Day Fourteen — Synchronicity
“The approved list for the flower arrangements reads as follows: lilacs, French lavender and water lilies,” Lily announced, excited.
“Aren’t we lucky Sys can make this stuff up at the last minute? Who asks for lilacs in an equatorial climate?” sister Novis mumbled, slightly annoyed.
“They fit into the lavender theme,” Lily tried to explain.
“Yes, I got that from the draping, the light show and the purple bunnies sister Joseph is breeding,” sister Novis acknowledged, completely unimpressed.
“Kittens, they are kittens!” Lily snapped.
“Whatever,” sister Novis said. “When we’re done spinning lilacs out of thin air, where do you want them?”
“Oh, dear! I haven’t thought about it, we need to create a cooling field around the flowers, or they’re going to wilt in this heat.” She jotted down a note to talk to Sys about it, and went on thinking out loud. “I hope that’s not going to interfere with the Fusion Cloud, if I have to ask for another approval from Vlor for the refrigeration system we might as well drop everything right now!”
“Sister Roberta is almost done with her surprise and in the spirit of kindness I thought I’d let you know what it is before you have to explain it to the wisps during the ceremony. Do you want to know?” sister Novis asked.
“Go ahead,” Lily resigned herself.
“She made a kinetic art piece using controlled fluid dynamics on fog, it looks a little like Humon, actually,” sister Novis couldn’t help herself.
“That’s great news, we can safely assume the wisps are not going to speak to us again afterwards,” Lily commented, too tired to get upset.
“Don’t tease!” sister Novis replied.
“It will go great with Iseult’s monumental artwork, also a surprise. How come nobody got the message that surprises are not a good idea for this event?” Lily inquired.
“They did, they just don’t care. To tell you the truth, the wisps are irritating the living daylight out of some of us,” sister Novis answered, and from the all inclusive commentary, Lily deduced the sister was one of the peeved ‘us’. She decided not to delve into the reasons. Sister Novis continued.
“Ten days to the big event, how is Lelia coping?”
“Frankly, I haven’t seen her since last Thursday, this ceremony preparation gig seems to be a 24/7 activity. Haven’t seen Ael either, come to think of it, or my husband. At least I know Humon made himself scarce on purpose, I should take lessons. How does one manage to avoid the all encompassing interest and care of the wisps?” Lily said.
“I guess that being one, he’s familiar with the drill,” Novis looked at Lily. The latter looked frazzled and worn out. “We need to get you out of here, seriously, take a break!”
“And go where? Have you seen the Vlorian delegation in charge of communications? They’ll find me, I just know it, all I can accomplish is a change of decor for the nagging,” Lily moaned, dejected.
“Better than nothing! Care to visit Soléa?” sister Novis tried to tempt her.
“Not on your life! Endless wisp nagging and those anxiety provoking winds? Why don’t I rub my skin with sandpaper instead, it would be less unpleasant?” Lily snapped.
“Forgot about the winds. How about Neera Four? The ocean songs are soothing,” sister Novis suggested.
“Too dark. Not in the mood for purple skies,” Lily said.
“Ashtar?” Novis continued her tempting offers.
“To do what?” Lily said.
“Nothing, that’s just the point. Everybody does absolutely nothing on Ashtar, it would be a nice change of pace.”
“Too much machinery,” Lily protested.
“Elara?”
“Why would you chose a planet with no atmosphere?”
“It has a beautiful view.”
“Granted we manage to get out of there before its star goes supernova, it looks like it’s going to pop any second now.”
“OK. Veras. It’s sunny, it’s luxuriant,” sister Novis offered.
“It’s overrun by snails,” Lily protested.
“They’re not snails, they are the population. By the time they notice us, we’ll move somewhere else.”
“Thanks, no. Last time I got back home completely covered in slime.”
“Calix?”
“Calix is nice. It looks a little like Vlor, actually, and those harmonizing echoes between the stone formations, what a wonderful sound phenomenon!” Lily gave away her desired destination, without wanting to.
“Don’t tell me you miss Vlor!” sister Novis couldn’t believe her ears.
“Oh, how I long for the olden times when the eternal mists were just fog! I could cliff jump, it was quiet, I could be there by myself to sort out my thoughts…” Lily waxed nostalgic.
“You know, I didn’t think I’d say this but you and the wisps probably deserve each other. How can you miss Vlor, you can’t escape Vlor in death!” Novis said, perplexed.
“The old Vlor, the one without nagging clouds,” Lily clarified.
“Hey, I have an idea: go to Vlor and take Purple and sister Joseph with you. I feel you need some advice and companionship!” Novis laughed at her.
“I would have to spend all my time with the Tagas cloud, they wouldn’t dream of breaking protocol and allowing me to roam alone,” Lily sighed.
“Sounds exciting,” sister Novis couldn’t contain a giggle.
“Calix would be nice,” Lily reconsidered. “We could grab some of those fuzz balls the wind carries along the canyons. They’re purple,” she suggested.
“We promised sister Joseph we wouldn’t bring any more, she doesn’t want to overcrowd their habitat,” said Novis.
“Great, let’s go,” Lily got up, kind or excited about the trip, but was met at the door by Roberta, Mary Francis and a group of wisps who wanted to quickly clarify a few last minute changes. They wanted to make sure there was plenty of time left for the approval process, they didn’t want to rush the meetings, or miss out on any opinions.
“Well,” Novis thought, “if Lily doesn’t go to Vlor…”
The wisps surrounded Lily with a plethora of details, coordination items and approval requests. She looked so at ease among them, taking charge of the process immediately, confident and purposeful, that she made sister Novis uncomfortable.
“Look at her, she’d gone full wisp,” sister Roberta whispered in Novis’s ear.
“I don’t know what to say, at least she’s comfortable among them, better her than me,” sister Novis replied, unconvinced.
Landing Bay, Terra Two, July 16th, 3245
My dear child,
Everybody has a dream growing up. Do you know what mine was? I wanted to be an astronaut. My parents indulged my musings when I was really young, but as soon as I reached high school age and still carried around astrophysics manuals and talked about basic training and fitness standards they felt it was their duty to channel my efforts into an endeavor with some likelihood of success. I have to confess that I wasn’t an easy child: I had whims, demanding preferences and an altogether daunting stubbornness that ensured efforts had to be doubled for any activity that required my cooperation.
I certainly never agreed that being an astronaut was not in the stars for me (no pun intended), despite my parents’ pleas that my five foot ninety eight pound frame could not withstand the weight of the equipment and the rigors of basic training, not to mention the challenges one might encounter in outer space. They explained that getting anything but an A plus in physics (a feat that seemed impossible for me) was in itself proof that I was not cut out for this field and I was wasting both mine and their time and resources chasing after the wind.
My mother was a teacher, so she made a lesson plan from all the physics curriculum, pointing out that if I ever managed to master it she would consider the crazy pie in the sky idea and try to persuade my father. She was just trying to prove a point, but I took her at face value and studied until I could recite all the material in my sleep. My little brother was the only witness to the long hours I spent at night learning the lessons under my blanket with a dim flashlight as my only light source. He didn’t understand why I was doing it, but he worshiped me and assisted my efforts in every way he could: he kept watch for lights out signals, he did my chores for me when I was too tired, he brought me hot cocoa when I got discouraged by failures and he listened to my dreams.
Because he never questioned the possibility of my becoming an astronaut, which he thought was the greatest thing in the world, I weaved my web of dreams with him, and the more stories I told and the more I went into details of what I envisioned, the higher the probability of achieving my dream appeared.
When I turned nineteen I explained to my parents that I will either be an astronaut or I won’t do anything at all, and knowing my intractable personality they relented. I filled out all my paperwork, set up appointments for the standard endurance tests, registered for the theoretical exams, gave it my best shot and got a mountain of rejection letters to show for my efforts. If you are curious, the rejection letters pretty much pointed out that despite my praiseworthy enthusiasm for this daring human endeavor, my five foot ninety eight pound frame was not suitable for carrying even the weight of the basic equipment, and besides, even if it were, my command of astrophysics was average at best. The committee suggested a few career choices that would better fit my physique and knowledge base, wished me luck and never looked at my credentials again. I would lie if I said I wasn’t devastated: this had been my dream from the moment I opened my eyes to the world and it felt like the entire universe fell on it, crushing it to pieces. My little brother was always by my side, comforting me in my sorrow and bringing new boxes of tissue when I ran out.
He had been so devoted to my dream that he was even more upset than I at our parents, the committee and everyone who said it was for the best that I failed, because now I got to put my efforts into something worthwhile and forget this nonsense; at some point I didn’t even know anymore who was comforting whom in this setting.
If you don’t believe in life’s endless reserves to surprise you, listen up, here comes the good part. Because I was more stubborn than a mule (my father’s quote) and didn’t consider under any circumstances doing anything else with my life, my parents decided that an internship of hard physical labor would teach me better than any other life lesson why I had to accept my limitations like every normal human being on the planet (again, in my father’s words).
He strongly believed it was his duty to guide me and because it had become clear that my charmingly non-cooperating mood was not going to provide any positive outcomes, he took it upon himself to find said internship for me. This turned out to be a lot harder than he thought: nobody needed summer laborers in our day and age, all the hard tasks were already automated and tiny astrophysics enthusiasts with a bad attitude were not at the top of the wish list for any potential employer.
He wasn’t dissuaded, (after all where do you think I got the stubbornness?), and kept searching until he stumbled upon this add in the paper, from a convent in Perpignan searching for a person with a good science background to help out both in the experimental fields and in the lab. He immediately set up the trip and sent me there. I was furious. My brother took my side in protest, threatening to run away from home if I were to go and risking a timeout in the process, but our good fight was lost: my parents took me to Perpignan, dumped me at the door with a small piece of luggage and left.
“Agriculture!”, I thought, livid with rage. “Of all the activities to waste my time with, they chose agriculture!’ In all my life I’d never managed to keep a potted plant alive, not to mention work successfully as a horticulturist: I didn’t have the skills, the knowledge or the good will to make things work, which ensured that any expectation of success in this field was laughable at best.
Despite my growing discontent, it dawned on me that I was no better equipped to function as a horticulturist than I was to become an astronaut, and started to see the humor in life that one has a hard time finding when one takes one’s aspirations too seriously.
You know the sisters, but people change over such long periods of time, especially when placed in this paradise where everything is possible. It is hard to keep a morose attitude in the face of such a blessed life, even though God knows sister Joseph managed. Back then, though, everybody was a little rougher around the edges and my attitude certainly didn’t endear me to them, so my chore list always featured the pick of the crop of delightful activities: I tilled, I carried dirt, I dug holes for the trees and trenches for the vines, but most of all I got the pointless task of filling plot after barren depressing plot with this wretched mix of powdered brick and concrete bits and I swear to you I thought the sisters were just trying to wear down my pigheadedness with pointless and exhausting manual labor. As far as the lab work was concerned, the only experiments I ever ran there were painstaking soil tests, activity that required skills so much below my level of expertise that I literally took offense to it.
The sisters ignored me, for the most part, with the exception of sister Joseph, who took it upon herself to bring me down a peg or two on the scale of self-centeredness and uppity attitude and kept me on a steady diet of the diatribes we all know and love.
I was marking the days until my ordeal was to be over on the wall next to my bed, like one would while subjected to an unjust confinement like that. Two days before my “release”, as I was pushing wheelbarrows full of brick dirt around the lots, I overheard Seth argue excitedly with sister Joseph about the amount of potassium in the soil: the sister had tried to grow tomatoes in the wretched mix, an activity I found as pointless as anything else in that crazy place, and the plants weren’t showing any sign of thriving. I thought to myself that I could have told her it wasn’t going to happen before she even started and spared her the wasted effort. Somewhere in the discussion, though, the word Terra-forming popped up and my hearing grew sharper to catch the rest.
I couldn’t make up the entire story at first, I had to patch it together from listening in to bits and pieces of conversations, but when it finally dawned on me what the work on this little farm was about my heart immediately flung into excitement and panic. How was I going to convince my family to allow me to stay longer without bringing up the magic words “space exploration” which seemed to doom everything they were associated with to the pile of denied requests?
Fortunately for me I didn’t have to do anything at all, because Seth pleaded with my parents to let me stay another year. Putting the best of her persuasive qualities forward, she argued there was so much work to do, and they were so short staffed, and I was showing such glorious progress while at the same time making a worthy contribution to society that surely another year of building strength, agricultural knowledge and character could only benefit both sides. The words Terra-forming never made it into the conversation, an omission I’m still grateful for to this day.
The second year I was a different person: I worked my fingers to the bone to set everything in place just right and wore down the lab glassware with obsessively repetitive soil tests, and I’m telling you this just in case you weren’t convinced that knowing why you do something changes everything from your attitude to your stamina and your expectations of positive outcomes.
When the time came for Seth to pick a team for the maiden voyage to Terra Two there was never a question whether I was going to be selected or not, and I didn’t even consider the possibility that I might be left behind. I was chosen the moment I stepped foot in that strange old building with my little luggage, my bad attitude and my extensive but completely useless knowledge of astrophysics. It turns out they do make equipment for a five foot ninety eight pound frame, especially one that packed a lot of muscle from carrying around wheelbarrows full of dirt for two whole years.
After the shuttle left the solar system and we got into deep space I occasionally woke up thinking that I was still in the bedroom I shared with my little brother, and expected to hear him shuffle in his sheets and whisper at me to find out if I was awake, and my old self relived the sinking feeling in my stomach that my dream was never going to come true. You get so used to expect defeat and obstacles that even after you overcome them their ghosts still haunt you with memories of failures that never happened.
I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether fate smiled upon me, God answered my prayers, or simply coincidence led me to my desired future, but whatever it was, I am grateful. I got to see as much of the universe as I dared to explore, this strange and wondrous universe that never ceases to surprise me, and I owe it all to a pile of brick dust with little crumbles of cement mixed in.
I live an impossible dream, my dear child, and I want you to live your dreams too, impossible or otherwise. What else is this life for if not for making your dreams come true?
Your loving,
Sister Novis
