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.”
CHAPTER 58
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.”
CHAPTER 59
“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.”
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.”
CHAPTER 60
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 ou
r 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.”
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