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.