Terra Two Read online

  It was this very moment, though, this all important moment when their fates depended on concerted effort from everyone that the sight of Sarah mixing mud in a trough brought the most vigorous indignation out of all but the most God-fearing people. If it weren't for their disciplined training they would have protested for sure, but they contented themselves to work faster and more aggressively to consume the bounce in energy that their annoyance generated. Sarah was oblivious to the quiet ire and kept stirring the contents of the trough like her life depended on it. All around her small ATVs, surveyor teams, logistical groups, laser wave carriers and reverse osmosis fresh water pumps moved constantly in a mindful chaos, each team going about its task without interfering with the others.

  "How much organic matter do we have so far?" Seth asked, breathing down Sarah's neck as usual.

  "About seven hundred cubic feet, we need a few days for the microbe cultures to mature."

  "Start another bin, they are almost done with the growing beds, we want to get everything going as soon as we have a water line."

  A quick look at the lima beans determined that the constant 82 degree temperature was going to be an issue in the absence of water so they moved half of the trays back inside. This change increased the energy consumption for growing lights and watering systems and Seth was not pleased. She said nothing but her transparent eyes spoke volumes when they scattered lightning bolts on every one who happened to cross her path.

  "We need to work faster", she said. She would have liked to put some urgency under the team in charge of water distribution but since the horticultural experts weren't exactly a top priority she chose her battles and reconsidered. One could see that every second that passed elevated her anxiety and annoyance levels and the sisters who knew better found ways to be out of sight for a while in order not to be on the receiving end of a very sharp tongue and frightening stares. To be sure nobody slept well until they had water to the site because the more dire the lima bean situation looked the more irate Seth became. Between the increasing tension of the team and the cat food diet, Sarah started to remember her early days in Perpignan and kicked herself mentally for being such a push-over.

  At the end of each day she sat on a sewer pipe left over from civil works and opened the unthinkable food ration with hands covered in dust and sweat while her fiery hair lit up in the rays of the setting suns.

  ***

  Four days later, to the complete shock of the rest of the settlers, the experimental farm was ready, both hardscape and landscape completed, the housing units finished, the storage facilities prepared, all waiting for water.

  The head of the water distribution team happened to meet Seth's gaze and started wondering if indeed it wouldn't be a good idea to make sure the crazies had what they wanted before they started going off the rails. After all people who travel twenty light years to mix mud in a trough can't possibly be in control of their mental faculties. They mumbled about the waste of their time but installed the piping, the solar pumps and the reverse osmosis systems quickly so they could get out of the nut factory as soon as feasible.

  Sister Jesse planted quickly the surviving lima beans, watered them deeply and prayed for the best. Years later when the stable atmosphere carried moisture and rain clouds it seemed impossible to believe how precious water was in the beginning and how difficult it was to keep it where it was needed. The hot dry air absorbed water like hygroscopic gel, no amount of watering would last more than a few hours, and keeping the pumps running constantly became their most important activity for the following years, until the atmosphere absorbed all the water it could hold at 82 degrees and the system reached balance.

  Chapter Fourteen

  "How lucky are we to be so assured we know the world we live in! Every now and then a strange occurrence wakes us up to the reality that maybe things are not exactly the way we think. We are unsettled by the new reality, not knowing how to take it in but there is always an explanation for the things that make no sense, we just don't know it yet."

  "Terra Two was so new, so strange, we didn't question anything. If we woke up in the morning and saw Earth rising elegantly over the horizon we wouldn't have thought it strange. Our mind can only absorb so much and once it's filled with new it dams the torrent of information like a slow clerk shutting the window in front of the queue at closing time. If the sky is coffee colored and the dirt looks like raspberry pudding, why even wonder about anything else? If it's there, it's probably real."

  That morning Sarah woke up to complete silence. An unusual silence it was too, none of sister Joseph's mythical moans, no sounds of sister Jove dropping objects because she wasn't yet fully awake, no humming of ATVs outside the tuna cans, no gusts of wind.

  She didn't understand it at first, still half immersed in a dream impossible to remember. She sat up and looked around: she was laying on a patch of soft powdery dirt in the middle of the desert that the wind gusts gathered around her like a nest. The edge of the ocean was relatively close but then again this was a pattern on Terra Two so it could have been anywhere on the planet, really. One of the two suns was close to the horizon and the other one right above her head and as we already know that meant absolutely nothing. It would take the sisters another ten years to figure out repeating patterns in the movements of the suns that would allow them to tell the time of day and which of the suns was real.

  As far as the eyes could see there was nothing but hills and valleys of the brick colored debris, weirdly distorted by pockets of methane moving close to the ground. This experience was so surreal that fear didn't get a chance to process because despite all the less than usual ways in which Sarah's life unfolded so far this was not something she anticipated. She took a moment to contemplate the fact that maybe she should have, since after all it wasn't really clear that she was still alive, so why shouldn't she wake up in the middle of the desert one morning for no reason? Maybe the laws of causality didn't apply to the after-life and maybe if she closed her eyes and wished really hard she would wake up on her parents' farm, surrounded by nieces and nephews. She tried. It didn't work.

  "Darn", she thought, "a girl can't catch a break in the thereafter either." A familiar twinge alerted her to the fact that alive or not she was still hungry and any moment now the lack of drinking water will become a major problem.

  The old Sarah, the angel haired one who liked cats and crinum lilies would have gotten scared and start crying, but the new Sarah, the one with the bacterial cultures, took one look around, tried to educate herself best she could about which direction could be north and started walking.

  She walked for hours through the desert, close to the edge of the water, just in case, watching the strange sun paths act even more chaotic than usual, showing no signs of sunset. A parching thirst was burning her throat but she chose to ignore it. She concentrated on the horizon trying to distinguish even the slightest shape, the smallest glimmer that would hopefully mean the camp was within reach. She wasn't paying attention to the ground and she stumbled upon a familiar and despair inducing shape: she had ran into the nest she woke up in, which meant she walked in circles for hours and surrounded the island.

  First reaction, anger. Second reaction, she decided to walk straight away from the water to see if the camp was by any chance situated in the middle of this island. She walked for yet more hours and reached the edge of the water again. She sat, dejected, not knowing what to do. She remembered from her childhood a science fiction episode that dealt with situations where there were only losing options. Of course that episode depicted a tactical exercise whereas her situation was real, unexpected and life threatening. She knelt on the soft brick dust facing one of the suns, closed her eyes and started going over beautiful images in her mind, memories from her childhood, sounds of her brothers giggling and chasing each other around the tree with the tree house in it, herself as a little girl hiding in the doorway between the kitchen and the herb garden at the monastery listening in to the nuns'
conversations, her grandparents house with the famous touch table, the transparent rose.

  She started praying softly, first in her head, than out loud, because she wasn't alone in the desert, she could never be alone anywhere in existence, for where God was, there was love. Her eyesight dimmed gradually and she couldn't figure out if it was finally night or she was losing consciousness. She welcomed the soft warm embrace of the darkness that surrounded her, gentle as a mother's caress. Her lips were still moving when the light completely disappeared and a far away roll, like distant thunder was vaguely ringing in her ears. At first she thought she was hallucinating because she could distinguish voices in the rumble, familiar voices, the booming words of sister Joseph, Seth's tense calling of her name, white noises from the crowd.

  "Sarah, can you hear me? Sarah, could you please open your eyes, try to open your eyes." A rush of pressured oxygen invaded her airways making her choke and cough.

  "Open your eyes, Sarah, do you know who I am? Sarah, please open your eyes!"

  Her eyelids were heavier than lead but she struggled with them until a very sharp ray of sunshine hit her cornea. She recognized the voices and guessed she must have reached the camp in the dark and fainted before she got to see it.

  With effort she opened her eyes, staring at twelve worried faces looking down on her.

  "Thank God you found me!" she managed to mutter.

  "Found you? What is she talking about?" boomed sister Joseph with her characteristically annoyed tone.

  "You hit an air pocket and by the time we got to you, you were out cold. We've been trying for the last five minutes to wake you up. Do you recognize me?"

  "Yes, Seth."

  "What year is it?"

  "2113".

  "What is your name?"

  "Seth!" she protested.

  "Your name is not Seth", the leader smiled. "Get up, we have work to do."

  Sarah got up and reached for the shovel.

  "Not you, good grief! Get in the tuna can and sleep this off. Make sure you have the neural interlink on, I want to know immediately if there is any sign of trouble."

  Sarah turned the neural interlink on and watched Seth listen intently to her thoughts.

  "Quite an interesting experience you had there at the end of the world. Do you want to talk about it?"

  "No, I'm ok." Sarah headed to the tuna cans kind of groggy, her eyelids still heavy. She felt very tired and threw herself backwards on the bed, for once admitting that sister Joseph had a point about the lumpy mattresses, then closed her eyes and continued her prayer, from exactly the point where she was before she came to, softly, slower and slower, until she fell asleep.

  Chapter Fifteen

  "We were put in charge of a modern day Noah's ark to make the animals comfortable under two suns instead of one and I assure you they were even more confused than us humans in their innocence. They couldn't tell but they could feel and we tried to assuage their stress the best we could until they got used to their new world."

  "When the cats arrived our lives recovered a significant part of normalcy, whatever that means, we weren't alone in an alien world anymore, we were at home, with plants and animals and rainclouds and gentle breezes. A small seedling taking root in a vast and welcoming universe."

  "Sister Roberta, could you please give the lab a well deserved rest and join us for a minute?" asked Seth, in her poised tone of voice. Seth had this amazing talent of making herself heard even in the lightest whisper because every time she looked like she had something to say everyone snapped to attention. Sarah could never figure out if it was well earned respect and admiration, a healthy apprehension for Seth's formidable gaze or a combination of the two that did the trick.

  Everybody was already gathered around her in one of the tuna cans waiting for sister Roberta to finish fumbling with the magnetic wave generator and join them. The three pieces of metal that were gravitating in thin air connected by invisible forces to the circular wire dropped on the tin support with startling noise. Sister Joseph mumbled some well seasoned thoughts under her breath close enough to sister Jove's ear that the latter shuffled uncomfortably and started coughing.

  Sister Roberta approached the group sheepishly, avoiding sister Joseph's bitter stare. Sister Joseph was even grouchier than usual; the draught, the maddening sun paths and the constant noise of the reverse osmosis pumps drove everyone crazy.

  "Where do we stand on the soybeans?" Seth asked, matter of fact.

  "The ones we set up six weeks ago are progressing nicely, though we haven't planted them outside yet. The third set of plantings that we set outdoors are finally taking root, I think we have just about enough water in the atmosphere to generate rain." Since they were outside they all looked overhead where a fluffy mist moved about swiftly, connecting and separating randomly, slightly distorted by different atmosphere densities, a fascinating man made tapestry of vapor. Here and there, for reasons known only to physics but not yet uncovered by the sisters, rain fell in compact fascicles, pretty much as if a large number of showerheads started and stopped randomly accompanied by the weird and fascinating sounds of the chocolate rose aurora borealis.

  It is interesting how adaptable the human mind is, if anybody saw this heavenly singing fountain show for the first time they would have been so mesmerized they couldn't do anything else but stand in awe, but for the sisters after five years of pumping water and mixing smelly mud it was just another work day. Seth frowned imperceptibly when one of the random showers landed on her shoulder, but continued unperturbed.

  "Are we finally going to be able to see harvest from this next set of plantings? We're running on fumes here and I don't want to request additional food provisions from the Space Science Center, we'll look like idiots."

  Sarah grabbed the criticism and swallowed it whole, as unfair as it was, since she really didn't see how she could be in control of what the beans liked or disliked about the soil.

  "Of course, Sarah, if you are thinking about an excuse please remember that you are the soil fertility expert, brought here for this specific purpose. Whatever the truth is, I'd like to know it now, but I hope it's good news."

  Sarah had kept a little experimental tray of beans aside and kind of hidden, since she didn't want to get everyone's hopes up for no reason, but since Seth dragged that out into the open she decided to talk about it.

  "We might be able to jumpstart the plant feeding with some of the bi-products from the desalination pumps, we can isolate useful ocean minerals. I started a couple of trays and one of them is showing promise."

  "I saw it, I was just wandering what it was. Start more, let's see if we can get the crops to move a little faster."

  "Dearly beloved", Seth started.

  "We are gathered here, in the eyes of..." sister Joseph mumbled under her breath, until one of Seth stares pierced a hole through her skull and got out the other end. She became silent.

  "Dearly beloved", Seth said, "I have great news for you."

  "What was with her", Sarah wondered quietly, "this crazy planet must have affected her brains too, everybody was on edge and kind of zany."

  "The Space Science Center is sending us the first in a long convoy of Noah's arks, yes, plants will no longer be the only sign of life on this planet. Why, you wonder, when I told them we are still having issues with the crops and just managed to saturate the medium with sufficient moisture so we don't see vapors hissing out of the scorched dirt the second water touches it? You might want to bring up that question with them. For now we're getting more mouths to feed. Fortunately for us the cattle is on the second transport, so we won't have to worry about their feed for another six months, but tomorrow we get our very first crème de la crème load of cats."

  The sisters looked at Seth and then at each other, trying to ascertain if this was one of her sarcastic comments or the craziest truth ever spoken. Seth looked serious.

  "Cats? What are we going to do with cats? I hate cats", sister Joseph sa
id. "What are they for, belts and shoes?" Sarah cringed since she loved cats and wouldn't want to even think harm to them, but was just as puzzled as the grouchy sister at the Space Center's wisdom.

  "Apparently they are the most adaptable animals and are sent here as test subjects. They come with their own food and the way things are moving we're going to have to steal it from them if these crops don't get on to a solid start soon." Seth frowned at Sarah again but the latter didn't notice, overjoyed as she was at the thought of tens of purring and meowing bits of happiness frolicking freely among soybeans and carrots. She even decided what kind of cat she was going to adopt and gave it a name, Solomon, that was what she was going to name it, or Lisa, depending on the gender.

  "Sarah!" Seth yelled, irate. Sarah came back to reality. "So, when the transport arrives everybody is going to take responsibility for one or more cats and ensure their health and wellbeing. Of course they will have to sleep in the tuna cans with us, at least for a while until they adapt to planet life."

  "Why, you're afraid that the great and mighty Chupacabra is going to get them?" protested sister Joseph. "How are we going to sleep in these cozy quarters with forty cats?"

  "Remember what happened to Sarah? We'd like to keep them breathing until the atmosphere stabilizes."

  ***

  The next morning the transport arrived with not forty but fifty fluffy and friendly kitty-cats, a little shy to the new surroundings but young enough not to care. Sarah was in heaven; she picked her four protégées, named one Solomon and one Lisa and the other two Gulliver and Missy and spent the entire day playing with them, trying to stay out of Seth's sight to avoid thunderbolts.

  Seth was getting more and more tense the closer they got to the cattle transport deadline and even though the veggies had finally started growing well she couldn't see how their production would be enough to feed cows. In the meantime the cats made themselves at home filling every nook and cranny in the tuna cans, laying down on the exposed wall girts, cozying up in the nooks behind equipment and taking over both the top and the underside of the beds. They figured that the outside was unfamiliar and to be on the safe side they were staying indoors driving sister Joseph insane.