Far From The Sea We Know (47 page)

The surface of the huge rounded mass burned
with a cold fire. Lightning struck the dome, and leapt back above
to clouds tinged with a pulsating green. Thunder crashed, but
instead of rain falling, a phosphorescent glow blushed out along
the tips of the waves all the way to the ship and up the masts. The
whole sky took on a magenta cast, and an unexpected fragrance
wafted through the air. Violets.

“My dream,” Malcolm said, a satisfied smile
washing over his face. “It’s my dream for real….”

The dome kept rising, widening out as if it
would never stop until its sides abruptly curved under to reveal a
slightly convex bottom festooned with crystalline structures in the
center. Like titanic signal lights, they flashed in alternating
hues of green and blue in a pattern just beyond Penny’s
incomprehension. As it rose above the waves, water still poured off
it in torrents, but the seas were beginning to calm. The largest
waves had passed, and Andrew had once again brought the
Valentina
through intact.

“We are not under attack,” Penny heard
Chiffrey yell into his satphone as the wind brought his voice to
her ears. He cupped his hand around the mouthpiece. “Do you copy?
Not under attack. Do you copy?” She raced past him down to the
bow.

The dome made its way up so slowly she could
barely tell it was moving. It hummed like a child’s top, and the
deck beneath her feet vibrated in sympathetic resonance. A rosy hue
played about the waves and on the
Valentina
’s mastheads.
Though the time was near midnight, light from the luminescent
waters shone bright as day. The seas had become relatively calm.
Everyone was standing now, quietly watching as the dome floated up.
When it was far above them, but still as easy to see as a second
moon, it seemed to move away in every direction at once, and the
sky all around it fell apart like a heat mirage. A brief instant of
absolute silence fell over them all. Then came a slow boom, like
the deepest thunder ever heard, that reverberated on and on. A
torrent of silvery hailstones fell straight down into the sea in
front of them then stopped as quickly as it had begun.

The sky, left empty, now seemed a poorer
place.

The engines powered up slightly. Andrew was
taking them closer to where it had emerged.

Seaweed strands, pulled up from the bottom,
were floating everywhere. The sea was transformed into a
phantasmagoria as thousands of fish skimmed along the surface,
leaping out of the rosy fluorescence in crazed splendor. The gulls
and other seabirds were finding their way back and, even though it
was night, began to feast with abandon under the sky of a spectral
day.

“Matthew!” Chiffrey said, suddenly
remembering. He ran aft and up the steps to the tank’s observation
platform. Penny followed him, though there was really no need. She
sat down by the side of the tank and waited. Chiffrey stared into
the empty waters of the tank as if he would somehow find an answer
there.

“Lost him,” he said finally.

She didn't look at him, but replied in a
whisper. “He’s gone. But not lost.”

Probably only minutes passed by, but those
moments sitting on a storage chest by the holding tank felt like
days. Penny's old life faded away into an impersonal antiquity
along with much of what she once believed. The one thing she was
certain of was that it was a life she’d never have back.

The crew and students came, many wrapped in
blankets although the night felt warm. Heat had come from the
dome’s departure, and it lingered enough to warm the air into a
false tropical humidity. Yet when someone offered her a blanket,
she gladly accepted.

In the fading bioluminescent glow that
played on every surface like a phantom fire, she gazed at the
student crew and felt like she had known them all forever.

“I will tell you what I can.”

“Yes…” Chiffrey began, but stopped. The
puzzled look that clouded his face made him look both older and
younger.

She took a slow breath and the connection to
the dome that Matthew had somehow shared with her strengthened. She
could almost feel Matthew’s hands around her and the presence of
the dome surrounding them, but it was not as overwhelming as when
they floated together in the tank. Yet even a glimmer of that
presence brought her back to before her earliest memories of life,
back seemingly even before her birth.

“Thank you for your care,” she said softly,
but everyone must have heard her, as all other sounds, even the
engines, seemed to have receded into the distance. She closed her
eyes. Her voice came from some other place, a place so vast that it
made all their own lives but the flickers of embers rising from a
dying campfire.

“The words alone that I am left to tell you
can only be shadows of the truth.”

“Is this going to be a channeling session or
something?” Chiffrey asked.

She opened her eyes, and smiled as she saw
their glimmering reflection in his. A distant memory found its way
to her, and so a place to start.

“In the
Bluedrop
,” she said, looking
at her father, “by the large vent you last remembered. Matthew
never moved. Time and space around him moved. Then somewhere else
folded in all around him.”

“Wait,” Chiffrey said. “Matthew told you
this when he was in the tank?”

“He spoke little, but I was somehow
connected to his experience. It just came to me.”

“I don’t understand that at all.”

“Let’s just listen, Lieutenant,” her father
said. Chiffrey shrugged and remained sullenly silent.

“At first,” she continued, “Matthew could
not remember his name. Or even his humanity. Then the fear slipped
away, and he found himself enfolded in beauty. All around him the
very engines of creation seemed to sing.”

Chiffrey held up his hand. “When you say
‘engines,’ do you mean of the ship he was in, that incredible
spacecraft?” He looked at her father. “Well, we all saw it, there
can be no doubt anymore what it was.”

“No,” she said. “He breathed in a vast space
that somehow contained itself in a single point. Like a cathedral,
but you could not tell where anything ended or began. I no longer
had a separate body.”

“You?”

“Matthew connected me. Or it connected me. I
felt as if I breathed, and moved, and sensed everywhere at once, in
everything. And with everyone.”

“Who else was there?” Chiffrey asked. “Did
you meet the occupants? Even a glimpse?”

“Your question…I can only say time flowed as
a place, not a passing by. Time is not a river, it is a place, the
only place.”

“Hold on,” Chiffrey said. “Maybe you
experienced an attempt at contact by whatever alien presences
occupied the ship.” He glanced at her father again. “That could
leave anyone confused.”

“Please just let her continue.”

Penny waited, then looked around at all the
people gathered on the aft deck, at the ship and the gear, and
closed her eyes again. “An intense perception of life poured into
me, life with nothing left out. I looked from outside and saw
everything at once, all at the same time, all the way to the stars
above and the mud below, and yet
just and only this
! Given
like food to me, like ambrosia.”

“What? Ambrosia?” Chiffrey said. “Jell-O
mixed with itty bitty marshmallows and a little fruit. Have it at
the cafeteria sometimes.”

She laughed, and then her body shook for a
few seconds like a dog shaking off water.

“All I’m saying, would help if you could be
more specific.”

She became calm again and cupped her hands,
looking straight at him with unblinking eyes. “You have a sip of
soup. A taste. Then you have the whole bowl.” She mimed slowly
drinking down a bowl of soup from her cupped hands. “The same taste
as the sip, but when you have the whole bowl, you receive
sustenance, not just the taste. You have the life of everything
that went into the soup, everything connected to that life all the
way to the sun and down to the bottom of the seas, every story
spreading out infinitely….”

“Into a kind of crescendo!” Becka said
suddenly, almost shouting. Then, more quietly, “Or what a crescendo
aspires to be. Everything together, yet each its own.”

“Yes,” Penny said.

“Like what happened to me.” Becka’s voice
trailed off to a whisper.

“Your speech is off,” Chiffrey said to
Becka. He looked at Penny. “And yours as well. Dammit, the way you
are talking, the rhythm, the tone, is odd. Are you under an
influence of some kind?”

Penny let a few more breaths go by. “One way
or another, we all come ‘under an influence’ the moment we enter
the world.”

“Well, I suppose, but you don’t seem
yourself. That concerns me.”

“Just let her get on with it,” Becka said
with an edge back in her voice.

“You’re still somewhat yourself, at
least.”

Her father raised a hand as if asking
permission to speak. “Matthew was in the dome. That seems
clear.”

“In the simple way of saying,” she said,
“yes.”

“Finally,” Chiffrey interrupted. “Okay,
let’s get down to it. The radar problems surrounding the
Honey
Pot
incident. Did the dome cause that? I mean, on purpose?”

She glanced up at him, looked out to the now
diminishing glow on the wave tips. “Your radar problem, yes.”

“And the dome did come from outside, from
deep space somewhere?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it! This really true?”

“As true as you can hear it.”

“Could you please be less quixotic? Where
did the ship come from?”

In a kind of a chant, Penny said, “In
beauty, wrapped in beauty, I move in beauty….”

“Not back to that again,” Chiffrey said,
shaking his head and more annoyed than ever. “But okay, I’ve been
monopolizing the conversation.” He looked around. “Anyone
else?”

No one seemed inclined toward inquiry.
Instead, they mostly sat completely still, entranced by Penny’s
every word. Malcolm looked like a monk meditating. Becka was once
again in the throes of some quiet elation. Penny’s father wore his
trademark look of bemusement, listening intently, while the Captain
of the
Valentina
, the man she had known as Andrew her whole
life, seemed somehow oddly detached, as if attending a play he had
seen many times before, but still enjoyed.

Chiffrey looked around, and especially at
Becka. “No one wants to have a go? Then I’ll continue. Why’d they
come here?” he asked Penny. “To this particular place on our
planet?”

“Here?” She looked out to the sea again.
“Injured. From the long journey.”

“Well, that could explain a lot,” Chiffrey
said. “The dramatic entry, for instance. If true.”

“I speak only as I know,” she said, ignoring
Chiffrey’s snide tone.

“And now what? Am I supposed to keep
guessing? Has this ‘damage’ been repaired yet?”

“She’s telling you what she can,” Becka
said, suddenly slipping out of her reverie and sounding annoyed
again. “Try paying attention.”

“Ask,” Penny said to Chiffrey.

“Thank you.” Chiffrey cleared his throat and
looked around as if searching for a place to spit, but instead
said, “So, it came from where exactly?”

“Too far to measure.”

“And why’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right, fair enough I suppose, although
again conveniently unspecific. One more question. Why? Why did they
come all this way? What’s their intent toward us? Is that too much
to want to know?”

“That’s four questions,” Penny's father said
in a low voice.

Chiffrey began to respond until she slowly
raised her left hand. A burning look flickered in her eyes, and
when he saw this, he tensed up reflexively. Everyone had remained
quiet, but they now became as silent as the dead. She finally began
speaking again. “Long before we walked, she knew herself here…” She
paused, trying to find the way to go on. She looked at her hand,
still up, and slowly brought it down, gazing at it in wonder as if
she had never seen it before. She brought the hand softly against
her other and looked at Chiffrey. “Understand? What you call the
dome has returned to the sea that bore her. Our sea. Its first
home.”

“Of course, of course” said Penny's father,
a look of sudden enlightenment in his eyes. “The only explanation
that makes sense. Of course. The dome started here, was born here.
And first evolved here into what it has become!”

“Then it left,” Malcolm added, nodding, eyes
still closed. He kept on nodding.

“You’re saying….” Chiffrey stared at Penny,
as if he wanted to speak, but he seemed to lose his voice. Finally,
he turned to her father and managed, “Could you run that by me
again?”

Penny's father glanced at Malcolm to see if
he was going to add any more, but the young man had gone quiet
again, so her father went on. “The dome must be as much a
self-contained ecosystem as a single entity. It’s not a ship. It
doesn’t need one. It is its own ship and
a world unto
itself
! A unique anomaly, another path of evolution, but only
this single one because it multiplied and evolved inside itself,
not outside like the rest of terrestrial life. It’s a living world!
And it began here, most likely long before us. Long before. At some
point in the primordial past, it gained the ability to move without
obvious physical means. I know it sounds incredible, but don’t you
see? If it could do what we have all witnessed, there seems no
reason why it could not travel anywhere, including the farthest
reaches of space. I have no idea how, but think of it, we are
talking about an evolved consciousness that’s had a continuous
lifespan of millions, perhaps even tens of millions of years. What
wouldn’t be possible? Imagine what we might become and what we
might be capable of in another million years or so? Assuming we
haven’t destroyed ourselves, of course.”