CHAPTER 61
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.”
“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 clear
ly, 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.
CHAPTER 62
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.”
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br /> “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.
CHAPTER 63
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.
Far From The Sea We Know Page 37
