are
ready. Preparation is for now.”

“Sola, how do I—”

“You begin by not worrying, little fish!
Stay in your day, in this time. Be as you are. See, look around,
where are your feet? Feel them. Here.” Sola bent down and placed
her brown hands on Valentina’s feet. A moment went by without time
until Sola stood up, saying, “Now enough. Look over there! Is that
not Danino’s? We go now for some lemon ice.”

Sola had dropped the subject, and Valentina
knew better than to belabor it, and the lemon ice from Danino’s was
the best in Rosario, perhaps in all of Argentina.

“It was the day it all began for me,”
Valentina said. “I have no doubt. Soon after, I started collecting
shells and books. Everything to do with the sea was all I was
interested in. Then later came the whales, the Patagonian coast,
and Golfo Nuevo where, it seems, I was destined to meet you! All
from a fish out of the River Paraná where people stroll in the
early evening and have lemon ice.”