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.