Chapter Seventeen

"There comes a time in everyone's life when all the certainties one relies on to feel safe are shattered. We find ourselves naked and alone with only our faith to sustain us. God remains the only shelter that keeps us from despair. Never lose faith. Never lose hope. Never lose faith. Never lose hope. Never lose faith. Never lose hope."

"We are all born with talents we don't know exist because the life we live has no use for them. These talents manifest themselves when we are faced with impossible odds and they become the key to our survival. It is this grueling feat of raising above one's condition that moves civilization forward."

 

Everything that morning had been completely uneventful. A new Noah's ark arrived bringing fluffy bunny rabbits, certainly more numerous than they were when they embarked. The mud mixes were prepared, the bacterial cultures were tested, the morning check of the crops was run of the mill and the sisters were preparing for lunch.

"What happened to the com link?" Seth asked, with an even tone of voice that didn't betray irritation or anxiety.

"Nothing, why are you asking?" said sister deAngelis, who was on com duty at the time.

"Have you tried to use it during the last half hour?"

"Of course, I'm monitoring it as we speak."

"Have you ACTUALLY tried using the communication devices? With a response from a real person, not computer feedback?"

Sister deAngelis complied, sending messages into the ether to the ever so solicitous team in charge of their mission back home, but no answer returned. She didn't say much, but Seth could read the fear in the sister's eyes so she tried not to press the issue to the point of full panic.

"I assume that we are not sure how long we've been in complete communication silence?" she asked.

"No, Seth, I don't know. The last real message we received was yesterday at 8:00, they are sending earthworms and insects, I don't even want to know what kind."

Seth frowned at the unrelated details.

"So we could have possibly been out of range for maybe 12 to 14 hours?"

"It's possible."

"How come nobody on the other teams noticed, surely they talk to Christchurch just as often as we do?"

"I didn't ask, they must be relying on auto-feedback to monitor the connection, like we do."

"Announce this to everybody and tell sister Roberta she's got to shift her work schedule. How are we doing on supplies?"

"Six months plus what we grow and the animals. Eggs and milk if nothing else."

"I assume that the wise and stress-free planning managers who put this mission together accounted for a situation like this?"

"Yes, there are several contingency plans available for various stages in the project development."

"For how long?"

"The longest is six months."

Seth stared through the com station so intently one could almost hear the metal hiss and melt.

"How long can we survive on local production alone?"

"I don't know, Seth, technically there is no limit, if we run out of crops we can always grow more."

"Start now. Call sisters Novis, Jove and Mary-Francis and ask them to put a plan together to double the plantings. Sarah will be in charge, she's got the gift. We're going to be fine."

The new responsibility was appointed to Sarah without much fanfare or extraneous words. She didn't say anything and attended devotedly to her duties, but spent the following months in breathless full blown panic.

In light of the new challenge she looked around, didn't recognize any of the sights that were supposed to look familiar by now, didn't recognize the person whose confidence and sense of control gave her a reason to believe that things will turn out as planned and feared not only for her life, but for her afterlife as well.

Growing up with nuns she never questioned the existence of the immortal soul and the final judgment, she only thought that if she lived her life well and attended to good deeds she would make it upstairs, after all God was all merciful and loving and wouldn't begrudge her the occasional misstep as long as she meant well.

Now she started wondering if what she considered to be a good life wasn't good at all, it didn't seem to be very clear what good really was, and she was assaulted by remorse and doubt, and most of all by the feeling that the artificial environment they were creating was some sort of Icarus flight and there was just a matter of time until they will all be punished for their audacity.

 

***

 

Sister Roberta worked on the com link that day, and the day after, and the following week. The engineering team inspected the satellites, which was not an easy task with all the methane containers floating around and bumping into them. There was nothing wrong with the satellites, though, everything worked perfectly. For an entire month they tried and failed to establish communication with the home team. Two months later the new shipment arrived with the news that a cloud of dust and ice was crossing the transmission path and there was nothing they could do about it. All debris was expected to clear in about three months, after which normal communications would resume.

The incident didn't have lasting impact and the shipment brought more than enough provisions but it left a clear imprint in everyone's mind of the necessity to be self-reliant.

That month the real terraforming started, not in the science team exploring the unknown sort of way, but in the settlers who burned the ships when they reached the shore sort. Everything else declined in importance compared to the need for sufficient food, water and energy to ensure their survival. All of a sudden they ceased being on a mission away from home and became the dwellers of the wilderness, to survive and thrive through their own skills and God's mercy.

Sarah continued her life almost the same as before but whatever it was in her soul that allowed her the certainty that things would always turn out ok was gone. In time she recovered the grace of not fearing that God hated her which provided tremendous comfort for her tormented soul. She became very quiet and inasmuch as sister Joseph appreciated the stop of incessant chatter, the sisters started worrying about her.

One interesting consequence of her altered state of perception was that God took her certainty with one hand and gave her miracle working power with the other. If Sarah had a green thumb before there was nothing she couldn't grow now. If she accidentally touched a dead stick it sprung forth in bloom and turnips grew an inch taller just because she passed them by.

The success she had with all things green elevated her status from apprentice to master and an equal among her piers, but she never processed what engendered this change and whether it was yet another random event or fate at work.

The teams were working double shifts to increase yield so in the evening everyone was so exhausted they didn't have time to think about what all of this meant. Sarah was passing time watching holographic recordings from her childhood on the touch table and she adjusted the boosters to fine tune the light beams but instead of realigning the laser interference the mirrors picked up strange images, clearly non-random, a continuous and fascinating pattern of lines and waves, an alien language of sorts.

Someone on the logistics team recognized rhythms in the patterns and started deciphering the code. As clear and logically dispersed as the curves were he couldn't put a finger on the signal, there was something incredibly familiar about the way the patterns flowed, like the sinus waves of a heartbeat with multiple interfering harmonies.

It looked as if light particles were dispersed by modulations of longer wave lengths, the same way water particles get stirred around a moving fish. Apparently the holograph had picked up disturbance created by radio signals in the photon field and translated it into the extraordinary visual they all saw.  They fed back the wave lengths into the sound equalizer, adjusted for the photons bouncing off ice crystals and obtained a warbled but understandable communication, ironically enough desperately trying to get in touch with them.