Chapter Eight
"It is not the things we embrace that define our ethics but the things we refuse. Not until we are forced to trade one value for another do we realize that doing the right thing is not straightforward at all. It's easy to abide by one's principles when no conflict of conscience challenges them."
"The battles that are waged inside our souls are the toughest tests the Lord would have us take, tests with no answers at times, and no preparation most times. Some assuage our worries by saying "there is no right or wrong answer", but there is always a right and a wrong answer for you because these tests are laid at the defining moments of your life in order to decide its direction. We may judge at the end of a moral struggle that the effort wasn't warranted for something of so little consequence. Those are the most important long term choices of them all."
The next months were a blur of activities, home visits, feverish preparations, last minute triple checking of data and calculations, and teary farewells from family and friends. Since the sisters didn't plan to bring much in terms of personal belongings they each gave a small part of their allocated cargo share to Sarah so that she could have a little more room for her stuff. Everybody in the family insisted that she took a little thing to remind her of them and since they were so many the cargo module filled to the brim and started overflowing. Sarah just couldn't find the heart to tell any of her loved ones that there was just so much space she could use and did her best to optimize the storage of mementoes.
She had just managed to compact everything and close the door when she received a message from her mother. Her grandfather was coming to visit, driving all the way from North Dakota despite his advanced age, and had a big surprise for her, something that she was very attached to. Sarah couldn't imagine what that might have been since the one thing she really could remember being magnetically drawn to was her grandparents' touch table.
When she was a child that table felt nothing short of magic, a fairy tale surface that came alive at a touch of her fingers and could teach and entertain her for hours. Her grandparents had to use all their grown-up skills to keep her away from it, from fresh apple pie to playful kittens nothing could dampen the fascination that magical object wielded on her. That couldn't possibly be, though, because the table was, well, table sized, it wouldn't fit in any means of transportation her grandfather was travelling in and surely nobody could consider bringing this particular item which by itself filled the entire cargo space graciously allocated her.
She woke up the next morning to a racket of claxons and rushed yells and grunts to look out the window and see her grandfather guide a group of movers with expansive gestures and lots of verbal directives in order to maneuver what appeared to be a sizable object off the top of his vehicle. Sarah was stunned. She knew there was no way this large sentimental item was going to get approval to embark and there was absolutely no way she was going to refuse her grandfather after all the trouble he went through to bring this cherished childhood memory to her.
The conflict that ensued still resonated in Sarah's memory almost a hundred years later as one of the defining moments of her conscience. It is when you pick what you believe to be worth fighting for, despite every influence from adversaries, but most importantly, from the ones closest to you that you finally start understanding your own heart. Said heart is hard to find among flurries of activity and commonality of thought where it echoes back and forth from one authority figure to the next in uncontested harmony.
It only took a stern no from the administrative committee to bring the fire out of the redhead. She planted her feet into the floor of the Space Science Center and decided not to move from that spot until the issue was resolved to her satisfaction. Threats were uttered, some veiled, some directly, Seth threw in her two cents, quite unconvincingly, the sisters insisted that it was unreasonable to insist on this specific item and one can't have it all; her family pressed the other side of the coin offering a multitude of I told you so's and using this event as a teaching moment to reinforce the foolishness of her decisions and her need for counsel from those wiser in years. Sarah spent some of the loneliest moments of her life with only this inanimate object to console her, finale both defying the reason for her insistence to bring the item along and helping her appreciate its value even more.
At the end of this moral/sentimental shoot out at the ok corral she managed to be on barely speaking terms with her grandfather, the administrative committee, the sisters, and her own mother, while earning some unspoken admiration from Seth, who didn't like wishy-washy people. Out loud though the latter expressed a quite harsh admonition for this self-serving indulgence.
The fight made Sarah chuckle softly now, after so many years, but it deserves mentioning that from that day forward Seth got the unshakable conviction that the redhead was undisciplined and irrational, opinion unchanged by the many decades that followed and that was still popping up on the rare occasion when Sarah happened to be late for Vespers for any reason whatsoever. Not even after the times when the table was their only working computer and means of communication for many months, not after she surprised the sisters by programming it to run soil chemistry tests, not after they designed and 3d printed the first all terrain vehicle prototypes on it did the leader's opinions change, one must assume that the little angel hair was not the only stubborn element in the bunch.
Anyway, after a fight worthy of a monumental cause Sarah got to have her table and keep it at the price of gaining the reputation of being willful, selfish and insubordinate. If her memory served her right, Seth had used another word which will not be mentioned in this story, since history really doesn't care for the verbal wrappings of ideas as they happen in the moment, but for the ideas themselves. As I said, the sisters despised demureness as a fancy societal way to disguise one's true feelings.
What Sarah also learned was that showing her true feelings without the cover of civility was not as well received as one might expect, since everybody sang the apology of brutal honesty right up to the point when brutal honesty was frankly presented to them.
The second thing Sarah learned was that she wasn't fighting for a table, which would have been absurd, even for somebody as obstinate as herself, but for the continuation of human mores, culture and civilization it represented, for the right to respect her traditions, and for the utmost importance of protecting what she loved.
She endured many dirty looks from the maintenance crew who was called in at the last minute to install brackets on the ceiling so that the unreasonably large and really unnecessary object that didn't fit in the cargo space could be mounted overhead and be in everyone's way as they went about their daily tasks.
A wiser and somewhat more cynical Sarah stepped on board of the shuttle on a bright October day, a lot less prone to theatrical outbursts in the aftermath of this emotional battle, so caught up in the minutia of her administrative struggles that she failed to process the magnitude of the task she was embarking on or the privilege of pioneering this new frontier for humanity.
Only when the final countdown started did she internalize what her relatives have been saying for months, that she was going to be gone for a very long time, maybe forever, and that what was awaiting their team was not easy, but with all the fighting over the touch table and the mental anguish of rubbing everybody the wrong way Sarah didn't get a chance to worry.
Chapter Nine
"We started our journey in the year of our Lord twenty one hundred and ten, a few brave souls traveling at amazing speed in a contraption smaller than a tin can, packed to the brim with necessities, devoid of privacy and life's comforts. Our automatic navigation system kept us on the calculated trajectory during a long monotonous voyage that almost made us take leave of our senses."
"If human beings were supposed to span the darkness with no air we would probably have not been born on a flourishing Earth under a blue sky of wonder. There are few things the human soul abhors more than nothingness, and nothingness was what w
e experienced for the endless months of our travel. When no other sight but darkness is available one has two options: lose one's soul or accept that the interstellar void is just as much a part of Creation as the light of the stars, and wherever God is, there is no reason to fear."
No experience on Earth could prepare the crew for the awe and unease of living so close to the stars, so close one felt one could almost touch them, looking much larger in the absence of air, much brighter, much colder too. It was a slightly maddening experience to go around one's regular schedule while suspended in the vastness of space, it made one feel small, vulnerable and omnipotent at the same time.
As the days went by Sarah settled into her new schedule, which was pretty much the regular research schedule she had had for the last few years adjusted for the artificial gravitational field and the enhanced oxygen mix. Pretty soon the monotony of a very long voyage set in and everybody got used to seeing plants grow taller and more vibrantly green. Prior to their takeoff they had discussed actually using the greenhouse space as a breathable air recycler but the scientists who designed the system didn't feel comfortable relying on it for a large part of the crews' oxygen needs. Since photosynthesis worked as well as expected the air inside the shuttle became so oxygen rich that it made everybody feel good to the point of giddiness.
"So, how does it feel to be a space dweller?" Seth asked, slightly uncomfortable. As always, she showed up from nowhere, despite the fact that goodness knows their quarters were so cozy there was literally no place to hide. Sarah had tried to figure out during the years she had known Seth how she managed to move completely unnoticed across a large room and startle her with a subtly voiced but very direct remark always addressed to the back of her head. Sarah looked her straight in the eyes, with a hard and somewhat cold stare, not antagonistic but searching much deeper behind the almost transparent gaze. It knocked Seth off the extraordinary emotional balance that took her almost ten years to master, so much more because she didn't expect it, still thinking of Sarah as a work in progress and an undisciplined one at that.
"How did you find me?" Sarah asked, with no introduction, as if continuing an already started conversation in her mind that she now finally gathered the courage to express.
"What do you mean, you know exactly how we met, you won the scholarship."
Sarah took the hit of this denial of trust very deeply, realizing all of a sudden that she wasn't as she thought 'one of them', despite being launched on a trajectory to terraform a planet and floating in the middle of a deep soul sucking void she tried to ignore but couldn't. The apparently reasonable unfolding of her life and all the events that led her to this point suddenly crashed into a little pile of voided thoughts she could almost picture falling apart. Sometimes Sarah wished for a less active imagination, she could surely have done without the visual of her existential angst. She suddenly got angry but didn't let anything come out, a habit learned through long practice. She smiled politely.
"Well?" Seth asked.
"Oh, Sarah started nonchalantly, did you see the new cultures? I think we can double the growth rate if we increase the temperature by two degrees".
Seth didn't miss the chill, but looked intently at the cultures and nodded.
"Probably, let's try this over the next three days, see how it goes".
Sarah worked diligently for a couple of hours setting up cultures to the exacting specifications her demanding training accustomed her to, trying to chase away the thoughts inside her head, thoughts which after a while became a slow flowing river of memories and emotions, sunny days on the farm with her father, her brother's wedding, the many lovely afternoons in the company of her aunts at the convent, her mother's never assuaged concern regarding her marital status, her grandfather's grand gestures and intense curiosity, the light shining in her hair at dawn and setting it on fire, the touch table, so familiar she could almost feel it under her fingers. For the first time she realized how essential the fight over that touch table was and how lucky she was to have won it, despite all the commotion caused and the bruised egos.
A memory of herself at the age of five, flaming hair all a tangle, sneaking into the parlor to play and standing on her tippy toes to reach the center of the surface hit her so hard she felt as if all the air was pressed out of her lungs and she could never draw breath again. She stood, frozen, with her mouth open like a fish out of water for what felt like a very long time and when she finally drew breath an ocean of tears came out, soaking the cultures, her hands, her feet, and the floor, too fast to stop, too many to hide. She kept working steadily for the rest of the day while tears kept flowing and memories kept surfacing, beloved memories of what was once her life, so far removed right now they seemed almost implausible, like a lucid dream upon awakening.
Looking out the window into the opaque darkness pierced by stars, a little lightheaded from all the tears and the elevated oxygen levels she got a sudden but overwhelming conviction that she was already dead though she didn't remember it happening. How else would all of this be possible, this life of hers where nothing even remotely approximated reality. If you think of it, if you were dead there would be no way to prove or disprove it, for who really knows what the afterlife is like? After that day she spent a few weeks trying to confirm or refute this hypothesis and stopped eating to see if she still needed to. Because of her young and strong constitution the hunger strike had no effects other that a horrendous heart burn and nobody reacted as if this behavior was in any way bizarre, so after endless and exhausting runs through the pros and cons of her being alive or dead she finally gave up, vowing to never question it again. In either case the reality she seemed to belong to wasn't going anywhere. Technically that was not true as she was travelling through hyperspace at 7,500,000 miles per second towards a planet with a methane atmosphere.
Sarah had become the first case of what would later be diagnosed as Temporary Dissociative Space Syndrome but since there were no precedents and she didn't abandon her daily duties it went unnoticed. The sisters' behavior in general could be considered eccentric so if Sarah decided to spend her trip standing on her head covered in feathers, no one would question it as long as the job got done.
In this jumble of lost thoughts, fears and uncertainty the confused redhead found the face of God and never let go if it again, neither in her waking nor in her sleeping state, a safety line that kept her balanced whether she was alive or dead. She remembered a chant from the Easter sermon and placed it in the forefront of her mind to have it be the first conscious thought upon waking: "This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!"
The cold bright stars started looking friendly and familiar as life slowly returned to normal, whatever normal was, a beautiful part of God's universe, not scary, not easy to explain, undeniable like miracles always are. It didn't matter where she was or what it looked like, from that moment on she was never alone and in the empty vastness of space she felt protected.
Chapter Ten
"The endless trip frayed our nerves. The tight quarters didn't allow for privacy, we thought that our Spartan living habits would make it easy to adjust to a place with no walls. Everybody took for granted the simple happiness of our old stone building and more than anything, our magical suspended garden. We missed the birds and the cloudless sky, the rolling hills fading into the sea, the changing of the seasons, the breeze. So much of our happiness is ineffable even defining its absence eludes us."
"A lot of our innovations were born out of mistakes we made during this time of inescapable boredom. It made us wonder how many great discoveries were overshadowed by the human failure to accept challenging perspectives. To paraphrase the great Sherlock Holmes, if you eliminate the concept of impossibility whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
About half way through the trip everybody started getting antsy. There wasn't a certain event or attitude that one could pinpoint, more of a generalized restlessness, a vague unsp
oken sense of discomfort that saturated the already cramped quarters and put everyone on edge. After a while everyone realized that they had way more time on their hands than they anticipated. There was just so much to do around the shuttle, plants take care of themselves if they have food, light and water.
Everyone took this opportunity to get a renewed interest in their hobbies and while this was supposed to be a non-eventful endeavor it yielded one of the most important discoveries of their journey.
It happened one afternoon when sister Roberta, bless her heart, was playing with the wavelength tuner to harmonize the lasers and accidentally bonded the spectrometer to the table. Subsequent molecular scans of the bond revealed that the two materials had combined into a very stable and completely new substance, crystalline in nature and extremely hard. Sister Roberta crossed herself and spent the remainder of the afternoon in prayer to thank the Almighty that it was the spectrometer and not her hand that was irreversibly bonded with the table while the other sisters quietly assessed the risk of electronically stimulated amplified light putting a hole through the hull.
A ban on all hobbies was imposed immediately, including reading, cooking and plant hybridization, so that electromagnetism enthusiasts and light wave modulation hobbyists wouldn't feel unfairly targeted. Sister Roberta spent the next few weeks in sheepishly humble self deprecation and bore patiently the dirty looks of the others. Soon the mind numbing boredom of actually being forbidden any activity outweighed the risks of hull breach and everyone gave in to the burning curiosity of how exactly the fusion of materials happened. Of course precious time and energy had been lost in blaming and self righteous outrage so the poor sister couldn't remember the exact frequency that resulted into changing the structure of matter. The silver lining of this event was that everybody got so immersed in the scientific query that all existential angst flew out the window. The drawback was that no matter how many mnemonic techniques, relaxation exercises or reenactment of events, it was absolutely impossible for the sister to replicate the experiment.