Far From The Sea We Know (40 page)

“No one listened to me.”

“Your father, you mean.”

She didn’t reply.

“Go talk with him,” he said.

“With him or at him? When has he ever
listened when it really mattered? He was dying to go down, and you
know it. He can’t bear the thought of retiring. Yes, I know: ‘There
are repercussions if we act, but there are repercussions if we do
nothing. I chose to act.’ That’s the one they’ll put on his
memorial plaque for a new wing at the Point after he’s safely dead
and out of their hair.”

Andrew didn’t react, but after a pause said,
“Your reasons for their not going down were more like worries.
Didn’t seem like you.”

“So, my worries were not good enough, and
now Matthew is gone.”

Andrew stood and waited with the patience of
a stone. “Before my watch, I got a little sleep,” Penny said. She
cradled the package she had retrieved from her bag against her
chest like a schoolgirl would her books.

“I saw him in a dream last night.” She gave
Andrew a sideways glance.

“Let’s hear it,” was his only reply.

“You sure? I find listening to other
people’s dreams excruciatingly boring.”

“I get a message, I listen.”

“I didn’t say it was a message.”

“In some way, everything is.”

She laughed and looked at him another
moment. Then she began to gaze inward, eyes half closed. “I’ve had
no memory of any dreams for ages. That’s how I like it. Sleep like
the dead. Good practice for the future. Nothing, absolutely
nothing. I never understood the attraction of an afterlife. Isn’t
one enough?”

He wouldn’t say much more until she was
done, so she went on. “I went to a Jungian analyst for almost three
years. It seems a long time ago now. We always talked about my
dreams, which were vivid back then. I’d write them down, sometimes
in the morning, sometimes at night when I woke. It helped me at a
time when I needed help, and I hate needing help, as you know. Then
I stopped dreaming. Completely. I figured I was ‘cured.’ The
analyst was not happy. I think she felt I was holding something
back, and the way it all ended led me to at least a partial loss of
confidence in the whole business.”

She slid the cloth off the package. It was a
scrapbook. While gathering her gear for the trip to the
Valentina
, she had come across it in the closet of her old
room at home. For some reason, she had brought it along, perhaps
just to have a bit of something familiar with her while at sea. The
covers were made of animal skins, road kills mostly, that she had
tanned and sewn together over cardboard when she was fourteen. She
hadn’t looked at it for years. Inside, she had glued things like
leaves and feathers. Two facing pages had been needed for the
cast-off skin of a rattlesnake she had found on a field trip east
of the Cascades. Other pages held her first field notes illustrated
by sketches, all meticulously done from nature. She turned a few
pages until she came to a sheet that had been folded in half to
fit, then sealed closed with wax. She carefully broke the seal and
half-opened the sheet as if not wanting something to escape as she
peered inside. Her eyes teared up before she looked away and closed
the book. After a moment, she continued speaking to Andrew.

“The dream I had last night was by far the
most vivid I have ever had. I’m not even sure it was a dream. It
seemed so real. More than real. Makes whatever we’re in now seem
like a dream in comparison.”

“A vision?”

“After what I have been saying lately about
other people here, this seems strange. Sure, me, the big skeptic.
But I have more than the dream. I have proof.” She gently hefted
the scrapbook a few times as if judging its weight.

“Proof isn’t always as strong as faith.”

“I’ll think about that one later, but proof
is important to me. It tells me I’m not just deluding myself.
Listen to the whole thing, then tell me if you think I’m full of
it.”

She took a deep breath, let it all out, and
half-closed her eyes again. “Trying to get back into the dream. I
have this way.” She continued breathing, but her breathing got
slower, deeper. She began to speak, not thinking or caring what she
said.

I’m somewhere on a beach. Behind is a fence
on the border of a forest. Hills, green and misty, go off in the
distance and far behind them are mountains, massive and sharp with
snow. The peaks are in brilliant sunlight and seem to glow from
within, but everything is dead quiet, totally still. It is
beautiful, but something is absent, painfully absent…

A ship is coming from the sea. Pirates are
on the decks and in the rigging, the classic kind with bandannas,
striped jerseys, and cutlasses. The ship drifts, almost seems to
float in the air above the water, toward the beach. Its purpose is
evident, yet I don’t know what it is. Like an apparition, the ship
approaches, and the people on the beach are so fascinated they
appear hypnotized.

A shark gets mixed up in this somehow, and
is transformed in a horrible way so it can move on land. It is
coming toward the beach with the ship. I am completely terrified
and try to erect a barrier to protect us from the shark creature. I
am working fast, but it is too late.

I look out and see a man standing on the
deck. He’s the only one not dressed like a pirate. As the ship
approaches, it changes, keeps changing until it becomes achingly
beautiful. The people on the beach are transfixed. The man walks up
front and puts a foot on the bowsprit, and he and the ship are
riding over the rolling shore waves in a kind of dance.

The shark is suddenly gone, or rather
transformed. What takes its place is indescribably beautiful, yet
awful to behold. It’s like something so long forgotten, that it’s
been replaced by a nameless fear. Now it is finally remembered
again as what it always was: a precious gift.

The man is there still, and he dives into
the creature as if into a pool and disappears. My fear leaves me. I
can hear a kind of music, can almost remember something long lost,
the most important thing, the one thing. I reach after it, but
everything stops and there is nothing but the need to grasp after
it. Over an eternity, it slowly slips away.

I’m on the beach, and the people there,
hundreds, thousands, are all around me. I seem to know them all,
even closer than family. Like they are me. It all becomes an
endless celebration and the man from the ship, smiling at me like a
little baby in the sun, is walking toward me….

A long quiet minute went by. She wiped her
eyes with Matthew’s cap, glad for the sunglasses. “I didn’t really
remember it all until now,” she said. “The man on the ship and the
beach? It was Matthew. I could see him as clearly as I see
you.”

Andrew shifted his weight and leaned back on
the railing. “Other people on this ship have had visions. You
dismissed them.”

“I know, and I’d probably be the first to
blow this off if anyone else came up with it, but the whole thing
seemed so real, so full of presence. But there’s more. When I
awoke, I didn’t remember the dream at first. Later, when I did, I
knew I’d had this feeling before, and even though it was just as
intense as it was last night, I had somehow forgotten it
completely. The dream I had last night was the same dream I had
once when I was a girl. Exactly the same.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Andrew, I’m sure. Matthew was in my dream
fifteen years ago!”

“We all tend to remake things in our minds
to agree with the way everything seems to us now. You told me that
once.”

She held the scrapbook, still closed, in
both hands. “Not long after I made this, I drew a picture of the
man from the dream and stuck it inside. Never showed it to anyone.
Forgot all about the scrapbook until just before this trip, when it
surfaced while I was looking for travel gear. For some reason I
brought it with me, maybe with some vague idea of going through it,
but I hadn’t really looked at that drawing in all that time until
today.”

She thumbed through and quickly found the
place she wanted. The paper that the picture had been drawn on was
faded yellow, and turning brown at the frayed edges.

“Guess I ought to find a way to preserve
this. See? Did it on a larger sheet, so the drawing is pasted in
and folded in half so it will fit. Did it with colored pencils.
Never liked felt tips.”

When she was young, she had spent hour upon
hour drawing leaves, insects, anything from the natural world and
had become a fairly good artist able to execute a good likeness.
The drawing she unfolded was of a ship, a pirate-looking ship. The
detail was amazing, even the rigging looked right. The man with his
foot upon the bowsprit stood out from the others who were only
roughly sketched. She had even drawn a detailed close-up of his
face in the sky.

“Remarkable likeness,” Andrew said, nodding.
“Even the clothes. That’s Matthew for sure.”

“You believe me now?”

“We’ll find him. Or he’ll find us.”

She looked at him a long while and turned
away a moment to wipe her eyes. “Sun’s getting me today.” The
ship’s bell rang. “Time to meet the devil,” she said.

“Your father?”

“No,” she said. “Chiffrey.”

She didn’t like it. Chiffrey was standing
almost at attention when she walked into the small media lab. Is
this what they did when they gave you news of those lost in action?
A few words and a folded flag? They had not said a word to each
other since the
Bluedrop
had resurfaced, but it was he who
had left the note on her cabin door. Wanted to meet and talk, and
he also mentioned that there was news. “Much news.”

When she came in, he made a point of making
eye contact.

“This is the deal,” he said. “I’ve already
passed on some of this to your father.” He paused. “Listen. First,
I’m sorry about Matthew, I really am. We all are. Every effort will
be made—”

“Just the news, please, though I’ll hold you
to your promise, whether you meant it or not.”

“Okay. After much effort, I have again
convinced the powers that be that it is in their best interest to
allow the
Valentina
and her crew to continue as the main
instrument here. The
Valentina
is still functioning, after
all, and is the only ship that seems to manage that within the
circle.”

“And?”

“The deal is, we see if we can come up with
something concrete about what we are dealing with here. They won’t
second-guess us this time. Carte blanche.”

“More like, they’re fishing, and we’re the
bait again.”

Chiffrey shook his head. “You fought me
since the beginning to keep a hand in this mission. All of you
did.”

“
Mission
is your word, not mine.”

“It’s a word I cannot dispense with. The way
we’ve had to go about this is not ideal.”

“Such as, you still haven’t told us
everything!”

“What, exactly, haven’t I told you?”

“I don’t know, obviously.”

“Well, there’s not much I can say to that.
What I will say is that under normal circumstances, we do not
involve civilians, but this situation is far from normal, and many
more lives could be at stake than our own. I did give everyone a
chance to opt out. More than once. You all were our best hope.
Still are, in my opinion. The loss of Matthew is on my head, and
I’d do anything to get him back.”

He still didn’t look uncomfortable enough to
satisfy her, but his veneer had taken a few nicks. “Chiffrey…”

“I’m saying it
because
it’s true.
Listen. What happened down there in the
Bluedrop
, the people
I report to didn’t believe at first when I told them. But they
believe in the disabling of all those ships, because they have the
evidence.” He smiled. “And I just found out they got some
more.”

“Then why don’t you fill me in, instead of
just dangling it in front of my nose.”

“Okay. I just read a report about the prop
shafts on the disabled ships from our first encounter. Came in half
an hour ago. Says the metal on the shaft ends has been molecularly
rearranged and recombined, perhaps with other elements from the
surrounding seawater. It is now a thin but diamond-hard sheet. It
is diamond, at least on the surface. This layer is extremely
uniform, a perfect molecular structure. I mean literally, as far as
they can tell, perfect. Highly reflective, as well, in a way that
doesn’t make sense yet.”

“How do you get diamond from a steel
propeller shaft?” she asked.

“I’m not a metallurgist, just parroting what
I read. I’m good at sounding like I know what I’m talking
about.”

She let the attempt at a joke pass without
notice.

“Another thing,” he continued. “Even though
the end of the prop shafts have been exposed to seawater for days,
they’re not tarnished at all.”

“And not even a theory on how this was
done?”

“No one’s venturing any. There simply isn’t
any explanation, orthodox or otherwise. That’s the opinion of
authorities on the subject at Sandia. These are good people, none
better.”

“Then why can’t they say more?”

“They all agreed that a highly advanced
mastery of material and energy is in evidence here, but the tracks
are leading us well past what is known or even glimpsed in advanced
physics. I don’t understand very much about what they have told me,
but those prop shafts have them excited. And by the way, they
finally found the props themselves.”

“Dredged them up?”

“No need for that. They turned up at the
Pentagon.”

“What?”

“Staff found them this morning, all four
neatly stacked—and these things weigh several tons each—in the dead
geometrical center of the courtyard
inside
the Pentagon.
Here’s a photo.”