Far From The Sea We Know

CHAPTER 60

  It was early morning. At Chiffrey’s insistence, they had scanned the area for signs of Matthew and the dome, all through the night and now into the day. Nothing. Chiffrey stood by Doctor Bell near the holding tank on the aft deck. Bell couldn’t help glancing down at the spot where his daughter had spent the night.

  “How is she?” Chiffrey asked.

  “Sleeping again, in the women’s quarters. She woke up early and headed over there with a little help from Becka and me. She’ll be fine, I’m sure.”

  “Did she say anything about Matthew when she woke?”

  He shook his head.

  “We need to know more, Doctor Bell.”

  Penny’s father smiled. “You need to know more.”

  “True enough,” Chiffrey said with a rueful laugh, “but you’ve made some good guesses before, and I could use your help. Anything.”

  “If you insist, but what I say is only how it seems to me at the moment. Understand?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Then hear this. I believe the dome is nothing like us, nothing at all. Nothing like any other life we know on earth, but it is of our earth. My best sense of it is that it can only know the world through the world. It uses life on the outside to know life on the outside. Hence the whale.

  “Something like a mobile probe?”

  “Yes, but take care not to venture that analogy too far. Again, we are dealing with a consciousness that is nothing like our own, so as well as giving the dome sensory information and a means to act, the whale also may have given it a means to experience and process that information! And most likely it is the same with Matthew. Do you understand? To it, a mode of consciousness, in our case, our sense of individuality and how we experience our life, may simply be like another color or shade. Not what we think of as the person. Our intrinsic sense of identity may be just another faculty to the dome, like the ability to walk. If I’m even near the truth, the implications are staggering.”

  “Why Matthew?”

  “Many were called, perhaps, but Matthew seems to have been chosen for some special role.”

  “Or maybe he was simply the first to meet the specs so to speak.

  “‘Something rich and strange,’ yes? Sea-changed.”

  Chiffrey smiled. “You know, as crazy as all that sounds, it’s starting to make some sense to me. Thing is, my superiors need to find out why it is here.”

  “Threat assessment.”

  “It’s our job. Quoting Shakespeare won’t be enough. We need to know where all this is going.”

  Doctor Bell nodded. “I can assure you, that is a question I am also interested in.” He took a few paces around the aft deck and leaned against the gunwale, gazing out at a now calm sea. Chiffrey joined him at the rail, but remained silent.

  “I’m sure Matthew has a purpose,” Doctor Bell said after a while, “but even he may not know what it is. How humanity fits into the purpose of what we encountered is another question entirely. We may not even have the capacity to discern it, let alone comprehend it. We may not even be important enough to be a part of it. For that matter, it may not even be a ‘purpose’ or ‘intent’ in the way we would usually understand one. Not at all.”

  “If you’re right in any of that, Matthew is still our only link. We have to find him.”

  “He’s gone, at least for now, and the dome as well. I’m fairly certain you won’t see either of them soon.”

  “I can’t go back empty-handed.”

  “Back?” Doctor Bell smiled and put a hand on Chiffrey’s shoulder. “There’s no going back to the world as we once believed it to be. Not for any of us. Including you.”