Far From The Sea We Know

by Frank M Sheldon

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.”