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 over 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 microclimate 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 with 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 join 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's 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 surfaced, 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'r
e 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 so 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 was 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 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.
Chapter Twenty One
Of Feelings
"Get away, you pest! Oh, just wait until I get my hands on you, you little ingrate!" Sarah screamed at the dragon who stared at her innocently with two of its heads as it continued munching on aloe vera with the other three. Half of the leaves on the gardenia shrubs were consumed to the bare branches and Solomon had found refuge all the way up one of the pear trees, hissing like a tea kettle with all its fur standing on end.
"Don't you talk like that to my dragon! Come here, sweetie, did she hurt you?" sister Joseph came quickly to the lizard's defense.
"You were concerned what it was going to eat? It eats everything in sight, it's an unstoppable garden wrecking machine, and it's not picky either! Check out the hot pepper patch, your beast has no taste buds! I replanted the aloe vera five times already!" Sarah protested, really flustered and trying to look menacing to the lizard. The dragon watched her innocently, attempted a gurgle and blinked its eyes in series. "I swear if you weren't so cute!" Sarah thought. "Sister Joseph finally lost it! She wouldn't dream of letting the goats have free reign of the vegetable patch but she has no problem allowing mini-Godzilla here to run havoc through the land!"
"It's not like I can't hear you! You stay away from my dragon, it's infinitely more interesting than any one of you!" sister Joseph picked up the lizard who blinked at Sarah and then half-closed its yellow eyes feeling protected and content in its owner's arms; the redhead could swear she saw one of the muzzles sketch a little smirk like a reptilian Cheshire cat.
"You may swindle sister Joseph who gave into her weakness, but you don't fool me with that innocent stare, you evildoer! Stay away from my plants and leave Solomon alone!" Sarah frowned furiously at the dragon.
"Screech!" the dragon uttered cheerfully.
"You tell me if she bothers you and I'll give her a piece of my mind! And I won't be shy about it either!" Joseph coddled the creature as the rest of the sisters collectively burst in Homeric, albeit inner laughter.
Sister Joseph named the beast Josephine despite the fact they haven't figured out yet if dragons had genders (if someone were able to ascertain that fact it would have been the sister herself). Joseph didn't take this detail into consideration when she decided the dragon would be a 'she' and allowed 'her' to share her name. Nobody could argue with the sister about the behavior of her beloved pet, Josephine could do no wrong in her eyes and showed such devotion to her master that it was allowed to follow her everywhere with the exception of the Prayer Hall and that only because the sisters decided the line needed to be drawn somewhere.
A second mat was placed on the other side of the Prayer Hall door and Josephine lay there munching on veggie snacks for the duration of the service, eyeing Solomon with a couple of its heads and making the cat bristle its fur and push its ears back.
Josephine was loud, especially when discontented, and the sisters learned it was less unpleasant to accommodate her whims than to put up with the horrid noise, but otherwise she proved to be an adorable creature who gleamed through the Institute hallways in intense cobalt blue looking like she had just come down from the Gates of Ishtar.
The original idea was to keep her in one of the desert greenhouse environments but Josephine didn't take well to being confined and screeched their ears off until they let her out to the absolute delight of the children, visitors and science delegations and the chagrin of Sarah for whom protecting the crops became a full time occupation.
She remembered her daydream about petting a peacefully resting dragon who was supposed to lie cooing at her feet but nobody other than sister Joseph ever managed to touch the scratchy lizard. It turned out that dragons were really fast runners when they didn't fly and were not shy to use their five sets of teeth if annoyed. Josephine had the activity level and temper tantrums of a toddler and after putting up with the biting, clawing and deafening screeches Sarah resigned herself to admire the creature from a distance and breathed a little sigh of relief when it was quiet.
***
"
Are you letting the dragon roam free? Aren't you worried it's going to attack the children?" doctor O'Shaughnessy asked, concerned. He had brought his own toddler to Terra Two and the sight of the seemingly vicious lizard ran shivers down his spine. The little boy on the other hand was absolutely enthralled with the alien creature and didn't seem to question the fact that it had five heads.
"Not at all! Josephine is the sweetest thing and completely harmless!" Sarah said with a level of conviction that seemed a little suspect. "I can't believe I have to defend the wretch after she practically destroyed my garden! What am I saying, we don't even know it's a 'she', there's a good side project for sister Joseph! She's the animal specialist, she should be able to figure that out!" her mind rummaged quietly.
Josephine stared at them turning one of its heads sideways like a chicken to get a better view. It gurgled, took a few steps forward and pecked at whatever was left of the cauliflower patch. Sarah uttered a sigh and resolved to put an invisible fence around the vegetable garden before the lizard finished it off.
"Josephine is part of the family," sister Joseph intervened, concerned that the little boy might rough handle her beloved pet, as if anything on two legs could outrun the blue lightning, especially at his age!