"It's done, sister. I'll send it to you right now."
Sarah went back to her lounge to find Jenna nervously printing a model of her latest chemistry project, a complicated synthetic ribonucleic acid she'd been working on for the last two months. The strand had to be real size and printing it under the microscope was taking all of Jenna's focus and hand-eye coordination. Sarah was waiting for her to finish.
"Don't you have microscopes in the lab?" she asked.
"They are all taken, everybody is working on their finals!" Jenna answered not lifting her gaze from the complex molecular construction.
Sarah sighed and made her way back out into the garden, with Sys in tow. They walked through the gate towards the Prayer Hall and took a narrow dirt path out into the field, trying not to get their feet tangled in the wild greenery, walking between patches of soybeans and vegetable rows, passing by the Tree of Life and the pear orchard. The apothecary shed looked small and ancient compared to the new edifices but everything inside it was perfectly cleaned and maintained, no spec of dust, no water spot on the glassware, all mainstay substances well stocked.
"How long has it been since you last came here?" Sys asked.
"I come here every day," Sarah answered to um's surprise. "Can you place this on an up link please?" she handed her a copy of the report and Sys obliged. "This is the last place I can actually use, nobody else comes here anymore." A rattle of moving glass begged to differ as Jimmy emerged from behind the counter with a Wheatstone bridge in one hand and a deflection magnetometer in the other.
"Hi, sister! Sys! I need this..." the boy started.
"For a school project, I know!" Sarah finished his phrase, resigned. She turned around to tend to one of the cell cultures in progress and found herself face to face with Seth who, as usual, had shown up behind her unnoticed.
"Goodness, did anybody forget to mention the quorum meeting to me?" the redness startled, uneasy.
"Am I ever going to get that report?!" sister Joseph answered her question in a sour mood as she opened the door.
"I already sent it," Sarah protested but the sister who had just received it dismissed the commentary with one hand to focus on the details of the analysis.
"Where is Jimmy?" sister Roberta came in through the back door, furious that the youngster forgot the subatomic particle tuner running when he left the lab. She was just back from one of the endless project coordination trips and had all her concerns validated by finding her beloved lab in disarray.
"The deadline is four o'clock, Jimmy!" sister Novis interjected. "It's almost two."
"Yes, sister," the latter acknowledged and squeezed out the back door, too rushed to listen to the outraged litany sister Roberta had prepared for him.
"Why is everybody here?" Sarah asked. A couple of cats moved swiftly across the rafters in response to her question, leaving a waft of lavender and chamomile behind them and enticing Gemma to come out quietly from the VR bubble where she'd been hiding to practice with her flight simulator.
"Really, Gemma? You couldn't find another place to make sudden movements than a laboratory full of glassware?" Sarah chided. Gemma didn't answer, she picked up one of the cats and skipped out the door to join a passing group of kids.
"And this is our sister Sarah's famous biochemistry lab, where most of the research you're interested in started," a tour guide led a sizable group of visitors into the small room that started creaking at the seams.
***
"Is the project going well, sister?" Sarah asked Roberta.
"It's on schedule, I'd like it to go faster," the latter replied. "Can you read this for me, please?" she pushed the wave generator with the Purple tome of quantum physics towards the redhead.
"Really, sister, I'm not all that great at reading Purple, besides even if I did I wouldn't understand the theory," Sarah protested.
"Try, though. As Mother Superior said, what's it going to hurt?" Roberta insisted.
Sarah turned on the machine and a beautiful harmony of celestial music crashed inside her mind like waves on a beach. She listened dutifully till the end, understanding about half of the translation and none of the science.
"Really, sister, I can't possibly..." she said apologetically.
"How did the music make you feel?" the sister asked anxiously and Sarah looked at her to make sure she didn't lose her mind.
"I beg your pardon?" she replied.
"It's connected to your emotions, not your reason, so how did the music make you feel?" the sister insisted.
"Overwhelmed," Sarah tried.
"That's not good. What else?" sister Roberta noted on her pad like a psychiatrist during a talk therapy session.
"I don't know, blue?" Sarah answered tentatively.
"Ok, what else?" sister Roberta continued.
"No, sister. I mean the color blue. The music made me feel the color blue and it tasted like caramel," Sarah chuckled.
"Now you're talking! Anything else on these lines?" sister Roberta asked again.
"Pears. Caramel covered blue pears."
"Of course!" sister Roberta blurted and jumped to her microscope, forgetting about Sarah altogether and feverishly inputting modeling equations into the machine.
"What's with the blue pears, sister?" Sarah asked timidly.
"We need to start with the strange quarks," sister Roberta mumbled unfazed.
Sister Joseph had forgotten to share with the others her visit to the ice cream wonderland where every subatomic particle had real color and flavor and in the absence of pertinent information the entire conversation seemed so patently absurd to Sarah that she didn't think there was any reason to continue it, shrugged her shoulders and headed towards the door. Sister Roberta raised her head from the microscope, smiling.
"Thank you, dear! You're a godsend!" she said with gratitude.
"If you say so, sister. I'm glad I could help," Sarah answered befuddled.
***
The sisters were so busy with all the tourists and the science delegations that they didn't notice sister Roberta's absence. Some assumed she was on another trip to Airydew, others that she was involved in any number of the simultaneous activities she usually juggled with superhuman ease. It wasn't until Sarah ran a quick errand to her lab to borrow a piece of equipment that everybody found out the sister had been spending every waking moment there, surrounded by particle dynamics simulations running at various scales and speeds and completely immersed in the accursed quantum physics manual that defied her understanding.
The less she understood the more she insisted, since scientific curiosity and acerb tenacity were core components of her personality, and as Sarah entered the door she had just started reading the tome from the beginning, beet red with frustration and with a wild gleam in her eyes.
"What do you want, sister?" she asked, her voice grittier than sandpaper.
"The spectrometer. I didn't mean to bother you," Sarah apologized.
"It's on the top shelf in the back," Roberta fumed, angry at the location of the spectrometer, Sarah and her need for said piece of equipment.
Sarah took the device quietly and snuck out the back door without noise, like a ghost. She had known Roberta long enough to realize leaving her to her research was the only acceptable finale for this scene.
Roberta started again, focused obsessively on the music. The tome melodiously narrated seven very logical paragraphs and reached a conclusion that didn't derive from them in any way, like a sunset ending at high noon. If Sarah were there she could have used the caramel covered blue pears example as an object lesson about the importance of inferred knowledge to the understanding of things, but Sarah wasn't there, apprehensive no doubt of the annoyed physicist's wrath.
"I'm sure they are doing this to me on purpose!" sister Roberta's mind fumed silently. Sarah would have loved to jump to Purple's defense, but she remembered the whole 'water.blue' incident and remained philosophically quiet.
"There is no logic wha
tsoever in this text! 'Dancing on mirrors in the past', what in the world do they mean! If I told you that gluons are dancing on mirrors in the past you'd lock me up!" sister Roberta's mind exploded.
"We should have locked you up a long time ago, I'm sure it's too late now!" sister Joseph mumbled. "Kinda' makes sense to me, though!"
"What, sister? What of this makes any sense to you?" Roberta retorted.
"Sounds like your theory works in time too, not only in space," sister Joseph continued.
"Can I see the particle simulation? I heard it's quite something," Seth entered the conversation.
"NOW?" sister Roberta asked, a little more assertively than she should have.
"Yes, now!" Seth replied tersely from the doorway. Roberta begrudgingly compiled the program and let it run.
"And it's not 'dancing on mirrors in the past', it's 'reverberating in mirrors of the past'", the leader clarified as she entered the bubble.
"Are you sure?" Roberta followed her in with a blank stare.
"Sister, I wrote the language," the leader protested.
The scrumptious world of quarks and leptons was in constant motion with particles being carried by their charges like bubbles on the surface of a brook, colorful and deliciously fragrant. There was something about this subatomic world that could make anybody giddy and Seth giggled as a lepton brushed against her hair, briefly hanging on to the static around it.
"Which ones are the gluons?" she asked.
"They're the strawberry flavored sprinkles," sister Joseph clarified from the tomato patch.
"Why is this reacting to my electrical charge? I thought this was supposed to be a simulation of a field, not a real one?" Seth asked, brushing a dusting of colorful gluons and bright yellow photons off her shoulders.
"You and me both," Roberta replied. "You know, Jimmy was the first to figure this out: simulation or no, at quantum scale interactions will occur."
"What is 'reverberating in mirrors of the past'?" the leader asked.
"That's Purple for 'we want to drive you insane'!" sister Roberta's frustration returned and her face turned a deep shade of fuchsia.
Chapter Eighteen
Of the Heart of Scorpius
"Gluon. Time. Reflection. Different. Gluon."
"I'm sorry, I don't understand!" Sarah replied apologetically.
"You. Yesterday. Not. You. Now." Purple insisted, annoyed.
"Of course it's the same me!" Sarah protested. "You don't get the concept of time?"
"You. No. Time. Concept." Purple replied, offended.
"Whatever you say," Sarah tried to pacify it.
"How. Same. You." they asked.
"I'm the same person, just one day older," Sarah elaborated.
"Gluon. Same. Older." Purple responded.
"But you can't see yesterday me!" Sarah exclaimed.
"Long. Time. No. See." Purple joked. "See. All. One. Minute. Sarah."
"Not at the same time!"
"Define. Same. Time." Purple asked.
"What does that have to do with entangled particles?" asked Sarah.
"They gave me the same speech yesterday. If you understand it your're better than I!" sister Roberta interjected, frustrated.
She was fumbling with the lasers, trying to adjust the wavelengths and creating beautiful ad-hoc light shows when the beams bounced between the mirrors. Every now and then the photons ran interference and thousands of little sparkles glimmered like so many constellations. Waves kept bouncing off the walls of their reflective container at light speed, too fast to figure out which was first, which was real, for unlike the mirror image of a grain of sand, every reflection of light is light.
Sister Roberta finally tuned the lasers to the precise wavelength and configuration she was searching for and an image of the deep space station Antares Corde appeared.
"Is this in real time?" Sarah asked, excited.
"Not exactly, about three months off. They bundled the visuals in the subspace transmission, but that's the fastest we could get it, considering the distance," sister Roberta clarified. "Oh, I will be so thrilled when I finally get the wicked bouncing on the mirrors puzzle, so we can get instantaneous access to this area!" she groaned sorrowfully.
"It's probably finished by now," Sarah offered.
"I don't think so, they seem to be four to six months from the Grand Opening. Look at the center of the seven o'clock strand, it's still exposed to space." Sister Roberta rotated and zoomed the image to focus on the unfinished area. Antares Corde looked like a miniature spiral galaxy, its curving strands spinning slowly in the middle of a circle of artificial satellites, twelve of them to be precise, like a colossal space clock. The strand pointing to seven, at least from their current point of view, was swarming with a fervent mechanical activity that reminded Sarah of a giant anthill. Far away in the distance the real heart of Scorpius glowed large and bright orange on the background of deep space in all its supergiant glory, dwarfing the tiny stars around it.
"I used to watch this constellation every night when I was at the institute in Christchurch," Sarah remembered images from two centuries ago.
"I grew up gazing at the Southern Cross, I dreamed for hours about the worlds that lay beyond the deep expanse."
"You're from the southern hemisphere?" Sarah asked surprised.
"Argentina, born and raised. Puerto Deseado," sister Roberta answered.
"You never told me that!" Sarah objected.
"You never asked," Roberta answered simply. "I never thought I'd see Antares up-close, though. Looks like we're not the farthest humans from Earth anymore."
"How is Soleá?" Sarah asked.
"Basking in the sunshine," sister Roberta answered. The new M-class planet was larger, colder, rockier, and as its name implied, brighter than Terra Two, dazzling in the magnesium light of its sun. It already had an oxygen rich atmosphere, much thicker than Earth's, due to the massive size of the planet. Its rocky soil was fertile enough, although compared to the unbelievable fecundity of Terra Two it seemed almost barren. One feature of Soleá made it unforgettable: its heavenly blue sky, a sky so deep its color echoed in the peaceful oceans, in the rocky cliffs, in the scales of the dragons. Unlike Terra Two, it had been clear from the beginning that Soleá was bustling with life, most of it reptilian-like, kind of cute, actually, if you didn't mind five headed creatures. The indigenous vegetation was twisted and bristly, true to the arid environment, with grayish-blue grass and Oma plants, so fluffy and colorful they could be mistaken for Truffula trees.
"It looks like our counterparts got all the perks: breathable air, drinkable water, edible plants, no osmosis pumps..." Sarah enumerated.
"Aah, but do they have Purple siblings?" sister Roberta asked rhetorically.
"I heard Lily wants to go," Sarah hesitated, still feeling the guilt of having abandoned her birth planet for the siren song of Terra Two. "The children will be graduating in a few months, I guess they aren't children anymore." Nostalgia and unease cast shadows on her spirit because even if Sarah's body never aged, her soul did. Another generation of children came and went, taking a little of her heart with them when they left to chart their own path on other islands, on the other side of the planet, the constellation, the galaxy.
"Don't you miss it sometimes?" sister Roberta asked, with unspoken longing, staring at the hologram of deep space dotted by stars.
"What, space travel? Goodness, no! I almost lost my mind with boredom on the way here. Same stars over and over, crammed quarters and nothing to do for months on end!" Sarah protested.
"Oh, come on, admit it, it's tempting!" sister Roberta insisted.
"I'd like to see Soleá, maybe consult with the exobiology team for a couple of years, how long would the trip be?" she asked, expectantly.
"With our current technology, approximately thirteen years," sister Roberta deflated her enthusiasm.
"Thirteen!" Sarah exclaimed.
"It's clear on the other side of the gal
axy. You can stop visit Earth on the way there, if you want," sister Roberta continued unperturbed.
"Just because I have no expiration date it doesn't mean I want to spend my life staring at space!" Sarah protested. "Good grief, let's look at that theory again! It can't take thirteen years to decode it!"
***
There was something in Sarah's personality that once hooked to an idea would follow it to the proverbial ends of the Earth. In her case it was more like the ends of the universe, provided they were lucky enough to untangle the tangled particles mystery.
Ever since she learned about the dragons the redhead had not have a moment's peace, because how could there be a place with dragons that Sarah didn't explore? Nevertheless, she wasn't willing to waste twenty six years of her seemingly endless life on this adventure because she didn't believe the gift of immortality was a license to spend one's years in wasteful pursuits.