Later, the still nameless civilian took over and essentially went through all the questioning again to see if he could shake their story. Since they avoided any lies the first time, they were able to keep to the same line. In the end, the investigator expressed no satisfaction or thanks but simply explained the obligations that came with the security clearance they were given on the Valentina, as if he had given the same speech a thousand times before. At this point though, and not only because of Matthew, neither she nor her father had any wish to publicize what had happened anyway, so they agreed to the restrictions without resistance. They would keep what happened on the Valentina to themselves as long as the incident was classified, which most likely would mean their whole lives.
The agencies involved had nothing legitimate they could draw on to bring Penny or her father into custody regarding the Valentina’s inexplicable disappearance. More to the point, harassing them would simply attract the glare of publicity. The investigator had told them if they stuck to the agreement, they would never be bothered again. So far, he had kept his word. In the weeks that followed the interview, no one else came to their door.
This included reporters. In the news accounts, all the leaks, unintended and otherwise, had combined with the public’s tendency to either dismiss or exaggerate. The last known voyage of the Valentina was distorted into unrecognizable fictions. Experiments gone wrong. Radiation accident on a submarine. Tabloid theories, including UFOs and Atlantis. In the end, it seemed, all the conflicting tales taken together canceled each other out and many came to believe it was nothing more than overblown summer filler. A few well-placed, but misleading, words in the media from those behind Chiffrey accelerated that process, but it was probably inevitable as what falls beyond our comprehension slips past the hooks of memory. After a week, the story dropped out of the news cycle as the public moved on to other entries from the daily all-you-can-eat menu of endless distraction.
The evidence that the crew had gathered, little as it was, had disappeared along with the Valentina. Chiffrey’s employers would keep the few scraps they possessed for themselves, hidden away to be scrutinized in some secure location. The videos, scans, and even the affected Navy personnel could only yield so much information.
So what. Penny no longer cared about convincing anyone of anything. Let them all believe whatever they would. She only wanted time and solitude.
After their return from the Valentina, the afterglow of Penny’s encounter with Matthew in the tank had lifted her up for days, but as time wore on it slowly faded, and left her feeling the like some cast-off skin whose owner would never return. Denying it at first, she began to slip into despondency, but was able to keep this to herself. She was surprised at how well she outwardly carried on just as if all was as it should be. Later, she resolved that although she may not have that rare song singing in her heart anymore, she would still keep a place for it.
In late August, she gave notice to the research team she had been a part of that her leave of absence would be permanent. She had remained at her parents’ house without really deciding. Her parents never mentioned it.
The next few months passed slowly. While the nights grew longer, daytime was in steady retreat and seemed in danger of surrendering forever to eternal darkness. The rains that year were light but almost constant, and the grounds around the house seemed perpetually half-hidden in slow rolling mist.
“Your mother and I are going to meet an old friend in Bali,” her father announced one morning. “And we’d like to stay there for a few months. Kind of a retreat, really, and one we need to do together.”
“So, you decided.”
“I sent in my resignation to the Point this morning. It was that or be forced out. No regrets,” he said as if reading her thoughts. “We all knew this was coming, and I’ve come around to believing it might be the best thing that could ever happen to me. Already it is, pardon the cliché, as if a great weight has been taken off my shoulders.”
“Good to hear that, and maybe you’re right.”
“We’ll be gone till next July. Think you could look after things here for us?”
“Give the devil something to do, right?” she said with a quick laugh. “To keep her out of mischief. Of course.”
“So you’ll have a retreat as well,” her mother added. “On your own. A bit of heaven.”
Her mother and father had never been overly protective of their children. They knew Penny needed solitude at regular intervals and perhaps needed even more now. They trusted her. She suspected they were going away at least as much for her as for themselves.
A few weeks after they set sail on a classic liner, on a day made dark by the dense clouds of late December, she was going through some old papers in her room, sorting them in piles, most of them to be discarded. The world outside had reached that pause of the pendulum before the season finally swings back. The air outside was still, the wind having lost its way in the mountains somewhere. She was enjoying the song of winter birds in near silence until the sound of an engine rose up like a prelude from the driveway below the cliff. An unannounced visitor to see her parents? Sounded like a motorcycle. An old one. She walked out to wait at the stone terrace.
“Wonderful to see you, sugar. As welcome a sight as the sun would be.”
Chiffrey, back to his old self. Or maybe not. He was wearing an old leather jacket with a flannel shirt hanging out below, and well-worn black jeans with grease on the cuffs.
He leaned on the galvanized iron railing that ran around the terrace in a semicircle, his back to the sea. His smile had returned, but not completely the old one. He seemed different. Though he looked like he had been spending much time outside, it was more than that.
“Yeah, this is me now,” he said. “Gone to earth, back on the street.”
“You left the Air Force?”
“More like it left me.”
“And what about your…other employer?”
“That too. I left it all. Had a little encouragement truth to tell. Hey, you believe what I’m saying.” He laughed a little and shook his head. “Not like you.”
“You’re not like you. Something’s gone.” She gave him another quick once-over and sniffed a few times. “You even smell different.”
He laughed, but didn’t say anything. Instead, he turned and looked out across the Strait for a while. A lone fishing boat was passing by.
“I started seeing things differently than some people thought I should,” he finally said. “After a decent mourning period for my career, I made it my own decision before it became someone else’s. Just walked away from the whole game.”
“Must have been hard.”
“Hard to come to, but once I did, I was done.” He ran his fingers through his now longer hair. “Anyway, Becka and I were staying together. I thought we might get married. She turned me down gently, but it was not just a ‘let’s wait a while’ thing. She’s living on a boat again, by the way, but not at sea. In Ladakh, on a mountain lake in northern India. Just ‘needed to be there’ she told me, but not why. Another string to bow, I guess.”
He turned toward the house again and took a small step sideways along the path back. “Well, just wanted to check in, say hello, see how you were.”
She shook her head. “No need to hint. Come along, we’ll have some tea.”
While Penny poured hot water into the pot, Chiffrey sat at the ancient kitchen table and casually examined its surface. The top had long since worn down to bare wood. Her mother scrubbed its vaguely rounded surface with sand once a month, but otherwise, she let it take whatever stains found their way into the bleached grain. In so doing, the table had become a record of the heart of this house, a story that spanned her entire life.
“The way things worked out in the end made a number of people extremely unhappy with me,” Chiffrey said. “Some felt I mishandled the whole thing, but the loss of the Valentina with the DNA samples and other stuff was especially bad. It was my idea to leave ju
st the Captain on board until everyone else disembarked, if you remember.”
“Appreciated.”
“Glad to hear, but no one else did. And there were plenty of others who never quite bought what happened, and as time went by with little hard evidence, they bought it less and looked for other explanations. They’ve archived the study of what evidence they do have so deeply that it’s become almost a myth. Even the few supporters I had knew that someone had to fall on their sword for the whole mess. At that point, my name might as well have been Lieutenant Someone.”
“And no honor burial.”
“I don’t really blame them. I mean the people who wanted me gone. It’s a risk that comes with that kind of work. Just the way the game has to go sometimes, and we all go in knowing that. Thing is, when Captain Thorssen beamed out with the Valentina, I was not only stunned like everyone else, but stunned that I felt damn glad he’d done it! Wished I’d gone with him, to tell you the truth. That’s when I knew the job was no longer for me.”
“And now?”
“The mind is such a sticky web,” he said. “Good for catching flies, but you try to think some things out and you only catch yourself.”
He nodded as if waiting for her to respond, but she had nothing to add so he continued on his own. “The history that thing must have. Deep in the ocean, growing, but never growing old. Never dying.”
He looked out the kitchen window at the now falling rain. “Guess I’m going to get wet on the way back.”
He lowered himself a little in the seat, hunched down over his steaming cup, and said, “So, okay, it was born and raised here, been around a long time, took a little holiday and came back. And might be gone again or not, no one knows for sure. Far as I know, at least. I’m mostly out of the loop now. But if you take humankind as a whole, we’ve also had a long and continuous history on this planet.”
“The difference is our generations roll by and most of us forget and are forgotten.”
“We’ve learned how to preserve experience. We pass on what we know and future generations build on that.”
“If you mean information, yes. We acquire, preserve, and build on knowledge. The dome remembers everything, not the way we do, but as if it’s always all happening now. Everything is one big ‘now’ for it, she can hold it all like a grain of sand in the palm of your hand. Everything! That’s the clearest way I can put it.”
“Well, you didn’t really have that long…”
“By the clock, maybe not, but it felt like a lifetime. Believe me.”
“I have no reason not to.”
“Well, we all lie, it’s all we can do no matter how hard we try. You and me, everyone. That is the fundamental human tragedy. For most of us, by the time we have an inkling of what might be possible, we are near the end of our existence and it’s too late.”
“Kind of pessimistic. And strange to hear. You seemed to have had such a strong connection that night on the ship. Inspired, if you will, though I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, I’m sorry to say.”
“Lately, it feels like it happened to someone else.”
“I think that’s one reason Becka left. Went looking for what she lost, maybe.” He sipped from his cup then looked at her carefully. “If you feel so disconnected now, why do you keep evangelizing? Sorry, but you used to hold some of the others onboard up for scrutiny for much the same reason.”
“And I probably still would.” She got up and turned on the oven to give a little warmth against the chill. “There’s a difference between how something first emerges and what we later twist it into for the sake of what we can bear.”
“Amen,” he said with a smile. He watched her for a moment, then stared into his tea as if to divine some answers before adding, “Still, I keep wondering about the ‘Orb,’ as Becka now calls it.”
“Way too precious,” she said solemnly, and then laughed.
“Hey, I’m trying to be serious,” he said, smiling. “Listen, here’s a question, sugar. If you or I were to have as much experience, a life where even millennia might seem but a moment, and there was no one else like you anywhere, and you remembered everything, what would you be?”
“Only a fool could know,” she said. Then closed her eyes. “Everything and nothing.”
“Now who’s being precious?”
She laughed and shook her head. “Listen, it’s a waste of time. You’ll never figure it out. It can’t be figured out.”
“Maybe, but my reality is that I have to try until some better way comes along. And it hasn’t, believe me.”
She leaned over toward him and looked into his eyes unblinking. “Out there. On the Valentina. That was reality, or at least a taste of it. Most of the rest of our lives we spend in a little cage of our own making, bumbling around showing our teeth as we lurch into one another. We settle for a shambling fake of a life, and burn through our days, all the while hoping for the unlikely happy ending. You believe that’s reality?”
“No need to sugarcoat it for me.” He stared out the window for a while before saying more. “I know most of that song, and it’s been around as long as people have.”
“And why is that, do you think?”
“Because there’s too much truth in it to ignore, much as we might like, though I hope I’ll never find it’s the only truth.”
“Same here.”
Chiffrey raised his cup in a toast. “We’re more alike than you might like to admit. My cupcake’s just frosted a little different, is all.”
He drank the rest of his tea and eyed the pot, so she poured him some more. He nodded in gratitude and took another sip, peering at her over the rim like a puppy on the wrong side of the screen door. “Reminds me. Went to the metaphysical section of a bookstore the other day, thumbed through a few volumes of new and forgotten lore. Some of what I read did give rise to wonder, but I can’t see me going that way. I just wish I understood what really happened out there.”
“Maybe you just don’t realize yet that you have understood something.”
“Meaning…?”
“Well, you’re sitting here now instead of skulking around on whatever your next assignment would have been. That should tell you enough.”
He let out a deep sigh. “After I bailed on my career, I spent too much time wondering why. I mean…I never had the encounter experience that seemed to touch most everyone else onboard. Why was I left out? And that I was has to be at least part of the reason Becka moved on without me. And why what I thought was my life moved on without me.”
“Think back a little,” she said. “I wasn’t exactly an early convert, if you recall, and I can remember feeling a little like you do now.” Chiffrey just looked off at the wall, nodding vaguely. She didn’t know what else to say. They sat together in silence, drinking from their cups, taking in a little warmth against the winter. “Pie?” she finally asked. He smiled, and she put half an apple pie in the now-hot oven to heat it up.
“Why the dance?” he said. “Why won’t this thing make direct contact? Can only be one reason. It can’t. Or at least, can’t all on its own. Needs someone. That would explain Matthew. Maybe Lorraine, too, and to some extent everyone else who was touched in some way. And the Captain with his ship, apparently. How about you?”
“Mine was a one-night stand, and the bed was cold and empty in the morning. But to answer your question, before he left, my father came up with this analogy: What if you were trying to speak to someone, but the softest you could make your voice would still kill them? You’d have to filter or dampen it somehow. Or maybe find someone who could take that volume. Do that, and they can pass it on at a lower volume.”
“Only it wasn’t a person,” he said, showing no surprise. “You mean the whale. So, it can’t communicate with us directly. It needed something in between, like a mediator. Or filter.”
“The decibel analogy is far from perfect, however. It’s not just a matter of intensity. It would be as if there were an untranslatable language.
”
“Maybe not perfectly, but every language can be translated.”
“The dome, which is really a sphere, has no language at all, or at least not one in the sense that we would understand. Why would it need a language, after all, if it’s the only one if its kind? Language is essentially symbols. It doesn’t use symbols. For me, it was a direct link to knowing. But there’s another reason it doesn’t just say, ‘good morning, what a day, huh?’ Back in the tank, for one long moment, it was as if I took us all in as we appear to the dome.”
“And?”
“Mad.”
“She…it’s angry at us?”
“No, ‘mad’ as in crazy, and it’s us who are crazy. We’re like a snarling dog with its leg caught in a trap, dangerous even if you’re trying to help. And if you do manage to help, the dog just runs back to jealously guard its dirty little chew toy, instantly forgetting everything else. Or tries.”
“Kind of a bleak assessment even by my standards.”
“We expend an enormous amount of energy and resources to make sure we never know how bleak.”
“So, no hugs coming our way from our new neighbor.”
“We probably got more than we deserved.”
“Well, I kind of hope we deserve all the help we can get, but I take your point.”
She didn’t comment. A winter fly appeared and landed on the table amid a few grains of spilled sugar. Chiffrey watched it eat for a while before saying, “In case you didn’t know, Jack’s been moved to a private psychiatric hospital, a place so posh I wouldn’t mind a holiday there myself. My old crew certainly has people inside.” He smiled. “To watch him, I mean.”
“How’s he doing?”
“They wouldn’t let me see him. Being out of the game, I’m little people now. Their excuse was they didn’t want to get him going again which, to be fair, is exactly what happened when Becka tried a visit. Took three guys and the maximum dose of tranquilizers to bring him to earth, apparently.”
Far From The Sea We Know Page 39
