Chapter Twenty - Of Dragons

Photo by lauramusikanski at Morguefile.com

It felt strange to the sisters to walk behind the children in the bright magnesium light of Soléa, stranger still to follow Lily’s lead and watch her dispatch directions to her childhood friends with the authority of a five star general.

There was no hesitation in her demeanor, no shadows in her eyes when she gazed towards the horizon as if trying to see miles beyond it, curious, eager, fearless. Sarah almost thought she could see a young Seth standing beside her, giving instructions to the construction team in the middle of the brick colored desert of Terra Two, just as sure of herself as Lily was at the same age, also for no reason at all.

The redhead couldn’t help a smile to the bemusement of the real Seth who was standing three feet away from her with one of her legendary stares in her transparent eyes and a deep furrow between her eyebrows. Physically she hadn’t changed since then but Sarah could see the fire in her eyes mellow over time, her moves become less impetuous, her bearing attain a permanent state of poise that seemed to literally emanate from her being the way it did during daily service.

They appeared close in age, Seth and Lily, but a closer look immediately revealed the senior. Seth commanded her environment anywhere, whether it was Earth, Terra Two or Soléa. She didn’t inhabit a space, she filled it and imparted it with her personality the way a lake creates a micro-climate for water plants in the middle of a forest.

Soléa had plenty of good water, which brought a grunt from sister Joseph who had always taken it personally that Terra Two didn’t come with drinkable water and abundant oxygen. The sister scanned the landscape with uncharacteristic excitement, trying to spot any trace of blue among the bristly foliage. Unfortunately for her the dragons were shy and knew all the good places to hide, there was no trace of scale or wing anywhere.

Lily stepped forward with great assurance and the team followed her without asking where they were going, happy to feel the warmth of the sun on their skin. The sudden temperature drop between the equatorial climate of Terra Two and the temperate climate of Soléa made them feel a little chilly.

They walked quietly for about an hour and stopped at the edge of a small pond whose shores were crisscrossed by little webbed footsteps. A tentative coo echoed from behind one of the Oma trees, followed by a cascade of responses from fellow lizards. A trio of scaly heads emerged from behind the tree trunk and squeaked at the group; the dragon cautiously decided to keep the other two heads behind the tree until it could assess the new situation. Lily approached it slowly and the dragon took off, fluttering its hollow boned wings and whistling like a pigeon. A flash of blue zapped across the sky faster than lightening and disappeared behind a tall bluish rock. The other lizards cooed in approval, invisible in the colorful fluffy foliage of the Oma tree.

Sarah had never seen sister Joseph smile but now the latter was chuckling and jumping around like a child, trying to catch a glimpse of the gleaming lizards and cooing like they did to attract their attention. A tiny dragon, well camouflaged in the low growing bristle, flew at her feet faster than quicksilver, brushing her leg with its leathery wings in the process.

“I saw one, sister, it’s right there! Don’t go any further, you’ll scare it away!” sister Novis directed the search.

“I think if you coo, maybe they’ll come out,” sister Mary-Francis added her opinion.

“No, don’t coo, it’d be easier if you caught them by surprise!” sister Jesse objected.

“What exactly are you trying to do?” Seth asked, faithful to logic.

“Here’s one!” Sarah exclaimed, and the combined noise of their conversation alerted an entire flock of lizards which took off in such large numbers it looked like the ground itself lifted up.

“Great job, cat-brains! You just can’t stop yakking, can you! I get one joy in this dimwit ridden life and you manage to impose your ineptitude and take it away from me!” sister Joseph turned around furiously. “If I asked you to scare them away you couldn’t wrestle a sound to do it, you waste of purple goo! Shut up!” she continued, more and more irate. The sisters turned quieter than an empty room, watching intently as the fuming Joseph, her smile now gone, tried to lure another flock of dragons.

As luck would have it the sister’s animal whisperer gift didn’t work on cows alone. With the benefit of quiet she managed to get the correct tone of voice that inspired trust in the wary dragons. A slightly larger one, the apparent leader, advanced cautiously towards her and stopped three feet away, staring curiously at the weird alien with all its twenty yellow cat eyes. It started blinking from the first head on the left and the blink propagated through the row of heads until it reached the other end. Sister Joseph was mesmerized with excitement and couldn’t make a sound, so the dragon broke the silence by uttering blood curdling screeches from a few of its heads and stretching its wings to make itself look more imposing. The sun of Soléa shone on the blue metallic scales making them sparkle like precious gems and casting rainbows from shoulder to tip.

“You really are noisy, aren’t you?” sister Joseph thought, watching the surreal creature that looked like a scaled down model of the legendary dragon. Standing only two foot tall, Soléa’s lizards were closer in size to a dog, if a dog were blue and had scales, wings, three eyelids and five heads.

The dragon screeched again, this time approaching sister Joseph, and stretched out one of its long necks towards her hand, keeping the other four alert with the frills around them fanned out to show the unfamiliar audience it meant business.

“Aren’t you the prettiest sight to behold!” sister Joseph said gently and smiled to encourage the guarded creature.

“Screeech!!” the dragon answered, relaxing its war posturing just a bit.

“The loveliest creature we’ve been blessed with in this vast universe!” the sister continued the cajoling.

“Screech-screech!” the dragon answered, somewhat pleased.

“You know, we can keep some in one of the greenhouses,” Sarah offered to appease Joseph.

“Ah, you figured! Why don’t you all find something to do, this is going to take a while,” the latter smiled like the Sphinx and sat down to make herself less scary. The sisters backed out gently, careful not to scare the wary flock that started to gather around sister Joseph.

---

Lily gestured directions and the group followed her towards a gentle bluff overlooking the water that gave them good visibility all the way to the horizon. They set camp for the night, watching the sky darken gradually and trying to guess which of the unfamiliar constellations was home. In the middle of the sky, outshining every other star, Antares glowed bright orange, splendid like an amber jewel in a black velvet box. Sister Roberta sighed almost imperceptibly, but Sarah had keen ears.

“Do you miss home, sister?” she asked gently.

“Which home, dear?” the sister answered. Far away from both Earth and Terra Two her ‘new’ home bonds began to melt and much older memories resurfaced, helped out by the scarcer landscape of Soléa. Roberta pictured tiny boats in the natural harbor in front of her, and the screeches of the dragons sounded like orcas in the sunset. Her childhood was still picking seashells off the beach at Puerto Deseado in the cool winds of June when Sarah’s voice startled her.

“Where do you think Earth is?” Sarah asked to cheer her up, feeling slightly guilty that her own heart was bound with Purple strings. She almost had a panic attack earlier thinking what would happen if the time slide didn’t work in reverse. The thirteen year trip all of the sudden seemed desirable and a small price to pay in order to get back to her Garden of Eden bathed in vanilla and gardenia fragrance. She strengthened her grasp on the tiny box where the Purple delegation was living it up in boron plenty. Purple hadn’t said a single word since their arrival on Soléa, thrilled by the new experience and trying to take it all in.

Sister Roberta didn’t answer. She frowned at the sky, scanning the unrecognizable constellations, then pointed assuredly at a non-descript corner in the eastern quadrant of the firmament.

“Now how can you be so sure? You’ve never seen these star configurations before!” Sarah protested.

“Of course I know! Don’t you recognize the Milky Way? I’m pretty sure Earth is somewhere in that corner,” she explained to a puzzled Sarah who couldn’t read the Milky Way in the random light splashes in the sky.

“What about Terra Two?” the latter asked eagerly.

“Frankly, I have no idea!” sister Roberta shrugged her shoulders.

“Then how do you know how to get us back?” Sarah asked and little tears of panic gathered in the corners of her eyes.

“Stop fretting, dear! It’s all pre-programmed,” sister Roberta answered with no trepidation whatsoever.

“You’re counting on the machine to chart our path?” Sarah exclaimed.

“It brought us here, didn’t it?” sister Roberta replied calmly. “Sleep now, tomorrow it’s going to be a long day.”

---

The sun was only half way up the horizon the following morning when sister Joseph showed up with a dragon on her shoulder. She never told anybody how she mesmerized the creature, but from that day forward it followed her around like a shadow. The blue lizard screeched, almost like a gurgle, and ruffled the frills around one of its heads.

“Can you check the composition of the local plants?” the sister whispered to Sarah, waking her up from her sleep. Sarah didn’t say anything, she got up, grabbed a handful of bristly growies and dumped them in the tissue scanner. The plant structure was a little different, the cells were much larger and had thicker linings than Sarah was used to seeing, but the chemical make-up was almost identical with that of the plant life on Terra Two.

“We can bring back plants too, you know? Or we can synthesize some of these shrubs in the lab, I’m sure Sys won’t have any trouble doing that,” Sarah smiled.

“Don’t you try to be smart! I don’t want you feeding made-up food to my pet!” sister Joseph snapped, waking the others.

Lily got ready in silence while the rest of the group fumbled with the gear, breakfast and filling the canteens with water.

“We rendezvous with the Antares deep space station research team at noon and their camp is a three hour hike from here,” Lily said. “We’d better get going.”

They arrived at the camp four and a half hours later (the added time was due to the sudden and unplanned stops for sight-seeing, water gathering, lizard spotting and picture taking with Oma trees, to Lily and Seth’s annoyance), dusty and tired and in the company of the very respectable sister Joseph whose shoulder dragon made her look like a pirate.

Purple finally exhausted its silence and was now a veritable chatterbox, commenting on every stick, pebble and scale they encountered and turning Sys into a frazzled mess by remote.

“Oma. Sister. Dragon. Sister. Love. Dragon. Dragon. Cat.” Sys babbled like a rogue robot.

“Dragons are not like cats,” Sarah explained patiently.

“Dragon. Cat.” Purple insisted and Sarah let it go. She knew how unbelievably stubborn the immortals could be.

“I don’t believe this!” the research team leader exclaimed. “You know, we’ve been trying to catch one of these things for months, nothing gets past that sea of eyes! How did you…” he started asking, but the expression on sister Joseph’s face didn’t encourage further communication, so he hesitated.

“I have my ways,” the former responded vaguely. They spent the remainder of the day exchanging data, verifying research and making plans for the Terra Two team that was going to be left behind for a period of time yet to be determined. Lily was going to lead the effort and many of Sarah’s pupils were on her team. They were all grown up now but the redhead could still picture them giggling and fussing about the lab and pulling pranks on each other around the metal tables they were barely tall enough to see over. To Sarah’s unspoken relief Sys was way too attached to Purple to stay away for long and was already missing her music studio.

They set up the communication systems, the portals to Terra Two, Earth and the deep space station, gathered plant, soil and water samples, took plenty of pictures with the Oma trees, the lakes and the dragons, planned their next visit and were eager to leave.

One can trick the body but one can’t deceive the spirit. Despite their youthful appearance the sisters had old souls and felt even older watching the children take over the adventure that used to be their life. The existential struggle seemed to be lost on Purple who had lived its eternal life untarnished by the passing of time and still managed to get excited by anything new.

“Ready, sisters? We have to stop by and visit Earth on our way home, let’s not diddle-daddle!” sister Roberta said in the most serious tone of voice and nobody even blinked at the enormity of the statement.