Terra Two Read online

  The incident didn't have lasting impact and the shipment brought more than enough provisions but it left a clear imprint in everyone's mind of the necessity to be self-reliant.

  That month the real terraforming started, not in the science team exploring the unknown sort of way, but in the settlers who burned the ships when they reached the shore sort. Everything else declined in importance compared to the need for sufficient food, water and energy to ensure their survival. All of a sudden they ceased being on a mission away from home and became the dwellers of the wilderness, to survive and thrive through their own skills and God's mercy.

  Sarah continued her life almost the same as before but whatever it was in her soul that allowed her the certainty that things would always turn out ok was gone. In time she recovered the grace of not fearing that God hated her which provided tremendous comfort for her tormented soul. She became very quiet and inasmuch as sister Joseph appreciated the stop of incessant chatter, the sisters started worrying about her.

  One interesting consequence of her altered state of perception was that God took her certainty with one hand and gave her miracle working power with the other. If Sarah had a green thumb before there was nothing she couldn't grow now. If she accidentally touched a dead stick it sprung forth in bloom and turnips grew an inch taller just because she passed them by.

  The success she had with all things green elevated her status from apprentice to master and an equal among her piers, but she never processed what engendered this change and whether it was yet another random event or fate at work.

  The teams were working double shifts to increase yield so in the evening everyone was so exhausted they didn't have time to think about what all of this meant. Sarah was passing time watching holographic recordings from her childhood on the touch table and she adjusted the boosters to fine tune the light beams but instead of realigning the laser interference the mirrors picked up strange images, clearly non-random, a continuous and fascinating pattern of lines and waves, an alien language of sorts.

  Someone on the logistics team recognized rhythms in the patterns and started deciphering the code. As clear and logically dispersed as the curves were he couldn't put a finger on the signal, there was something incredibly familiar about the way the patterns flowed, like the sinus waves of a heartbeat with multiple interfering harmonies.

  It looked as if light particles were dispersed by modulations of longer wave lengths, the same way water particles get stirred around a moving fish. Apparently the holograph had picked up disturbance created by radio signals in the photon field and translated it into the extraordinary visual they all saw. They fed back the wave lengths into the sound equalizer, adjusted for the photons bouncing off ice crystals and obtained a warbled but understandable communication, ironically enough desperately trying to get in touch with them.

  Chapter Eighteen

  "We think in human terms and assign our human limitations to life as a whole but in creation life cycles can be shorter than the blink of an eye or as long as eternity. Immortality doesn't have to be larger than life, it may come in the smallest, most unassuming forms to challenge our assumptions and keep us humble. We found life on Terra Two, not intelligent life, at least not in the way we understand it, but immortal life."

  "The beings we disturbed by settling here live their endless existence on a square foot of dirt, the entire population, the whole life of the planet. What divine modesty it is for an eternal to exist in this boundless universe of ours and only carve a minuscule corner for itself, content to live there anonymously forever."

  "Do you know what this is?" asked Seth.

  Sarah was staring incredulously at the beanstalk in front of her. Half of the leaves were turning a delightful shade of purple, looking otherwise healthy in every way. She didn't know what prompted the change and was preparing to harvest a fistful of leaves and take them to the lab to take a closer look. Solomon, who never left Sarah's side and was of course present at the scene stood up, stretched his back and brushed against Seth's leg, making the latter slightly uncomfortable: she wasn't too keen on displays of affection, not even the feline kind. Solomon purred, looked her straight in the eyes, and started chewing on a purple bean leaf. Sarah tried to stop him, but by the time she picked him up the cat had already swallowed the leaf and was licking his lips to clean off the last drop of the purple juice oozing out of the crushed foliage.

  "I hope whatever this is it's not poisonous", Sarah said and picked up the cat, somewhat concerned. Solomon purred with delight, in a much better mood than anyone ever saw him. He started stretching and patting gently at Sarah's arms, then shuffled a little bit to be set free and disappeared under a broad cabbage leaf.

  Sarah looked around to see if there were more purple leaved beans but couldn't see any. The dirt that mounded around the base of the bean plant was tinted the same intense color, as if somebody tried to color the bean on purpose by pouring indigo ink around its root.

  "Do you think someone did this on purpose?" asked Seth, unconvinced.

  "I can't even guess what it is", said Sarah, scooping up a handful of dirt and picking a few more leaves to take back to the lab. By the time she got in front of a microscope her hands were stained with purple juice in a very intense and slightly iridescent hue.

  The cellular structure of the bean leaf was completely ordinary but looked as if it were dyed on purpose, like the hydrangea flowers Sarah used to experiment on when she was in school to shift their color from pink to green or blue.

  The chromoplasts of the cells were producing large quantities of anthocyanins, the same component that stained the dry beans a deep purple, almost black, no doubt in response to the stress of growing under the light of two suns. Sarah didn't realize how much the light intensity differed from the one on Earth, the coffee/caramel sky diffused and subdued it, masking its effects.

  First she made a mental note to let everyone know they should wear sunscreen, then she looked closer at the substance. The plant made so much of it that it seeped out into the ground around its roots. The strangest thing was that there was only one plant, why that plant and not the other ones? There was no explanation she could find, really, so she was about to throw in the towel and tend to her other duties. She got up from the microscope and turned around, only to see Seth standing in the doorway and waiting with uncharacteristic patience for the findings.

  "So, what is it?"

  "Antocyanins, we need to wear sunscreen, the plant is protecting itself from extreme light intensity."

  "Why only this plant and not the others?" came the unavoidable question. Of course Sarah knew the moment she saw the leader leaning on the door jamb that she wasn't going to get away with leaving this issue unresolved.

  If there was something certain beside the proverbial death and taxes was Seth's thoroughness about getting to the bottom of a problem: she stuck with it until it was clarified, analyzed and archived. There was absolutely no way that Sarah would have any peace until she figured out why the one plant turned purple while all the other ones were still green.

  "You can take some time figuring this out, there is no rush until the cows arrive." Moments like this made Sarah question her sanity, there was something about a cow transport arriving at light speed in combination with strangely colored foliage that tore a rift in the fabric of normalcy, even on this odd planet.

  "Now?" Sarah asked.

  "Yes, is there something else more important you have to do?"

  Sarah knew that the only acceptable answer to this question was no, so she turned to the microscope to take a second look and noticed that the chromoplasts had moved noticeably from their previous location. She increased the magnification by a factor of a thousand and got confronted by a huge pair of black eyes, round and beady like those of a lobster. The creature moved quickly and Sarah rushed to adjust the microscope so she could see it better. There was an entire colony of them, building microscopic hives on the inner surface of the chromoplast,
working in concerted fashion like an ant colony or a bee hive, diligently catalyzing the plant's processing of sugar, purple sugar to be precise.

  "Where did they come from", Sarah thought, "and what were they eating before the plants got here, there was nothing on the planet surface that they could metabolize, nothing organic, anyway."

  Sarah increased the magnification again, to atomic level. "Great", she thought, "I get to witness the digestive processes of a microscopic bug." Inside the microorganism boron atoms combined with sugars, moving them around like a miniature transit station towards the cell membranes, strengthening them, feeding them, a flawless symbiotic system.

  Fascinated, she watched the matter distribution for a while, thinking that the little bugs must think they have gone to heaven themselves, given how much easier it was for them to process the boron already refined and made soluble by the plant's metabolic processes. Life, of course, how come they didn't think about it?

  Life on this planet made perfect sense, life at such a different scale that it existed outside of their grasp, like humans ignore the gigantic energetic processes of a super nova.

  The question of the singular plant still remained unanswered but Sarah was tired and her hands were still purple from the bean juice and she had a creek in her neck due to tense concentration. She decided to take up the challenge again in the morning and went to bed, exhausted.

  ***

  The next morning she went and checked the entire bean patch and all the other plantings, there was no purple foliage among them or markings on the ground, no purple at all. Nor did the purple phenomenon extend to other plants as years passed. For once a question remained unanswered, despite effort and frustration, one of those things in life that were beyond human control. The sisters made many assumptions and tested many theories, none of which panned out. Sarah's personal opinion was that the microscopic inhabitants that turned the plant purple were the entire population of the planet, and since the conditions inside their little milk and honey host were so good they never dreamed of leaving.

  Seth judged the hypothesis and found it preposterous but since she couldn't come up with a better explanation she left the whole thing alone.

  The unique bean plant with leaves half green half purple never died, it grew larger and its stem turned into a woody trunk, thicker than an arm. In time the sisters built an entire support system around it to protect this curiosity of nature and offer sanctuary to the gracious hosts that shared their planet with them. When many years passed and Solomon was still with them the sisters started wondering what wonderful properties this tree of life possessed, but none of them dared to try and eat the leaves, not out of fear that they would be poisoned, but out of respect for the life, even microscopic, that had no choice but to accept their imposition, oblivious settlers that they were.

  Sarah quietly wondered if any of the juice was absorbed through her skin, since it took more than a week for the purple coloring to subside, but never talked about this and felt guilty for the damage she caused the immortal microscopic colony before she knew better. She wondered if life inside the purple leaves was more advantageous for the little bugs than life inside her own body and questioned if there was enough boron in her own metabolic process to support their existence. She was sure she had a few Terra Two natives running through her veins, hard at work in cellular repair, restoring parts of her to the original, optimal design.

  Three living hosts resided on Terra Two, three gigantic cities for the immortal natives of the planet, Sarah, Solomon, and the bean plant. Two of them accepted their new role without reason, as the natural order of things. For Sarah the role of carrying this alien life inside her for the rest of her years became a sacred duty and she got a lot more aware of the need for her body to stay healthy and strong, so that the beings she accidentally took upon herself could continue their existence in comfort and peace.

  The sisters teased Sarah for a while after she became a they, always addressing her in the plural and making sure that her guests would not be unduly stressed by the performance of her daily chores. Sister Joseph commented that it served her right, after mulling so much bacterial muck, to have to provide more decent accommodations to her work.

  Chapter Nineteen

  "I rarely stopped to think what life would have been like if I chose a different course, if I stayed on my parents' farm, or if I took a teaching position in Nairobi. The other choices never lingered long enough to make me question my path, although I have to admit that life on this planet was few bolts short of sanity most of the time, with human daring pushed to its extremes."

  "One year on Terra Two equaled seven on Earth, so much stuff happened in so little time our days buckled and creaked at the edges, ready to burst open at any time. One has a general goal one pursues in life but the really interesting events happen around it and are somewhat unrelated."

  Sarah didn't know if it was an ancestral, instinctive call of the natives or a personal affinity, but she got into the habit of taking Solomon and his basket and sitting in the shade of the purple bean plant to read books or news from the central computer via her neural interlink. From a distance, as she sat there gazing vaguely into the distance, petting Solomon and browsing the information she looked like she was zoning out and this image managed to annoy some of the sisters and many on the logistics team.

  There was this unspoken understanding among the settlers that if one wasn't constantly involved in some activity, productive or otherwise, one wasn't carrying one's own weight around the camp and deserved admonition. In this respect the cats were the absolute winners of the game: they didn't have any tasks, were well taken care of, had a glorious social life, answered to no one and everybody liked them.

  Solomon looked at Sarah with slight reproach, as if he heard her thoughts and disagreed. There was a strange alignment between Sarah, the cat in her lap and the tree-like structure behind her that almost seemed to spring from her being, they looked like beads on a vertical string attached to the sky.

  That afternoon Sarah was listening to news about the space greenhouse CAHS had launched in orbit around Earth and gazed at pictures projected inside her mind of the beloved and now almost forgotten experimental fields. She had spent four years in those fields, she could wander around blindfolded and stop precisely in front of a specific plant. She didn't dare close her eyes because she didn't want to get lost in the green and blue landscape and also because she didn't want to look like she was taking a nap in the shade in the middle of the day.

  Earth looked so much greener and bluer than Terra Two, so intensely painted in cool jewel hues, it almost felt strange to Sarah, the brightness of the blue sky hurt her mind's eye. She was watching two different landscapes at the same time and one could think that an impossibility if one didn't experience the phenomenon: it was as if she had two sets of eyes, a pair on her face and a pair on the back of her head, and saw two completely different scenes with each set. The scenes didn't interfere, each preserving its perfect clarity, one with blue skies over bright green fields growing in dark rich loamy soil, the other chocolate, raspberry and wine, with northern lights and atmospheric songs and lush green giant plants growing in a brick colored rubble and casting two shadows.

  One of the instructors at CAHS approached the camera and Sarah felt like the person was walking straight towards her. The redhead still had trouble adjusting her reflexes to the electronic projections she only saw with her brain.

  Sister Roberta was coming towards her, this time for real, and Sarah turned off the neural interlink so she wouldn't be distracted.

  "Hi, Sarah, Solomon", sister Roberta started, in a semi-formal tone that made Sarah wonder what she wanted. Sister Roberta had always been nice to her but it was a rule for the sisters in general not to make small talk. It was bad enough they had to talk to convey information and engaging in chatter felt painfully uncomfortable.

  "Hi", Sarah answered.

  "I was wondering if you could help m
e with this", the sister pulled out a shiny object from under her jacket, all smiles.

  Sarah had seen a good share of sister Roberta's inventions, enough to make her approach the issue with some reluctance. She hoped that whatever the gizmo did didn't interfere with breathing or gravity.

  "What is it, sister?" she asked, knowing ahead of time that she would regret her involvement later.

  "I was wondering if you could stand up and move over there, we need as much clear space around you as possible, in case the range is still imprecise."

  "What exactly does it do, sister?" Sarah asked, concerned. She had very strong misgivings about the outcome of this experiment.

  "It's a surprise, you'll see, ooh, I'm so excited about this!" sister Roberta couldn't contain her enthusiasm. "Now stand up straight, but don't be tense, it will only take a moment."

  Sarah was looking for a way to politely refuse and she still had Solomon in her arms when her entire landscape changed and she found herself in the middle of a gentle rolling valley covered in flowers, next to a bubbling brook streaming over bedrock.

  There was no sign of Roberta or their village, and Solomon tensed up in her arms. An enormous Siberian tiger approached leisurely, looking almost like it was smiling.

  "Hi again", said the tiger, in sister Roberta's voice, jumping on its hind paws and patting Sarah's shoulder, almost knocking her down.

  "Oh, my, a virtual space! This is so great, do you have any other scenes?"

  "I experimented with a forest view and the sea shore, but they're still work in progress."

  "How does it work?" asked Sarah, fascinated, picking a very real flower, soft, scented and slightly cool to the touch.

  "It accesses centers in your brain, this stuff is not really here. It temporarily blocks the interpretation of sensory perception and replaces it with this scene. If one could see you now, you would be staring at dirt with a delighted look on your face, talking to my waist and holding an imaginary object in your hand. But nobody can see us, it's like a stealth bubble. It works with reflections and transparency, it gets complicated".