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.

 

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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.