Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
The End
Acknowledgements
Notes
Copyright 2014 by Frank M. Sheldon. All Rights reserved. No part of this manuscript may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except for a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. S-50506
Far from the Sea We Know
by Frank M. Sheldon
For Caroline
“Fiction is obliged to stick to the possibilities. Truth isn’t.”
– Mark Twain
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“The Time will come when those who dedicate themselves to Science and those who devote themselves to the Divine will find each other and, from that day, be surprised forever.”
– Doctor Martin Bell, Founder of The Point Kinatai Marine Science Center
CHAPTER 1
Somewhere off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, not long before the beginning of the twenty-first century…
“Three points off the starboard bow!” Matthew shouted above the grinding gears. It did no good. The hulk of a man he had yelled at still stood staring at the ocean swells as unseeing as a stunned cod. To be safe, he disengaged the winch, took a step back and leaned hard against the gunnels of the Eva Shay before speaking again.
“The whale up front,” Matthew yelled again while pointing toward the western horizon. “Gilliard, the whale is Purple!”
“I ain’t…deaf,” the man eventually mumbled back, and that too was strange, for Gilliard’s mouth was famous on the waterfront for having a life of its own. Matthew had never seen the man so utterly speechless. This gave strength to doubt, so he again looked westward to compare the clear evidence of his own eyes with what his mind argued could never be.
They had just been securing the last of the gear for the trip back to the southern reaches of British Columbia. As always seemed to happen after the last of the catch was in, the adrenaline that had kept them going for six days and nights of fishing was beginning to dry up. Yet now, as if reading his concerns, one by one the tired crew finally looked up and soon all were staring out in the same direction. There before them, fifty or more gray whales in tight formation were heading north on their annual migration. An unprecedented grouping like this was incredible enough, yet their odd behavior was not what held their gaze now. It was the whale leading them.
No one spoke a word until Gilliard’s voice, at last reborn, came booming above the sound of the ship’s engine. “Goddamn freak or maybe…hey! Bet you a beer as cold as my old lady’s heart that those science bug-heads are behind this.” He paused to launch a huge gob of spit over the rail. “Going to drive us all down to handouts, spending our tax money like it’s their due! What you bet?”
Matthew gave him a sharp glance before looking back to the whales.
“Now, professor, you going back to your schooling down in the States next week, ain’t yah? Still believe you can become one of those useless fools?” Gilliard spat again. “You never even learned to bait a hook right, so I doubt they’ll let you join their precious little tribe but, hey, why don’t you ask them why they did it? Painting whales purple so they can track ’em or something? Hell, why stop there, why not give ’em cute little hats—Hey! You listening to me?”
Matthew was not. He was still facing seaward, completely transfixed. With the light behind them, the gray whales stood out clearly from the distant swells, their arching backs pouring in and out of the seas like warm tar. Then he felt the Eva Shay come about and glanced up to see Captain Juvinor in the pilothouse with his hand on the wheel. He had propped opened the window and brought a pair of ancient binoculars up to his old, yet smooth, pink face.
Gilliard, his eyes squinted, looked up toward the wheelhouse. “So what is it, Captain?”
“I can only tell you what it ain’t,” the Captain called down, continuing to peer through the binoculars. “She’s no whale God ever made.”
“Devil fish then,” Gilliard said under his breath. He glanced around, but his smirking face found no takers.
Matthew vaulted over a hatch cover, and ran up toward the bow. The cold spray on his face was reassuring, but nothing else was. Everything he saw seemed etched into his eyes, every smell and sound amplified. A cold wind played up from behind as they changed heading and blew a lock of dark curly hair across his eyes. He pushed the hair back under his baseball cap, finding the sensation of his hand comforting.
The Captain’s new heading would soon have them closing in on the whales. The unmistakable smell of fresh-plowed earth coming from the immense sea mammals wafted past Matthew like a false call to home. He watched the whales rise and fall in unison, their slow dance hypnotic, but kept going back to the lead whale. Her hide was covered with large blotches of garishly purple skin, intermingled with the usual dark shades of gray. The cartoon-colored flukes, splotched with violet and magenta were an insult to his eyes.
Matthew looked astern to the other crew who were lining the gunwales and yelled, “Anybody have a camera?”
He turned back, and every joint in his body instantly locked. The lead whale was suddenly much closer and had turned straight toward the Eva Shay. Now it stood upright in the water as if spy hopping, but was dead still. The whale’s colored surfaces began to shimmer and the light seared his eyes like a cold flame.
Everything stopped.
“No…,” Matthew whispered to no one. “Wait…”
Bright burning gray, the world erased, acid taste and smell of violets, always the same, never the same…
His knees had given out and his hands were grasping the railing so hard that his fingers were bone white. Crosscurrents of feeling flooded through and left him drained. He shook his head
, but wished he had not. For the first time in his life, he was seasick.
He got his breath back and tried to speak. Words rolled out of his mouth, yet he did not know them as his own and they left without memory. His heart pounded to a crescendo, then calmed as the reverie fell away like a morning mist. A gull’s cry overhead ended in a mad laugh.
Matthew looked in every direction. There was not a whale in sight. All his crewmates had lost their footing. Some slumped listlessly over hatch covers. One man was trying to stand. Gilliard sat on the deck like a baby, with glazed eyes and splayed feet.
Matthew found it hard to remember what had happened. He tried to play it back in his mind and describe it in words to himself, but his attention kept wandering.
He looked at his watch: five-seventeen in the afternoon on May twenty-ninth. At least he got the time.
Up in the wheelhouse, old Livijo was shouting as he stared at the sonar unit.
“Haaa,” Livijo yelled, “I have the fish finder, and it go so crazy!” He thumped the instrument like a preacher on his bible, gripping the open window frame with the other hand. A desperate smile contorted his face as he glanced back at the screen.
“First is stuff. Stuff all over the place, and now nothing—wait! Wait, is back, back now, the screen back, but no show the damn thing. They…gone, gone, all them gone. Bottom, yes, is right, nothing else, they move so fast, too fast, sweet Mother of God, me never—”
“Livijo!” Captain Juvinor silenced the old man. Sadness came to Juvinor’s eyes. He closed them and whispered something to himself, paused for a moment, and then leaned out the window toward the crew. “There’s a weather front moving on us, time we get out of here. Okay, feet on the deck, now! See to your line, Gilliard.”
It was late. They needed to finish stowing the gear and ice the rest of the fish. He made himself work again, but he kept a watch on the horizon. The sky was darkening.
“Painting whales,” Gilliard said, as he went through the motions of tightening already taut lines, his voice robbed again of its power. “Ungodly bastards to do a thing like that.”
His words broke into mutterings, and then trailed off to one quiet sob.
CHAPTER 2
Matthew had gone to have a drink at the High Life, his favorite bar in Victoria. It was his last day before heading back for classes. Through the picture window looking south, a light from over the water in Washington State blinked like messages waiting. In many ways he preferred his quieter life here in British Columbia, but he was looking forward to completing his degree.
Unfortunately, Gilliard had just spotted him and invited himself to Matthew’s table, and was now going on and on about his belief that an experiment gone wrong was surely responsible for all they had witnessed on the Eva Shay.
“Why’d you have to bring that up?” Matthew said. He stared into his glass, annoyed. Matthew did not want to get into it at all, not with these other characters from the bar around. He signaled the waitress, so he could pay his tab and slip out.
A regular from the next table looked over his shoulder toward Matthew.
“You saw a purple whale?” he said in a voice loud enough for the whole room to hear. “Might be some kind of sign, I guess, but kinda early.” He leaned toward Matthew unsuccessfully hiding his smirk and said, “After all, the Millennium’s still a couple years off!” Most of the bar’s frequenters laughed, but not too loud.
“We all seen it,” Gilliard shot back as he slammed his glass down on the table. “Captain Juvinor, the whole crew. Swimming at the head of these grays like a circus parade! Them bastards down at the professor here’s school in the States did it, but he denies it to my face.”
“Of course he would,” the regular said, leering at Matthew. He tipped his chair forward. “But what’s this about them disappearing?”
“Lies,” Gilliard said, yawning. “They all dove under, that’s all. We couldn’t hang around and wait, just got the hell out of there ’fore the weather front broke.”
What?
Gilliard made this last comment casually as if nothing much had happened when the whales disappeared. Then again, Matthew’s own memories had by now faded like a dream at dawn.
“You know,” Gilliard blathered on, “I heard this thing the other night on cable, about how the scientists can change animals now, mix them up, maybe even make new ones.” The deadly serious expression he wore made his face almost unrecognizable. The bar patrons stared as he went on. “Wouldn’t surprise me one bit if they were doing something like that across the Strait, and who knows,” he continued in a stage whisper, “maybe we saw one that got away.”
By this time, those at the other tables were smirking and giving each other elbows and winks. “Ooo, stop, Gilliard, you’re scaring me!” one of the regulars fake-whimpered.
“It coulda!” Gilliard bellowed. “Look at the trouble those bug-heads caused us already, and the government don’t give a—hey, where you going?”
“Getting late,” Matthew said. “Got to work tomorrow.”
Gilliard turned his head and spat on the floor. “If by work, you mean poking fish brains in a lab with the rest of those Birken-stockinged ninnies at that useless school, well you can—”
“Gilliard!” yelled the barmaid, “How many times I told you not to spit on the floor!”
“Then put the spittoon back! This place used to be fine, now you got that overpriced microbrew piss and next thing we’ll be sipping herb tea and stuffing tofu up our—”
“Out of here!” the barmaid yelled.
“Then who’ll walk you home, huh?”
The whole bar laughed again, and Matthew used the distraction to make an unnoticed exit, though the damage was surely done. Around the waterfront, they would get years out of a story like this, and he was sick of it already.
Matthew walked quickly in the light rain. Despite the on and off drizzle that had fallen through the day, it was warm for late May. The wet air soothed the flush of emotions burning through him, and he took in a few deep breaths to clear his head. Maybe what happened in the bar had been for the best. It was only the debt he incurred pursuing a degree in marine science that brought him back to the life of a fisherman, the little money he earned during his late-spring break from studies being better than nothing. What he needed was to focus on his degree in marine science, get away from a world of busted gear and diminishing catches, not to mention idiots like Gilliard, and do something with his life. Still the doubts, as usual, trailed him home.
Twelve years before, after a halfhearted stumble through college, he decided not to go into his father’s retail clothing business in Vancouver as had been hoped. Against the wishes of his family to see him safely established in the salary man’s world, he had instead moved further north up the coast of British Columbia, to a cabin by the sea. He took odd jobs when he could find them, barely keeping up with his low rent and the need to feed himself. Even if his family saw his choice as a long step down, he enjoyed working with his hands and living away from the hustle. His simple life ended when he became involved with a group that tried unsuccessfully to stop encroaching development. That, and a failed relationship with a woman who in the end left him for one of the developers, left him deeply disillusioned.
He moved back south to Victoria, where a friend managed to secure him a trial berth on a commercial fishing boat. Matthew’s first trip out on the Eva Shay was far more arduous than any other work he had ever done. The crew labored around the clock, resting only to sleep when they could. In spite of that, he took to a life that left him little energy to dwell on the past. He did well enough that they called him again, and he had been going out sporadically ever since, filling the ever more frequent down times due to quotas with the odd small building project. For a while, this was all he needed to do, and he was content.
Eventually, however, he had come to realize that the life of a fisherman would never be his own. He would never be fully accepted as one of them. It was a world he could on
ly visit. As for the other crew on the Eva Shay, they could only keep trying to make a living at commercial fishing. Catches were dwindling but there was nothing else they could turn their hands to that bring in close to their share of even the current hauls.
For Matthew, it was then that a clear calling emerged for the first time in his life: marine science. He would make a place for himself on his own terms. He went back to school part-time to complete his undergraduate requirements and then steadily worked his way towards completing a graduate degree. It had taken thousands of hours of work and nearly all his free time for the last few years. More than once, it had seemed impossible. In the end, it had proved only difficult, as long as he avoided distractions. And the sighting of a strange whale that no one would believe was a distraction. He would not take on a fool’s errand again.
He rounded the last corner and stepped along the wooden planks of the walkway to his place. He lived in the back of what had once been a net factory, and a few years before had helped the owner convert it into simple living spaces. When he was given a choice as to which space he wanted, without hesitation he had picked the loft. It was perched over one of the smaller harbors on the west side of the waterfront, held up like an offering on pilings that seemed to grow out of the sea like a drowned forest. Even at low tide, he could hear water lapping, but for the most part the place was quiet. Other people found the smell of rotting seaweed, fish and the occasional whiff of diesel offensive, but somehow it kept Matthew feeling clean. He could never explain why.
He walked in and threw himself down on the couch. As he looked out the window toward the harbor, he remembered his fishing mates. He would miss them and the life, in spite of everything. Although not as big as most of them, over time his muscles had become hard and tough, and gradually they had accepted him, if not as one of their own, then at least as part of the crew.
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