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.