The Little Sister

The Little Sister

         





Vancouver was rainy and dark in the winter; foggy and it rarely saw its sibling sunlight. Egan stood trapped in myopia before the living room window of the condominium that looked out over a concrete alley crowded with weed cedar and shadow. Impulse delivered him and he turned toward the bare salvation of a small neighboring kitchen scratchily lit by an incandescent bulb. He walked blindly past a picture of his father and young step-mother set in the wall, and sat down at a rickety steel table in the kitchen set with coffee and a newspaper. He turned to page two, scanning the science news and an article on Earth’s sister planet, Venus. A planet clouded with sulfuric acid, but seemed perfect from space; the same size as earth, a compelling and strange orb. He would never be very good at astronomy, but he had to keep up with the science news.
He sipped at the cup of coffee and then stood, walking to his bedroom, and pulled a manila envelope off a small wooden desk. Returning to the weak-legged table, he opened the folder and stared down at the job offer from a large provincial university; the double of his current employer, which was also a large provincial university.  Of course the eastern university might be identical in some ways, but it was a different world. The position would force him to move to that Eastern sister city where the university was located. Egan wondered what the city was like. He would be researching the marine biology of the Pacific Ocean’s little sister, the Atlantic, which he had never studied but the offer was lucrative, and Egan was often obsessed with what he didn’t know.
He finished the cup of coffee and looked down at his steel, mariner’s watch, startled to find that he was running late. Leaving the coffee cup for the night’s dishes, he rushed into the living room and threw on his hooded army parka – it would be much colder near the water. He descended a set of stairs from the condominium and jumped in an ancient, rusted and battered Volkswagen bug. He fired the engine and drove the car, hopping and squeaking on rickety suspension down the un-even alleyway. He turned onto a residential street and skirting a traffic circle decorated with flowering, wax leaved bushes turned onto an arterial the following block. He stepped on the accelerator and was soon driving toward the water front.
The car came out of nowhere, a sky-blue Volkswagen as his own, that turned onto the arterial unaware of his proximity. In a mirror-image blink of near sudden demise, Egan laid on the horn and swerved into the neighboring lane, lucky to find there was no-one next to him. Adrenaline surged through him too virulently for swearing as Egan let out a strangled shout. A tension ridden moment later, the other Volkswagen disappeared into his blind spot, a ghost. Egan only recovered when he arrived in the parking lot across from the pier; the near accident had frightened him, and he was more afraid that if he thought about it long enough, he would come up with an answer…
Egan approached the three-hundred foot research vessel, which painted a deep grey, reminded more of a military ship, but for the ship’s name, Alanis, stenciled on the side. He climbed the forty foot stairwell alongside the craft and saw that the oceanographic and meteorological teams were already aboard when he caught sight of the several rotating radar apparatus’ atop the tower spinning. He climbed a second set of stairs that lay alongside the command tower and stepping through a hatch raised a couple of feet above the walkway; stepped behind the tinted, plate glass of the bridge.
The captain, wearing khaki short-sleeves and trousers with a black baseball cap stood in front of a table of charts, using a compass-like device to unlock their secrets. Egan smiled;
“Hi Meg!”
Meg turned to him smiling, dropping the metal pointers (secant?) and unconsciously straightening the blond pony tail that fell through the back of the hat.
“Hi Egan,” she said in a serious and gravelly voice that seemed weathered by the ocean. Like Egan, she was a marine scientist, although her understanding of marine biology itself was a little less encyclopedic than Egan’s. She did have several ocean science degrees to her credit, and that often made her coarse compatriot to Egan. The relationship went deeper though, and although Meg was attractive in a rough sort of way, Egan was too close to her from the volume of work they had done together, and had a difficult time considering her any other than a relative. A sister, Egan thought, as he noted that Meg was unconcerned with the fact that he was late. “We should be underway in the next twenty minutes,” she added tersely.
Egan nodded quietly and then made his way toward the hatch in the back wall of the bridge, intending to find his cabin, where he kept his desk and his computer. He stopped at the hatch for a moment as Meg returned to the charts. Egan considered telling Meg about his morning. He considered telling her about how dark it had been when he had awoken. He considered telling her about the near-automobile accident with that identical vehicle, but something kept him from speaking up. He wondered for a moment whether she would have the right answer. He was afraid that she would…
Egan stepped through the larger hatch and made his way aft to the cabin. He fired up the computer, and while he waited on the machine to start up, walked to the port hole that bled daylight into the small office. He noticed an approaching vessel, a sister ship to the Alanis; the Alanis II; a smaller, night-time oceanic research vessel for the same university. The ship sounded its foghorn, saluting the Alanis and possibly wise-cracking about the weather out on the Prince William Sound. Egan turned back to his computer, smiling as a louder and resonant blast came from above-decks. He checked his email, finding a short message from his girl-friend, Leah;

Dear Egan,

This is the last time. You said you would be at our dinner date last night at seven o’ clock. You didn’t even show up. What you need is a little sister.

Leah

Egan groaned as he remembered the dinner date. He had become enmeshed in the computer data of a family of dolphins he was tracking off of the San Juan Islands, obsessed with the data and hadn’t left the ship until midnight. As he considered pleading with Leah, he felt the research vessel coming to life and casting off as he finally gave up Leah as a lost cause. Egan continued to click through the email folder, finding and ignoring message from his father;
A message came over the ship’s speaker in Meg’s gravelly and humorous voice;

“Welcome all on another voyage of her majesty’s Alanis.  We are now making our way past the Vancouver headland and should reach our first destination, point alpha, in the Prince William Sound in the next forty minutes. Please feel free to get up and move around the ship.”
Egan dismissed the email subconsciously, forgetting the message in the moment. Even if he had remembered, he would have had a difficult time understanding the passion in his father’s letter…
He clicked out of the email program and started looking at the charts he had created tracking the dolphin family. He then switched to a grouping of grey whales he had caught sight of a week previous. He could hear the sounds of the city fading behind him and stood at the porthole of his cabin for several moments. The myopia that had trapped him that morning once again seized his thoughts, and as the sounds of automobiles and ventilators and machinery faded from the aural spectrum, Egan felt as if he was once again entering a different world. Egan felt as if he were returning to a sister world, and to his own beginnings – the beginnings of life on the planet. The questions that over-arched his work became again the dominant and only thoughts in his mind.
Egan stepped through the hatch again, and made his way above-decks; he had to be ready with his skiff when the research vessel reached point alpha. He climbed a set of steps set ladder-like at the end of a short hallway and climbed into the open and foggy airs of the Prince William Sound. He walked through the tapers of mist to his boat; a small inflatable with a forty-horse engine. While piling his gear into the boat, he noticed a team of ocean-temperature researchers doing the same with a mirror image; The Little Paulie; of his own boat; The Little Gracie; on the opposite side of the deck. Egan hooked the deck winches to stem and stern of the craft while the team opposite him did the same with theirs, both intending to disembark at point alpha. One of the men across from Egan started to slowly whistle a popular Canadian tune; The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald; so that the folk song of offshore fatality rang through the fog eerily. Although the scientists aboard the Alanis rarely encountered bad weather, but they knew the gentle womb of the saltier sea could also birth bloody chaos. Waters could take life, and they had an unconscious respect for that. Egan began to whistle along with the man, and he and the leader of the ocean temperature team stared quietly; lesser mortals; at each other. Egan spoke;
“So Larry; how is the world of thermodynamics?”
“Pretty good, Egan – we’re exploring a new cold-current phenomenon coming out of Alaska; and marine biology?”
“I have a set of dolphins tagged and am looking at a group of Grey’s.” Of course, there was always much talk about the ‘big break’ in marine mammalian biology; the discovery of a more complicated language and even intelligence among certain species. “It’ll probably be pretty uneventful though. Luck with the new current.”
Larry frowned at the deck for a moment in thought;
“Luck…I mean with something new.” But after the dirge, luck seemed like something that could be good or bad, and if there was something new to come about, it probably had nothing to do with marine biology.
Egan heard Meg’s voice come over the loudspeakers as the ship began to slow;
“Approaching point alpha. Teams preparing to disembark. All hands to the inflatable craft. All hands to the inflatable craft.” Soon the two skiffs were surrounded by men wearing the same heavy-weather gear as Egan and the men in the team across the width of the ship. Both Egan and the team across from him stepped into the smaller research boats. Meg came down the steps from the bridge carrying a clip-board and pen.
“Larry,” she said addressing the leader of the water-temperature team and checking through the schedule in her hands. “I have you down for a buoy maintenance and deployment North-Northwest to meet at point beta.”
“Check.”
“Egan” she continued, running the pen through the list. “I have you down for research at points South-Southeast to meet at point Charlie. You have your walkie-talkie and air horn along?” Meg was always enforced regulations ‘to the letter’ when weather conditions like fog affected the research, and especially when one man went out alone, as Egan was today.
“Double check.” Egan said, responding to both the meet up coordinates and Meg’s question. Meg nodded and the crew began to push the winches over the sides to the boat. With the flip of a hand-switch, Egan and his craft were descending toward the ocean. The skiff set down on the one-and-one-half, two foot waves and Egan checked the compass and the chart he had brought with himself. He then pulled the starter rope on the forty-horsepower engine and pulled away from the Alanis. As he twisted the throttle, and the inflatable craft began to skip over the waves, Egan once again felt a free-fall from the more worldly concerns. Minutes turned into tens of minutes, and tens of minutes quadrupled as Egan became more and more immersed in the equivalent world. But what equivalent reality is there to time and space? To temporal life? Egan felt on the verge of an answer.
The chirrup of dolphins interrupted his thoughts, and Egan slowed the craft. By the time he started to throw whitefish from a bucket at his side, and as the boat slowed further to a walk, he had forgotten them altogether. A fin slid from the water on his port side, and Egan whistled, so that the fin playfully disappeared. He heard a second chirrup to starboard and threw some whitefish toward the sound. There was a gleeful, child-like cackle, and then the sound of moving water. Killing the engine, the world became still and fog-ridden. The dolphins seemed spirit creatures in the murky paradise; always nearby, though physically insubstantial. Egan pulled a clipboard from beneath the bench he sat on and started taking notes, throwing whitefish to keep the dolphins in the locale. He slowly became lost in thought, and finally his pen went lax. Egan noticed something peculiar in the air, and he had the feeling that there was something he had overlooked; something much simpler than scientific theory or fantastic postulates on the nature of sea creatures. Their very nature claimed the moment supreme, and as just a beginning. But the beginning of what..?
Egan shook himself from the lethargy, making visual identification when he could to ascertain the tags he had placed on the creatures were still functioning and in-place. He carefully observed the interactions among the group, occasionally Egan’s instincts once again told him of some enormous potential within the creatures and their world. For several moments he felt like an imbecile; incompetent before the sister civilization and those dimensions surrounding it; he felt unworthy of them. Egan gave up. If there was something to be learned today, it would not be from them.
Egan pulled on the starter cord again, and the small engine coughed to life. Soon he was again pounding lightly across the wave-tops. Egan glanced at his mariner’s watch, surprised by the amount of time he had spent with the dolphins. He would have to find the pod of Gray Whales quickly, and he wouldn’t have much time for taking notes. He checked the charts he had brought with him, pin-pointing the most recent co-ordinates. Slowing when he reached them, he attempted to use the binoculars, which didn’t work, and then cut the engine in order to better hear. For several moments there was silence, and Egan felt himself absolutely alone. He had been that way for a long time. Like a gentle finger tapping his shoulder, there was the sound of a blow-hole in the distance, and Egan powered up the craft again, moving slowly toward the sound. The mists cut at him, knife-like, and Egan shivered with the chill in the air. He heard another blow-hole nearer-by and again turned off the Evinrude forty-horse. The edge of the boat lifted slightly as a massive bulk slid underneath it. Although Egan knew the Grays to be at play, he couldn’t help feeling the great presence foreboding. The loneliness he had encountered several moments before returned, and Egan pulled a second clip-board from underneath the seat in an attempt to avoid his feeling of weakness before the elements. He started to note the whales’ behavior. Although he was not an expert on the creatures he felt obligated to track them because of their environmental status. Egan started noting the pod and its behavior, but as the chill soaked into him, his pen again started to go lax. Twenty feet away, one of the creatures surfaced, pounding its great tail down on the water. The sound was a clap of judgement.
Death. Egan recognized the fear he had been entertaining the entire morning. The chill soaked deeper and Egan’s hands twisted around the pen and clipboard in terror. Of course he would go the way of all men. The dolphins had known it, as the men on the ship had known it. The near collision had nearly proven it. Egan had been blind. The sister of life would come for him as it did for every man. Egan, for the first time in his life, began the grieve himself. The unexpected dawn of greater maturity carried him in its grip like a tidal flood. He began to cry as he lost part of himself and realized that he wasn’t at the center of things. Finally, Egan sighed and accepted it and in its place grew room for something else... Throwing down the clip-board and the pen, he looked at his watch and realized he was running late for rendezvous with the Alanis. Egan started the engine on the motorboat and twisted the throttle to full. At two miles distant from the Grays,’ he heard the fog horn of the ship calling him in. Egan pulled alongside the Alanis, and hooking winch hooks to the boat, stepped onto a rope ladder next to the boat. Smiling to himself, he climbed the ladder to find a deck crew swarming around the winch to his boat.
“Egan, where were you!?” Meg’s voice broke with anger and concern. Egan stifled the smile, although his eyes remained distant.
“Sorry,” he said, “something came up that I… didn’t expect.” He left Meg standing on the deck, a little flummoxed by an answer that wasn’t attentive and courteous; something that very usual for Egan. He turned and walked toward to the bow of the ship, as Meg followed him in disbelief. Egan stood at the prow, and for several seconds bent his arms into a rough cradle.
Egan had treated the news from his father as common place, but the new chambers in his soul suddenly opened to the miraculous truth. He had a little sister. Very little. Too small, almost, to cry. For several moments he was rapt with joy, and then Egan let out a loud whoop as Meg stood aghast at his behavior.
“My father and step-mother have just had a little girl.” Meg’s round eyes softened and then moistened.
“Congratulations, Egan,” she said, smiling, but Egan was already making his way below decks to email his father; to tell him that he would be visiting.