 
## Terra Two

by Francis Rosenfeld

© **2013 Francis Rosenfeld**

Smashwords Edition

Cover Design by Shardel

Discover other titles by Francis Rosenfeld:

Generations - Terra Two Series, Volume 2

Letters to Lelia – Terra Two Series, Volume 3

The Plant – A Steampunk Story

Door Number Eight

Fair

### Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

Chapter Twenty Three

Chapter Twenty Four

Chapter Twenty Five

Chapter Twenty Six

Chapter Twenty Seven

Chapter Twenty Eight

Chapter Twenty Nine

Commencement address to the class of 2198

About the Author

Other Books by Francis Rosenfeld

### Chapter One

"I, the most humble Mother Joachima, now in the one hundred and sixteenth year of my life, in obedience to Mother Superior's wishes, was entrusted with chronicling the beginnings of our mission here on Terra Two and the first hundred years of terra-forming."

"Many people would have been better suited for this task since they are more knowledgeable and eloquent than I, but I was chosen for I was blessed to witness many of the events first hand. Whether I will be worthy of this task is at the mercy of the Almighty to Whom I pray for guidance and fair resurgence of my memories."

"As I advanced in years I got set in my ways and despite the younger sisters' attempts to teach me how to use the neural interlink for writing I can't make the wicked thing work for me, so after many unsuccessful attempts to transmit the first phrase of the chapter to the central computer I gave up and used my old touch table, a curiosity among the younger sisters and a very cherished heirloom from my grandfather."

"Many old memories are attached to its shiny surface, polished even more by extensive use, since in the very beginning of our being here it was at times our only way to communicate with Earth as we struggled to put together our energy and communication infrastructure. Of course my grandfather intended it as a sentimental gift and would have probably been stunned to learn how extensively it was used (and what ingenious modifications have been done to it in order to enhance the broadcasting range and the battery life). Grace to sister Roberta, may the good Lord keep her in health and happiness for He bestowed on her the sharpest mind an engineer could ever wish for, the table is now running indefinitely on less power than it takes to light up a LED bulb. Not exactly a perpetual motion machine, but close. One can only mess with the laws of physics so much..."

The words failed to migrate to her fingers, which had started to get tired from all the typing. She looked at her hands almost not recognizing them, with thinning skin almost translucent, vigorous curling veins and protruding joints. They had no embellishment aside from her ring, and showed the marks of many decades of hard labor.

It was time for Vespers and Joachima placed the bracelet on her wrist and activated the interlink. The sisters' prayers burst into her mind with great intensity and she realized she was late. Mother Superior didn't tolerate tardiness, so Joachima kept her mind very still trying to blend in the common prayer unnoticed. No such luck, she felt Mother Superior's quick admonition and intent to discuss this disciplinary lapse later.

Her mind slowly quieted in prayer, she set aside material concerns and presented her heart to God. The hours passed and light diminished gradually from the light rusty color of the day to a deep chocolate brown. Joachima couldn't help herself and broke her focus to look through the thick windows at the sepia gradients of Terra Two's sunsets, amazing blends of light coffee latte, milk and dark chocolate brown with delicate iridescences of deep wine.

She rested her eyes on the soybean fields with their imposing plants from the land of the giants, three times the normal height and overflowing with pods due to the lower gravity and a soil extremely rich in nitrogen and phosphorus. They reminded Joachima that this dirt was really blessed with every nutrient a plant would ever need. Terra Two definitely lived up to its promise to be an agricultural paradise, even though it had taken some time to get used to an image of paradise with coffee colored skies.

The reason this project started in the first place was that the probe sent from Earth to investigate the new planet, now called Terra Two, came back with surprising and somewhat disconcerting results to the science team. Everybody expected the report to show great conditions for mineral extraction, rare metals and new sources of energy. These where present indeed, as they would be on any planet, but what the probe brought back was an ideal profile for agricultural production: a perfect combination of nutrients and soil consistency in the presence of water, a blend that like the best quality flour only needed the yeast of microorganisms and invertebrates to turn this land into the bread of life.

The science program changed on the fly from the remote possibility of terra-forming to the active pursuit of this goal. A decade was dedicated to creating a breathable atmosphere, a decade during which the thrills of the hard earned successes were only equaled by the unbelievable and almost insurmountable challenges. It was during this decade that Mother Joachima was born, the second child of a farmer family on the border of North Dakota and baby sister to her brother Thomas.

She arrived on a gloomy day at the beginning of February when wispy frozen rain knocked on the windows with ghostly little fingers. Her parents named her Sarah, after her grandmother, Sarah Feaherty, a little eight pound bundle of joy with strangely luminous hair spun from candle flame. Her parents thought her strange colored locks were just baby hair that would change but Sarah was fated to go through her life donning these luminous tresses that made her seem descended from a pre-Raphaelite painting. Their fire didn't dull with the passing of the years and only recently started showing signs of age.

Shortly after her arrival the family increased again with a Christmas gift for the Feast of Stephen, a little boy who of course shared the name of his patron saint.

Sarah opened her eyes to life in the middle of a little earthly Eden, learning to walk on lush grass, soft as angel's wings, under a periwinkle sky.

Her family was huge, with numerous cousins, uncles and great-aunts; when they got together for Thanksgiving the house was bursting at the seams. Sarah's mother had five sisters of which two had joined a convent a few miles away from their village. When Sarah was little she experienced life in the convent as an extension of her home life, a different kind of family, but a family nevertheless. When she visited this cloistered space she was going to her aunts' house, complete with home made ice cream and fudge. Her aunts loved children dearly and spoiled little Sarah with the angel hair, as they liked to call her, way too much for the taste of her parents. The aunts disregarded any call for a young child's need for discipline and made every one of Sarah's visits to the convent a trip to Wonderland, a place where no rules apply and children are spoiled rotten. Sarah especially liked to sneak into the kitchen through the refectory because she knew she would find some goodies waiting for her on the table: fresh baked pastries, warm bread with lavender honey, and hot chocolate.

The kitchen door and windows opened to the herb and vegetable garden and more often than not they were left ajar to let the breeze through. During her visits Sarah leaned against the door jamb and watched the nuns tend to the plants, pluck weeds, harvest food, and talk about their day.

The most significant part of those trips, though, was the fact that only women were allowed on the premises, so the experience was for Sarah and Sarah alone, something her brothers could never enjoy. Not that they wished to, but it still made Sarah feel special, which, come to think of it, defied the purpose of her being there in the first place.

Sarah's dad spent almost all his time either playing with the children or putting together a never ending assortment of seesaws, swing sets and tree houses, to Sarah's mother's dismay. "How many playthings can a child possibly need?" she wondered, and secretly thought that her husband was building all these play sets for his own indulgence rather than the children's.

Some of Sarah's most cherished memories were of walks with her father, an educated botanist, who programmed the tractor to till or harvest and took the children into the fields to give them practical instruction about how plants develop and by what time, what diseases and pests to look for, which plant belongs to what family, and how to care for them.

Between her father and her aunts, by the time she was ten Sarah became some sort of gardening expert; she never figured if it was her early developmental years or a true passion for plant life that pushed her in this direction, all she knew and was going to manifest faithfully throughout her life was that nothing made her as happy as being in the garden.

Sarah's mother was zealously devoted to her children's education and used every resource at her disposal to further their knowledge. Their home was less of a farm house and more of a small lab filled with screens broadcasting information at all times, day or night, because she thought that as long as the children were awake they should be learning something. Since the useful life of a computerized device was a year tops and she had to have the latest version, always, the small sunroom behind the house became an experimental ground for the children to take electronics apart and put them back together.

Sarah liked science just as much as the next gal but at some point her neural pathways became so saturated with quantum theory or new elements of the periodic table that if you shook her a differential equation fell out. When she got overwhelmed she snuck out with a tablet and hid in the tree house, quiet as a mouse, until everybody forgot about her. She liked to stay up there and watch activity unfold, unseen like a little ghost, and record her thoughts on the tablet in a secret diary. To her chagrin she found out many years later that her secret diary was the favorite lecture of her brothers who followed it like a pirate novel, careful not to miss an entry.

By the time Sarah was seventeen her family grew bigger still once her older cousins married and had children of their own. They visited the farm a lot and the neighbors got to watch this unreal scene: a willowy creature with flaming hair walked slowly, almost floating over the grass, surrounded by a large group of children, answering their questions and smiling. This became such a habitual image for them that after a while they expected the small group to always be together and seeing Sarah alone alarmed them.

After long and mostly decorative debates around the kitchen table Sarah made the obvious choice and joined the prestigious College for Advanced Horticultural Studies in Christchurch to further her studies in macro-biology and botanical genetics, to the pride of her parents, her father especially, and the talk of her neighbors and extended family. It was a dream come true for Sarah and she suspected that her aunts must have spent some extra hours in prayer to help it along.

CAHS was a miraculous world where every question had answers, no idea was too outrageous and innovation came as natural as breathing. The plants Sarah saw in the botany lab were hybrids she couldn't even conceive of, not to mention design, plants whose scale was controlled to the micron, diminutive pine trees and gigantic chamomile, leaves of every shade but green processing chlorophyll, plants without roots that could move around at will, transparent roses, rubber trees genetically altered to secrete aluminum, cucumber plants that changed their color like vegetal chameleons, microscopic baobabs, sub aquatic corn fields, and a soy bean that tasted just like steak.

If anybody took time to design Sarah's heaven it would probably have looked like that, she had to keep pinching herself the entire four years to make sure she wasn't dreaming. After graduation many of her colleagues took enviable positions at the Equatorial Horticulture Institute in Nairobi, the Green Academy of Brasilia, or the Royal Aquatic Farms off the coast of Australia, but Sarah decided to continue her studies at a small experimental farm in the south of France, a very private place which offered one scholarship every ten years to graduates with very narrowly defined specialty studies for which Sarah just happened to be a perfect match.

### Chapter Two

"Our story began in the year of our Lord twenty one hundred and five at a farm in the south of France, a small stone building surrounded by vineyards and lavender fields baked by the Mediterranean sun. Our sun, the yellow one, pampered to have the firmament all to itself. In the modest garden surrounding the edifice I first saw the dirt of our promise."

"The most fertile soil in the universe looked like the scrap pile of a brick kiln, ruddy and dusty, impossible to stabilize, incapable of holding water, so silky that it didn't stick to the soles of our shoes. I didn't know how dear this pitiful rubble was going to become, I was young, educated and plucky, out to conquer the world, and my challenge was not to cultivate the impossible medium but to vanquish its unyielding grit."

She arrived in Perpignan on a clear Sunday morning carrying a backpack filled with communication gadgets and testing equipment and a couple of changes of clothes. Since there was no obvious means of transportation to the farm Sarah shrugged her shoulders and started ahead with the thought that she will get there when she got there. It wasn't very far, though, a couple of hours of pleasant strolling through a landscape of vineyards and lavender plantings.

The farm was atop a gentle hill, evidently well cared for but with no signage, test lots or any other indication of the scientific research conducted inside. Sarah approached the front door of the old stone building haunted by the eerie sounds of a wind chime collection that hung from the bay tree by the entrance.

She knocked with a pleasant smile on her face and after what seemed like forever the massive wood door with wrought iron hinges opened accompanied by a blood curdling screech. A tall young woman with raven hair was standing in the doorway. Her piercing nearly transparent eyes reached into Sarah's brain like a spear and brought to the foreground of her mind every moral failure and second guessing she experienced through the current year.

"I am..." Sarah started sweetly.

"I know who you are, we could watch you move through the landscape like a burning bush, that hair must be visible from the moon." She stopped abruptly, turned her back and started walking down the hallway. Sarah hesitated a moment, not knowing what proper etiquette dictated in circumstances like this, but then realized that she really had no another option but to go inside.

She followed the tall woman in silence recognizing her stance, that very familiar soft walk, almost sliding across the stone floors, with no sounds. There was such sparseness in the decor surrounding her, such silence, that Sarah started feeling a little anxious and reevaluated her life choices, beginning with the curiosity for unfamiliar settings that had brought her here. The host stopped abruptly in front of the door leading to a large hall containing twelve beds.

"That one is yours" she said. "We meet at seven", and she left.

Sarah would have liked to ask her a few questions, like what her host's name was, where was everybody else, and if by seven she meant morning or evening, but the young woman was already gone so Sarah resigned herself to slide her backpack under the bed and take a much needed nap. She didn't even realize where she was the next morning when very crude rays of sunlight burst through the windows as if aiming specifically for her eyes and the room was disturbed by a mild commotion of shuffling bed sheets and dropping shoes.

Nobody seemed to care that there was a new resident in the room so Sarah cleaned up the best she could and followed the others to the mess hall. " _At least they're all women"_ , she thought, a little surprised but not giving this detail too much thought.

The host was standing at the head of the table and waited for everybody to be seated before she began.

"Good morning. We have a new student, her name is Sarah Feaherthy. She studied macro-biology and botanical genetics at CAHS. For her sake I will go through a few things about us. This is an international experimental farming program that accepts interns for the duration of one year. Ours is a teaching enterprise, unless you want to pursue the path of an educator, there is no reason for you to stay longer. My name is Seth Rosenfeld, I am the leader of the program. Our schedule is as follows: from eight till three we work in the gardens, from four till seven we study in the library. There is a fountain outside if you need to wash yourself. We prefer not to speak unless absolutely necessary, we find it distracts us from our tasks. We grow all our food here, if you need anything else you'll have to walk to town to get it."

Sarah felt twelve pairs of eyes probing her intently and she had this strange feeling that she would have to explain her hair again and again, as if she did it on purpose.

"Any questions?" Seth asked Sarah. Sarah wanted to ask who named her Seth and why, where was all the equipment, what did the science program consist of, what was expected of her, why did they all except for Seth have to sleep in the same room, if she could visit the library and take a look at the books before her first study session, if the schedule was any different on weekends, how she was going to communicate with her family, and most of all why did this place look more like a convent than a school? She quietly signaled no and they all ate breakfast in complete silence.

***

The first week unfolded at the speed of a snail and during the entire time Sarah kept asking herself what on earth she was doing there. The program's wherewithal was more modest than the set-up on her parent's farm and there was really no schedule set for her, nor did anybody there seem to expect her to do anything. The vegetable beds were well tended and food was always abundant but there was no attempt to try new breeds or do fancy analysis. Sarah found it difficult to occupy her time since everything that needed done seemed to have already been done, and short of undoing work only to do it again there really was nothing for her to do.

Library time went quicker because the bookshelves were well stocked with books, not necessarily specific to horticultural studies but definitely educational in every way.

After the first week Sarah gathered enough courage to track down Seth (which was a project in itself, really, because Seth liked to move around the premises with a ghost-like demeanor that made it seem as if she was never there) and ask her for a few moments of guidance to help her understand what exactly she was supposed to do there. She pointed out there was no biology lab or structured course of instruction and she didn't seem to fit in at all. It was the silence that built up Sarah's anxiety since she was used to talk talk talk all the time with relatives and neighbors and colleagues and friends, and ask questions, challenge results, offer opinions. The quiet was maddening.

Seth frowned and the steely resolve of her transparent eyes became even more intense. Sarah was starting to regret her audacity and quickly assessed the library hall for possible nooks and crannies to hide in before the thunderbolt in Seth's eyes descended upon her and struck her down. It was a very uncomfortable situation for her, given her completely non-confrontational upbringing; according to her family mores getting into a conflict was among the worst things one could do.

"You came here for post graduate education. We all assumed that you wouldn't be interested in going through the same experiments and do more of the same things you did before, please correct me if I'm wrong." Sarah wouldn't have dreamt of correcting, interrupting, or in any way bringing attention to her own breech in protocol, because every time Seth looked at her the redhead remembered something else that she wasn't particularly proud of.

"You have one year to do something new. Can you do something that was never done before?" She saw the dazed look in Sarah's eyes and didn't wait for the answer.

"Everything you did so far relied on equipment invented and built by somebody else, the tests you ran were replicas of originals by others. What did you do, personally? What would you do if you had to run your experiments with just a handful of seeds and a magnifying glass?"

Sarah went from uncomfortable to mortified and wished she could roll back her life to the point when she was not in this awkward situation and stay there.

"Chicken!", Seth said, with a tone that sounded more disappointed than angry. "Don't ask me what to do with your life. I'm your guide, not your master."

Sarah took her wretched self back to the garden, went through the remainder of the day in silence and cried herself to sleep.

From that day forward she abandoned all attempts to look busy and started paying close attention to what the others were doing, which looked to her like gardening as usual. Since she couldn't garner excitement over tomato production and nobody paid attention to her she put together her own schedule, a subset of a master schedule that was so vague it was almost impossible to disturb.

As a first order of business she took an early morning to walk around the building and found out what was in each room. She found the kitchen, the seed storage, and the tool shed. She found a large ball of rough yarn and a pair of scissors. She found the technology lab, yes, they really did have one after all. She found peat pods and a watering can.

She set out to replicate the transparent rose experiment without the centrifuge, the spectral analysis computer program and the wavelength isolation equipment. She didn't know how she was going to run anything successful in one year without the benefits of genetic growth acceleration but in a couple of weeks, amazingly enough, the plant was well on its way. A little bud was about to open and Sarah was staring at it intently, trying to guess whether the petals were transparent or not, and she didn't feel Seth's shadow cover her shoulders like a blanket.

"Interesting" Seth said in a normal tone of voice that sounded deafening to Sarah, focused as she was on her rose. She jumped, startled, and almost lost her balance.

"Come with me!" Seth boomed. They walked to the edge of the garden to a patch of dirt that screamed to anybody who grew up on a farm _"don't waste your efforts, I'm sterile soil with no nutrients"._

"Why don't you try growing plants here?" said Seth.

"What plants?" Sarah asked hopelessly.

"Any plants", Seth answered calmly. "Something edible would be nice. It doesn't need to be transparent", she mumbled irritated. "Don't amend the soil, it has to be exactly like this."

Sarah looked at the miserable patch of reddish dirt that looked like debris from a brick kiln. There were little bits of rubble looking vaguely like crushed cement, it had a powdery consistency that no root could grasp for food or support and it held water like a sieve. She didn't need to run a chemical analysis of the soil to figure out it had no nutrients at all.

"Are you sure about that?" Seth asked, out of nowhere.

"What **can** I do to make it yield" Sarah retorted, a little peeved.

"If I knew that I would be doing it myself, not asking you", said Seth. Certainly demureness was lost on the group who despised it and those who cherished it as well. Sarah abandoned the fight for sweetness and light and decided not to waste her time fuming over the sharp directness.

### Chapter Three

"'The first step in addressing a situation you haven't encountered before is to forget everything you think you know about similar circumstances. The easiest mistake is to think that adding more effort and complexity to solving a problem is the sure way to its resolution. It usually is not."

"What good is the knowledge that sophisticated equipment and the wonders of chemistry can completely transform your surroundings when you have no access to said enhancements? After years of being shown the miracles brought forth by science one tends to forget that nature does more effortlessly. A leaf stuck in the ground sprouts roots, it doesn't get more miraculous than that."

Over the next couple of weeks Sarah transformed the kitchen into a small laboratory filled with countless glasses containing various mixtures of water and dirt. The mixes incorporated cabbage juice, some really slimy algae that she had fished from the nearby pond, a couple of really uncomfortable frogs and some fresh water clams. The other members of the group worked and ate around this weird set-up with a detachment that made Sarah wonder what it would take to perturb them.

She mixed some of the loamy dirt from her old lot in a bucket of water and left it outside by the kitchen door, where the sun baked it into a mini swamp that stunk of sewer and rotting matter. She tended to the putrid miasma with the patience and self-denial of a martyr, stirring unspoken malodorousness out of it every day to make sure the microorganisms saturated the mix. Just when her colleagues' looks made it clear that she will end up wearing the contents of the bucket if she didn't dispose of it soon she built up a small brim around the brick like debris and poured the liquid in.

If Sarah ever had a wish for solitary life it was fulfilled during the next two weeks when nobody came within fifty feet of the little lot which bore the same intense odor as the substance that enriched it. Nobody, that is, but Seth, who made it a habit to inspect the setting every day and assess the rottenness of the six buckets of muck in various states of putrefaction.

The big day finally arrived and Sarah brought a fistful of seeds and planted them in rows, careful not to let the silty mix wash off on the pavers. Seth was breathing down her neck, watching every move.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" Seth asked, frowning with concentration. Sarah didn't say anything but reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of healthy squirming earthworms.

***

Everybody waited patiently but by the end of the third week it was painfully clear that any other biological phenomenon was more likely to occur to those seeds than germination. Sarah swallowed her dejection and walked around sheepishly staring at the ground for days while she continued to brew the disgusting concoction that polluted everybody's olfactory sensibility within a half mile radius.

Six months passed, filled with failed seed startings and the ever present stench that now permeated Sarah's clothes and skin. She got so used to it that she almost couldn't smell it anymore. Every morning she mixed another bucket of dirt and then either started a new set of seeds or hope against hope to see something green emerge. She wasn't even aware that her gestures had become automatic and her mind traveled away from the disgusting task to the extraordinary labs in Christchurch where it contemplated visions of transparent roses and blue chamomile.

***

"Wake up! Wake up now!" Seth shook Sarah and almost dragged her out of bed while the first rays of dawn were still struggling on the horizon. Sarah put her shoes on feverishly and almost knocked Seth over as she ran to the door.

"Where is it? I can't see anything."

"Here, look here" said Seth. Sarah stared at a little indentation in the dirt, right next to the pavers, where something slimy but definitely of a greenish hue tinted the surface.

"This is lichen" said Sarah, who judging by Seth's reaction expected to find out that the heavens opened and replaced the stinky barrenness with lush greenery and abundance.

"It's alive!" Seth said, elated, "It's alive!"

### Chapter Four

"Life has its ways to keep us humble, just when we take most pride in our accomplishments we find out that everything we've done has been done before, often better. We pour all our spirit and our energy into an endeavor and it inevitably falls short, yielding to the limitations of our human condition on this Earth."

"There is no point in becoming dejected, living in the flesh is but an imperfect reflection of our hopes and dreams and we are always bound to leave our work unfinished so future generations can continue it. Don't take yourself too seriously and heed the wise advice of the Ecclesiastes: eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do."

A little weedy sprout sprung up at first, then a scraggly plant of undetermined provenance, then finally a soybean bush. Sarah was beaming with pride. She really wanted to keep the thrill of success to herself but it was written all over her face.

What nobody expected, not in their most ambitious dreams, was how fast the plants were growing, nothing short of magic, with an accelerated rhythm that made their head spin and made them double check their grasp on reality. After a week they had a full crop cover. After three weeks pods were sprouting everywhere. After a month they had a harvest. After eight weeks they were well on their way for the second one.

"This is great, Sarah" Seth said, in a firm voice that tried but didn't succeed to conceal excitement. "With just a little more work you are bound to have a tomato patch just like sister Joseph's."

The overwhelming enthusiasm that swept through Sarah's psyche flattened out like a soufflé pulled out of the oven too fast. She revisited the mental picture of the tomatoes, trying to recall what they looked like, but couldn't remember anything out of the ordinary. Her surprise turned to chagrin and then very quickly to anger, a frothing mental anguish so intense that she didn't even question the word 'sister' at the end of the sentence. All the back breaking work of the last six months came to her mind and made blood shoot up to her cheeks and reflect a wild light in her eyes, a light that would have made a normal person run for cover.

Seth was not a normal person, as normal goes, and she didn't even blink, as if Sarah's reaction was the most natural thing in the world. Sarah would have liked to scream at Seth and claw her face - _"do you mean to tell me that I lived with stench and worms for six whole months when you had the answer all along?!"_ as her anger grew more and more inflamed, pumping plenty of hot air back into her emotional soufflé and puffing it back up. She didn't have to say a word, every droplet of outrage and fury was showing on her face. The leader seemed amused, in a weird way even pleased with Sarah's annoyance.

"Don't be upset, we couldn't tell you how to do it, this was the whole point of the experiment. Every one of us came into success in her own way. You don't even want to know how sister Abigail made her crook neck squashes grow. Anyway, it took sister Joseph three years to bring her tomatoes to this state, so you should be pleased."

Now the word 'sister' read loud and clear and the rage in Sarah's eyes turned quickly to surprise and then intense curiosity.

"We are a religious order, dear", sister Roberta said kindheartedly, all a smile and brimming with contentment.

_"I knew it"_ , Sarah thought, there was no way to mistake that familiar walk, that detached attitude, that quiet way of life for anything else. She didn't even question how her life led her to this and why of all the paths in existence her footsteps took her full circle to the herb fragrant kitchen of her childhood, as if she walked on the thin wire of a helix and ended up in the same spot but one level up.

"Why am I here?", Sarah gathered the nerve to ask.

"As I said, this is an international experimental horticulture program and we are a teaching community, but you are here because you have both the education and green thumb instincts that would push you to try things that have not been tried before. After all, the medium you are cultivating is not exactly of this earth."

***

Everything else stopped in its tracks as the whole group started discussing combined methods of watering and fertilization, made suggestions of what to plant and predicted outcomes. If one wanted to find a word to describe the brick colored crumbly mix it would have been _perfect_ ; it had an ideal composition and proportion of minerals and the now slightly gritty particles offered a strong foundation for the little plants to sink their roots into.

The planting started just as prosaic as it's always been but on an accelerated schedule to keep up with the needs of the fast growing plants.

It took some getting used to seeing five foot tall green onions and tomato chords looped twelve times around the plot as they kept growing. They braided the green bean vines and twisted them into vegetal ropes, thick as their forearms, and spun them overhead, winding them between plots and across walkways, weaving them into a connected green openwork without an apparent beginning or end. Some of the open loops attracted the many birds of the neighborhood and between the nests and the clusters of hanging fruit from various other plants that started using the openwork for support the lacy green second surface took on a life of its own, a brave new world within arm's reach, floating over head like the miraculous suspended gardens of Semiramis.

They had to be on continuous duty to prune enough openings into this luxuriant green blanket to ensure the space below it still received enough sunlight.

The birds flocked in the sky above the experimental farm, finding comfort and shelter in this unusual man made jungle, and their colorful noisy groups attracted the curiosity and photographic interest of neighbors and tourists alike, making it difficult for the sisters to work around the crowds that seemed to devise ever more innovative means to find their way back into the quasi-cloistered garden.

Sarah walked through the racket of this three dimensional green space with strange detachment, her flame colored hair catching every ray of sunshine and reflecting it amplified, like an angelic vision in the garden of Eden, charting progress, recording growth patterns and anticipating results.

At the end of the year the documentation, statistics and developmental research were sent to the Space Science Agency in New Orleans, accompanied by Seth and Sarah who for lack of well needed time became appendices to the study. They went there to serve as footnotes, source documentation, amendments and errata wrapped into a couple of walking reference desks, two little human libraries from whom data and research could be drawn and added to the study as needed.

### Chapter Five

"When it became clear that the dirt of Terra Two could be brought to life the gears of our terraforming enterprise started moving faster, putting programs in place, facilitating procedures, allocating funds, encouraging communication. We were so caught up in our day to day work that we didn't realize the magnitude of the system that made this project unfold flawlessly."

"Sequences and fine points were painstakingly evaluated, searching for possible flaws, missed details or overlooked minutia since the impact of any mistake grew exponentially with the distance and our lives literally depended on good execution and fail-proof contingency plans."

It was drizzling in New Orleans when they arrived, the warm air held on to water like an oversized sponge. Hydrocars floated back and forth on the narrow foggy streets, sliding over the old pavers without really touching them, silent as whispers. Seth and Sarah walked briskly without words, trying to dispel the unspoken tension. Seth was tense because she knew who they were meeting, Sarah because she didn't. They took a turn on St. Peter's street, then Chartres, and cut across Jackson Square to reach Decatur street.

The street was crowded as always at this hour, with busy people waiting to make the transfer from land to water at the Decatur sluice gates to join the tumult of boats and hydrocars floating on the Mississippi river. The vehicles moved in a fluid apparently random pattern that was intuitively understandable, like blood flows through a dense and comprehensive network of arteries, vessels, capillaries and interstitial spaces to ensure that every cell is reached and fed.

The sweet and enticing aroma of vanilla and hot chocolate followed them for a while as they advanced on Decatur and passed the equestrian statue of Jeanne D'Arc. Sarah would have liked to stop for a beignet but didn't dare propose such an outrageous breech of schedule to the very tense Seth who forged ahead as if propelled by an external force towards the Space Science Center. Its imposing building marked the end of the street with a shiny chrome astrodome, half opened for the evening observations.

Seth often forgot to eat and considered the craving of food a base and pointless lack of self-control and she would have liked to instill this higher level of discipline into her pupil. Sadly the brief time they had spent together did not allow her to teach a reasonable level of self denial to the redhead.

Cheerful shop windows put on a continuously moving display of advertisements as the glass changed from clear to broadcast and then to colorful artwork faithfully aligning itself to the information on Seth and Sarah's neural interlink bracelets in a proactive attempt to anticipate their every wish. A softened watercolor ad for steaming hot cocoa appeared repeatedly, so lifelike with the accompanying aroma that it diverted several people from their path and led them to Cafe du Monde, the plausible source of the comforting smell. Scented ads had become so popular that one couldn't tell if one was in a bakery or a perfume shop anymore. Seth frowned, irritated, but said nothing.

The _yellow brick road_ kept materializing in front of their feet to mark the next few yards of their journey as charted by their travel guide. Sarah liked to input random quotes in the yellow bricks and entertained herself by reading comments about her journey as she put one foot in front of the other.

A group of kids on a school field trip crossed their path, spread out to inspect the fruit stands in the market and then reassembled on the other side to reach the river bank, just as Sarah was reading " _Nobody told me it was impossible when I did it._ ", written in phosphorescent lime green font, cursive and covered in curlicues.

"We're late", Seth spoke nervously, even though they had at least half an hour to span the five minute walk to the Space Science Center. The highlighted brick in front of Sarah read _"Any place is within walking distance if you have enough time"_. She could swear even the travel guide read her mind sometimes. She giggled inwardly, rushed to keep up with Seth's accelerated pace and didn't think of getting anxious about their presentation until they reached the gate. _"You have arrived"_ said the yellow brick road.

_"Parents give children middle names so they can tell when they are in trouble",_ said the yellow brick road. Sarah was suddenly relieved her parents didn't think to give her one, then shook her head at the absurdity of the thought.

_"When in doubt, mumble",_ said the yellow brick road, and then shut down with a delicate and reassuring chime.

***

They ran up the transparent stairs whose gleaming in the light on the setting sun created the precise out-worldly effect that the architect's team was hoping for. For the life of her Sarah couldn't understand why they were rushing so since it was twenty five minutes to the hour of the meeting. She took a second to observe the eerie structure they were entering. Held together by transparent boron cables and structural glass it seemed made of water. Waves of changing light and reflections of passing hydrocars caressed the ever changing transparent envelope, alternately concealing and revealing the fervent activity behind it.

It felt strange to walk inside this completely see through structure, with fiberglass re-bars showing through the translucent columns, and step on the thin crystal floor that revealed the steady movement of the Mississippi river below it. The obvious metaphor of walking on water warmed Sarah's heart; she smiled and went over the last details of the presentation in her mind.

The double doors slid open to allow them to pass from the antechamber to the meeting hall, in a very strange move of entering a space while you are actually in it. The terraforming committee was waiting, more friendly and relaxed than Sarah expected, considering that the elite training at the Space Science Academy had tested every boundary of their physical endurance and intellectual capacity. Sarah felt out of place in her plain cotton sweater and khakis standing in the midst of this spotless surrounding where everything was so precisely designed; she was starting to get nervous and looked at Seth to see if the latter felt the same. Seth stood tall, shoulders straight and chin up, her steely eyes burning with intense determination, and all of a sudden her presence here made all the sense in the world, she looked like she belonged.

"Sit down, please", said the chair. "We reviewed your findings and would like do discuss some of the details of your report that brought up questions."

Four hours later the doors slid open again to let out a completely drained Sarah and a seriously tired Seth. Sarah could not remember in her long history of taking exams and research presentations a time when she had to draw upon all the things she had ever learned in order to answer. The questions were exhaustive and very specific at the same time, dragging her from botany to chemistry, geological analysis, chemical physics, environmental science, botanical genetics, biotechnology and of all things professional writing. The plant trays laid on the table between them during this volley of questions and answers, oblivious to the technical improbability of their existence and defying common sense.

Tired as they were they stepped over the endlessly moving waters of the river without noticing them as they walked towards the front door, only to bear testimony to how easily the human spirit embraces the unusual or seemingly impossible once it has experienced it and turned it mainstream.

"You did well", Seth spoke, walking down the stairs in the soft and humid darkness of the night. The fog surrounded the fast moving headlights with glowing haloes and softened the crinkled contours of the trees, fading them in the distance. "I wish we had more time, we can always send more data if needed." Sarah didn't answer, she was tired and her head was spinning. The yellow brick road said _"Experience is the kind of thing you only get after you need it."_

"Let's find a place to eat", said Seth, "but first cocoa and beignets."

### Chapter Six

"The most important decisions of our lives are always the easiest to make. The younger we are, the most obvious they seem, but even in our later years we recognize our destiny when it crosses our path."

"Our ancestors dreamt about being the first to cross the ocean, the first to fly, the first to leave Earth. Like the early explorers we embarked on our ship, just like them not knowing what we were going to find, considering the risk worth taking so that we could be the first humans to settle another planet."

"What was that about?" Sarah asked, forgetting her usual timidity. A bowl of beignets arrived, so buried in confectioner's sugar that they had to dig in with their fingers to find them. The pastry was steaming hot and melted goodness dripped down their wrists and forearms. The fine powdered sugar dispersed with every breath or gust of wind, dusting their faces and the fronts of their shirts.

"Have you heard about Terra Two?" asked Seth in a slightly distracted conversational tone.

"Yes, they have been working on the atmosphere for years, it seems that the methane is stratifying close to the planet surface which raises the new atmosphere temperature too much. What does that have to do with our project? You don't mean...!"

"Yes."

"And that planting mix was...?"

"Yes."

"And we managed to...?"

"Yes"

"Wow! How did you get involved in this? Why didn't they send it to a university?"

"They did. Several. Us too, we worked together in the past."

"How come they are talking to us, though, didn't the other projects work out?"

"Certainly, they just needed a lot more in terms of equipment and materials, the project is supposed to be as bare bones as possible. It takes a lot of energy and manpower to transport things from here."

"So it was what, luck?"

"Part of it, I'm sure."

"What's the rest then?"

Seth didn't answer. She was focused on the delicious beignet in front of her whose wispy aroma steamed the already humid night air. She was trying to keep the raspberry jelly from running down her fingers and spoke with her mouth full.

"Mercy, these are absolutely delightful! I wonder how they make them. You know, they published the recipe but good luck trying to get the pastry to taste the same. It's the baker, I tell you, I'm so glad you thought of this."

Sarah chewed on her beignet savoring it like a three year old on her first field trip to the bake shop. She sat in quiet reflection of the information received, not knowing how to react to it.

"So", Seth said after a long pause, "what are you going to do after your specialty program ends?"

The question took Sarah by surprise, she had been so immersed in the intensity of this project that she never took time to think what was going to happen when it was over. She didn't really know, if anything her parents couldn't wait for her to come back, they were counting on _angel hair_ to improve the harvest, she had gained quite a green thumb reputation around her corner of the world.

Her younger brother was getting married and everyone in the family was knee deep in wedding planning and preparation. Her aunts had sent her numerous messages to keep her current with the most intricate details of who said what and who didn't agree, together with the fifteen versions of the wedding party design, flower coordination and color scheme. Sarah's head was spinning around all of these already overwritten versions of how things were going to be and couldn't decide if it was sadness or relief that she didn't participate directly in the planning. The only thing the entire family agreed upon from the very beginning was the timing, a very traditional harvest themed wedding.

For a moment the entire terraforming project took a back seat in Sarah's mind to the swarm of details surrounding the wedding.

"Well?" Seth asked, impatiently. Sarah shrugged, a simple gesture her mentor had learned to anticipate with irritation. Sarah shrugged when she wasn't sure, didn't want to accept the assertion, was cold, had an _aha_ moment, knew she was right, wanted to stretch her back, didn't understand the question, experienced contradictory emotions or any of a great number of completely unrelated feelings, so a shrug from her was even less of a clarification than no answer at all.

"I haven't thought about it", Sarah said, suddenly realizing that she would never again experience the double layered paradise filled with birds and curious visitors, where everything was so much larger than life, so unreal that nothing she could achieve from this day forward could match it. It just wouldn't be possible, there was no _not of this earth_ medium to cultivate outside of those old stone walls, maybe in one of the universities involved with the program, if she was lucky to get into one of the long term studies.

"We could use some help, you know, I'm not sure exactly how we're going to work this out, we have to talk to the guys at the Space Science Center to see if we could get another grant. It will be different, a lot more traveling and coordination with them. If they are convinced we have a working solution, and at this point they probably are, we're going to have to move some of the setup here, it will make the collaboration easier. You will need to get a hold of some books, I'll make you a list, they should prove helpful. You will also need formal clothing for functions and a place to live. Can you drive?"

Sarah listened to this detailed list of activities dumbstruck as she realized that Seth didn't even consider the possibility of her choosing another venue. She started to bring up her brother's wedding but apparently Seth had included the wedding ceremony and regular visits to her parent's farm in the schedule, together with additional post doctoral studies on chlorophyll metabolism in low light environments and cellular engineering for enhanced processing of carbon dioxide and rare metals.

Sarah kept munching on her jelly filled pastry and realized that she made a life changing decision in less time than it took to finish a beignet, in less time than it took the jelly inside it to cool down.

### Chapter Seven

"The hardest thing we had to do wasn't to prepare ourselves for the challenge, we didn't question it or think about the dangers, but to share our plans with our loved ones. From the safe distance of what they perceived as normal and desirable our decision looked selfish and unforgivable and they couldn't understand or justify it."

"They were afraid for us but also ashamed that we took leave of our senses, after all their efforts to raise and educate us, after teaching us right from wrong, after giving us all the love they had. We embarked our vessel with our hearts bleeding, this was the price we had to pay for our audacity."

The next year turned into the next two, then four years, with studying, testing, analyzing, refining, in a sometimes mind-numbingly repetitive sequence of processes which morphed into each other to the point where the team had to stop all activity and review where they were, what they already covered and why they were doing what they were doing.

The overheated atmosphere issue lingered like a bad smell as the environmental science team worked their way through the methane with the slowness of a snail and the patience of Job. The methane was consumed in the oxygen rich environment in painfully small doses, as if finishing this project during the scientists' lifetimes was not in the cards. At least this is how it seemed to them, they got more and more impatient with this never ending challenge.

It was ironic that they had to burn through most of this vast amount of fuel just to make the air breathable and they agonized over the decision for months, but the number of containers was limited and the temperature stubbornly refused to drop. They still managed to isolate and pump a good part of the gas in countless tanks to be used as fuel.

When they ran out of space on the surface and underground they started launching the tanks in orbit to be retrieved later and as the shiny containers floated kilometers above the surface outside the new and fragile atmosphere they looked like a myriad stars studding the coffee latte sky, brilliantly reflecting the light from the sun in freshly melted pools and streams of water, and creating a dreamlike emotionally charged imagery that was going to fire-up the creativity and inspiration of several generations of poets and artists.

***

Meanwhile the whole congregation moved from Perpignan to New Orleans in small groups of two or three as the need for extra hands and minds increased. The plants were doing well and grace to extensive studies on increased carbon dioxide processing were both showing real promise for bioengineering the atmosphere of Terra Two and feeding entire sections of their earthly host city.

Years and events passed over Sarah and the sisters as if they belonged to a different, slower time, while the faster, more tumultuous one surrounded and flowed next to them, two streams with different beds in the same large river. After the first couple of years the small group got so deeply immersed in the life and times of Terra Two that the consideration of a pioneer mission came as a natural development of the project. There was no real discussion about when that was going to happen and who was going to go but it was assumed that the mission would include the sisters and will launch as soon as feasible.

Sarah's parents were stunned and objected vociferously to the harebrained idea that their beautiful young daughter instead of settling down and starting a family would risk her life in a hellishly scary environment where air was scarce, water even more so, and food was non-existent, alone under a godless sky, millions of miles away from home. Who would care for her if she got sick, whom would she cry to if she was scared, when would they ever see her again?

No argument remained unused, no anguish was spared, no understanding shared. Sarah tried in vain to explain that this was an experience so rare in the history of humankind that anybody would be honored to be selected, that the mission consisted of a few hundred people and she wouldn't really be alone, and that every detail was considered, every need taken into consideration, and every possible comfort provided.

After several unsuccessful efforts to persuade her and a quite blatant abduction attempt, after both of her brothers were very transparently used as proxies to convey the message from a younger perspective, but that of people still in possession of their mental faculties, a guilt-ridden and misunderstood Sarah remained unmoved in her decision.

The family discussed the issue for months, complaining about the redhead's lack of wisdom, making assumptions about the connections between the fire colored hair and the ludicrous life plans, and only relented when they found out that the mission included quite a number of eligible young men, recipients of doctoral degrees, physicians, engineers, physicists, biopharmaceutical experts, all single and confined to a limited choice of potential brides, far away from home for years and years.

The thought that she might marry on Terra Two enflamed the conversation even more when very indignant family members contemplated the thought of raising babies in that God forsaken place. After a while the irritation of simply talking about this issue became so intense that they stopped bringing it up altogether and limited themselves to briefly present the news that Sarah continued to convey every week.

This family drama made her realize that she knew close to nothing about the sisters, especially Seth, and wondered if they too experienced disapproval, if their families were equally upset. She had stepped into their tight knit group which seemed to have been together forever and didn't stop to think what their lives might have looked like if they never joined the order.

She also realized that for the other people participating in the mission she too was Sarah with the anaerobic bacterial cultures, for them the _angel hair_ child that hid in the doorway leading from the kitchen to the herb garden and listened to the nuns talk about their day never existed. This little change of perspective made it a little easier to accept her parents' outrage. They haven't participated in her experiences over the last few years so for them all the extraordinary research and engineering feats were a vast blank space with _Terra Two_ scribbled on it in big, bold and scary letters.

Chapter Eight

"It is not the things we embrace that define our ethics but the things we refuse. Not until we are forced to trade one value for another do we realize that doing the right thing is not straightforward at all. It's easy to abide by one's principles when no conflict of conscience challenges them."

"The battles that are waged inside our souls are the toughest tests the Lord would have us take, tests with no answers at times, and no preparation most times. Some assuage our worries by saying "there is no right or wrong answer", but there is always a right and a wrong answer for you because these tests are laid at the defining moments of your life in order to decide its direction. We may judge at the end of a moral struggle that the effort wasn't warranted for something of so little consequence. Those are the most important long term choices of them all."

The next months were a blur of activities, home visits, feverish preparations, last minute triple checking of data and calculations, and teary farewells from family and friends. Since the sisters didn't plan to bring much in terms of personal belongings they each gave a small part of their allocated cargo share to Sarah so that she could have a little more room for her stuff. Everybody in the family insisted that she took a little thing to remind her of them and since they were so many the cargo module filled to the brim and started overflowing. Sarah just couldn't find the heart to tell any of her loved ones that there was just so much space she could use and did her best to optimize the storage of mementoes.

She had just managed to compact everything and close the door when she received a message from her mother. Her grandfather was coming to visit, driving all the way from North Dakota despite his advanced age, and had a big surprise for her, something that she was very attached to. Sarah couldn't imagine what that might have been since the one thing she really could remember being magnetically drawn to was her grandparents' touch table.

When she was a child that table felt nothing short of magic, a fairy tale surface that came alive at a touch of her fingers and could teach and entertain her for hours. Her grandparents had to use all their grown-up skills to keep her away from it, from fresh apple pie to playful kittens nothing could dampen the fascination that magical object wielded on her. That couldn't possibly be, though, because the table was, well, table sized, it wouldn't fit in any means of transportation her grandfather was travelling in and surely nobody could consider bringing this particular item which by itself filled the entire cargo space graciously allocated her.

She woke up the next morning to a racket of claxons and rushed yells and grunts to look out the window and see her grandfather guide a group of movers with expansive gestures and lots of verbal directives in order to maneuver what appeared to be a sizable object off the top of his vehicle. Sarah was stunned. She knew there was no way this large sentimental item was going to get approval to embark and there was absolutely no way she was going to refuse her grandfather after all the trouble he went through to bring this cherished childhood memory to her.

The conflict that ensued still resonated in Sarah's memory almost a hundred years later as one of the defining moments of her conscience. It is when you pick what you believe to be worth fighting for, despite every influence from adversaries, but most importantly, from the ones closest to you that you finally start understanding your own heart. Said heart is hard to find among flurries of activity and commonality of thought where it echoes back and forth from one authority figure to the next in uncontested harmony.

It only took a stern _no_ from the administrative committee to bring the fire out of the redhead. She planted her feet into the floor of the Space Science Center and decided not to move from that spot until the issue was resolved to her satisfaction. Threats were uttered, some veiled, some directly, Seth threw in her two cents, quite unconvincingly, the sisters insisted that it was unreasonable to insist on this specific item and one can't have it all; her family pressed the other side of the coin offering a multitude of _I told you so's_ and using this event as a teaching moment to reinforce the foolishness of her decisions and her need for counsel from those wiser in years. Sarah spent some of the loneliest moments of her life with only this inanimate object to console her, finale both defying the reason for her insistence to bring the item along and helping her appreciate its value even more.

At the end of this moral/sentimental shoot out at the ok corral she managed to be on barely speaking terms with her grandfather, the administrative committee, the sisters, and her own mother, while earning some unspoken admiration from Seth, who didn't like wishy-washy people. Out loud though the latter expressed a quite harsh admonition for this self-serving indulgence.

The fight made Sarah chuckle softly now, after so many years, but it deserves mentioning that from that day forward Seth got the unshakable conviction that the redhead was undisciplined and irrational, opinion unchanged by the many decades that followed and that was still popping up on the rare occasion when Sarah happened to be late for Vespers for any reason whatsoever. Not even after the times when the table was their only working computer and means of communication for many months, not after she surprised the sisters by programming it to run soil chemistry tests, not after they designed and 3d printed the first all terrain vehicle prototypes on it did the leader's opinions change, one must assume that the little _angel hair_ was not the only stubborn element in the bunch.

Anyway, after a fight worthy of a monumental cause Sarah got to have her table and keep it at the price of gaining the reputation of being willful, selfish and insubordinate. If her memory served her right, Seth had used another word which will not be mentioned in this story, since history really doesn't care for the verbal wrappings of ideas as they happen in the moment, but for the ideas themselves. As I said, the sisters despised demureness as a fancy societal way to disguise one's true feelings.

What Sarah also learned was that showing her true feelings without the cover of civility was not as well received as one might expect, since everybody sang the apology of brutal honesty right up to the point when brutal honesty was frankly presented to them.

The second thing Sarah learned was that she wasn't fighting for a table, which would have been absurd, even for somebody as obstinate as herself, but for the continuation of human mores, culture and civilization it represented, for the right to respect her traditions, and for the utmost importance of protecting what she loved.

She endured many dirty looks from the maintenance crew who was called in at the last minute to install brackets on the ceiling so that the unreasonably large and really unnecessary object that didn't fit in the cargo space could be mounted overhead and be in everyone's way as they went about their daily tasks.

A wiser and somewhat more cynical Sarah stepped on board of the shuttle on a bright October day, a lot less prone to theatrical outbursts in the aftermath of this emotional battle, so caught up in the minutia of her administrative struggles that she failed to process the magnitude of the task she was embarking on or the privilege of pioneering this new frontier for humanity.

Only when the final countdown started did she internalize what her relatives have been saying for months, that she was going to be gone for a very long time, maybe forever, and that what was awaiting their team was not easy, but with all the fighting over the touch table and the mental anguish of rubbing everybody the wrong way Sarah didn't get a chance to worry.

Chapter Nine

"We started our journey in the year of our Lord twenty one hundred and ten, a few brave souls traveling at amazing speed in a contraption smaller than a tin can, packed to the brim with necessities, devoid of privacy and life's comforts. Our automatic navigation system kept us on the calculated trajectory during a long monotonous voyage that almost made us take leave of our senses."

"If human beings were supposed to span the darkness with no air we would probably have not been born on a flourishing Earth under a blue sky of wonder. There are few things the human soul abhors more than nothingness, and nothingness was what we experienced for the endless months of our travel. When no other sight but darkness is available one has two options: lose one's soul or accept that the interstellar void is just as much a part of Creation as the light of the stars, and wherever God is, there is no reason to fear."

No experience on Earth could prepare the crew for the awe and unease of living so close to the stars, so close one felt one could almost touch them, looking much larger in the absence of air, much brighter, much colder too. It was a slightly maddening experience to go around one's regular schedule while suspended in the vastness of space, it made one feel small, vulnerable and omnipotent at the same time.

As the days went by Sarah settled into her new schedule, which was pretty much the regular research schedule she had had for the last few years adjusted for the artificial gravitational field and the enhanced oxygen mix. Pretty soon the monotony of a very long voyage set in and everybody got used to seeing plants grow taller and more vibrantly green. Prior to their takeoff they had discussed actually using the greenhouse space as a breathable air recycler but the scientists who designed the system didn't feel comfortable relying on it for a large part of the crews' oxygen needs. Since photosynthesis worked as well as expected the air inside the shuttle became so oxygen rich that it made everybody feel good to the point of giddiness.

"So, how does it feel to be a space dweller?" Seth asked, slightly uncomfortable. As always, she showed up from nowhere, despite the fact that goodness knows their quarters were so _cozy_ there was literally no place to hide. Sarah had tried to figure out during the years she had known Seth how she managed to move completely unnoticed across a large room and startle her with a subtly voiced but very direct remark always addressed to the back of her head. Sarah looked her straight in the eyes, with a hard and somewhat cold stare, not antagonistic but searching much deeper behind the almost transparent gaze. It knocked Seth off the extraordinary emotional balance that took her almost ten years to master, so much more because she didn't expect it, still thinking of Sarah as a work in progress and an undisciplined one at that.

"How did you find me?" Sarah asked, with no introduction, as if continuing an already started conversation in her mind that she now finally gathered the courage to express.

"What do you mean, you know exactly how we met, you won the scholarship."

Sarah took the hit of this denial of trust very deeply, realizing all of a sudden that she wasn't as she thought 'one of them', despite being launched on a trajectory to terraform a planet and floating in the middle of a deep soul sucking void she tried to ignore but couldn't. The apparently reasonable unfolding of her life and all the events that led her to this point suddenly crashed into a little pile of voided thoughts she could almost picture falling apart. Sometimes Sarah wished for a less active imagination, she could surely have done without the visual of her existential angst. She suddenly got angry but didn't let anything come out, a habit learned through long practice. She smiled politely.

"Well?" Seth asked.

"Oh, Sarah started nonchalantly, did you see the new cultures? I think we can double the growth rate if we increase the temperature by two degrees".

Seth didn't miss the chill, but looked intently at the cultures and nodded.

"Probably, let's try this over the next three days, see how it goes".

Sarah worked diligently for a couple of hours setting up cultures to the exacting specifications her demanding training accustomed her to, trying to chase away the thoughts inside her head, thoughts which after a while became a slow flowing river of memories and emotions, sunny days on the farm with her father, her brother's wedding, the many lovely afternoons in the company of her aunts at the convent, her mother's never assuaged concern regarding her marital status, her grandfather's grand gestures and intense curiosity, the light shining in her hair at dawn and setting it on fire, the touch table, so familiar she could almost feel it under her fingers. For the first time she realized how essential the fight over that touch table was and how lucky she was to have won it, despite all the commotion caused and the bruised egos.

A memory of herself at the age of five, flaming hair all a tangle, sneaking into the parlor to play and standing on her tippy toes to reach the center of the surface hit her so hard she felt as if all the air was pressed out of her lungs and she could never draw breath again. She stood, frozen, with her mouth open like a fish out of water for what felt like a very long time and when she finally drew breath an ocean of tears came out, soaking the cultures, her hands, her feet, and the floor, too fast to stop, too many to hide. She kept working steadily for the rest of the day while tears kept flowing and memories kept surfacing, beloved memories of what was once her life, so far removed right now they seemed almost implausible, like a lucid dream upon awakening.

Looking out the window into the opaque darkness pierced by stars, a little lightheaded from all the tears and the elevated oxygen levels she got a sudden but overwhelming conviction that she was already dead though she didn't remember it happening. How else would all of this be possible, this life of hers where nothing even remotely approximated reality. If you think of it, if you were dead there would be no way to prove or disprove it, for who really knows what the afterlife is like? After that day she spent a few weeks trying to confirm or refute this hypothesis and stopped eating to see if she still needed to. Because of her young and strong constitution the hunger strike had no effects other that a horrendous heart burn and nobody reacted as if this behavior was in any way bizarre, so after endless and exhausting runs through the pros and cons of her being alive or dead she finally gave up, vowing to never question it again. In either case the reality she seemed to belong to wasn't going anywhere. Technically that was not true as she was travelling through hyperspace at 7,500,000 miles per second towards a planet with a methane atmosphere.

Sarah had become the first case of what would later be diagnosed as Temporary Dissociative Space Syndrome but since there were no precedents and she didn't abandon her daily duties it went unnoticed. The sisters' behavior in general could be considered eccentric so if Sarah decided to spend her trip standing on her head covered in feathers, no one would question it as long as the job got done.

In this jumble of lost thoughts, fears and uncertainty the confused redhead found the face of God and never let go if it again, neither in her waking nor in her sleeping state, a safety line that kept her balanced whether she was alive or dead. She remembered a chant from the Easter sermon and placed it in the forefront of her mind to have it be the first conscious thought upon waking: _"This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!"_

The cold bright stars started looking friendly and familiar as life slowly returned to normal, whatever normal was, a beautiful part of God's universe, not scary, not easy to explain, undeniable like miracles always are. It didn't matter where she was or what it looked like, from that moment on she was never alone and in the empty vastness of space she felt protected.

Chapter Ten

"The endless trip frayed our nerves. The tight quarters didn't allow for privacy, we thought that our Spartan living habits would make it easy to adjust to a place with no walls. Everybody took for granted the simple happiness of our old stone building and more than anything, our magical suspended garden. We missed the birds and the cloudless sky, the rolling hills fading into the sea, the changing of the seasons, the breeze. So much of our happiness is ineffable even defining its absence eludes us."

"A lot of our innovations were born out of mistakes we made during this time of inescapable boredom. It made us wonder how many great discoveries were overshadowed by the human failure to accept challenging perspectives. To paraphrase the great Sherlock Holmes, if you eliminate the concept of impossibility whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

About half way through the trip everybody started getting antsy. There wasn't a certain event or attitude that one could pinpoint, more of a generalized restlessness, a vague unspoken sense of discomfort that saturated the already cramped quarters and put everyone on edge. After a while everyone realized that they had way more time on their hands than they anticipated. There was just so much to do around the shuttle, plants take care of themselves if they have food, light and water.

Everyone took this opportunity to get a renewed interest in their hobbies and while this was supposed to be a non-eventful endeavor it yielded one of the most important discoveries of their journey.

It happened one afternoon when sister Roberta, bless her heart, was playing with the wavelength tuner to harmonize the lasers and accidentally bonded the spectrometer to the table. Subsequent molecular scans of the bond revealed that the two materials had combined into a very stable and completely new substance, crystalline in nature and extremely hard. Sister Roberta crossed herself and spent the remainder of the afternoon in prayer to thank the Almighty that it was the spectrometer and not her hand that was irreversibly bonded with the table while the other sisters quietly assessed the risk of electronically stimulated amplified light putting a hole through the hull.

A ban on all hobbies was imposed immediately, including reading, cooking and plant hybridization, so that electromagnetism enthusiasts and light wave modulation hobbyists wouldn't feel unfairly targeted. Sister Roberta spent the next few weeks in sheepishly humble self deprecation and bore patiently the dirty looks of the others. Soon the mind numbing boredom of actually being forbidden any activity outweighed the risks of hull breach and everyone gave in to the burning curiosity of how exactly the fusion of materials happened. Of course precious time and energy had been lost in blaming and self righteous outrage so the poor sister couldn't remember the exact frequency that resulted into changing the structure of matter. The silver lining of this event was that everybody got so immersed in the scientific query that all existential angst flew out the window. The drawback was that no matter how many mnemonic techniques, relaxation exercises or reenactment of events, it was absolutely impossible for the sister to replicate the experiment.

"So what are we going to do now?" asked sister Mary-Francis.

"I don't know, do you want to volunteer to become the first human/table hybrid?"

"No, do you?" The spirits rose again after the near miss and the tempers came right back with them.

"Look on the bright side, we may be the ones to restore alchemy to its rightful place in science."

"Yea, we may use this opportunity to turn you into a dishwasher, that pile of dishes kept following me around for hours."

"Hey!"

"Please, can we talk reasonably?"

"She sure can't!"

"Seth, what do you think?" The commotion finally subsided.

"If we manage to find out how to duplicate the experiment we might find a use for it, I'm not exactly thrilled to live the rest of my life in a tuna can". She was lovingly referring to the modular dwelling units that were going to become their first home on Terra Two.

"Sister Roberta, since you found it in your heart to revolutionize science in such close quarters please take a break from your daily chores and spend the next three weeks to research what happened and share with us the modeling equations for an experiment that would SAFELY recreate the result".

Sister Roberta set diligently to work and indeed produced what was expected of her, since being focused and dutiful were her best attributes, but it would take guts of steel to test the validity of her theories, all things considered.

***

"Stand back, please", said sister Roberta, with a reassuring smile.

"Oh, that's surely going to help us if we get exposed to space", mumbled sister Jesse, morosely.

"Shut up, jinx!" hissed sister Joseph. "So help me, if anything goes wrong I'll blame you!"

"Please be quiet", said Seth, with a firm but calm voice that didn't reveal her inner tension. "Go ahead, sister!"

If sister Roberta had any misgivings about the experiment going wrong only she and her Maker were privy to that secret because she executed it flawlessly according to the new theoretical model and the results were exactly as predicted. After a while they fine tuned the technique using various blends of potentially compatible materials and found a very interesting combination of metal and ceramic that was not only extremely strong, but the combination was reversible at a specific laser wavelength, so the materials could be used and reused endlessly.

"So much for recycling", sister Joseph mumbled, unenthused, for as every one in the group knew there was nothing short of rapture that would ever impress her.

Chapter Eleven

"If we were shown thereafter, I don't know. If our eyes and minds deceived us, I don't know. If our entire experience was real, I don't know. I can only bear testimony to what was my perception of our surroundings to the best of my knowledge."

"If I will be so blessed to be welcomed to Paradise when the Lord decides to take me home I now understand that my previous expectations were but a pitiful shadow of His infinite beauty. If Terra Two is real, or even if our minds could fathom it as a vision, then the boundaries of our inadequacy can't allow us to imagine Heaven. Perceiving a universe of infinite dimensions would be as impossible as appreciating the mastery of a symphonic piece if you've never been endowed with hearing. It would be as impossible as defining the color purple if you don't know sight exists."

"We have eyes but don't see. We have ears, but don't hear. We are so small, so feeble, so incomplete."

An unusually bright light shone through the view screen and in the first seconds of her awakened state Sarah didn't fully realize where she was. The fact that she woke up from her sleep while the real light penetrating her eyelids was interpreted through her REM state into a very vivid dream about her childhood made it even more confusing. In her dream the sun was shining brightly over the wheat fields and her brothers were flying colorful kites in the midst of a racket of barking dogs and fiendish shrieks.

It took her a few moments to remember how far away that image was and to become aware that the surrounding light was not part of the dream. A few other sisters were also awake, staring intently at the window.

Covering half the view screen in strong contrast with the blackness of the void shone Terra Two, formally known as 90354 ENOS. Its surface was a stunning paisley pattern of islands surreally iridescent in light chocolate and deep rose and its sky was studded by a million shiny metal dots that sparkled in the light of dawn, scrumptiously delightful like an enormous chocolate raspberry soufflé bedazzled in rhinestones.

The sun peeked from behind Terra Two, festooning its edge with a very thin and sharply intense sliver of light that broadened quickly, casting coffee colored shadows on the chocolate rose surface, shimmering on the plane of the water and making it shine like old gold. The images of the methane containers echoed on the restless liquid surface and thin wisps of foam got carried by the breeze to form even and delicate crests between the islands. The waves interfered and harmonized creating complex ephemeral patterns almost as if the planet was trying to tell the newcomers a story in a language so ancient and abstruse only it understood.

Everyone stood absolutely still in awe of this sight which indeed looked as if it were not of this world, as if it could not have happened because of the whims of an oblivious universe, but was crafted by a most sophisticated artist to impassion the soul.

A steady streak of tears flowed freely down Sarah's cheeks, tears she wasn't even aware of in the ecstatic experience of bonding with this strange new home, this world of coffee caramel sunsets bedazzled by a million artificial stars.

Since Sarah still hadn't figured out whether she was alive or dead this moment brought to her attention that she might be contemplating Paradise, or at least her understanding of it, for what other place in creation would be so beautiful, calling directly to her soul like a forbidden siren song?

The planet got larger and warmer as they continued approaching, lost its curvature showing dimples and ridges and waves crashing softly on the islands' perimeters. As they pierced the edge of the atmosphere the light diffracted in the thin air, creating a refined interpretation of the Northern Lights, if one could imagine them in a warm range of chocolate, rose and rust.

The sun was now high above the horizon, or suns, was more appropriate to say, to the confusion of them all. Terra Two didn't have two suns, just one, but one of its natural satellites was a gaseous moon that refracted light like a sparkling gemstone. Following the path of two suns in the caramel sky was a hypnotic experience, made even more disorienting by the fact that they were following completely different trajectories. Their paths brought them at times very close together and soon following at complete odds, so one couldn't tell if it was morning, sunset, or high noon until the very second the real sun hid behind the horizon and took with it the reflected light of the satellite. Both suns disappeared suddenly as if they melted in the hot chocolate of the sky, soft like marshmallows, leaving behind nothing but one subdued corona of opalescent gas.

The sky of Terra Two was so fascinating they almost forgot to breathe. So overwhelmed they were by the continuously changing backdrop that nobody bothered to look down at the deserted surface covered with a fine debris that no root could grab hold of, a wretched mix of what looked like crushed brick with little pieces of cement mixed in, the perfect combination of nutrients, the ideal agricultural land, the miraculous cradle of life that was the soil of their new home.

Chapter Twelve

"Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and we all thought Terra Two was beautiful. Not as we see it now, with lush fields of soy beans and corn and orchards weighed down with fruit, but as we first laid eyes on her, dusty, sparse and vulnerable, an empty field open to all possibilities, a place for dreams to come true."

"Maybe we were all crazy, too daring for believing that we could breathe life into a mineral world just through the power of our resolve but once there we didn't have the luxury of fear because it would have been useless and defeating. How does one fear the world one lives in, the sun(s) that sustain it, the sky overhead? We loved Terra Two and she loved us back, furthering a new frontier for the human race with her unmatched plenty."

The shuttle touched the ground gently and everything became very quiet. A sense of permanence crept in, a feeling that this was no longer a daring adventure but their reality from this day forward. Even though they haven't yet stepped foot on the soft brick colored dust they could feel it under their soles, after all they had spent years puttering in Terra Two's dirt back home, half a galaxy away.

The words 'back home' were going to linger in their vocabulary for months or years to come until each and every one of them realized that 'back' was not home, Terra Two was home, their real home. They had all lived and breathed the vision of her despite disapproval, concern and ridicule and became so attached to the possibility of this brand new mysterious world beckoning to them from afar, a world they all knew they could reach but didn't really expect to, that living on earth was but a shadow, a preparation for fulfilling this dream.

Finally the dream turned into reality, here they were, on their long awaited promised land, and it was barren! As beautiful as the chocolate raspberry jewel looked from above, picture if you please a completely deserted expanse of ruddy dirt dotted by brick colored boulders in an atmosphere of uneven density that made light and sight lines bow and buckle in weird ways.

The group paused for a second before deciding to step foot on their dream world. It looked so eerie they were a bit afraid that once they took the leap of faith out of the shuttle airlock their collective hallucination would disappear, they would fall into a gaseous mass and keep falling through it until they reached the other side.

It was warm on Terra Two, a constant 82 degrees that didn't drop much at night, and the balmy thin air made them lightheaded. Breezes moved oxygen dense pockets around and breathing felt almost like having to share an oxygen tube under water at times, courtesy of the problem with the methane stratification that the terraforming team was so familiar with.

Terra Two's dirt was solid enough though, just as silty and rusty as they remembered, squishing softly under their shoes without one particle of dust sticking to them. As they stood in the middle of this desolate land, a few feet away from their small shuttle, they looked like the only fish in an endless ocean.

Seth maintained her usual composure as if being stranded light years away from Earth without food, water, shelter or emergency assistance was normal. She gathered the sisters around her while the engineering teams designated scouts to survey the terrain.

"Sister Joseph, after it's being decided where we set the base camp please get Jesse and Mary-Francis and start assembling the tuna cans. Sister deAngelis, find the food rations, I'm sure they're buried under Sarah's earthly possessions. Sister Roberta, please use your magic and get the communication devices and the power generators running as soon as you can. Sarah, are your plants still alive?"

Sarah didn't respond, so Seth continued.

"I assume that means yes, start bringing the trays outside, it would be nice to get everything started before sunset, whenever that may be", she said tentatively, looking up at the two suns that danced their completely random pathways across the sky.

"The air is too thin", gasped sister Joseph, uncomfortably.

"It's the only air we have, the sooner you get used to it, the better".

"I don't know what I was thinking coming here. You're never to old to be a fool", sister Joseph mumbled, frowning at the methane containers that moved gracefully over head. For any other person that image would have been a poet's dream, but the sister was not particularly impressed by poetry or fond of the great outdoors. Roughing it brought back memories of homelessness and starvation for her, so she took as little time as possible to do her work and ran back into the relative comfort of the shuttle to snuggle under her blanket.

Seth turned to Sarah, to the dismay of the latter. Sarah had learned that whenever Seth was tense she would act out by demanding unholy amounts of detail from the person closest to her, and at this point Sarah was that person.

"Where are the lima beans, I thought we started lima beans. Do we have them? I want to see them now. I think we should start with those, they are the most resilient. Sarah, where are the lima beans?" Sarah was holding two trays of lima beans right under Seth's nose.

"Right here." Seth stared intently at the tiny plants, healthy and green in their peat pods.

"Set them down in a place with full sun exposure, I want to make sure they get the best growing conditions". Sarah feared for Seth's sanity because there was no object taller than fifteen inches that could possibly cast a shadow on Terra Two except for themselves. She almost expected Seth to ask her to move so she doesn't block the sun.

"Tomorrow we start brewing slime to mix in the soil. Do you have the bacterial cultures? We can't brew without yeast". Sarah had the bacterial cultures.

"Bring the bedding borders", said Seth.

"Where are the power tools?" asked Seth.

"Do we have a light source?" asked Seth.

"Are we done?" asked Seth.

Sarah nodded, dragging out the last of the supports for what was to become a large trellis. The object was about a foot by a foot by eight foot long and weighed her down like led.

"Have you seen my laser meter?" asked Seth. Sarah shrugged, dragging the very heavy pole and wondering if it could possibly occur to her mentor to lift the other end.

The suns set abruptly as they were almost done.

"Great work, sisters, a lot more to do tomorrow". A choir of groans, moans and mumbles accompanied the comment. Sarah couldn't feel her feet and was painfully aware of every muscle fiber in her body. Her pounding headache intensified at the thought of the herculean work to be continued tomorrow.

"Rest, you're going to need it", Seth said, and then retired to the shuttle. By the time the sisters followed she was already out like a light, in a slumber so deep that a foghorn couldn't wake her.

Chapter Thirteen

"It is not easy to explain the reasons for your actions when by all rational standards you look insane. I spent the first days on Terra Two mixing mud. I spent the next years on Terra Two mixing mud and watering. I wish I could invent something noble and heroic, a glorious story that may live in legend, as it is fitting for this extraordinary endeavor of ours, but it would be a lie. We spent our early years on Terra Two pumping and desalinizing water to dump onto the ever thirsty dirt. We watered day and night, until the vapors turned to clouds and the clouds blessed us with rain. We watered until the dirt absorbed all the water it could contain and the air was filled with all the water it could carry."

"We didn't send progress reports, like the other teams, who built infrastructure with the speed and efficiency expected of them. We didn't comment on the first five crops that were completely compromised as the dirt sucked up all the water with the hissing sound of a hot iron placed on a wet shirt. We did nothing but water until we saw clouds, until we saw rain, until we saw harvest. And it was good."

The sun popped above the horizon startling the sisters who were already awake. The satellite lit up faithfully as soon as the sunbeams reached it.

Sarah got up, stretched her painful limbs and was quite ready to fall right back to sleep off the muscle aches, but she met Seth's stark stare half way through the move and quickly reconsidered. She sighed, got up and opened a can from the food rations. She felt more like a cat every day, if cats were able to open their own cans of food: the rations were tiny, round, and contained all the nutritional supplements required for a healthy diet in a vaguely meat-like product with not too much sodium. The sisters were all awake now, listening to sister Joseph complain about her lumpy mattress. Sarah remembered the old story about the princess and the pea, but she kept the smart-aleck comments to herself.

"Can I have your attention, please?" spoke Seth, in a firm tone of voice. The mumbles slowly ceased. "Where is the time schedule?"

Sister Felix, who was closest to the desk, pulled out the timetable on which the first week was marked with a tiny dot.

"Today we start construction on the vegetable beds. Sisters Benedict and Abigail, this is your task. Sister Roberta, could you put your new macromolecular binder to good use and weld the corners? Sarah, start multiplying the microbe cultures, we'll need as much as you can produce as fast as you can produce it. Sisters Mary-Francis and deAngelis, build the trellises. Sister Jove, make sure we have something to eat. Sisters Joseph, Jesse, Therese, Novis and Felix, start assembling the housing units".

Everybody got to work as fast as their aching bodies allowed. The long trip had taken a toll on their fitness levels and they weren't as spry as they used to be when they were working outside all day in Perpignan. The memory of their suspended garden brought a smile to Sarah's lips and all of a sudden the barrenness surrounding her disappeared and left way to images of wonderful songbirds, butterflies and fragrance. While she was daydreaming about scented lavender fields an air current moved the oxygen pocket she was in and got her winded. She gasped and kept dumping dirt into the trough in front of her, a wide open bin ten foot by ten foot where a slimy mud mixed with bacteria already started bubbling and thickening in the warmth of the morning.

The sight of Sarah working hard to yield muck looked so absurd to the engineering teams, who were feverishly establishing communication lines and fresh water processing stations, starting power generators and verifying topography, that many questioned the wisdom of the Space Science Academy for bringing these resource consuming, ridiculousness proposing, deer-in-the-headlights looking bunch. They didn't say anything out loud, of course, but decided to work around the sisters and made sure they didn't get involved in anything crucial in nature. Some had heard rumors about sister Roberta's laser bonding tool but since nothing good could possibly come out of the 'flower children', as they called them, it was discounted as another one of their nonsensical make-believes.

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 said. "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.

Every one of the sisters had the task (in addition to their never ending list of daily chores) to bring the cats outside and try to make them adjust to the brick colored rubble, and that was not easy to accomplish. The cats were frazzled and bolting for the door as soon as set free, stepping tentatively on somewhat unstable grounds, evidently uncomfortable.

Sarah made Solomon a little basket filled with pillows and managed to convince him to accompany her while she attended to her chores. Since none of the sisters were fond of conversations and Sarah's chatty nature suffered profoundly she found Solomon to be a very good listener and started telling him about the farm in North Dakota, her former pets, and how to grow bacterial cultures. Solomon, a blue eyed Birman, had a gentle nature and was purring and slanting his eyes in approval at times, as if he understood. In fact he found the sound of Sarah's voice soothing and preferred it to the constant racket the pumps and ATVs made, and the weird atmospheric sounds.

Solomon didn't understand why the sky changed color in his world but accepted the fact that the change was permanent, so, wise cat that he was he tried to make the best of his life. The pillows were comfortable, the food was acceptable (Sarah thought at times that switching her food rations with the cat's might actually be an improvement for her, given that they were eerily similar). After a while Solomon ventured out of his basket, not very far at first, stepping gingerly among the bean poles, finding shelter from the suns under a broad squash leaf, and negotiating territory with other brave felines.

Time passed over humans and cats and the group got used to sister Joseph's constant complains, even though everybody knew she was secretly spoiling her pets rotten when she thought no one was looking.

Chapter Sixteen

"We molded our planet as much as our planet molded us. How many people get the chance to design their entire world, to pick their plants and their animals and the location of the bodies of water? How many people get to add stars to their sky, even artificial ones, like those we had? We did the best we could to take care of the life brought here to breathe spirit into our new home."

"Almost over night our barren world was not barren anymore, it felt like we went to sleep in an unyielding desert and woke up in paradise. Six years had passed us by, six years of hard work and relentless endurance, six years of wishing and envisioning the landscape now surrounding us. It seemed to have sprouted suddenly out of nothing, but nothing comes of nothing, we fed and watered the sterile dirt, we poured our effort and our love into it, we blended our own essence with the reddish crumbles and willed them to spring forth abundance. We let Terra Two borrow life from our lives and now every time I look at the endless soybean fields I feel the pulse of my own blood run through them."

Living with cats in this strange landscape with a chocolate sky studded with rhinestones was a wholesome and rewarding experience for all the sisters but mostly for Sarah who really loved cats and was overjoyed to have them around. The furry companions took to gardening very fast by feline standards and followed her around while she was mixing mud (yes, this enjoyable activity remained very much a constant of Sarah's life on Terra Two, so much so that after a while she stopped thinking about it and it became a habit like brushing her teeth or brewing morning coffee: she woke up, she got ready for the day, she mixed smelly mud in a bucket, she studied the microbial cultures) or puttering around in the unfortunate brick colored crumbles.

Having to move a cat to dig a hole for soybean planting was not an uncommon occurrence and these instances drove sister Joseph to distraction and a vocabulary totally uncalled for in company. The cats didn't mind, though, they were friendly and calm and resumed their activities upon reaching a new location. Their activities were of course grooming, sleeping and purring. Every now and then one of them would tentatively chew on a bean shoot and unleash a symphony of negative commentary from the grouchy sister who reviled working in vain and thought the fur balls unworthy of consuming resources. Sarah secretly enjoyed these emotional outbursts because they broke the monotony of her strange days - all the same but riddled with surprises at the same time. She said nothing but was bursting with laughter on the inside just watching this strange theater - a ranting and raving sister yelling at multiple cats who stared back at her out of large, peaceful eyes completely bereft of understanding, as they would watch a moving blade of grass, or a passing ant, not aware that the scuffle had anything to do with them and cleaning a paw every now and then to pass the time.

Seth noticed Sarah's little personal entertainment and disapproved, she frowned and threw an icy stare that could cut glass towards the undisciplined disciple but said nothing, probably acknowledging the fact that being in charge of mixing mud as a permanent occupation was punishment enough.

Sarah found the cats to be wonderful conversation partners and non-judgmental listeners. If cats could talk they could recount volumes of Sarah's stories from childhood, her blended upbringing that mixed technology with religion and working the land in a way that was so unique to her, her fishing trips with her brothers, the winter afternoons staring out the window at the fluffiest, plushest snowflakes ever to materialize, her visits to her grandparents' house, the miraculous transparent rose, macro genetic plant engineering.

Sarah ran the equations for recessive gene modification by the cats to double check herself and actually answered their perceived commentary, which made the other sisters cross themselves and wish someone thought to bring along a psychiatrist, but since the results were usually positive and ended in boosting production they let it pass and allowed Sarah and the cats to live in happy harmony.

The cats thrived and the sisters didn't have to eat their food after all, since the soybean crops finally took off, just in time for the arrival of the cows. Transport after transport arrived, countless Noah's arks filled with critters, chicken, dogs, pigs, turkeys, rabbits, goats, guinea pigs, field mice, but the cats reigned the land supreme, as first comers and superior companions; they learned the territory better than anyone else and made themselves at home under the bean teepees or broad cabbage leaves.

The farm finally managed to draw the attention of the logistics team who started to see some method in the madness even though they didn't approve of the rudimentary methods the sisters used and thought them stuck in the stone age. Why would one choose to make mud stink so bad on purpose when there was an entire chemistry lab available for the most precisely balanced artificial fertilizers one could dream of?

The farm was expanding though, first a little patch of veggies, then a vineyard, then a clump of trees with blades of grass stabilizing the soil, next a ground cover extending its roots farther and farther away, turning their little island into a strange chocolate paradise, dazzling in the double light of the suns, sparkling like a diamond in the reflection of the studded night sky, the promised land of unlimited abundance, their legacy to humankind, the unique and lovely Terra Two.

Accompanying the humming sounds just before dawn the critters clucked, squeaked and bellowed, better adjusted to the rhythms of the suns than the humans, sticking to their instinctive schedule and waiting for the morning feeding.

As soon as the suns came up the strange sight of Sarah's hair lit up the still dark profiles of the orchard, her flaming locks guiding the clowder of cats who wove themselves around her ankles. One could almost trace the tracks of her luminous hair as she passed, a halo of sorts, reflecting even the faintest gleam of light like a Fresnel lens. Some of the team members even started joking that they knew it was morning when Sarah's hair started shining. At times, bent over a fledgling seedling with her candle flame colored locks that dressed her shoulders like a mantle she looked so much like an angel that people took pause for a second to remember who she was and settle their fluttering hearts.

When Sarah didn't speak her presence was iconic, there was something about her appearance that didn't look earthly, even on Terra II: she was walking tall, almost floating over the brick dirt surrounded by light and her flaming locks were blinding in the sunshine. Of course one minute later she would start talking to the cats about the double bound modifications to the axillary buds of _Agastache anisata_ and the timed germination rates for _Levisticum officinale_ , technical details strangely mixed with cute pet names for the felines and description of traditions and superstitions from her childhood.

For instance she had filled the already occupied sills of the tuna cans with bowls of wheatgrass for the feast of St. Andrew to the distress of the displaced felines and the mumbling protests of the sisters whose crowded quarters were grating their nerves already and who saw enough agriculture during the day not to need a reminder indoors for their few hours of rest. The stubborn novice was adamant about this superstition and wouldn't let go of it out of fear that the crops won't thrive otherwise. One doesn't know if the crops took off because of or despite this pointless waste of time and seed, as sister Joseph called it, but the cats benefited greatly from a vegetarian delicacy in their diets: they gained exceptional intestinal health and produced significantly fewer hairballs.

***

It was early in the morning when sister Roberta uttered a shocking gasp and rushed all the sisters to their feet fearing the worst. They fumbled out the doors of the tuna cans, half dressed, hair in disarray, to find the source of the trouble.

In the middle of the courtyard, two steps above the grass, sister Roberta was floating in thin air grace to the magnetic gravitational device she had been working on for the last two weeks, stuck in animated suspension and unable to come down.

"Can somebody turn this off, please?" she asked sheepishly, not looking Seth in the eye. Seth had rationed the energy supply and running the antigravity machine was in flagrant violation of her rule.

"Sister Mary-Francis, can you please help our delinquent down?" the leader said in an even tone of voice. The machine kept humming along diligently and picked up one of the corners of Seth's tin can lifting it in the air like a nut shell. "Hurry, please, before sister Roberta launches us all into space, I kind of like breathing if nobody minds." The tuna can kept elevating while the sweating and stressed out sister was fumbling with the controls, trying to figure out which one of the switches would turn the machine off.

"It's the second one on the left, dear", sister Roberta said, calm and composed despite raising slowly but steadily into the atmosphere. "Don't just turn it off, I'll break a leg, turn it down gently as you would a dimmer switch." Sister Mary-Francis complied and Roberta descended upon the land like a futuristic Mary Poppins without an umbrella.

"What is the exact capacity of this device, sister?" Seth asked unperturbed.

"30,000 tons", the former answered.

"So what you are telling me is that we had a great chance of being thrust outside the atmosphere, tin cans, cats and all", said Seth.

"'Fraid so", mumbled sister Roberta, soft as a whisper.

"If I didn't know any better I'd think this was your second attempt to eliminate us all", Seth said calmly. Sister Roberta said nothing.

"30,000 tons, you said. Any use we can think of for this contraption?"

"I'll ask the engineers, they'll find something to do with it."

"Any chance it could be used for propulsion?"

"Probably, if we try spinning the magnets maybe we can..."

"Please, sister, I don't want a 30,000 ton propeller under my backside, hold your enthusiasm and pass it along to motor design, although I'm not really sure what kind of building wouldn't go up with it. How do you come up with these things? I don't know if you are making great advances in propulsion or creating a doomsday device. This stuff can easily be the end of this colony. Is there any way to control the level of energy that comes out of your contraptions?"

"In time", sister Roberta said, looking down half embarrassed, half prideful.

All the logistics team saw from a distance was one of the sisters raising slowly from the ground and floating above the top of the vineyard. They commented in a somewhat fearful voice about the possibility of witchcraft and the weird practices that were going on in the mud mixing camp. They thought now very differently about Sarah and her strange old world superstitions, her flaming Irish hair and the apparent lack of technological prowess of the stone age group and thought for sure there was a lot more to their odd rituals than met the eye. After all, maybe they really did talk to cats, who knows what else they were capable of?

Even after Roberta came over with the spectacularly small magnetic anti-gravity device they still had their doubts, because it seemed impossible for one of the sisters to conceive of it, let alone build one from construction scraps and repurposed shuttle engines.

Chapter Seventeen

"There comes a time in everyone's life when all the certainties one relies on to feel safe are shattered. We find ourselves naked and alone with only our faith to sustain us. God remains the only shelter that keeps us from despair. Never lose faith. Never lose hope. Never lose faith. Never lose hope. Never lose faith. Never lose hope."

"We are all born with talents we don't know exist because the life we live has no use for them. These talents manifest themselves when we are faced with impossible odds and they become the key to our survival. It is this grueling feat of raising above one's condition that moves civilization forward."

Everything that morning had been completely uneventful. A new Noah's ark arrived bringing fluffy bunny rabbits, certainly more numerous than they were when they embarked. The mud mixes were prepared, the bacterial cultures were tested, the morning check of the crops was run of the mill and the sisters were preparing for lunch.

"What happened to the com link?" Seth asked, with an even tone of voice that didn't betray irritation or anxiety.

"Nothing, why are you asking?" said sister deAngelis, who was on com duty at the time.

"Have you tried to use it during the last half hour?"

"Of course, I'm monitoring it as we speak."

"Have you ACTUALLY tried using the communication devices? With a response from a real person, not computer feedback?"

Sister deAngelis complied, sending messages into the ether to the ever so solicitous team in charge of their mission back home, but no answer returned. She didn't say much, but Seth could read the fear in the sister's eyes so she tried not to press the issue to the point of full panic.

"I assume that we are not sure how long we've been in complete communication silence?" she asked.

"No, Seth, I don't know. The last real message we received was yesterday at 8:00, they are sending earthworms and insects, I don't even want to know what kind."

Seth frowned at the unrelated details.

"So we could have possibly been out of range for maybe 12 to 14 hours?"

"It's possible."

"How come nobody on the other teams noticed, surely they talk to Christchurch just as often as we do?"

"I didn't ask, they must be relying on auto-feedback to monitor the connection, like we do."

"Announce this to everybody and tell sister Roberta she's got to shift her work schedule. How are we doing on supplies?"

"Six months plus what we grow and the animals. Eggs and milk if nothing else."

"I assume that the wise and stress-free planning managers who put this mission together accounted for a situation like this?"

"Yes, there are several contingency plans available for various stages in the project development."

"For how long?"

"The longest is six months."

Seth stared through the com station so intently one could almost hear the metal hiss and melt.

"How long can we survive on local production alone?"

"I don't know, Seth, technically there is no limit, if we run out of crops we can always grow more."

"Start now. Call sisters Novis, Jove and Mary-Francis and ask them to put a plan together to double the plantings. Sarah will be in charge, she's got the gift. We're going to be fine."

The new responsibility was appointed to Sarah without much fanfare or extraneous words. She didn't say anything and attended devotedly to her duties, but spent the following months in breathless full blown panic.

In light of the new challenge she looked around, didn't recognize any of the sights that were supposed to look familiar by now, didn't recognize the person whose confidence and sense of control gave her a reason to believe that things will turn out as planned and feared not only for her life, but for her afterlife as well.

Growing up with nuns she never questioned the existence of the immortal soul and the final judgment, she only thought that if she lived her life well and attended to good deeds she would make it upstairs, after all God was all merciful and loving and wouldn't begrudge her the occasional misstep as long as she meant well.

Now she started wondering if what she considered to be a good life wasn't good at all, it didn't seem to be very clear what good really was, and she was assaulted by remorse and doubt, and most of all by the feeling that the artificial environment they were creating was some sort of Icarus flight and there was just a matter of time until they will all be punished for their audacity.

***

Sister Roberta worked on the com link that day, and the day after, and the following week. The engineering team inspected the satellites, which was not an easy task with all the methane containers floating around and bumping into them. There was nothing wrong with the satellites, though, everything worked perfectly. For an entire month they tried and failed to establish communication with the home team. Two months later the new shipment arrived with the news that a cloud of dust and ice was crossing the transmission path and there was nothing they could do about it. All debris was expected to clear in about three months, after which normal communications would resume.

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 me 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".

"How big is it?"

"I didn't get a chance to build more, what you see is what you get. If you proceed forty steps ahead you are going to see its edge." Sarah started, curious of course, and arrived to a sharply drawn line that sliced the beautiful florid scene like a saw and continued with the soybean rows. She realized that they must have stepped on some of the plantings on their way and there will be some _'splainin'_ to do once they got back to reality.

"This is amazing, sister, how do you turn it off?" asked the redhead.

"I haven't gotten to that part yet", sister Roberta said in the most serious tone, then burst with laughter, "just kidding, you should have seen the look on your face! Pull my left ear."

Sarah pulled and three Chinese fortune coins fell to the ground singing a delicate jingle.

"I so wanted to do this!" Roberta the tiger sighed, pleased. She pressed a bluish colored rock on the edge of the stream with one of her front paws and the scene vanished, giving way to the messed up soybean fields and a frowning Seth staring them down.

"Where have you been and how did this happen?" asked Seth, pointing at the ravaged soybean rows behind them. Roberta filled her in on the details which brought up a few questions to Sarah's mind.

"How come Seth didn't appear in the scene?" asked Sarah.

"It only works in harmony with individual brainwave patterns, they weren't matched to hers, so she didn't interpret the signal, we're all special and unique. I still have to tune it, Solomon shouldn't have been there either, it's getting there", mumbled sister Roberta in an excited tone of voice.

"How did you know what my brainwave pattern was?" asked Sarah, concerned.

"I scanned you", said sister Roberta, completely tone deaf to Sarah's upset at this invasion of privacy.

"I don't remember you asking me", said Sarah, who didn't want to be unpleasant but wanted to point out that she was a person, not a lab rat and the least one could do was ask for permission.

"Oh, that's ok, dear, I got all the information I needed", said sister Roberta, completely unperturbed. She picked up the shiny gizmo and went back to the lab to fine tune the range.

Chapter Twenty

"Once you realize that the impossible doesn't exist the universe opens its treasure chest to reveal things you couldn't conceive of before. Some are fundamental scientific breakthroughs and then some are trivial but quite entertaining bits of impractical nonsense. No matter, though, because our life here made the important and the unimportant become equal."

"I learned that we define what is or is not important by the standards we embrace from our older loved ones, or our trusted teachers, sometimes without realizing it, but once the system of reference changes the standards no longer apply and we set aside the sorting sieve to appreciate the miracle, large or small, just the way it is."

"Sister Roberta, can you help me make some titanium?" asked Sarah.

"For what, dear?"

"What can we make titanium out of?" Sarah asked, naturally.

"Well, we can use the tuna cans, but then we're going to have to sleep under the stars. There are adequate amounts of magnesium and boron in the soil, but it's too much trouble knocking out all the extra particles. How about iron, surely there is plenty of it all over the place in this red soil? What do you need the titanium for, anyway?"

"We're going to get some extra juice for your antigravity device", said Sarah, in the hope that this offering would incentivize the curious sister.

***

There wasn't a scientific challenge that sister Roberta wouldn't accept. In record time she put together a science lab that looked very much like an old scene from the gold rush days: rough carts on wheels advanced slowly through the electromagnetic field which separated the iron particles from the dust, then an alternating pulse of negative and positive particles knocked out electrons and protons to change iron into titanium. Alchemy at its finest. Of course the substance obtained was significantly heavier, but the properties were fundamentally the same.

"What should we call it?" sister Roberta asked.

"What's wrong with _titanium_?" retorted Sarah.

"It is not titanium, really, we have to be more precise about it."

"How about _ferium_?"

"Doesn't have a good ring to it. _Light iron_?"

"Worse. _Heavy titanium_ sounds better."

Sarah engaged in this philosophical debate about the proper name for this modified element just to please sister Roberta, she really couldn't care less what the material name was as long as the sister produced enough of it.

"How long would it take you to make enough for 20,000 square feet of heavy titanium plate?" asked Sarah.

"What on earth for?" asked sister Roberta, alarmed.

"ALBEGs."

"What's an ALBEG?" asked sister Roberta.

"Ambient light bio-energy generator", said Sarah.

"You mean solar panels?" asked the sister, bursting with laughter. Sarah didn't answer.

With a lot of work from sister Roberta and the half-hearted cooperation of the metallurgical team who had serious concerns about the long-term stability of this compound, Sarah managed to get enough titanium trays and wiring to cover an entire soybean field lined up between the rows.

The commotion attracted a large audience, both scientists and non-scientists alike and generated a lot of commentary regarding the possible use of the apparatus. The redhead spent the next week boiling red cabbage in very large bins and mixed in cream of tartar, stirring with an enormous ladle and mumbling under her breath, for theatrical effect. She figured if she was going to spend so much time doing this with so many people staring, it might as well be entertaining. Slowly but surely the little trays started filling with purple juice which was subsequently sealed with a film of soybean oil that had chamomile and lavender essence mixed in.

"Why are you doing this", asked Seth, whose curiosity burned more and more intense as the project advanced?

"UV ray blocking, we're trying to keep the juice vital for as long as we can."

"It would be more efficient if they were sealed."

"Yes", said Sarah.

"The electrical team is going to laugh at us."

"Most likely."

"Why didn't you ask them to make the cells?"

"They don't have cabbage juice", asked Sarah simply.

"Make some!" yelled Seth, but then felt kind of bad about it because Sarah and the sisters were connecting the cables to a large electromagnet that picked up three water canisters and kept them suspended waist high.

"It's not that innovative, you know, they invented this thing in 2010", commented Seth.

"Still a good source of energy. We'll always have cabbage and soybeans", Sarah said and immediately regretted it, because she felt Seth's formidable gaze burn the back of her head.

"We can scale this indefinitely, you know", she spoke, softly.

"How hot does the liquid get?" asked Seth, worried about the cats knocking the trays over and getting scold burns.

"Somewhere in the range of 100F, we're safe."

"We're going to trip over these trays every time we harvest the beans, are you sure this is the best place for them?"

Sarah shrugged, picked up a community cat that was rubbing against her ankle and continued to watch the water canisters float gingerly in thin air.

The sisters and the engineering team accepted the upgrade without enthusiasm or objections, but pawing at the trays became the favorite preoccupation of the cats, whose fur became infused in the chamomile and lavender essential oil and started carrying the scent around like a mobile perfumery lab.

The perfumed cats of Terra Two became famous as years passed, a main visitor attraction together with the studded sky and the atmospheric light and sound show. Generation after generation of cats were so doused in fragrant oil that they internalized it, making it part of their natural scent, and their presence was made known to the nose before it was obvious to the eye.

Like fragrant clover, one could wander for hours trying to find the source of the scent, only to give up finding the secluded corner the private feline hid in to get respite from the suns, traffic and curious visitors.

Sarah was sometimes absorbed in the pruning of a tomato chord and felt a waft of chamomile or lavender fragrance brush past her, as delicate and elusive as the breeze. The sisters hadn't figured out if the cats were accidentally spilling oil from the trays or did it on purpose because they found the aromatherapy soothing.

***

When the luxury of having all necessities ensured afforded Sarah time for favorite activities she started an herbalist studio that looked more like an apothecary shop than a chemistry lab.

Bunches of herbs were hanging from the rafters, exuding aromas from pungent to heavenly amidst glass jars, marble mortars and pestles, glassware and wooden bins. The place didn't have windows, just shutters that let light in obliquely, painting abstract patterns on the rough wooden floors. The cats found the place fascinating and the more Sarah tried to keep them away from the drying racks, the mixing pans and the medicated salves, the more they found ways to sneak back in.

Solomon had a privileged situation, him being Sarah's favorite cat, flirting with immortality and quite frankly having won the territorial fights, so he spent his time on the countertop, next to the round bottomed flasks where his aromatherapy oils were distilled. He didn't mind the heat and more than once singed his whiskers trying to get closer to the irresistible aroma, more intense and enticing because of the heated volatile components.

"No, Solomon!" became Sarah's most used words, as she chased after the cat to prevent him from pawing at the flames, pushing against lab glassware and licking perfume concretes set out to macerate.

The perfume lab started more or less as a pass-time but soon became a luxurious haven of fragrance that was irresistible not only to the cats, but their caretaker too. Sarah became so passionate about her new hobby that she spent all her spare time, which now was quite copious, replicating fragrances or isolating healing oils.

"At least it doesn't stink most of the time", was sister Joseph's commentary, even though she was trained to praise austerity and self-denial and this lavish decadence seemed somewhat wicked.

"We got a cauldron, we got a broom", she said occasionally.

_"We don't got eye of newt",_ Sarah thought, but kept it to herself because sister Joseph was on her case enough as it was and she didn't feel the need to aggravate her.

Seth pretended not to be interested, even though the fragrance and sadly sometimes the reek of Sarah's experiments wafted around the tuna cans like a cloud from a higher dimension, but once the pharmaceutical products emerged she started examining the results in the name of common good. As Sarah acquired expertise in the ways of chemistry, remembering some of her college training and the herbalist lessons learned from her father and her aunts, the products became more and more sophisticated: a universal antiviral remedy, a cellular regeneration stimulant, a drinkable hair coloring product.

Seth complained about the latter, mentioning that Sarah's time would have been better spent developing something less frivolous, but accepted to become a test subject and walked around with deep violet tresses for a couple of weeks until her body filtered out the dye.

Normally the group would have relished in every type of joke and commentary imaginable, but it was Seth they were contemplating and apprehension won its battle with entertainment. They didn't know what would happen if they said a few words too many, but were certain they didn't want to find out.

Sarah wanted to try the dye herself, but was forbidden under the threat of choking to change the color of her heavenly tresses. The sisters protested as one saying it would be an offense to the benevolence of the Almighty who graced her with the undeserved treasure of hair of gold and fire, like that of the angels, but sadly complemented it with the brains of a chicken if she considered altering it in any way.

Chapter Twenty One

"We always live in the present when events seem urgent, inevitable, unmovable, but life is not a sequence but a tapestry, only to be understood as a whole. One's goal in life, one's talent, is to weave a beautiful, understandable pattern, not a random collection of clumsy stitches meant only to cover the fabric."

"Imagine if you will that a master weaver is asked to create his or her art without a pattern or a color scheme, making do with what he or she is handed gradually over time. What skill is required to weave wonders under these circumstances, and how valuable the end result!"

"Sarah, are you happy?" Sister Therese asked, all of a sudden.

The question took Sarah by surprise, she didn't think that anybody in the group was guided by anything other than faith and duty. Come to think of it their happiness was probably wrapped in the faith part, but she didn't think one of the sisters would consider it separately.

She didn't know how to answer the question, she had been so engulfed in her constant and all consuming activities that she didn't have time to assess her emotional state.

They woke up at the equivalent of six in the morning and worked solidly through the evening for about sixteen hours at which point they were so tired that they barely made it to their beds. After the first six years when the schedule seemed to relax a little bit, the dutiful Sarah filled it back up with the herbalist shop, medical research and biotechnology studies. She loved working with herbs, it reminded her of her childhood, the scents, the colors, the peaceful surroundings and the ever present cats.

She was almost thirty-three now, she passed the thirty year mark without making note of it, without feeling any different in the strange two sunned days of Terra Two. The childhood softness of her features had hardened a bit, her face looked more chiseled and a couple of thin lines showed at the corner of her eyes when she smiled. Other than that she was still the Sarah they all knew and since they saw her every day they didn't get to notice the slight changes.

Was she happy? What a strange question to ask, Sarah thought. She never had a clear plan for her life, she let it take her where it led. Other people knew exactly at the age of fifteen what they were going to do, whom they were going to marry, how many kids they were going to have and what their home was going to look like. Sarah thought that if she ever had plans as clear cut as those she would have been disappointed for sure, miss one of the details and the plan is not perfect anymore. She liked perfect, that was one of the little things that both made her excel at her work and drove the sisters nuts. _"What was the point of making something flawed?"_ she thought.

She looked at herself standing tall dressed in the tan work overalls. What a hideous color, she thought, of all the colors of the rainbow they chose something that looked like dirt. What, they were afraid aliens were going to see them from up high and attack? A robin egg's blue or a clear turquoise would have been so much better, to draw out her eyes and compliment her fiery hair.

Sarah was a beautiful woman, quality she never treasured for some unknown reason, and she had caught the eye of several guys from the logistics team but she never pursued a relationship and continued her path through life in the company of the sisters who by default were all single.

She would have liked to have children, she often imagined the giggle of little ones chasing each other around the counters in the lab, playing with the cats and knocking over bottles of aromatic oils. Their little camp was expanding with real homes for everyone and lush green gardens and social spaces, it wasn't like she was going to bring children into a desert world.

Her parents found the idea revolting in every one of its aspects, from who was going to take care of the kids to who was going to educate them, and the sisters didn't care one way or the other. In the absence of a better half though, the issue remained open and was not often pondered upon.

Was she happy? the question resurfaced, taking way too much time to answer. She thought about what her alternate life would have been, probably a professor position at one of the top universities, maybe she could have been on the base team back on Earth supporting this mission. She thought how sad she would have been to watch the images of Terra Two from afar, never being able to experience them first hand. Maybe she would have visited though, they got many visiting scientists and tourists now. The thought of seeing her brainchild at the age of ten and raised by someone else made her heart ache. She knew every spec of dirt, every gust of wind, she felt like she planted every blade of grass herself.

She looked around and her eyes rested on the emerald green soy bean fields shining in the suns behind the herbalist studio and she let her gaze linger on the purple bean tree, almost over-shadowed by the other tall trees in the orchard. The suns set suddenly, melting in the raspberry chocolate sky and a myriad of artificial stars appeared. The sisters were winding up quietly in the field preparing to turn in for the night.

Was she happy? the question followed, relentless, bouncing against her thoughts, tangled in her fire colored hair that caught the last rays of light and shone like a candle.

"I guess so", she said aloud and smiled.

Chapter Twenty Two

"Left to its own devices the wild astonishes us with results that defy the possible. Sheltered between the mountains and the sea in the movement of warm humid air entire microclimates formed, fertile and excessive. Plants found the best combinations to thrive in this environment, both taking sustenance from and reinforcing their new stable and self reliant surroundings."

"Nature doesn't believe in thrift, it constantly pushes life higher, better, closer together, it takes everything to the limit of resources, finding the perfect point of balance to keep the cycle going indefinitely. There is no space left in its vegetal extravagance, no square inch of dirt uncovered, no lack, no waste. We often say there is no perfection in the world, but how can one believe it if a completely self-contained ecosystem can function for so long with this degree of precision like a living breathing perpetual motion machine."

"Did you compare the last two atmospheric humidity readings?" asked Seth irritated, trying to squeeze through a compact group of visitors who were attracted to Sarah's shop like moths to a flame. This was happening because her herb scented shed had the highest density of fragrant cats per square foot and all but guaranteed a sighting.

Sarah couldn't find it in her heart to declare her haven off limits and was trying her best to perform both duty and hobby amidst a chaotic crowd that reached under the countertops and stretched to the rafters, oblivious to simmering pots of oil and chemical processes in progress. In this bedlam the poor cats, frazzled by the excessive attention, were jumping dangerously close to open flames and glassware filled with hot liquids, trying to find shelter in the open roof structure, practically the only place that was safely out of reach.

"I'm sorry, I was going to get to it later", Sarah apologized, understanding from Seth's tone that the readings had already been compared and found lacking. "What's wrong?"

"See for yourself", Seth boomed, throwing a few thunderbolts from her eyes, evidently annoyed by the ceaselessly moving mob.

Sarah looked: between yesterday afternoon and the present morning humidity had dropped from 87 to 52%, with the temperature staying a steady 82 degrees.

"There must be something wrong with the readings", Sarah started, but was harshly interrupted.

"There isn't. I triple checked them and asked Sister Jove to check them too." Sarah felt strangely guilty, as if the density of water vapor in the air was her direct responsibility.

"We watered this blessed dirt for six years straight", Seth blasted, "if the vapors vanish into nothingness I'll... " She paused, recomposed herself and continued. "Could you please put together a team and go on a field trip to see what the problem is?"

Sarah honestly didn't think that a field trip was going to provide the miraculous solution to their now front and center problem, but was grateful to get out of the chaos for a few days and see more of the planet. For all their dare devil adventure after landing on Terra Two they became more tied to the land than any Earth farmer would be, since the crops and the animals required their constant attention and leaving even for a day would have imposed undue burdens on the remaining sisters.

The farthest Sarah had ventured was the sharp mountain rim on the horizon, probably five miles away if even that. She knew that by now several islands had been settled, and they were in constant communication with their neighbors, but none of them had time to visit. Terra Two had come to life with a vigor surpassing all expectations and every seed that was carried by the wind or the insides of a bird fell on the ground and multiplied, covering the undeveloped areas with a weird farm-like vegetation, all mixed together and growing wild for the benefit of the little birds and animals that called the islands home.

"I'll take sister Mary-Francis and sister deAngelis", started Sarah.

"Sister Mary-Francis it is. Can't spare two."

Sarah didn't say anything, but thought it kind of dangerous to venture off into the wilderness in such a small group.

"Don't worry, you'll be fine", Seth answered her thoughts. They wore the neural interlink bracelet all the time now, and since no one ever bothered to politely reframe their thoughts it didn't make any difference whether they were talking or thinking. "Two days, go north."

_"Which way is north?"_ Sarah asked herself, for the first thing they found out after they landed was the magnetic field of Terra Two shifted constantly in response to the movement of the two suns and one couldn't use a compass to save one's life.

"That way", Seth picked a random direction and pointed towards it decisively.

"How are we going to find our way back?" asked Sarah, in a quietly alarmed tone.

"Trail some breadcrumbs", said Seth and left. Sarah didn't know sometimes if Seth had a high level of trust in her abilities or was trying to get her killed. She shrugged, though, and looked for a suitable material for the bread crumbs. Everything mineral in nature on the planet looked exactly the same: a brick colored, even textured aggregate with no distinguishing features.

***

The next day Sarah and sister Mary Francis left the camp carrying two very heavy backpacks filled with colorful glass beads that dropped behind them to form a winding path as they passed. Sweating buckets in the 82 degree heat they both offered a few unguarded opinions about the unfortunate choice of material and the weight thereof.

Sister Roberta wanted to be 100% sure that they had enough breadcrumbs for two days, so she built a margin of safety in the quantity of beads by almost doubling it.

They walked quietly among the wild tomato chords and the trailing grape vines, gently pushing clumps of wheat out of the way, scattering the over ripe kernels on the ground. Every now and then a little field mouse or a garden snake scurried out of the way, unaccustomed to visitors.

They reached the sharp mountain range and stopped for a new reading: the humidity had come back to 87 and a few rain fascicles turned on suddenly like faucets, drenching them in less than five minutes, after which they disappeared into thin air as if they have never been.

Sarah had thoughts about some people's jumping to conclusions and making unnecessary work for other people who had better things to do than to carry thirty pounds of ballast on their back up the mountain.

_"I know",_ Seth's thoughts resonated through the neural interlink _, "I saw the reading, keep on going and let me know what you find."_

The view from the mountain top was a pastoral dream, fields of green undulated gently softening the sharp contours of the valleys and loosing themselves into the distance, almost blending with the metallic blue of the sea. There was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that looked alarming and as she sat on a rock admiring the view without the backpack pushing her into the ground, Sarah was pleased to have taken this brief vacation. Far towards the horizon she could distinguish the contours of neighboring islands, lost in a chocolate haze that thickened with the distance, looking like enormous grazing animals peacefully at rest.

"We should keep going, we need to find a suitable camping site before nightfall", said sister Mary Francis almost apologetically. They were cleaning up the remnants of their frugal meal when another set of rain fascicles appeared from blue skies and drenched them to the bone again.

_"What the...",_ Sarah thought.

_"Language!"_ a choir of sisters thought in response.

_"You should be talking, especially you, sister Joseph!"_ retorted the redhead.

Nobody answered. Sarah and sister Mary Francis continued their descent as dense clouds kept gathering and rain splattered on and off stubbornly.

The landscape had changed, grass land plants had given room to trees, pear trees to be precise, with vanilla vines clinging fiercely to their trunks and clambering avidly towards the suns. In the shade of the pear tree forest coffee bushes ran wild, growing clusters of red berries in a dense thicket and attracting flocks of very loud yellow and green canaries. Every now and then stately stalks of rhubarb towered over the lower plants, and puddles of water dotted the landscape, with a gentle mist floating above them in the heat of the afternoon. Rain started again, generous and rumbling, creating temporary torrents that ran down the sides of the mountain, washing off the dirt and taking it downstream.

In the distance, in a clearing, turmeric had spread and it was in bloom, covering an entire hill with lavender flowers, reflecting the violet fruit and flowers of the eggplants on the other side. Large butterflies sprinkled the landscape, gathering nectar from the flowers of star anise that scented the humid overheated air with an intense licorice fragrance.

"The entire floor is wet, I don't think we can camp here", said sister Mary Francis, trying to extract her feet from the thick muck with the boots still on. "We need to go back", she said, and rain started again as if summoned, drenching them.

***

The next morning the rain was gone and the suns were shining in the coffee sky casting a warm glow over the pear tree rainforest. Sarah took a humidity reading and it was 52% again.

_"That's ok, you can come back now",_ Sarah could sense Seth laugh, _"there is no point in you two getting rained on for two more days, we're good. Get a few vanilla beans so we can assess the quality."_

"Can we dump the remaining twenty pounds of glass beads? We can see the camp from here."

_"Bring some pears too",_ asked Seth, with a completely uncharacteristic but powerful craving for the fruit.

_"Got you, master Yoda, you are human after all",_ thought Sarah.

_"Did you say something to me?"_ Seth asked, sharply.

"We're coming back."

Chapter Twenty Three

"We seldom think of how interconnected our lives are. We don't realize, busy as we are with daily chores and little challenges that capture all our attention sometimes, that our relationships are essential ingredients of our lives. They tie events together and make sense of the things we can't understand."

"We've been together for decades, sharing work, meals, and purpose. There comes a time in your life when you have known a person longer than you haven't. This never happens by accident, you chose to keep this link alive for more than half of your life. In more ways than you know it is very important to you."

They started back towards the camp with backpacks full of edible samples and giving out the most divine vanilla scent to the confusion and disappointment of several butterflies and a couple of humming birds. Despite having dumped the now pointless glass beads, their backpacks were ten pounds heavier than they were when they started.

"There is a new transport coming next week", sister Mary-Francis said. "They are bringing more cows."

She didn't need to give Sarah the update, everybody knew about the transport, she just wanted to break the silence. Contrary to Sarah's initial understanding not all the sisters enjoyed the vow of silence and being in the wilderness together gave the chatty Mary-Francis an opportunity to engage in pleasant conversation.

Sarah didn't know what to answer, but she didn't want to miss the opportunity to actually communicate with another human being, so she replied.

"I know, there is going to be quite a lot more work, I wonder why they are not sending more people too, they probably forgot there are only twelve of us."

"Thirteen", sister Mary-Francis said. Sarah nodded her head in approval, even though Seth was more involved in decision making she was working as hard as the rest of them.

"Do you remember what this planet looked like when we first came here?" asked Sarah. Sister Mary-Francis remembered. Sarah glanced at her for a second. The sister was a tiny woman, deceptively strong for her constitution, with a good natured round face, dark brown hair, gently waved and sparkling blue eyes. It always seemed that all the sister's being was concentrated in her eyes whose intensity revealed extraordinary spiritual strength. It was hard to tell her age, she could have been anywhere between thirty and forty-five.

"You know, sister, we've been working together for more than ten years now and I don't know anything about you or any of the others for that matter", said Sarah in a tentative tone, careful not to intrude or offend.

"Nobody asks", said sister Mary-Francis, as if she had been waiting for this question for a long time. "I was born Kenza Banzi, in Tangiers. My father is a doctor and my mother teaches chemistry. I have two brothers and a sister, all younger than me. When I was six or seven, my mother took me on a field trip to a lavender farm to visit the perfumery lab and I knew then this was what I wanted to do in my life. I went to college and got a doctorate in biochemistry and then I got a scholarship at the farm in Perpignan."

Sarah was startled at how very similar their life stories were.

"Do you keep in touch with your siblings?", she asked.

"All the time, my brothers started an accounting firm and my sister joined my father's medical practice, she is a gerontologist."

"How long have you been in the convent?" Sarah asked.

"I spent three or four years there before I joined, one year or so before you came in." Again, Sarah was surprised, because she always assumed the sisters had been together forever, she couldn't imagine a time when they weren't functioning as a group.

She took a long time to ask what she was very curious about. She knew that sister Mary-Francis could hear her through the neural interlink, however for some reason the latter decided to wait for the question to be answered out loud.

"Why did you join the convent, sister?"

"I got the calling, dear", sister Mary-Francis answered simply.

"How about the others?" Sarah asked.

"Why don't you talk to them and find out for yourself", replied the sister.

_"That would be the day",_ Sarah thought, laughing heartily on the inside as she imagined sister Joseph's reaction to this interview, scene reinforced by the sharp commentary the said sister offered through the neural interlink.

Her argument could be politely summed up as an imperative for everyone to mind their own business and remember first all the tasks they had left undone for the other unfortunate team members to pick up in their stead and stop the incessant and irritating chatter that disturbed the peace of decent people. The younger generation was better served by being loving, patient, hard working, respectful, and most importantly, stopping their blabber mouths long enough so that the older and wiser such as sister Joseph could hear themselves think.

"That went well", sister Mary-Francis barely managed to utter between irrepressible bursts of laughter and the effort of trying to keep up with Sarah's longer stride.

"Dare I ask about Seth?" Sarah chuckled, knowing the answer already.

_"If you put half of your curiosity to better use we could have been two years ahead by now, but no, you have to waste your energy and our time gossiping like a fishwife. You should have been here already, everybody is barely drawing breath because they have to work two shifts",_ replied Seth through the neural interlink, irritated as always.

_"Why is she always mad?"_ Sarah asked herself. _"We're all in the same situation and I don't feel like yelling every other word."_ Seth didn't answer.

They had started construction on the permanent building that was going to house their activities, a light and airy crystalline structure with views to the fields and the sea. Years later Sarah would spend many hours inside it meditating and resting her eyes on the serene landscape but for now the construction created additional work, cramped their quarters even more and got on everybody's nerves. Bulldozers and cranes moved back and forth, constantly raising clouds of dust and making a terrible racket.

"Why is everybody so rude?" Sarah let out, simultaneously recognizing that to ask this question was rude too.

"Not everybody I hope", answered sister Mary-Francis gently, and Sarah realized that other than sister Joseph and lately Seth everybody was quite mild tempered and accommodating.

"You are right, I'm sorry", Sarah said. The evening was fast approaching and she was hungry but didn't want to stop, they were probably two hours away from the camp.

"What is it like being immortal?" sister Mary-Francis asked unexpectedly.

"Who says I am immortal?" answered Sarah, puzzled.

"Solomon hasn't aged a day", the sister replied. "Have you ever thought about it?"

The future would reveal that Sarah's aging process was still going on, though greatly slowed, and she was going to become an old woman eventually, but for now nobody knew what was going to happen so she had this special aura of invincibility that both intrigued and annoyed the others. She shrugged her shoulders and didn't know what to say.

"If that were true then after a while all of you will be gone and I'm going to be all alone", Sarah said.

"There are always going to be people here, you know", sister Mary-Francis answered kindly.

"Yes, but not you."

_"I can't believe I have to listen to this self-defeating pity fest!"_ Seth ranted through the neural interlink. _"Move faster, we're not going to wait for you two for another day, the rest of us don't spend our days contemplating eternity and the meaning of life, you have to get here by nightfall!"_

_"Maybe you should",_ Sarah thought, but widened her stride to make up the time.

Chapter Twenty Four

"Many people wondered about us, about how long we've been here, about how old we are. To my knowledge I am about one hundred and sixteen now, but who is to know? After living on Terra Two for so long one is bound to lose track of Earth years. The days are different here, the years too. No two years are the same, the paths of the suns oscillate and their cycles are roughly ten Earth years long, but it's almost impossible to discern repeating patterns."

"We lost track of our age in this coffee paradise with no seasons, how does one weigh the passing of time when one's body doesn't change? I think I'm around one hundred and sixteen now, give or take a few decades."

"Have you seen sister Roberta?" Seth asked. She was walking very fast towards the weather station and the sisters to whom she addressed the question started following her around, just to be able to answer. If one watched Seth walk places and didn't know her one would think that the world was in a constant and imminent crisis that she and she alone was capable to address. If one spent some time with Seth as the sisters did, one knew there was no particular urgency to any of her daily tasks, she just walked fast.

The logistics team had panicked a few times during the early years, seeing her swoosh across the landscape as if the universe was coming to an end and dropped what they were doing to assist in whatever seemed to be the emergency, only to later get used to ignore the commotion and follow up with their tasks.

Seth didn't close any doors behind her, she just busted carelessly through them like a force of nature, so fast that she created air movements around her passage. Sarah found this somewhat endearing because it brought back fond memories of her grandfather who was exactly the same: he never sat down for more than three minutes, never spent more than fifteen minutes without planning a new activity, and never closed a door, a drawer or a cabinet. If it didn't leak, waste energy or smell, whatever it was, he left it open.

The consequence of this habit was that her grandparents' house was some form of sheltered extension of the outdoors where one experienced nature without being impacted by it.

Of course on Terra Two the weather was a non-issue, since the temperature never changed and the rain didn't really fall like it does on Earth, evenly distributed from a large and undefined cloud formation. Rain on Terra Two felt like the amusement park giant bucket, you had to be right under the condensation cloud at the precise time it poured out.

"She's in her lab", sister Jove said, trying to catch her breath and keep up with Seth.

"As grateful as I am for all the wonderful innovations sister Roberta contributed to our community I have to say I am a little worried about whatever she's doing right now that occupies all her attention. I still break into a cold sweat whenever I think about her mega magnet antigravity machine."

Seth and the sisters reached the weather station where the former recorded the 82 degree temperature and the 87% humidity on her tablet and observed the wind direction: N to NW. She turned on her heels and started rushing back, with the poor sisters being pulled in the vacuum she created behind her like small boats in the wake of a coast liner.

"She's working with Sarah", sister Novis added, and this piece of information made Seth stop and turn around.

"Now I really have to know what they are doing", Seth frowned, curious. She changed direction suddenly and started towards the lab.

In the middle of the room a holographic projection of Sarah's insides floated two feet above ground, while sister Roberta was asking the machine to peel off layers and turn organs and body systems on and off. Ten feet to the left, like a commentary on the virtual image was Sarah in the flesh, also floating two feet above the ground, but fortunately with her epidermis fully intact. All around the device the cats of Terra Two gathered in tight concentric circles, so close together it was really difficult to walk towards it without stepping on them. They all looked delighted and their collective purring almost covered the strange low hum that emanated from the machine.

Sister Roberta kept giving commands to the machine, asking it to slice thin layers and magnify, magnify, magnify.

"Here they are, the sweet little darlings", said sister Roberta as she watched a little immortal colony move about its business on the surface of a mitochondria, graciously assisting in the metabolism of glucose while keeping the lion's share of boron for themselves. "They look very healthy and happy."

"As they should, I never ate so much cabbage in my life, there should be enough boron in my system to feed three times as many!"

Sister Roberta increased the magnification to a wavelength of 10nm. An enormous image of one of the immortals filled the room in exquisite detail.

"Wow!" Seth couldn't help exclaiming. "How did you do that?"

"I modified the clarity of the boron lens. Magnify!" she ordered again.

The zoom reached molecular level and they all watched the dizzying buzz of electrons moving around the nuclei. The immortal kept generating enzyme keys that rearranged the cellular components, fixing broken chains and restoring symmetry.

"Magnify!" said sister Roberta again. The machine looked deeper into the enzymes' composition, a stuffy and repetitive chain of amino acids vibrating silently with an electronic buzz. "Freeze frame. Identify chemical formula."

"Are you trying to duplicate these?" Seth asked.

"If we can, I'm not sure what they are made of yet. Or how they function at cellular level."

The machine diligently wrote down an exhaustively long series of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon and germanium arranged in every combination possible, clustered together in long strings, endlessly repeating but no two the same.

"Germanium?" asked Seth. "This life form is germanium based?"

"Stranger things have happened", sister Roberta replied, watching with fascination how the long organic molecules kept fixing and rearranging Sarah's chemistry, in an almost obsessive focus on restoring perfection into any system that seemed out of balance.

"Zoom out", sister Roberta said. The machine brought magnification back to cellular level and they all watched with their mouths open as the enzymes digested a damaged cell and spit it back out, rearranged the pieces in the right order and dissipated.

"Congratulations, Sarah, whatever cells you have right now will live forever in everlasting perfection."

"What happens with the new cells?" asked Sarah.

"I guess your little immortal friends sent signals to your body to stop generating them unless they're absolutely needed. I never thought I would experience this in my life, but as far as biological beings go you are now in a state of perfection: every functioning system is optimized."

"Do you think you can synthesize the enzyme?" asked Seth.

"That would be quite easy, I just don't know how to introduce it to a living entity and if it would work the same. I don't know who would volunteer to be a human guinea pig."

"Test it on other creatures first and then I'll try it myself", said Seth. "By the way, what's with the cats?"

"They just like the hum of the electro motor. It soothes them. No connection."

_"What's it like being immortal?"_ sister Mary-Francis's question resonated in Sarah's memory.

_"I guess you are going to find out",_ she thought, smiling.

Chapter Twenty Five

"We don't exercise our talents and skills for their own sakes, what would be the point of creating new things, of advancing technologies, of changing the way we see life if there was nobody to pass them on to. We are only a link in an endless chain of existence and our greatest joy, our most cherished goal is to move our kind one step forward, cure one more disease, fulfill one more need, make hope one granted wish stronger."

"When children were born on Terra Two it was as if our race had been reborn, not from the past, but from a future we didn't know we were contemplating. We didn't realize until we saw them roam happy, curious and care free through the lush green fields that they were the first humans born to paradise."

Time flowed around them like a lazy river, bringing accomplishments and events, weaving a beautiful tapestry, rich and complex. Its layers interweaved with the development of the planet, the changes of society, the dwellers' own advancement in wisdom.

The most significant change was the gradual transformation of their little colony from a professional group exclusively focused on performing highly specialized terraforming tasks to a diverse and colorful society complete with social activities, artistic endeavors, spiritual pursuit and most of all, the birth of children.

The first baby of Terra Two was born to a physicist and an energy engineer, but really she belonged to all, since her arrival was anticipated, discussed, and cherished by each and every human being on the planet. Lily, named after her grandmother, arrived at the cusp of evening, just as the suns melted suddenly in the coffee sky, a healthy and vivacious bundle of joy. Her chocolate skin had the warm glow of Terra Two's sunsets and her eyes were a liquid shade of blue-green that reflected the surface of its sea.

The sisters showed varied levels of enthusiasm about the event, but Sarah spent so much time around the baby that the parents almost had to expand their home to build sleeping quarters for her.

Many children were born in the next years, and play spaces, schools, exploration trails followed, together with the need for a lot more caring hands and watchful eyes. The little ones managed to find their way everywhere, from the astrophysics lab to sister Roberta's experiments and Sarah's bio-chemistry shed, they ran across the fields picking food right off the vines and were the only ones capable to spot and apprehend a cat in less than fifteen minutes.

Their skins reacted quickly to the light intensity on Terra Two, whose suns, though muted in the hazy skies, put out a lot of ultra violet radiation; they developed a healthy glowing tan. The parents were worried at first but then remembered that the synthesized enzyme they now carried repaired the damage, if there happened to be any.

Visitors doted on these little humans who grew wild and free among giant tropical plants, for whom the two sunned coffee firmament studded with metal dots was the only sky they ever knew, for whom cats were supposed to be fragrant and who couldn't understand the concept of winter. The kids' favorite activity was chasing rain showers, they liked to catch the moment of downpour and show up at home in the evening completely drenched and beaming with satisfaction.

The birth of a new generation set in motion a whole series of changes, from the building of schools to the arrival of teachers, pediatricians and candy shop owners, but the kids really didn't stay within boundaries, intensely curious, and learned by watching the civil engineering team how to build roads and move terrain, or by following the weather teams how to record temperature and humidity readings, or by chasing after sister Joseph while she was checking on the health of the live stock what it took to be a veterinarian. They made the latter mumble constantly under her breath about the parental lack of responsibility and the unfairness of life.

Sarah enjoyed teaching the little ones how to plant seeds and bioengineer the outcomes in ways that were nothing short of miraculous and spent long afternoons under the soybean tree telling stories from her childhood and amazing the children with descriptions of surreal mountains, blue skies with just one bright yellow sun, strong summer storms and the purest white snow. Incredulous eyes grew wider with wonder as the neural interlink bracelets projected the extraordinary Earth images into their minds, and they shared life stories with the children on that remote planet the grown ups called home, children whose delicate skin never ceased to astound them.

A new chapter opened in Sarah's life when she saw her own childhood experiences through the eyes of her parents. She knew not to ruin the wonder, the joy and the explorer pride of the young lives asserting themselves in a large welcoming universe.

Since there was no way to keep curious little noses away from her experiments Sarah set up equipment and tables and started a semi-formal course of instruction in the fundaments of organic chemistry and herbal medicine. Some adjustments had to be made, of course: the felines found permanent accommodation in the rafters, staring down at the noisy group with round attentive eyes and from a safe distance.

Terra Two was swarming with visitors who saved and sacrificed to visit the cradle of everlasting life, although the sisters and an army of scientists were trying very hard to explain that it was not immortality but a generous extension of natural life span that the enzymatic compound provided.

Sarah thought that ever since she met the sisters she couldn't think of many moments when she didn't have ten or more people around her, sometimes the sisters or members of the engineering team, but more often than not complete strangers. What was it about this group that attracted people like a magnet to watch whatever they were doing, even the most mundane activities, with bated breath?

Chapter Twenty Six

"We occupy ourselves with doing until what we do becomes who we are. The world of Terra Two grew around us quietly and we discovered it all grown and rich with events, a lot more sophisticated than we expected it to be, full of personality, confident and free."

"We never got used to it, partly because it constantly changed, partly because we weren't born of its essence. We carry the blue sky in our blood, the brightness of the sun, the majestic mountains and the painted clouds and as long as our lives last we'll keep yearning for them."

The sisters were quiet, gathered in a semi-circle on the crumbly dirt. The atmosphere was a little tense, there'd been a while since Seth found it necessary to call for an assembly meeting. They were all wondering what this was about.

Sarah was sitting in the back with Solomon in her lap, trying to keep the cat from chewing on the draw string of her overalls. The year had been quite fruitful, she thought as she watched the tall goldenrod panaches swing gracefully in the breeze. The animals were thriving, the barns were full, work on their fancy translucent building was almost complete, and due to their microscopic indigen friends they were all in glorious health.

"The last of the Noah's arks arrived today, from now on we will have to rely exclusively on local resources. There will be some medical and equipment cargo, but mostly passenger travel from now on. If all goes well we should be able to send shipments back some time soon, our vanilla beans are already famous."

Silence covered them like a blanket. They didn't know exactly why, but this great news weighed heavily on them, it felt like the end of an age, as if an essential connection that they thought permanent was suddenly severed.

Not that anybody thought there would be any hardship, Terra Two was holding its own, vibrant and abundant, it was just that until then, even if they never talked about it, they still considered themselves of the Earth and receiving a continuous supply of earthly beings and artifacts nurtured this feeling.

She didn't want to let it show, but Seth was sad too, in a deep and fundamental way that wasn't easy to put into words.

"My dears, I'm afraid we're all grown up", the leader said.

It felt strange, this sadness, especially while a crowd of visitors swept around their little group, almost touching them, and the kids of the island, oblivious to the elder's nostalgia, laughed and screeched with delight, playing catch and chasing rain showers.

"We should ask them for advice", sister Joseph joked, pointing her head towards the kids, "they're the natives."

"I noticed", Seth continued, in her even but firm tone, "that we've all been neglecting our spiritual duties lately. Fortunately for us the construction team built us this here beautifully transparent edifice and we should put it to good use. Vespers are at seven, I will be there every day, you are all welcome to join me if you wish."

This was how the formal part of Sarah's religious life started. During the early days on Terra Two the sisters had forgone the rites and rituals of their order, since daily survival took precedence over ceremony, but found them now with renewed enthusiasm, eager to reestablish rhythm and permanence into their lives.

Common prayer started promptly at seven in the large hall of glass that occupied the heart of the building. Light hit the crystalline edges and diffracted into rainbows, moving like ethereal artwork, bouncing and reflecting off the transparent surfaces. The enchanted backdrop of the planet surrounded them, rendered surreal by the light of the setting suns.

The sisters had decided to dress up for the occasion and wore their ceremonial attire, intimidating in its simplicity and so formal that Sarah almost didn't recognize them at first. They were sitting on the crystal floor that glowed dimly with diffuse light, very quiet in the common meditation their connected neural interlink bracelets facilitated. There were no random thoughts, no banter, the sister's thoughts joined in prayer as one, creating a hallowed space around them, the world at peace.

The evening descended suddenly over the transparent building, with its rich shades of chocolate and coffee, and as the lights started glowing in the crystal palace the image of their silent group became symbolic.

They prayed long into the evening for favorable atmospheric conditions and the increase of yield, for the well-being and prosperity of their colony, for their families and friends back on Earth, for continued progress of their endeavors and for all humankind.

***

Terra Two was maturing with the glow and mellowness of an expanding culture. Buildings grew like magic out of the crumbly dirt, surrounded by luxuriant vegetation, and the paisley islands became a lot more connected by bridges, ferries and shuttles, to enhance the cohesiveness of their nation of pioneers. As visitors arrived in larger and larger groups resorts developed on the most scenic coasts, dotting the island edges with a delicate embroidery of lights at night, marking runways, main streets and harbors, tracing festoon patterns along roads and around water reservoirs, and draping along the masts and sails of the boats out to sea.

Sarah had a little home built on the edge of the beach with views to the ocean. The kids often stopped by to have a pitcher of cold water or a few pears. Sarah joined them some times and would have liked to spend more time with them, but ever since the sisters started leading the prayer service the children found them a little unapproachable, they seemed so far removed from earthly cares. The children liked to watch them for a while but soon lost patience with the quiet stillness and fussed, giggling and pinching each other to the disapproval of their parents.

"Behave!" they were constantly admonished, and they would have ignored the rebuke as always, if they didn't happen to encounter Seth's ethereal gaze. If the kids thought that Seth's intense stare was fearsome under normal circumstances, being caught in its unearthly reverie during quiet meditation was way too scary to bear. They would rather have had the annoyed looks of their mothers foretelling trouble as soon as they got home than the all seeing eyes of the 'sainted ones' descend upon their little souls and find flaw.

Of course as soon as Seth and the sisters finished their prayer they came back to reality so to speak and were mixed in the hustle and bustle of the crowd just like everybody else. The talk of saintliness irritated Seth above all and she fought to refute this ridiculous idea at every opportunity.

"So help me, I've broken my bones and dripped every drop of energy I had into the dirt of this planet for eighty seven years and now they're declaring me a saint for staring into space", she commented, frowning.

Sarah tried everything she could to convince the little ones that she was not the recipient of holy grace and to stop calling her _sister Sarah_ , but of course her efforts were in vain. Sister Sarah she remained for a generation or two of children, until she decided to take on the habit for real and chose the name of Joachima.

"If I knew that wearing a robe would bring me this amount of deference I would have done it much sooner", commented Seth, who was no stranger to sarcasm. "Antigravity engine, endless cellular repair, breathing life into the wasteland \- nothing to write home about. Formal dress and a splendid building \- guaranteed sainthood."

One good thing that came out of the children's healthy respect for the sisters and Sarah in particular was that her semi-formal teaching of botany and chemistry became an actual course of instruction that was studied very seriously.

Chapter Twenty Seven

"None of us were born teachers, we shared the knowledge we accumulated over the years the best way we knew. It was impossible not to be enchanted by the innocent curiosity, the spirited energy that surrounded us, always wanting to know more, asking the most unexpected questions, making us all look at life through different eyes."

"In the ambitious challenges that lay before our young ones we saw our own story, one life ahead, with all the enthusiasm and avant-garde ideas that fueled our dreams and all the reckless daring that made them possible. Were we crazy? Of course we were, why else would we be here?"

It followed naturally that the place that made perpetual healing just another part of daily life became a medical research center, even though the distance added logistical complexity to the task. First housed in the transparent building the laboratories and testing areas grew so big they needed their own structure and most of the functions moved to a new building, even though Sarah and sister Roberta kept their headquarters in the old building out of habit. Sarah also cherished her old wooden shed with no windows for sentimental reasons and spent long hours there checking on the drying plant racks, mixing up tinctures and preparing concretes.

The farms were large now and mostly automated and the sisters turned their efforts to sharing their knowledge with the curious and unruly crowd of youngsters that roamed around their daily tasks and mixed themselves in every activity oblivious to social mores and suitable manners, a truly ironic commentary on the sisters' complete rejection of social pretense.

The children were practically born with the neural interlink bracelets attached to their arms and the usual ways of communication were foreign to them, like florid eighteen century language feels unnecessarily convoluted to a haiku poet. The majority of them mostly thought and the only reason they learned how to speak was that their parents forced them to.

"How are you going to communicate with grandma?" was the usual commentary and persuasive refrain of the parents and it worked most of the time, but when the children were among themselves they kicked the practice of speaking to the side like a toy they had outgrown.

The sisters unwittingly enabled this habit for practical reasons, sharing their knowledge with their students was so much faster without having to do the double work of putting their thoughts into words and processing the words they received in return. Besides it was really difficult to follow through with speaking when all the answers came back in thought form.

"God forbid we ever run out of parts for the bracelets, we'll turn into a nation of deaf mutes", sister Joseph grumbled, although she was always the first to banish chatter as a nasty and irritating habit and never spoke unless she had no other choice.

Sarah often spent time meditating in the round crystal hall, taking in the serene images of the fields that surrounded her and clearing her mind to let in happiness and peace. The settlers stopped by sometimes to find respite from their hectic lives, the sister's quarters exuded a secluded tranquility that reminded Sarah of her childhood visit to her aunts. The only difference was that there were no stone walls and doorways to hide in, just the iron will of its inhabitants to keep worry and trouble at bay.

There was one tradition Sarah devotedly maintained - the kitchen was always stocked with fresh baked pastries and cocoa, jars of herbed honey, pitchers of lemonade and bowls of fruit so that curious children who ventured deep into the insides of their transparent home would discover and enjoy yummy treats just as she did in her time.

***

"Are you ready?" Seth interjected, brusque as always. "We're going to be late for the graduation ceremony."

Sarah was fumbling with the folds of her robe, trying to figure out how they went, the draping didn't seem right.

"It's hopeless", Seth's encouragement followed, "don't bother, you're not going to get it right in time, just come as you are."

Sarah came out of her room, slightly peeved that she wasn't going to look perfect for her students. They were used to seeing her in her plain attire, always covered in dust or mud and for once she wanted to look worthy of deference, especially now when the course of instruction of her young disciples was coming to an end.

"Don't worry, they'll worship you", Seth smirked, half jokingly. Sarah could never tell when she was serious.

The hall was filled with parents and overexcited youngsters, all looking their best for graduation and completely unable to keep still.

All the courses of instruction were represented and the sisters' group advanced to their designated place and waited in silence for the ceremony to proceed. The sisters didn't know what drove the graduation committee, but they found it fit for Seth to give the commencement speech. The latter accepted this task graciously, as if she expected it. One of Seth's great skills was to rise to every occasion as if it was specifically designed for her.

She spoke for a long time in a soft, soothing voice that sounded warm and encouraging, speech and thought blended into one, she spoke about new things to be discovered and how eager all the teams were for them to join in, she recounted their first terraforming efforts and the dreams they had for their adoptive home, she spoke about the wind and the rain and reminded the young ones not to take them for granted, she thought more than spelled out a blessing for the graduates' future and happiness.

"Above all there is no more important discipline of the mind than owning your thoughts. Never stop questioning your reasons, never abide by rules you don't understand, never give up your dreams. There is an entire universe out there waiting for you to discover it, don't disappoint it by being afraid."

Chapter Twenty Eight

"The children discovered the virtual environment and immersed themselves in it with fervor. For them this artificial world was fairy tale, adventure land and superhero world all wrapped into one flexible and forgiving package right at their fingertips, a place that could be anything they wanted."

"They came up with ways to use it that we would never have dreamt of, so at home with the programming and the controls that all but sister Roberta had trouble keeping up with their upgrades and suggestions. Once they discovered this world it became their world, just like Terra Two became ours. They knew all the shortcuts and hidden access ways and could wander blindfolded through their virtual maze. The parents went after them looking for doors to walk through only to see the kids pop in and out of walls, tree clumps, ponds, and the most popular - clouds as they moved from one space to the next."

Sarah showed up out of thin air in the middle of the field, dressed in her work overalls and beaming with joy. She had just attended a virtual reality live feed of a bioengineering conference in Christchurch, a very exciting event to which she was thrilled to have been invited. For all practical purposes it was like being there, thanks to sister Roberta's creative brilliance. A similar device in New Zealand mimicked her every move making the interaction seamless.

She was delighted to see her college friends and some of the professors. She had a few years on them as far as cellular repair was concerned and most of her friends were a decade or so older, but in glorious shape.

"How was it?" asked Seth, smiling. Sarah saw that she and sister Roberta have been waiting for her to _return_ so to speak. The cloaking bubble allowed her the comfort of talking to air and soybean bushes without feeling absurd, since she knew nobody could hear or see her.

"Exquisite, you should see CAHS's new bio-pattern development labs, they created a dodo bird for this particular event, a real one. They didn't know what sounds a dodo bird makes, it being a mythical creature and all, so they gave it the vocal chords of a crested crane, it somehow seemed appropriate. We spent the entire conference trying to tune out the screeches so we can focus on the presentation. I tell you, the best day of my life!"

"Why did they pick a bird and not a plant, it's a horticulture school?" asked sister Roberta.

"More interactive. They had numerous plant exhibits too, have you ever imagined a terrestrial elk coral? It was huge, bright yellow and had bird nests between the branches. You know, living on Terra Two desensitizes one to weirdness, I should have gasped at the sight but it looked like it belonged, so I just acknowledged its presence next to the chestnut tree. The weather was so chilly I shivered all the time, I am not used to temperatures in the seventies anymore."

"You should have told me before you started", sister Roberta eagerly interjected, "I could have adjusted the temperature to your comfort range, you were not actually there, you know? Next time I'll disable the ambient component."

***

"How many times do I have to ask you not to leave the virtual reality compilers on?" Seth asked a rambunctious group of children who were playing in several environments at once and forgot to turn them off upon getting bored. The kid environments were open to all brainwave scans for simplicity and easier monitoring, so there was no telling when you were going to enter one if you didn't know it was there. Seth got especially annoyed when she stepped into a muddy jungle without warning, to be welcomed by a noisy group of imaginatively designed creatures, but this time she had to find her way out of an underwater adventure through a malachite mine and fall to her exit atop a massive waterfall.

"That's it, I've had it!" the leader snarled. "I am revoking all your VR privileges for a week and I want to speak with your parents this afternoon. You will all meet me in my office", she managed to utter before she stepped onto a secluded beach covered in conch shells.

It was an interesting fact of life that the leader, who was way into her hundred and twenties by now, looked the same age as the kids' parents, so the little ones had no understanding of the toll one hundred years of repeating the same request can have on one's nerves. Seth had mellowed with age and a combination of wisdom and wear softened the sharp thunderbolts of her eyes. The wise pondering gaze was the only true measure of her age.

The children were watching sheepishly as she came out of the bubble, significantly more irate than she was when she got in.

"Parents, now!" Seth boomed, sliding across the glass floor without a sound.

It took a while for the children to garner enough enthusiasm to get back home and confess their fifteenth VR occurrence that week to their progenitors and by the time the small penitent group of parents and guilty offspring was gathered in Seth's office the latter was in much better spirits.

"Please, sit down", she said, affably. "The children are of course grounded for a week, but that is not why I asked you to come here." Seth got up and touched a lit display on the virtual compiler. The room decor changed to Sarah's herb drying shed.

"We figured since the children are spending so much time in these environments they might as well go to school in one. Of course there would be no difference between Sarah's real shed and the virtual ones so we would like both yours and your children's input to make it more exciting. Some components are not open to discussion - the chemistry equipment, the curriculum, the standard tests, the environmental requirements - temperature, lighting, ventilation. The rest is open to creativity and interpretation."

The parents pondered the option unsure how to approach it but the children jumped at the chance with gusto, coming up with the most unlikely modifications containing but not limited to using live seahorses as stirrers, running the entire simulation upside down, having the chemical reactions sing cute little jingles when correctly balanced, making Sarah look like a blue Russian cat, having three dimensional models of organic molecules made of colorful hard candy float above their heads, chasing each other around the lab on high speed chairs and of course the oldies but goodies sound making whoopee cushions, randomly falling water balloons and flying zombies.

Chapter Twenty Nine

"I worry that many events worth recounting were left unmentioned either due to the dulling of my memory or the constraints of time but I trust that younger members of our community will add their stories to the chronicle and bear testimony to the life we built here under the blessing of Grace."

"I ask for forgiveness for the details my forgetfulness banished to oblivion, testify that the ones described are true and accurate to the best of my knowledge and remain your humble sister in faith, Joachima. We don't know how long our lives will be, we were already blessed with longevity beyond human reach, but we know that three things will last forever--faith, hope, and love--and the greatest of these is love."

Sarah's fingers paused for a second, caressing the old touch table; she rested her gaze on the endless soybean fields whose velvety foliage shifted color like the surface of the sea in the breeze. The suns were setting and a myriad of shiny metal studs showed up in the coffee caramel sky.

"Are you done yet?" Seth asked flatly, as she watched Sarah write the last phrase, as usual managing to get incredibly close without any sound. The waters of time had not habituated Sarah with this behavior and she was still startled by it when it happened because she was usually engaged in an activity that captured all her attention and the leader's proximity always took her by surprise.

"It feels like the events themselves took less time than their description and we've been here for over a hundred years. Good thing our life expectancy is longer than anticipated, I wouldn't have lived for the completion of this project otherwise."

Sarah knew better than to take the leader's theatrical effects to heart. She turned, poised.

"It's almost done", she said.

"I'd say it is completely done, it is supposed to be a account of the most important events, not the _roman fleuve_ of our generation. There are cob webs on your lab equipment. The children aren't educated. You haven't filed any research papers during the last two months. I have to study in a Roc bird's nest because nobody reminds the youngsters to put away their toys. The planet surface gathered an additional inch of galactic dust since you started."

Sarah got the gist of the repartee.

"I'll finish today", she said. Seth turned on her heels and vanished, quiet as a ghost.

Sarah with the angel hair picked up Solomon, who protested as always, and got closer to the glass to watch the sunset. She could hear giggles and running from the adjacent hallway where the kids were moving from bubble to bubble, and the irate mumble of sister Joseph admonishing them and complaining about cats jumping at her feet unexpectedly. Some of the sisters were still in the fields, she could see them among the plantings programming farm equipment for the following month.

They were expecting a ship full of visitors tomorrow and everybody was busy with last minute preparations, sister Roberta had a presentation for the guest science team that of course put everyone on edge, they weren't sure if this was despite of or because they didn't know what it was about.

Far into the distance the city was bustling with activity and shuttles shuffled back and forth over the land and the water.

Sarah put Solomon down, turned off the touch table and walked towards the door. Her old companion followed her like a shadow, weaving around her ankles with a litheness that defied his age. They walked together through the glass doors out into the fields with their footsteps muffled by the soft texture of Terra Two's dirt.

They stopped at the bean tree and sat under its canopy with Solomon curled up in Sarah's lap as he sat every evening. Light diminished gradually and her gaze gleamed, focused inside rather than out. She turned on her bracelet and joined the old chant as the sisters started evening prayer.

"As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be a world without end."

Commencement address to the class of 2198

I never would have dreamt to watch God's creation spring to life under my eyes, not to mention be entrusted to make it happen, but here I am, more than a century later, sharing whatever wisdom I gathered during this incredible journey with you.

We don't always understand the way we are brought to our purpose and only see it in retrospect, a frozen unchangeable story. We fashion our future from each moment; some decisions we make for ourselves and some are presented to us, they are presented and repeated as many times as needed for us to understand them.

_If we are lucky we rise to the challenge but often the things we learn about our hearts in the process aren't easy to bear. Some people insist that hardship forges character, others profess that ugliness and indignity crush the human spirit. I will not comment on either theory since it is more important_ _why_ _character is forged._

_We were so young when we arrived, so strong in our beliefs, so well prepared we thought we were ready for anything. We couldn't possibly anticipate what_ _anything_ _meant in this strange land and when the unexpected occurred, it always took us by surprise._

The most important lesson of our journey was the understanding that there is so much more to creation than the human mind can grasp and we shouldn't have taken for granted that which we believed to be true.

If your soul is unwavering, your soul will be tested, and tested again, and turned around, and tested unexpectedly again, ad infinitum. Don't squander your essence in this losing battle with deceit; truth, goodness and love never cause suffering.

Clean and mend the canvases of your lives and learn to see the wishes that always seem to elude you as the most important threads. Watch the world work miracles around you and know that nothing is impossible in the sight of God.

Our greatest achievements often came in the form of crisis and as we fought for our existence we cut new paths forward for your generation; the challenges we surmounted became the foundation of your work. We mirror our times but are always too close to our tasks to see their significance.

Be happy, beloved, keep your dreams alive, try the impossible, dare to change the world! Never forget that you are the pieces that make up the puzzle of history.

Love,

Joachima

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About the author

Visit Francis Rosenfeld's Blog at

www.francisrosenfeld.com

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Other books by Francis Rosenfeld

Discover other titles by this writer at Smashwords.com:

 https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/FrancisRosenfeld

### Generations

### Letters to Lelia

### Fair

### Door Number Eight

### The Plant – A Steampunk Story

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