Terra Two

by Francis Rosenfeld

  ***

  The first week unfolded at the speed of a snail and during the entire time Sarah kept asking herself what on earth she was doing there. The program's wherewithal was more modest than the set-up on her parent's farm and there was really no schedule set for her, nor did anybody there seem to expect her to do anything. The vegetable beds were well tended and food was always abundant but there was no attempt to try new breeds or do fancy analysis. Sarah found it difficult to occupy her time since everything that needed done seemed to have already been done, and short of undoing work only to do it again there really was nothing for her to do.

  Library time went quicker because the bookshelves were well stocked with books, not necessarily specific to horticultural studies but definitely educational in every way.

  After the first week Sarah gathered enough courage to track down Seth (which was a project in itself, really, because Seth liked to move around the premises with a ghost-like demeanor that made it seem as if she was never there) and ask her for a few moments of guidance to help her understand what exactly she was supposed to do there. She pointed out there was no biology lab or structured course of instruction and she didn't seem to fit in at all. It was the silence that built up Sarah's anxiety since she was used to talk talk talk all the time with relatives and neighbors and colleagues and friends, and ask questions, challenge results, offer opinions. The quiet was maddening.

  Seth frowned and the steely resolve of her transparent eyes became even more intense. Sarah was starting to regret her audacity and quickly assessed the library hall for possible nooks and crannies to hide in before the thunderbolt in Seth's eyes descended upon her and struck her down. It was a very uncomfortable situation for her, given her completely non-confrontational upbringing; according to her family mores getting into a conflict was among the worst things one could do.

  "You came here for post graduate education. We all assumed that you wouldn't be interested in going through the same experiments and do more of the same things you did before, please correct me if I'm wrong." Sarah wouldn't have dreamt of correcting, interrupting, or in any way bringing attention to her own breech in protocol, because every time Seth looked at her the redhead remembered something else that she wasn't particularly proud of.

  "You have one year to do something new. Can you do something that was never done before?" She saw the dazed look in Sarah's eyes and didn't wait for the answer.

  "Everything you did so far relied on equipment invented and built by somebody else, the tests you ran were replicas of originals by others. What did you do, personally? What would you do if you had to run your experiments with just a handful of seeds and a magnifying glass?"

  Sarah went from uncomfortable to mortified and wished she could roll back her life to the point when she was not in this awkward situation and stay there.

  "Chicken!", Seth said, with a tone that sounded more disappointed than angry. "Don't ask me what to do with your life. I'm your guide, not your master."

  Sarah took her wretched self back to the garden, went through the remainder of the day in silence and cried herself to sleep.

  From that day forward she abandoned all attempts to look busy and started paying close attention to what the others were doing, which looked to her like gardening as usual. Since she couldn't garner excitement over tomato production and nobody paid attention to her she put together her own schedule, a subset of a master schedule that was so vague it was almost impossible to disturb.

  As a first order of business she took an early morning to walk around the building and found out what was in each room. She found the kitchen, the seed storage, and the tool shed. She found a large ball of rough yarn and a pair of scissors. She found the technology lab, yes, they really did have one after all. She found peat pods and a watering can.

  She set out to replicate the transparent rose experiment without the centrifuge, the spectral analysis computer program and the wavelength isolation equipment. She didn't know how she was going to run anything successful in one year without the benefits of genetic growth acceleration but in a couple of weeks, amazingly enough, the plant was well on its way. A little bud was about to open and Sarah was staring at it intently, trying to guess whether the petals were transparent or not, and she didn't feel Seth's shadow cover her shoulders like a blanket.

  "Interesting" Seth said in a normal tone of voice that sounded deafening to Sarah, focused as she was on her rose. She jumped, startled, and almost lost her balance.

  "Come with me!" Seth boomed. They walked to the edge of the garden to a patch of dirt that screamed to anybody who grew up on a farm "don't waste your efforts, I'm sterile soil with no nutrients".

  "Why don't you try growing plants here?" said Seth.

  "What plants?" Sarah asked hopelessly.

  "Any plants", Seth answered calmly. "Something edible would be nice. It doesn't need to be transparent", she mumbled irritated. "Don't amend the soil, it has to be exactly like this."

  Sarah looked at the miserable patch of reddish dirt that looked like debris from a brick kiln. There were little bits of rubble looking vaguely like crushed cement, it had a powdery consistency that no root could grasp for food or support and it held water like a sieve. She didn't need to run a chemical analysis of the soil to figure out it had no nutrients at all.

  "Are you sure about that?" Seth asked, out of nowhere.

  "What can I do to make it yield" Sarah retorted, a little peeved.

  "If I knew that I would be doing it myself, not asking you", said Seth. Certainly demureness was lost on the group who despised it and those who cherished it as well. Sarah abandoned the fight for sweetness and light and decided not to waste her time fuming over the sharp directness.

  Chapter Three

  "'The first step in addressing a situation you haven't encountered before is to forget everything you think you know about similar circumstances. The easiest mistake is to think that adding more effort and complexity to solving a problem is the sure way to its resolution. It usually is not."

  "What good is the knowledge that sophisticated equipment and the wonders of chemistry can completely transform your surroundings when you have no access to said enhancements? After years of being shown the miracles brought forth by science one tends to forget that nature does more effortlessly. A leaf stuck in the ground sprouts roots, it doesn't get more miraculous than that."

  Over the next couple of weeks Sarah transformed the kitchen into a small laboratory filled with countless glasses containing various mixtures of water and dirt. The mixes incorporated cabbage juice, some really slimy algae that she had fished from the nearby pond, a couple of really uncomfortable frogs and some fresh water clams. The other members of the group worked and ate around this weird set-up with a detachment that made Sarah wonder what it would take to perturb them.

  She mixed some of the loamy dirt from her old lot in a bucket of water and left it outside by the kitchen door, where the sun baked it into a mini swamp that stunk of sewer and rotting matter. She tended to the putrid miasma with the patience and self-denial of a martyr, stirring unspoken malodorousness out of it every day to make sure the microorganisms saturated the mix. Just when her colleagues' looks made it clear that she will end up wearing the contents of the bucket if she didn't dispose of it soon she built up a small brim around the brick like debris and poured the liquid in.

  If Sarah ever had a wish for solitary life it was fulfilled during the next two weeks when nobody came within fifty feet of the little lot which bore the same intense odor as the substance that enriched it. Nobody, that is, but Seth, who made it a habit to inspect the setting every day and assess the rottenness of the six buckets of muck in various states of putrefaction.

  The big day finally arrived and Sarah brought a fistful of seeds and planted them in rows, careful not to let the silty mix wash off on the pavers. Seth was breathing down her neck, watching every move.

  "Aren't you forgetting something?" Seth asked,
frowning with concentration. Sarah didn't say anything but reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of healthy squirming earthworms.

  ***

  Everybody waited patiently but by the end of the third week it was painfully clear that any other biological phenomenon was more likely to occur to those seeds than germination. Sarah swallowed her dejection and walked around sheepishly staring at the ground for days while she continued to brew the disgusting concoction that polluted everybody's olfactory sensibility within a half mile radius.

  Six months passed, filled with failed seed startings and the ever present stench that now permeated Sarah's clothes and skin. She got so used to it that she almost couldn't smell it anymore. Every morning she mixed another bucket of dirt and then either started a new set of seeds or hope against hope to see something green emerge. She wasn't even aware that her gestures had become automatic and her mind traveled away from the disgusting task to the extraordinary labs in Christchurch where it contemplated visions of transparent roses and blue chamomile.

  ***

  "Wake up! Wake up now!" Seth shook Sarah and almost dragged her out of bed while the first rays of dawn were still struggling on the horizon. Sarah put her shoes on feverishly and almost knocked Seth over as she ran to the door.

  "Where is it? I can't see anything."

  "Here, look here" said Seth. Sarah stared at a little indentation in the dirt, right next to the pavers, where something slimy but definitely of a greenish hue tinted the surface.

  "This is lichen" said Sarah, who judging by Seth's reaction expected to find out that the heavens opened and replaced the stinky barrenness with lush greenery and abundance.

  "It's alive!" Seth said, elated, "It's alive!"

  Chapter Four

  "Life has its ways to keep us humble, just when we take most pride in our accomplishments we find out that everything we've done has been done before, often better. We pour all our spirit and our energy into an endeavor and it inevitably falls short, yielding to the limitations of our human condition on this Earth."

  "There is no point in becoming dejected, living in the flesh is but an imperfect reflection of our hopes and dreams and we are always bound to leave our work unfinished so future generations can continue it. Don't take yourself too seriously and heed the wise advice of the Ecclesiastes: eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do."

  A little weedy sprout sprung up at first, then a scraggly plant of undetermined provenance, then finally a soybean bush. Sarah was beaming with pride. She really wanted to keep the thrill of success to herself but it was written all over her face.

  What nobody expected, not in their most ambitious dreams, was how fast the plants were growing, nothing short of magic, with an accelerated rhythm that made their head spin and made them double check their grasp on reality. After a week they had a full crop cover. After three weeks pods were sprouting everywhere. After a month they had a harvest. After eight weeks they were well on their way for the second one.

  "This is great, Sarah" Seth said, in a firm voice that tried but didn't succeed to conceal excitement. "With just a little more work you are bound to have a tomato patch just like sister Joseph's."

  The overwhelming enthusiasm that swept through Sarah's psyche flattened out like a soufflé pulled out of the oven too fast. She revisited the mental picture of the tomatoes, trying to recall what they looked like, but couldn't remember anything out of the ordinary. Her surprise turned to chagrin and then very quickly to anger, a frothing mental anguish so intense that she didn't even question the word 'sister' at the end of the sentence. All the back breaking work of the last six months came to her mind and made blood shoot up to her cheeks and reflect a wild light in her eyes, a light that would have made a normal person run for cover.

  Seth was not a normal person, as normal goes, and she didn't even blink, as if Sarah's reaction was the most natural thing in the world. Sarah would have liked to scream at Seth and claw her face - "do you mean to tell me that I lived with stench and worms for six whole months when you had the answer all along?!" as her anger grew more and more inflamed, pumping plenty of hot air back into her emotional soufflé and puffing it back up. She didn't have to say a word, every droplet of outrage and fury was showing on her face. The leader seemed amused, in a weird way even pleased with Sarah's annoyance.

  "Don't be upset, we couldn't tell you how to do it, this was the whole point of the experiment. Every one of us came into success in her own way. You don't even want to know how sister Abigail made her crook neck squashes grow. Anyway, it took sister Joseph three years to bring her tomatoes to this state, so you should be pleased."

  Now the word 'sister' read loud and clear and the rage in Sarah's eyes turned quickly to surprise and then intense curiosity.

  "We are a religious order, dear", sister Roberta said kindheartedly, all a smile and brimming with contentment.

  "I knew it", Sarah thought, there was no way to mistake that familiar walk, that detached attitude, that quiet way of life for anything else. She didn't even question how her life led her to this and why of all the paths in existence her footsteps took her full circle to the herb fragrant kitchen of her childhood, as if she walked on the thin wire of a helix and ended up in the same spot but one level up.

  "Why am I here?", Sarah gathered the nerve to ask.

  "As I said, this is an international experimental horticulture program and we are a teaching community, but you are here because you have both the education and green thumb instincts that would push you to try things that have not been tried before. After all, the medium you are cultivating is not exactly of this earth."

  ***

  Everything else stopped in its tracks as the whole group started discussing combined methods of watering and fertilization, made suggestions of what to plant and predicted outcomes. If one wanted to find a word to describe the brick colored crumbly mix it would have been perfect; it had an ideal composition and proportion of minerals and the now slightly gritty particles offered a strong foundation for the little plants to sink their roots into.

  The planting started just as prosaic as it's always been but on an accelerated schedule to keep up with the needs of the fast growing plants.

  It took some getting used to seeing five foot tall green onions and tomato chords looped twelve times around the plot as they kept growing. They braided the green bean vines and twisted them into vegetal ropes, thick as their forearms, and spun them overhead, winding them between plots and across walkways, weaving them into a connected green openwork without an apparent beginning or end. Some of the open loops attracted the many birds of the neighborhood and between the nests and the clusters of hanging fruit from various other plants that started using the openwork for support the lacy green second surface took on a life of its own, a brave new world within arm's reach, floating over head like the miraculous suspended gardens of Semiramis.

  They had to be on continuous duty to prune enough openings into this luxuriant green blanket to ensure the space below it still received enough sunlight.

  The birds flocked in the sky above the experimental farm, finding comfort and shelter in this unusual man made jungle, and their colorful noisy groups attracted the curiosity and photographic interest of neighbors and tourists alike, making it difficult for the sisters to work around the crowds that seemed to devise ever more innovative means to find their way back into the quasi-cloistered garden.

  Sarah walked through the racket of this three dimensional green space with strange detachment, her flame colored hair catching every ray of sunshine and reflecting it amplified, like an angelic vision in the garden of Eden, charting progress, recording growth patterns and anticipating results.

  At the end of the year the documentation, statistics and developmental research were sent to the Space Science Agency in New Orleans, accompanied by Seth and Sarah who for lack of well needed time became appendices to the study. T
hey went there to serve as footnotes, source documentation, amendments and errata wrapped into a couple of walking reference desks, two little human libraries from whom data and research could be drawn and added to the study as needed.

  Chapter Five

  "When it became clear that the dirt of Terra Two could be brought to life the gears of our terraforming enterprise started moving faster, putting programs in place, facilitating procedures, allocating funds, encouraging communication. We were so caught up in our day to day work that we didn't realize the magnitude of the system that made this project unfold flawlessly."

  "Sequences and fine points were painstakingly evaluated, searching for possible flaws, missed details or overlooked minutia since the impact of any mistake grew exponentially with the distance and our lives literally depended on good execution and fail-proof contingency plans."

  It was drizzling in New Orleans when they arrived, the warm air held on to water like an oversized sponge. Hydrocars floated back and forth on the narrow foggy streets, sliding over the old pavers without really touching them, silent as whispers. Seth and Sarah walked briskly without words, trying to dispel the unspoken tension. Seth was tense because she knew who they were meeting, Sarah because she didn't. They took a turn on St. Peter's street, then Chartres, and cut across Jackson Square to reach Decatur street.

  The street was crowded as always at this hour, with busy people waiting to make the transfer from land to water at the Decatur sluice gates to join the tumult of boats and hydrocars floating on the Mississippi river. The vehicles moved in a fluid apparently random pattern that was intuitively understandable, like blood flows through a dense and comprehensive network of arteries, vessels, capillaries and interstitial spaces to ensure that every cell is reached and fed.

  The sweet and enticing aroma of vanilla and hot chocolate followed them for a while as they advanced on Decatur and passed the equestrian statue of Jeanne D'Arc. Sarah would have liked to stop for a beignet but didn't dare propose such an outrageous breech of schedule to the very tense Seth who forged ahead as if propelled by an external force towards the Space Science Center. Its imposing building marked the end of the street with a shiny chrome astrodome, half opened for the evening observations.