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.