Far From The Sea We Know (49 page)

“The fish you let go,” Andrew said. “Was it
from the sea?”

“We have some migratory species here.
Dorado, for instance, like a salmon. For years, I accepted what
Sola told me as truth, and when I found out that the fish I saw
that day hatches, lives and dies in this river, yes, I was sad, but
I excused Sola because she was not educated as I was.”

“But later, when studying
at the university, I was on a field trip on the coast. I was
daydreaming at a tide pool, when my professor happened by and
stopped for a moment. He said, ‘A little world in the making, your
pool. You almost can see it, can’t you? All life begins in the
sea,’ and he walked away. This hit me like a cool wave on a burning
summer day. I looked and it was like time stopped. I
saw
it so clearly, past understanding, you
know? I saw it all in a moment, everything. Sure, I knew this
information, ‘life evolved from the sea’ was already in my head,
but somehow in that moment of gazing into that tide pool, it became
real for me in a way that it never was before. More real than real.
I felt life, all life, stretching backward and forward. I felt the
life in me and the life in that pool as the same.”

“When I told this to people, they laughed,
so I don’t tell it anymore, but only to you now because you have
this too, I know. And Sola! Sola’s eyes and voice came back to me
then. Her soul was so strong. She was there that day by the pool.
It was true what she told me. It’s all right in front of us.
Everything will sing you its song if you listen. And all the
stories go back to the same place and time, and in my heart I am
sure they all go forward to the same place and time. Ah, you know
what I mean, don’t you? I know you do. Yes?”

When she spoke these words to him, it was as
if the unblinking light of the polestar had come down to stay in
his heart and burn forever.

All he could say at the time was, “Sometimes
I know. Not as often as I wish.”

She sighed and gave a little laugh. “How I
know! Still, worth it when it happens, yes?”

“No regrets,” he said.
“It’s my life. I want it to be
our
life.”

“It will be! Sola saw this for me, my whole
life ahead of me, what was possible. I know she did.”

“What happened to Sola?”

“The day after the adventure with the fish
on the causeway, we found a note from her. She had learned to write
while she was with us, which she did as slowly as if engraving
tablets. The note said it was time for her to return to her people.
She was needed. We never saw her again. I cried for days.

When I was older, I finally found her. She
never really told us where she came from, so it took some time. As
it was, she had died two years before I got there. Her people
showed me where she was buried. Her grave is a special place for
them and on it are placed many small white shells….”

Valentina’s eyes were gleaming, and as her
hand came up to the open neck of her blouse, the necklace she
always wore caught the light of the setting sun. “She is still with
me. A life is never lost.”

Valentina turned and linked her arm with
his. “The lemon ice, you must have one now. Danino’s is still the
best. Come, we go.”

His eyes opened. The light from the porthole
was brighter now, the sun tearing through the few clouds on the
horizon, gleaming the sea into a wide expanse of dancing light. As
he let his breath out, the last of a great burden left with it.
Ever since the appearance of the whale, the old sadness that lived
deep inside him had begun to leave. Now he finally understood
Valentina’s last gift. He dressed in the early light of this new
day and silently made his way to the bridge where the string of
shells and silver suspended above the compass waited for him as
true as the North Star.

Two days later, Penny stood at the railing
on the foredeck looking out upon the sea. Here and there, seaweed
that had been sucked up to the surface by the dome’s departure
still remained, but most of it had sunk down to the depths again.
The glow they had seen the first night had not returned. This
morning, Navy ships, including research and salvage vessels, had
arrived without incident and were cruising back and forth as if
celebrating their restored dominion. After the departure of the
dome, there no longer seemed any reason to object to their
presence. Life on the
Valentina
was back to what would have
to pass for normal.

“I looked for you this morning,” Chiffrey
said as he walked up to Penny. He leaned back on the railing and
squinted into the sun, his wrap-around sunglasses perched uselessly
on top of his head. His face appeared older.

“Your people giving you grief?” she stated
more than asked.

“My immediate superior is mad that I ‘let
the fish get away,’ while some of those less close to the action
are starting to believe I fell for a line that would be rejected by
the worst tabloid. Or maybe they’ve just decided to think that way.
It’s becoming inconvenient to be associated with what is now deemed
by some to have been little more than a greased pig chase.”

“No one really believed Matthew when all
this began,” she said. “Not even me, really.”

“Yeah, and now it’s my turn. The irony has
not gone unnoticed.”

“Still, you’ve got hard evidence. The
propellers, the divers. The lost time of the sub crews and their
chronometers. They can’t ignore that.”

“They can find easier explanations for some
of these incidents. And the propellers have gone missing.”

“What?”

“At first I thought our teleporting dome was
behind it,” Chiffrey said. “Now it looks like they may have just
been ‘mislaid’ after they were moved for safekeeping. There are
people that just want all this to go away, because there’s no box
to put it in. It doesn’t help that the various components of all
the incidents have been classified so tightly by so many competing
agencies that no one has the full picture anymore.”

Chiffrey smiled wanly and sighed as he
looked away before saying, “You haven’t heard anything from
Matthew, I suppose?”

“You never quit, do you?”

He shrugged. “Anything at all would be
appreciated.”

“We’ll never have it all.”

“Maybe, but I have to hand in a report
tonight. What I have so far is going to go down like a
three-day-old corndog. But forget that for a moment, and let me run
this by you.” He cleared his throat and looked down for a few
seconds, then said, “All ancient cultures had those who were
believed to have some special relationship with divine or
semi-divine beings of one kind or another. Some came back from
their encounters to utter wisdom and prophecy. Or as heroes. Others
came back mad, their minds broken.”

“You got that from my father.”

“Indeed I did and, disturbing to me as this
sounds, it’s starting to make some sense to me. Your father also
told me that if the dome was around long before we got here, then
it’s possible that humankind’s early encounters with it might
explain some of our legends and myths. Or maybe all of them!
Wouldn’t that just irritate some people no end, especially since
you called the dome ‘she’ the other night.”

“Listen,” Penny said, “it doesn’t have a sex
in anything like the usual sense. Don’t make that into more than it
was. And it’s not God.”

“But some would make it that way, while
others would be enraged at even the smallest suggestion of such a
thing.”

“Even if the dome had never been here, we
would have come up with our own stories of why our lives are the
way they are and where we will spend eternity if we just behave and
beseech the right idols. Survival first, which means some way we
can explain the world to ourselves that we can live with. Truth, if
at all, comes a distant second. It’s that or go mad for most of
us.”

“Like Jack Ripler?”

“The same fire so cozy in the hearth can
blaze the heart to a char.”

“Amen,” Chiffrey said, finally bringing his
sunglasses down to his eyes.

She watched as some passing gray whales fed,
probably on the krill or plankton that had temporarily become
abundant in the area. Stopping to eat was a rare act for them
during migration. Yet the whales’ behavior wasn’t abnormal. The
buffet may have simply been too rich for them to pass up. It was
unusual behavior but still within norms. There had been no sign of
Matthew’s whale. No sign of Matthew or the dome. There wouldn’t
be.

“But you can see why we have to be careful,”
Chiffrey continued after a while. “Lot of people would go all kinds
of crazy if presented with the fact that a godlike entity has come
back uninvited. And, with still no idea why, what would we tell
them? It would be the social equivalent of weapons grade plutonium
if it got out. You understand that, I hope.”

She looked at him and saw questions hovering
like moths around his face. She shook her head slowly. “The closer
we think we’re getting to understand this, the further away from it
we probably are.”

“Really? I hoped we might be coming to
something.”

“Trying to talk it out is just putting one
empty box into another. But that’s what your people want to do, box
it and bury it, right?”

“That would not be my choice if the decision
was mine to make.”

She turned and walked away, knowing that,
indeed, it wouldn’t be.

Later in the afternoon, Chiffrey gave them
the news that some of the involved agencies were insisting they
have some of their own people on board. Her father did not put up a
fight this time. They arrived the next day, three civilians and
half dozen Navy personnel, but it was obvious the civilians were
making all the calls. They were courteous enough, but they never
gave or used their names.

Chiffrey, to his credit, did what he could
to make this less painful. He told the new arrivals that they
should leave things like they were until they got back to port.
“Like a crime scene,” he had said. They had come with their own
containers, but Becka, standing alongside Chiffrey, made a
convincing case that the integrity of the tissue samples from the
dome would be in jeopardy if they were moved even a little without
special equipment. In the end the newcomers elected to simply seal
the labs and place them under Navy guard. They locked down all
outgoing transmissions, including data transmissions through their
own satellites, which even Chiffrey thought foolish. They even went
so far as to place one of the civilians on the bridge. There was no
reason given, and since all signs of the transceiver were long
gone, it seemed little more than a demonstration of control.

When Penny finally awoke after a long rest,
it seemed as if the previous twenty-four hours had all been a
dream, that what she had known and felt then, on awakening was just
a dimly remembered bedtime story. Yet some of the feeling remained
because her sadness at Matthew’s departure still burned like a
banked fire in her heart. The rest of her felt empty. The
hurly-burly of her old life seemed to have packed its tents and
cheap displays to skulk off on more profitable prowls. There was
space between her thoughts, and in these spaces blessed silence
reigned.

Out on the foredeck, Penny glanced up at the
bridge. The tall Navy guard still stood behind Emory, who hunched
resolutely over the wheel. She sighed as if a life had left
her.

I
’ve had enough.

She wandered into the galley to check the
status of the coffee urn. Her father was at the long table nearest
the port side alone. She sat down next to him.

“Dad?”

“Yes, dear?”

“They’re going to take the ship, aren’t
they?”

Her father’s face clouded. “Yes, I’m afraid
so. Almost certain.”

“But why? They can crate up everything and
haul it away somewhere, can’t they?”

“Because of the transceiver.”

“They’re just looking for an excuse. There’s
no longer any trace of it.”

“Well, exactly. That’s why they want the
whole ship, to find out if it did anything, and if it is still
active.”

“Chiffrey seemed to believe they wanted to
just forget the whole thing and move on.”

“I’m sure that’s right for many of the
parties involved. But not all. And if everyone else declares
victory and goes home, it’s convenient for those few who want to
delve deeper. And they may even be right to do so, who can say, but
taking our ship is the wrong way.” He took a slow sip of tea, long
grown cold.

“Did you tell them this?”

“Of course, but it’s not the way they work.
They don’t want us around, getting in their hair. Not much we can
do except protest, which we have and will continue to do.”

She saw the look hidden in his eyes.

“Dad, I’m sorry. They’ll take the
Bluedrop
, too.”

“Because of the disappearing hatch, if
nothing else. Yes. And we’ll carry on.”

“They’ll have all our records, all our
samples, everything in the end, and we’ll have nothing.”

“Not completely. I think we may still be, if
not in the loop, within sight of it now and then. Our Lieutenant
Chiffrey is insisting on that. And for the record, he was against
them taking the
Valentina
.”

“Sure, because he still views us as
assets.”

“That may be part of it but, I rather
believe, not all of it.”

She paused for a moment and in a low voice
said, “Dad, I need to get back.”

“Well then, you’re a mariner after all.”

She looked at him, puzzled.

“I sometimes feel the reason all sailors
venture out is only so they’ll eventually have a reason to
return.”

He gazed out the galley porthole as the
Valentina
came about. “You can feel it in the ship already,
can’t you? We’re heading home.”