Far From The Sea We Know (39 page)

“Is there anything we can do, Captain?”
Chiffrey said.

“The Navy? Probably not, but standby.”

“Yes, sir.”

“They’re not coming straight up,” Malcolm
said. “Side slipping, veering due north. No, eight degrees east of
north. Twenty-three…almost twenty-four meters a minute.”

Emory nodded slowly. “The hull may not have
been breached. They should reach the forty meter mark in about
eighteen minutes, then stop ascending—”

“Why stop?”

“It’s a built-in safety measure, unless,
well…The divers can take care of the rest.”

“If it works,” Penny said.

“Well, it seems to be working,” Malcolm
replied with a trace of annoyance.

Chiffrey touched Penny’s elbow. “Maybe we
should go up top.” She didn’t reply but followed him out of the
control room and up the steps.

When she reached the deck, she had to squint
hard against the clinically bright sun. Its cheery brightness felt
jarring, like a polka at a funeral. The fresh air, however, calmed
her down a little.

The
Bluedrop
had only lost power. The
hull was intact. But still, Penny couldn’t help imagining. Down
there drifting in total darkness, a part fails, something sticks,
jams…then the final gasp for the last air…

A mist of spray swept across her face and
helped her shake the dire images out of her head.

“I hope you don’t blame me,” Chiffrey
said.

“It’s just a power failure. They planned for
this, and they’ll be back up in a few minutes.”

She didn’t want to talk, and he left her
alone. But for some reason she stayed where she was. Even though
she didn’t want to talk to Chiffrey, she was glad he was there.
Stupid. They both leaned on the rail as if enjoying a summer
cruise. The engines throttled down, and further out, the divers
were going over the sides of the Zodiacs.

They waited.

Chiffrey looked at his watch and cleared his
throat. “They must be at forty meters by now. Do you know how long
it will be before—”

“Over there!” Penny shouted. The
Bluedrop
had come up almost a half klick away from the
divers.

“I don’t think they paused before
surfacing,” Chiffrey said. “Hang on.”

The
Valentina
surged back to life at
full throttle and wheeled around in the tightest turn she could
make, directly toward the
Bluedrop
. The divers scrambled
back into their Zodiacs and raced toward the minisub. They would
get there before the
Valentina
, but not by much.

Chiffrey was shaking his head. “How could
they not know they were that far off?”

When the divers reached the
Bluedrop
,
they went back into the water, and quickly surrounded her with
flotation buoys, even lashing one of the Zodiacs to her. Emory
could be seen climbing upon the hull and over to the hatch.

“She seems okay,” Chiffrey said. “Not
floating any lower than before. Now what’s the drill?”

The
Valentina
pulled up alongside.
The crane that had launched the
Bluedrop
just hours ago,
though it seemed to Penny like an age, was being readied to bring
her back on deck to her cradle. Divers worked lines and attached
fenders, reversing the earlier process.

Penny made herself speak calmly. “They’ll
winch them up to the deck, although I don’t see why they don’t just
open the hatch now. I can’t see anybody yet, the safety floats the
diver’s attached are blocking…”

She didn’t finish because now, as the
Bluedrop
slowly turned, she did see someone through the one
visible port. It was her father, and he was slumped over, not
moving. The interior seemed to full of smoke.

“Please, not a fire,” Chiffrey said.
“Emory’s having trouble getting the hatch open. Damn it!”

Her heart pounded, and her voice cracked in
a way she never let it. “Why isn’t anyone trying from the
inside
?”

A swell lifted the sub and her father’s head
flopped back and forth, all life gone.

“Dad! Dad! God, no. Matthew! Get it open!
Get them out of there! Shit!”

Penny ran to the port side, grabbed hold of
a line and half swung, half jumped over onto the hull of the
Bluedrop
, landing on all fours like a cat. A diver,
crouching on the hull, looked at her in bafflement, then up at the
deck as if waiting instructions. Before anyone could say anything,
she slipped past him and alongside Emory, who still wrestled with
the hatch opening.

“Pressure must have warped the seals,” he
said. He seemed not at all surprised at Penny’s appearance.

She placed her hands next to his on the
wheel he was trying to turn. Tilting her head forward, she took in
a breath and let it explode with a cry. “Now! Eiiiiyahhhhh!”

She focused the strength of her whole body
in her hands, and the hatch came loose with a hermetic hiss. She
sank back, panting.

“Open it. Please…” she implored.

Emory turned the last lug, even while
staring at her in amazement. The hatch opened, but it wasn’t smoke
that billowed out. Violets. It smelled like violets.

“They’re going to lift…hey, wait!” Emory
said too late as Penny dove like a rabbit into the open hatch.

“Take her up now!” she heard him say. After
the bright sunlight, she couldn’t see much at first in the unlit
sub with the flowery mist still swirling around, but she knew where
her father had been sitting. She groped around and put her ear down
on his chest, listening for a heartbeat. It was loud and clear, and
he was beginning to stir.

A deep sigh whooshed out of her, and with
it, the surge of energy that had propelled her since her leap from
the ship. She collapsed like a discarded marionette. Her vision
went black for a moment, then slowly cleared. Already she could see
better as much of the flowery mist had escaped.

They were all right!

The crane started to lift them out of the
water and enough daylight streamed through the windows to
illuminate the interior.

Penny held her father’s head, making sure he
could breathe. She heard movement behind her. It was Matthew coming
to. Without looking back, she said to him, “Satisfied? I hope it
was worth it, because it looks like the
Bluedrop
is fried.”
The minisub slid into its cradle on the deck with a dull thunk.

“Matthew?”

Her father opened his eyes. Becka was now
conscious, her hands coming up to her face. Someone appeared with a
stethoscope and held it to her father’s chest.

“Penelope,” her father whispered. “What’s
happened?”

“Dad…”

“How are they?”

“He’s gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“Matthew.”

“Where did you take him? Is he all
right?”

She held Matthew’s hat and kneaded it with
both her hands as she spoke. “He’s not here. Only his clothes.”

“Gone?” her father asked, but the look on
his face reflected her own and made it clear that no answer would
be necessary.

My name is Matthew, my name is…

A familiar presence. Always here.
Forgotten…

Softly encircled, I cannot move, I must…

Whose life?

My name…is…

I…must?

All around me, flowing through me, I close
my eyes, but no darkness waits…and then, it is all here, every
piece and particle unbound by space or plan, wordless and awful in
its coiled infinity and, in my terror, beautiful beyond
bearing.

Something opens…

I
am…everyone…everything…everywhere…always…

Someone knocked on Penny’s door, but she
said, “Go away.” Not long after that, she put the cap back on the
bottle of scotch. It wasn’t taking her where she wanted to go.

Just making it worse….

The last glimmer of twilight was coming in
through the porthole as she crawled under the covers of her
bunk.

Shut the curtains. Don’t try to sleep,
just…

But she did, and deeply. Her alarm went off
in her darkened sanctuary a few hours later and she immediately got
up and pulled on her shoes.

Yesterday afternoon, the day Matthew
disappeared, she thought Andrew might suggest she not take the
early morning watch, but he didn’t. And of course, he wouldn’t.
Idleness was not what she needed right now. And besides that, four
in the morning had always been good to her.

She arrived at the bridge and took her place
behind the wheel with barely a nod to the student crewmember she
replaced. At least he made no attempt to cheer her up. She didn’t
want to be cheered up.

She quickly scanned the horizon and surveyed
the instruments. Checked the watch log. All seemed as it should be
until her gaze fell on Valentina’s necklace. Suspended above the
center port window like a talisman, it barely moved in a becalmed
sea that in every direction was like an endless black shroud.

I’m not going to lose him, not another one.
The dream, what was it, what…

She kept the speed down to conserve fuel.
Just enough to keep the generators going and to make a little
headway. For the last day, they had just been crisscrossing the
circle, being careful to never to go outside its periphery. Even
when they got close, however, they could still not detect the small
anomalies she had originally discovered that demarcated the
circle's edge. The bottom showed up clear enough on sonar, but the
dome, whether hidden again or simply gone, was nowhere to be
seen.

Behind her, the transceiver was continuing
to spread out and, in the process, was steadily dissolving into the
decking. Though its “roots” seemed to have reached the
Valentina
’s instrumentation, no one had suggested they try
to do anything about it. Even if someone had, it would not be like
some barnacle you could just scrape off. She could just barely make
it out as it was, and she had a feeling it would soon disappear
completely.

Four hours later, Penny had done little
except stare at the horizon and occasionally the old brass compass
in the binnacle. A large mug of strong coffee, delivered by Mateo,
had been her only company. The day was now bright, and every wave
and ripple shot back at her like a million tiny suns. No one else
dropped by, and those now on deck didn’t glance up. They seemed to
make a point of not glancing up. She couldn’t really blame them.
Since Matthew’s disappearance, everything she had done and the few
words she had spoken had conveyed that she wanted nothing except to
be left alone.

Emory arrived to relieve her. He looked like
he might speak, but didn’t. Before he had a chance to change his
mind, she walked past him and went back to the cabin where she
found a note stuck on the door. She snatched it off without
reading, then walked into the cabin and shut the door tight.

The dream, so familiar…

She stood there for a while, not moving,
then bent down to haul a bag out from under her bunk. After fishing
out a couple of pair of jeans and too many socks, she slowly
withdrew a package wrapped in cloth. She stared at it as if trying
to divine its contents, then stood up and, without further
hesitation, made her way up to the aft deck with it under her arm.
The sun was piercingly bright, so she walked around to the shady
side and found a place at the rail, where she read the note that
had been stuck on her door, crumpled it up, and let it fall from
her hand into the sea. A gull swooped down and snatched it briefly
before dropping it without further interest.

Matthew’s green baseball cap, the one he had
worn during his decent in the
Bluedrop
, rested still
unfamiliar on her head. A ring of his old sweat darkened the faded
cotton just above the brim. She had seen him throw his other one
away during their first day on the
Valentina
. The memory of
his first confrontation with Ripler and the hat sailing off in the
breeze almost made her smile.

The weather would stay calm and sunny today
judging by the few clouds. A variety of seabirds were still around,
and someone had just tossed a sample net over the side to find out
what they were eating. Not much else was happening, but there would
be no talk of leaving the area, at least for now. Andrew had put
her mind at ease on that point at least by making it clear
yesterday the
Valentina
would stay in the area with no plan
to leave.

She put the package down for a moment, wiped
the salt from the sunglasses that Becka had recently given her with
the hem of her shirt, and put them back on. There wasn’t anything
on the horizon to keep her focus from wandering in and out. They
were headed in the same direction as the wind, so the air was oddly
still. It felt like being nowhere. She sighed and looked back
toward the stern. Their wake radiated out endlessly, mirrored twins
sundered by the knife of time and circumstance, the
Valentina
their only connecting point.

“He’s not lost.”

The voice came from behind her, but there
was no need to look back.

The Captain of the
Valentina
didn’t
say anything more but, as usual when Andrew did that, it got her to
talking.

“Why did he insist on going?” she said while
continuing to stare out across the swells. The ship had just turned
and the breeze was now coming across the deck, so she instinctively
walked toward a windbreak.

Andrew followed her around a bulkhead and
finally spoke. “And what would you have done?”

“I would have waited to see what else we
could have come up with, not go blundering down there because we
caved into pressure from people who aren’t here. We just dangled
ourselves in front of it to see what would bite—what kind of
strategy was that?”

“Putting it like that, a short term
one.”