Chapter Nineteen

"I rarely stopped to think what life would have been like if I chose a different course, if I stayed on my parents' farm, or if I took a teaching position in Nairobi. The other choices never lingered long enough to make me question my path, although I have to admit that life on this planet was few bolts short of sanity most of the time, with human daring pushed to its extremes."

"One year on Terra Two equaled seven on Earth, so much stuff happened in so little time our days buckled and creaked at the edges, ready to burst open at any time. One has a general goal one pursues in life but the really interesting events happen around it and are somewhat unrelated."

 

Sarah didn't know if it was an ancestral, instinctive call of the natives or a personal affinity, but she got into the habit of taking Solomon and his basket and sitting in the shade of the purple bean plant to read books or news from the central computer via her neural interlink. From a distance, as she sat there gazing vaguely into the distance, petting Solomon and browsing the information she looked like she was zoning out and this image managed to annoy some of the sisters and many on the logistics team.

There was this unspoken understanding among the settlers that if one wasn't constantly involved in some activity, productive or otherwise, one wasn't carrying one's own weight around the camp and deserved admonition. In this respect the cats were the absolute winners of the game: they didn't have any tasks, were well taken care of, had a glorious social life, answered to no one and everybody liked them.

Solomon looked at Sarah with slight reproach, as if he heard her thoughts and disagreed. There was a strange alignment between Sarah, the cat in her lap and the tree-like structure behind her that almost seemed to spring from her being, they looked like beads on a vertical string attached to the sky.

That afternoon Sarah was listening to news about the space greenhouse CAHS had launched in orbit around Earth and gazed at pictures projected inside her mind of the beloved and now almost forgotten experimental fields. She had spent four years in those fields, she could wander around blindfolded and stop precisely in front of a specific plant. She didn't dare close her eyes because she didn't want to get lost in the green and blue landscape and also because she didn't want to look like she was taking a nap in the shade in the middle of the day.

Earth looked so much greener and bluer than Terra Two, so intensely painted in cool jewel hues, it almost felt strange to Sarah, the brightness of the blue sky hurt her mind's eye. She was watching two different landscapes at the same time and one could think that an impossibility if one didn't experience the phenomenon: it was as if she had two sets of eyes, a pair on her face and a pair on the back of her head, and saw two completely different scenes with each set. The scenes didn't interfere, each preserving its perfect clarity, one with blue skies over bright green fields growing in dark rich loamy soil, the other chocolate, raspberry and wine, with northern lights and atmospheric songs and lush green giant plants growing in a brick colored rubble and casting two shadows.

One of the instructors at CAHS approached the camera and Sarah felt like the person was walking straight towards her. The redhead still had trouble adjusting her reflexes to the electronic projections she only saw with her brain.

Sister Roberta was coming towards her, this time for real, and Sarah turned off the neural interlink so she wouldn't be distracted.

"Hi, Sarah, Solomon", sister Roberta started, in a semi-formal tone that made Sarah wonder what she wanted. Sister Roberta had always been nice to her but it was a rule for the sisters in general not to make small talk. It was bad enough they had to talk to convey information and engaging in chatter felt painfully uncomfortable.

"Hi", Sarah answered.

"I was wondering if you could help me with this", the sister pulled out a shiny object from under her jacket, all smiles.

Sarah had seen a good share of sister Roberta's inventions, enough to make her approach the issue with some reluctance. She hoped that whatever the gizmo did didn't interfere with breathing or gravity.

"What is it, sister?" she asked, knowing ahead of time that she would regret her involvement later.

"I was wondering if you could stand up and move over there, we need as much clear space around you as possible, in case the range is still imprecise."

"What exactly does  it do, sister?" Sarah asked, concerned. She had very strong misgivings about the outcome of this experiment.

"It's a surprise, you'll see, ooh, I'm so excited about this!" sister Roberta couldn't contain her enthusiasm. "Now stand up straight, but don't be tense, it will only take a moment."

Sarah was looking for a way to politely refuse and she still had Solomon in her arms when her entire landscape changed and she found herself in the middle of a gentle rolling valley covered in flowers, next to a bubbling brook streaming over bedrock.

There was no sign of Roberta or their village, and Solomon tensed up in her arms. An enormous Siberian tiger approached leisurely, looking almost like it was smiling.

"Hi again", said the tiger, in sister Roberta's voice, jumping on its hind paws and patting Sarah's shoulder, almost knocking her down.

"Oh, my, a virtual space! This is so great, do you have any other scenes?"

"I experimented with a forest view and the sea shore, but they're still work in progress."

"How does it work?" asked Sarah, fascinated, picking a very real flower, soft, scented and slightly cool to the touch.

"It accesses centers in your brain, this stuff is not really here. It temporarily blocks the interpretation of sensory perception and replaces it with this scene. If one could see you now, you would be staring at dirt with a delighted look on your face, talking to my waist and holding an imaginary object in your hand. But nobody can see us, it's like a stealth bubble. It works with reflections and transparency, it gets complicated".

"How big is it?"

"I didn't get a chance to build more, what you see is what you get. If you proceed forty steps ahead you are going to see its edge." Sarah started, curious of course, and arrived to a sharply drawn line that sliced the beautiful florid scene like a saw and continued with the soybean rows. She realized that they must have stepped on some of the plantings on their way and there will be some 'splainin' to do once they got back to reality.

"This is amazing, sister, how do you turn it off?" asked the redhead.

"I haven't gotten to that part yet", sister Roberta said in the most serious tone, then burst with laughter, "just kidding, you should have seen the look on your face! Pull my left ear."

Sarah pulled and three Chinese fortune coins fell to the ground singing a delicate jingle.

"I so wanted to do this!" Roberta the tiger sighed, pleased. She pressed a bluish colored rock on the edge of the stream with one of her front paws and the scene vanished, giving way to the messed up soybean fields and a frowning Seth staring them down.

"Where have you been and how did this happen?" asked Seth, pointing at the ravaged soybean rows behind them. Roberta filled her in on the details which brought up a few questions to Sarah's mind.

"How come Seth didn't appear in the scene?" asked Sarah.

"It only works in harmony with individual brainwave patterns, they weren't matched to hers, so she didn't interpret the signal, we're all special and unique. I still have to tune it, Solomon shouldn't have been there either, it's getting there", mumbled sister Roberta in an excited tone of voice.

"How did you know what my brainwave pattern was?" asked Sarah, concerned.

"I scanned you", said sister Roberta, completely tone deaf to Sarah's upset at this invasion of privacy.

"I don't remember you asking me", said Sarah, who didn't want to be unpleasant but wanted to point out that she was a person, not a lab rat and the least one could do was ask for permission.

"Oh, that's ok, dear, I got all the information I needed", said sister Roberta, completely unperturbed. She picked up the shiny gizmo and went back to the lab to fine tune the range.