Seth watched this soul struggle with amusement, curious which part of the redhead's personality would win: daring Sarah with the bacterial cultures who made the split second decision to leave Earth for a planet twenty light years away or Sarah with the angel hair who loved cats and crinum lilies and dedicated her life to scientific research and educating children. Seth couldn't resist the temptation to tip the scales in her favor.
"Just in case you're considering a prolonged absence remember that your being here is not something we can replace. Who is going to run the institute?" she asked in a tone that concealed her upset.
"Good thing I'm not going to die, then," Sarah joked. "It feels good to be needed, thank you. I wouldn't dream of spending twenty six years in space, are you kidding me? If sister Roberta figures out a way to make us magically materialize there in a blink of an eye I would certainly like to see the dragons, they're adorable!"
"They're cold blooded five headed lizards," Seth protested, trying not to smile.
"They weigh fifteen pounds and their scales are blue, I think that qualifies as cute," Sarah continued, grinning from ear to ear. It became clear that the dragons made the redhead pursue her Gulliver's travels dream again. Not the Truffula trees, not the deep blue skies, not the fiery heart of Scorpius. For there be dragons on Soleá, and where there be dragons Sarah had to venture.
"Tell me if she does. I'll come with you," Seth replied naturally.
"Can you help us with the language? Details we're missing, nuances that escape us, mistranslations, anything?" Sarah pleaded.
"I'll change my schedule," Seth agreed.
"So, you all figured that the only person on this planet who would not be needed on an exobiology research trip is the zootechnical engineer!" sister Joseph expressed her wish to join the slowly coagulating science team in her usual manner.
"Sister, I wouldn't dream of leaving you behind when we're chasing dragons! By all means, come along!" sister Roberta retorted, still resentful over the spectrometer incident and slightly disappointed that the dragons in question were only two foot tall.
***
Of course reality always trails behind vision and Roberta's patience was tried for months while the construction on the collider concluded, almost at the same time as the seventh strand of the deep space station.
Progress on harnessing the magic of quarks was slow and despite Seth's masterful delving in the Purple ocean of metaphors they were no closer to a working theory than before.
Sister Roberta was hoping that working out the experiment in a real environment would straighten out some of the limitations inherent to the virtual reality simulation, but didn't have specific expectations in mind, a fact that irritated Seth, as always when someone proceeded without a plan.
Seth's strategic brilliance had served her well all her life and she wouldn't dream of pursuing any venue without at least three, preferably more, viable alternatives. She thought that people who flew by the seat of their pants simply lacked the intellectual discipline to develop a plan and didn't trust their solutions to work.
"Sister, you have to show me some progress each week, I feel like we're dragging our feet," she pressured poor Roberta, who needed the added pressure like water in her shoes.
"If God graces me with an instant revelation of the entanglement theory you'll be the first to know. In the meantime we can all read the tome together weekly if you'd like. It's very musical!" she griped.
"Surely there's got to be some way to anticipate what you expect to see as a result of this experiment, especially since it took so much time and effort to build the collider!" Seth insisted.
"I'm sure the scientific community will put it to good use. I'm not the only flower in the garden," sister Roberta pared down the leader's expectations.
The big day finally arrived, fascicles of particles were sped through the tunnel and circled Terra Two at twice the speed of light, smashing into each other, dematerializing and rematerializing like Roberta's jumping rocks.
"You could have studied the stones and skipped the generational project altogether," sister Joseph poured salt on the wound.
Sister Roberta didn't answer, focusing on the movement of particles around the planet and waiting for something, tense.
"That one!" she exclaimed. "It wasn't there before, I'm sure it jumped!"
"Jumped from where? And how could you possibly tell, all photons look the same to me!" sister Novis said, puzzled.
"From its previous location," Roberta said, elated, and decided to elaborate when she saw the flabbergasted look in sister Novis's eye. "Imagine a very tightly bound spring where a dot jumps up one spire without following the curve."
"What does that mean?" the sister still waited for a translation.
"It means this photon traveled 25,000 miles instantaneously. More correctly, it was brought from one second ago and materialized inside the vacuum in the here and now," Roberta continued.
"What does that mean?" the sister repeated.
"I don't know yet," sister Roberta's ecstasy receded, "but it is fundamentally significant."
"Does it work in a straight line?" Seth asked, with renewed hope.
"I don't know," Roberta answered.
"Is there any way to find out?" the leader continued.
"I don't know. Give me a week," Roberta got lost in one of her adventures of the mind and Seth realized it wouldn't make any sense to disturb her until she had a chance to mull things over.
Chapter Nineteen
Of the Past
A week later sister Roberta came forth, obviously tired but holding on to a shiny container with wonder and pride. She waited for the other sisters to be seated on the stone floor of the Prayer Hall and turned the device on.
The image projected on their visual cortex was deceivingly crude in its simplicity, an endless luminous coil stretched between them with its ends lost into the distance. The spires of the coil seemed to attract each other like magnets and then suddenly change polarity and hurl forward at great speed. The process repeated for the next pair, and then the one after that, transmitting a hypnotic wave pattern through the spring. The harmonics of the movement were so precise and so complex at the same time that the sisters took a moment to admire the dance before asking how it was relevant to their research subject.
"I'm afraid you'll have to explain this to us, sister. It really is beautiful but I don't understand how it works, " Seth broke the silence in a soothing voice. As they sat on nothing in the midst of deep space staring at the luminous spring spanning infinitely her voice made the sisters hearts stir. They felt as if they were awakened from a dream to hear the angels speak. Sister Roberta composed herself and then started.
"The principle is simple, really. Each spire catches the previous spire's version of a particle, speeds it up and passes it on to the following loop," she started.
"And how does that advance our purpose?" Seth asked, curious.
"Do you remember the particle movement that started the wave through the coil when I turned the VR compiler on?" Roberta asked. "At every given moment it belongs to that same time. If that particle were us, we'd all be still watching the beginning of this experiment."
"Clarify, please?" Seth asked, confused.
"We are translating a still frame across space without modifying the time it belongs to," sister Roberta explained to the audience who stood still in the middle of space with a blank stare on their faces.
"What kind of things can you transport this way, sister?" Sarah asked.
"Not things, time slices," the sister clarified.
"You lost us, dear," sister Mary-Francis commented gently, as the others nodded their heads in agreement.
"It's like borrowing yourself from the recent past until you get to your destination. Remember? See. All. One. Minute. Sarah."
"I'll have to see this to believe it!" sister Joseph exclaimed in the words of the doubting Thomas.
"It is very hard to explain when you're inside
the experiment, but you already have, though from your frame of reference there is nothing to see, since nothing changes. If this were the actual event, and not a simulation of it, this entire conversation would never have happened and we'd all be in the fields going about our daily tasks. At this point, depending on the speed, we could be two hours, one day or even a month behind real time."
"Get out of here!" sister Joseph couldn't believe her ears. "How much of our world can you translate in this way?"
"There is no theoretical limit, really," Roberta elaborated, so accustomed to the idea of translating reality through time that she didn't notice the horrified look in sister Joseph's eyes.
"Mercy, sister! When cat-brains made a sentient creature, I said nothing," the latter clamored, ignoring the disapproving shuffle in a crowd who had experienced that moment and 'nothing' was not an accurate description of sister Joseph's reaction, "but this time you are playing God. What's next, you want to scrap this universe and make yourself a new one?!" she continued, outraged. Sister Roberta was displeased with the outburst but not surprised and replied calmly.
"Actually one of the applications I envisioned for this device was to go past the limits of the visible universe, don't you want to know what's beyond the farthest object we can see? Lily wants to know!"
"Of course she does! You crazies have filled her brains with this nonsense! How long would that endeavor take?!" the sister protested, making clear to Roberta that she didn't understand the concept. For a moment Roberta wanted to point out to sister Joseph that she was sitting in the middle of a deep space that wasn't there and the time it would take to get to the edge of the Universe or anywhere else for that matter was always zero, at least as far as their reference system was concerned. She chose to abandon the fight.
"So, what's the conclusion of your research, sister?" Seth asked, and her voice got picked up in a feed-back loop, reverberating among the stars.
"We'd be like a candle between mirrors, dear. At the speed of light you can see all of the reflections of its flame at the same time. Only we'd be traveling so much faster than light that that we will see the last reflection before the candle is even lit," sister Roberta daydreamed. "The most important detail will be to keep the clocks synchronized. We won't want to live in a time paradox nightmare."
***
The sisters exited the glass building and Sarah turned left to take the narrow dirt path overgrown with bromeliads and Bird of Paradise flowers towards the beach. She walked through the soft sand for a while, lost in thought, until she reached the stairs leading to the Institute. She sat at the bottom of the steps in the shade of the pear trees and for a while she thought of nothing. The breeze caressed her cheeks, sifting a dusting of blossoms from the pear trees and bringing the delicious fragrance of vanilla closer.
Sarah smiled trying to imagine the trip to Soléa, the scaly skins of the dragons baked in the intense sunlight touching her palm, the still, mirror-like surface of its oceans. She wondered if they could bring back a dragon, then she remembered Solomon was quite territorial and might not like the cute little lizards. As she listened to Sarah's worry about what the five headed creature was going to eat on Terra Two, sister Joseph couldn't help herself and retorted.
"Thank Heavens, sister, that the world doesn't move according to that jumble you call a brain! This is your concern? What the lizard is going to eat? You! It's going to eat you!"
"Actually, they're vegetarian..." Sarah tried to explain as sister Joseph continued.
"You're not worried at all that you might get scattered across the universe as a result of one of sister Roberta's minor miscalculations?" her mind quietly grumbled.
"Don't worry, sister, we'll test it on you, that way we'll know for sure if it works properly!" sister Roberta couldn't help herself.
***
"So, you borrow me from the recent past," Seth started again.
"Yes, a second before, although if I could increase the interval it would certainly improve the efficiency of the system. Less loops," sister Roberta explained patiently.
"Why don't you get me from the present and add a one second delay to the transport time," Seth asked.
"I could," sister Roberta agreed, "but then you'd be one second out of sync with us, which is exactly what we're trying to avoid.
"But past me is out of sync too, isn't this supposed to be instantaneous?" Seth asked logically.
"It takes a second to start the machine," sister Roberta answered.
"What if it takes longer?" Seth asked.
"Well, then we'd have to readjust the timer," Roberta continued unperturbed.
"And that would be bad?" Seth responded in the same tone.
"Unless you're willing to have two yous walking around," sister Roberta continued.
"But if I'm gone for an hour, let's say, it doesn't matter that I come back a minute sooner," Seth continued her logical argument.
"I think it's best to keep our times synchronized, just so we don't run into anomalies," sister Roberta disagreed.
"You mean like translating a slice of time through thirteen light years?" sister Joseph intervened through the interlink.
"I was thinking more in terms of Seth not having to watch another her pop out of the machine every second," Roberta replied.
"You don't scare me, you know. I've known you long enough! As soon as this thing is ready to go, I'm going to Soléa. Do you think Sarah is the only one who longs to see dragons?" sister Joseph retorted.
"What if the doomsday machine misfires and brings you back in triplicate?" sister Roberta joked ominously.
"That would be my gift to you!" sister Joseph offered charitably.
The solenoid looked simple indeed, but the fine tuning of the timelines took forever. There was also the little matter of returning from the trip, which brought up the necessity of building another device to pass through the first one.
"Purple. Go. Earth. Soléa." the immortals murmured. "Purple. See. Different. Planets."
"You don't find this dangerous?" Sarah asked, worried.
"Giant. Funny. Purple. Go." the immortals sounded amused.
"If we send a probe to Earth there's no telling how they're going to react. What would you think if some piece of machinery materialized out of nothing?" sister Novis objected.
"If we tell them first, we'd have to wait for months to get the message through and the answer back," sister Felix noted.
"I'd say go ahead and send it. They'll figure it out," sister Mary-Francis recommended.
"Well, it would probably take more than a year to put it together anyway," sister Roberta thought aloud.
"Then we could send something older than one second, you know, to save time," sister Novis replied.
"But then we'd have to build extra loops to make the solenoid go backwards," sister Roberta continued her train of thought.
"Can you make it work backwards?" sister Benedict asked, curious as always.
"That depends of what you mean by backwards," sister Roberta pondered. "We can make it go farther back," she said.
"But still going only forward," sister Benedict clarified.
"Yes," sister Roberta agreed. "I can't imagine what this device would do working backwards," she mumbled, confused.
"It's always good to have all the options covered before we use it," sister Benedict continued. "I assume that if it were to work backwards it would have to take a particle from the immediate future and move it back a second in time to revert it to a previously held position," she took her argument to its logical conclusion.
"What in places does this have to do with reality!?" sister Novis exploded. "What rational person would attempt such a thing!"
"What rational person would attempt the opposite version of it?" sister Joseph muttered. "You're all crazy and you're driving me crazy too. I'm going home! I don't want to hear anymore about this until it is ready!" she got up.
"Sister. Stay. Learn." Purple whispered.
"You too
! Darn planet! Darn time travel!" she blurted.
"It's not time travel, actually..." sister Roberta intervened, but sister Joseph was on a roll.
"Don't you think you'll discourage me by running time backwards, fiends! Once the dreadful machine is working I'm going to Soléa!" she hissed as she walked out the door.
Chapter Twenty
Of Dragons
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.