Far From The Sea We Know (32 page)

Malcolm always insisted on keeping the
lights low, but her eyes were getting used to it. As she walked up
behind the others, familiar details began to materialize, like
returning ghosts. Nearly everyone had made this meeting except
Matthew. He was taking his watch on the bridge, but could listen in
by intercom if he wanted.

Malcolm was obviously dying to get his hands
on the video. He pushed his hair back from his eyes and said,
“She’s all set to go, Lieutenant.”

Chiffrey reached into his jacket, slipped
out the disc and handed it to him. “Lock and load.”

Malcolm took the disc and with minimal
foreplay slotted it in.

The screen barely registered the deep blue,
almost black, color, but Penny recognized it right away, having
seen deep undersea images from her father’s explorations since she
was a child. She looked briefly at Chiffrey, who was leaning back
on a stool, a look of absorbed contentment on his face. Without
bothering to look, he waved his little finger at her indicating he
was not so engrossed as he seemed. Once he began to speak, however,
he was fully engaged with his audience.

“This, of course, is the video the Navy got
when they were right in the middle of the circle that Penny
discovered on the charts. Got it sucked down in no time with the
sat-phone and new setup I got on that last resupply.”

He winked at Malcolm. “Yes, got my own link
now. I’ll let you have a look at it later.” Before Malcolm could
comment, he continued. “I was given a basic explanation and read
some notes that came with the download, but you’ll have to bear
with me as narrator because I haven’t seen the video yet, myself.
As I implied, it was taken by an ROV controlled from the surface.
Pipe up if anything strikes you as noteworthy.”

“In case it’s not obvious to everyone,”
Malcolm said, “the readouts on the side are, in order, depth,
temperature, and pressure. Depth is the green one on top. It’s set
up a different from ours…”

Malcolm droned on. The image on the monitor
was almost changeless. There wasn’t anything for the robot’s
cameras to see at this depth.

“How’s she doing, Malcolm?” Chiffrey
asked.

“About a third of the way to the bottom,
from the notes. What we are supposed to be looking for?”

“Let’s just wait.”

“Okay,” Malcolm continued, “we’ve still
got—”

“Stop!” her father called out.

Malcolm instantly hit pause. “We’re only at
two hundred and twenty meters, not even halfway down.”

“That can’t be the bottom,” Becka said.

“It’s not,” Malcolm said. “But what we are
seeing from the cameras isn’t showing up at all on the basic sonar
readouts to the side. See there? It shows the bottom at four
hundred and seventy-seven meters. There should be nothing but water
for almost two hundred and sixty meters more.”

“Advance a little, please,” her father said.
Soft circles of light from the ROV’s floodlights, bouncing off an
undulating surface, became smaller and brighter. It was getting
closer to something. “Again—stop!”

“Is that coral? A reef?” Becka said. “Looks
solid. And the ripples. Doctor Bell?”

“Convoluted like coral, certainly, but I’ve
never seen anything monolithic like this. Sloping down now, is
it?”

“Seems to be,” Chiffrey said. “Look at that
color.”

“Magenta,” her father said.

The hair on the back of Penny’s neck stood
up, a sensation she trusted more than words or reasoning. This was
trouble. Of what kind she didn’t yet know, but trouble was looking
right back at her from the screen
.

“Not the bottom,” Emory said. “Definitely
not.”

“No,” Chiffrey said, “even I can tell that.
Wait. The notes say the camera moves along a tad, then sweeps
across the surface.”

Becka said, “It’s curving down now, isn’t
it?”

“Sure looks that way,” Chiffrey said.

The ROV stopped for a while, and from the
way the floodlights bounced off the imaged surface, it looked like
its tethering cable was being rolled out so it could get closer
again. The convolutions continued and did not seem to alter in any
significant way, but the surface was beginning to slope down,
steeper and steeper. The ROV glided along, until a dark opening
appeared.

“Pause,” her father said. But the video
abruptly ended. “A cave? Or maybe a vent. Lieutenant, did they
estimate the size of what we were looking at?”

“The notes I have here say the operator was
able to make some good estimates based on the size of the circles
the lights were making on the surface and the distance covered.
They think four hundred and fifty to five hundred meters across.
Super-sized.”

The convolutions fit together in an
intricate way that had the feel of some complex geometry but still
seemed a thing of nature. The patterns seem to be always repeating,
yet never in quite the same way.

“Does anyone have a clue what we were
looking at?’ Chiffrey asked. “The floor is open.”

Becka looked at Malcolm. “Could you play it
again?”

“Yeah, sure.” The frames flashed by as
Malcolm said, “Okay, we’re moving across, in the same direction,
but I’ve slowed it down by half. It’s sloping down, looks like it’s
heading toward vertical. Like half a ball and we’re almost at the
bottom. It’s like a big Jell-O mold my mother had, like a giant
raspberry. Sometimes it would even be that color. The Jell-O, I
mean…”

“Yes, appears to be a half sphere,” her
father said, “but we’ve only seen one small part of it. Although I
have no idea what it is, I can say with some certainty that it’s
not Jell-O.”

Malcolm looked hurt. “I didn’t mean—”

“There!” Becka shouted. She pointed at what
looked like a depression in the surface. It had already gone to
static. “Can you back it up a little?”

“I can do better,” Chiffrey said. “Malcolm,
can you find a freeze frame of the final image somewhere on there?
It’s in a separate file, if these notes are right.”

“What happened there at the end?” her father
asked.

“That’s when the power went out,” Chiffrey
answered, “but they can’t figure out why. They were able to
manually haul up the ROV and once they got out of the circle, it
checked out fine. They’re doing more testing, so let’s wait on that
issue for now. Good, Malcolm’s found it. As you can see, this image
has been digitally enhanced, so it’s much clearer than the
video.”

“Does looks like some kind of vent,” her
father “but the image is still not clear enough draw any
conclusions.”

Chiffrey looked resigned. “You’re right, of
course, but you know, I keep coming back to why doesn’t this thing
show up on the side-scan sonar? The sonar showed nothing there, but
what we just looked at is close to five hundred meters in diameter.
Why didn’t it show up? Somehow, I doubt this thing being hard to
find was simply a matter of chance.”

“I agree,” her father said, “There is
clearly intelligence behind all this, but we don’t yet know on what
level, and we should not jump to conclusions as to motives.
Whatever it is, it has abilities we can’t at the moment even begin
to reckon.”

Chiffrey rocked back on his stool until he
rested against the bulkhead. “You think it’s natural?”

Her father glanced at Andrew, who paused
only a moment before saying, “Don’t know enough to say.”

Penny could tell by the look on her father’s
face that he agreed. “However,” he said, “this does look to have an
organic nature. Not artificial. Coral was mentioned.”

“It’s coral?” Chiffrey asked,
incredulous.

“No, but the immense size suggests it could
be a colony, rather than an individual.”

“Like honey mushrooms,” Penny suggested.

Chiffrey looked at her, slightly puzzled.
“Sounds delicious.”

“No, no, it’s a kind of wild mushroom.
There’s a colony in Oregon that covers acres, estimated to weigh
over six hundred tons, and to be more than two thousand years old.
Some well-credentialed experts feel it
is
a single organism,
and lately there are more scientists making the case for
classifying whole groups of interdependent species as one organism,
or at least something like it. The point is, the distinctions made
between species in the past may be more about our need to sort
things into categories than how life truly organizes itself.”

“Imposing an order, rather than perceiving
the underlying reality,” her father added. “An age-old
conflict.”

“Right,” Chiffrey said. “Run up against it
everyday in my work.” He smiled, then looked puzzled. “And you
think that’s what we have here? Something like a huge underwater
beehive?”

“Maybe,” Penny said, “but I wouldn’t get too
fixated on that image.”

“Okay, but I still don’t see how any kind of
natural organism on its own could have the capabilities we’ve seen
demonstrated. Advanced technology is surely a given.”

“Nothing new under the sun,” Andrew quoted,
with no sign of adding more.

Her father laughed. “As true now as it ever
was.”

“I’m not much of a churchgoer anymore,”
Chiffrey said, “but I know my Bible. ‘All is vanity.’”

“Which is the point,” her father said. “Look
outside any suburban window, and you’ll find tiny birds that weigh
next to nothing but nonetheless manage to migrate thousands of
kilometers every year, and replicate themselves, to boot. That, in
its own way, is surely as amazing as anything here. We’re just too
used to it. There’s an analogue in nature for almost any
technology, if you look hard enough.”

“But surely this is of a different order
entirely,” Chiffrey protested.

“Just because it seems to have capabilities
beyond ours, does not mean that it can’t be part of the natural
world.”

Malcolm was dying to speak, so Bell gave up
the floor with a wave of an open hand.

“I’m not a physicist, but I read a lot…”
Malcolm prefaced.

Penny readied herself for another of his
rambling monologues by slumping back against the only free bit of
bulkhead in the cramped lab.

Malcolm looked around as if he didn’t
completely believe everyone would listen, but went on. “Well, at
one point, I considered going into physics. I was interested in the
implications of quantum mechanics, where it might go. This stuff
sounds completely crazy to most people, I mean parallel worlds,
entanglement…”

“That’s great,” Chiffrey said, “but where
are you trying to point us?”

Malcolm’s face scrunched up for a moment,
then he moved his hands as if he were trying to mold the perfect
words from the air itself.

“Okay,” he said, “I don’t know what we saw
on that video any more than you do, but what if it is the source of
an intelligence that is not only able to perceive how things
really
work in the universe, but can manipulate those forces
as well? I’m talking the whole enchilada, you know, what underlies
all energy and matter, stuff we can’t even conceive, right? And
what if this intelligence is able to manipulate those forces as
easily as we use the principle of leverage to open a can of
soda?”

Penny stood upright and took a small step
forward. “Then what about the people on the
Honey Pot
and
Matthew’s fishing boat? And the Navy divers? For that matter, why
have so many of the people on this ship been affected the way they
have?”

Malcolm pointed at her and nodded in
agreement, as if she had just solved a charade. “Because we were
caught in a lens effect. You know, the way a star can bend light
because of it’s massive gravitational field.”

Chiffrey arched his eyebrows.

“It is like we’re under different laws now,”
Malcolm continued. “Deeper, more foundational laws. Closer to the
way things really are.”

“I don’t think so,” Penny said. “More like
we’ve been caught up in the wake of something powerful and churned
about. Maybe there is something to what you’ve suggested but, if
so, it seems more to me like some people here have been besotted
with imagined insights and a sense of meaningfulness and connection
where there is none. That could be simply a
side effect
, and
I don’t see any reason to believe any of it is real.”

“How can you be so sure?” Becka asked. “And
aren’t you the one who used to tell us we should be willing to
discard outgrown beliefs and assumptions?”

“I didn’t mean we should replace them with
fantasies. But perhaps Jack could set me straight.”

Malcolm waved his hands like a referee.
“Hold it, please!”

Her father held up his hand just enough to
gain attention. “At this point, we can’t really step outside it all
and make an accurate observation to determine the truth. A pity to
be sure.”

“I’ve only been theorizing,” Malcolm
said.

“Had a go at quantum mechanics once,”
Chiffrey added. “No matter how hard I tried, it remained just a
scribble of Greek on a whiteboard.”

“I didn’t say it was quantum mechanics,”
Malcolm said. “I only used that as an analogy. I mean, physicists
hate it when people who don’t know what they’re talking about—”

“I’m sure they do, but some of my people are
quantum physicists, and they’re looking into that aspect. Has to be
some explanation, after all.”

“Great,” Malcolm said nodding. “And I know
you have a highly qualified science team that you consult with but,
since your having trouble, I’m sure I could help you get a grip on
the essentials.”

“Later might be good, Malcolm.” Chiffrey
covered a yawn. “Really.”

Her father stood up. “We’ve probably got
enough to digest for now.” He looked around the lab, taking his
time. “When we get to the site, we’ll have a more thorough look at
whatever is down there and, hopefully, have much more to go on. At
some point, we may even have the opportunity to go down and have a
look.”

He glanced at Penny and said, “But only
when—and if—we’re sure it’s the right time, so no worry.”