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 about using 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!
“Come here, sweetheart!” the sister enticed Josephine and the latter batted its wings leisurely to jump on her shoulder. “Say ‘hi’ to the nice people!” Joseph encouraged and Josephine uttered a random sequence of little screeches from a few of her heads.
“Who’s a good dragon?” the sister asked.
“Screech-screech!” Josephine replied, fluffing the frills around her heads.
“Shiver me timbers! Now the only things she’s missing are an eye patch and a peg leg!” Sarah thought.
“I’m not missing them at all,” sister Joseph frowned at the latter, to the confusion of the visitor who wasn’t wearing an interlink bracelet. “Would you care for a tour of the Institute, doctor?” she graciously asked the guest, then left with Josephine, the doctor and his son. The lizard’s tail swayed gently in the breeze while a dozen of her eyes looked back reproachfully at Sarah. Sarah got annoyed that the dragon stole her thunder and was now conducting the tours but slightly relieved that she got an hour to herself to tinker with brews in the apothecary.
No such luck, though, because when she arrived at the shop she found Gemma running a large experiment that required virtually all the glassware and equipment. The teenager smiled apologetically when she saw Sarah come in.
“I’m making something for Jimmy and Jenna, they must miss home!” she said.
“And home surely misses them,” Sarah thought, taking a moment to remember that Jimmy and Jenna were not children anymore. “What are you making?” she asked curiously.
“A globe shaped terrarium with miniature Terra Two plants,” she said. “It’s completely self-sufficient, it should be able to keep itself in balance indefinitely.”
“Oh, I see you even included Purple, they’ll be pleased to send a delegation!” Sarah smiled. In the middle of the Lilliputian landscape a minute graft of the bean plant flourished, half green, half purple, just like the original. “What’s with all the dirty glassware?” she asked, puzzled.
“Soil, air and water testing, the chemical balance has to be perfect,” Gemma said, and that’s when Sarah noticed that the miniature planet had rivulets and lakes and tides in its oceans, and up in its atmosphere fluffy clouds gathered, releasing sudden showers over the toy sized rain forest.
“What, no cats?” the redhead joked. “You know, there are a lot of visiting horticulturists in the Institute right now, maybe it would be a good idea to have a presentation of your project before you send it to Soléa, I don’t think anybody ever made something like this before.”
With all the back and forth between Terra Two and Soléa the solenoid attained the well worn look of an old favorite sweater that gets softer and more comfortable after many washes.
Restless parents found every reason imaginable to slide through time back and forth with warm clothing, fresh baked pies or favorite and woefully unavailable fruit.
Lily and her exploration team were past the eye-roll age, even though not by much, and wore down the device just as much from the other end, coming back often to Terra Two to grab the music they forgot to pack, their sculpting tools, their scuba gear.
Because the dragons were quite friendly, though not trustful enough for contact, some of Sarah’s kids made regular trips home to bring them delightful succulent treats from their planet, so different from the dragons’ scraggly diet and so flavorful in comparison. Despite Lily’s impossible to enforce ban on bringing alien food to upset their regular fare, Jimmy snuck back to Terra Two on a regular basis to bring fresh vegetables he pretended to eat himself, so many that he had to print a couple of extra refrigerators to store the kale and lettuce the blue lizards liked so much.
Their accommodations were modest to say the least because it was decided Soléa’s environment was too pristine to be developed and it was to be disturbed as little as possible. The children had never seen a wilderness like this, born as they were in a world made by hand, a place designed from the bare ground and filled with plants and animals brought from Earth. Soléa was rugged and cold like the top of the mountains, worn by winds and overwhelmed by the vastness of its deep blue sky.
Its vegetation was low and cast almost no shadows on the archaic rock formations and its topography looked frozen in time shortly after the ground hardened, harsh like it had just emerged from the bowels of its molten core and showing strangely little wear for a planet haunted by the winds. Everything had a blue hue on Soléa, mostly because of the refraction in its thick atmosphere, but not entirely so. There was blue and azure in the rocks themselves from the aluminum salt deposits, and the peculiar prismatic structure of the dragons’ skins only let out the color of the sky.
Here and there in long dried river beds the water had carved and polished the soluble rocks into giant sculptural masterpieces, round, hollow and twisted like frozen waves, with stunningly beautiful grain hugging their curves. Far in the distance tall limestone needles glowed violet against the horizon like a stone forest.
The scarce vegetation rarely covered the ground and their team carved no paths through the bristle, they just walked around it following the tracks of the dragons to the best watering holes, the thickest clumps of Oma trees or the soft sandy shores of the mirror lakes where the blue residents of the planet built their nests undisturbed.
Flocks of dragons flew majestically overhead watching the newcomers with tolerant dignity almost as if they wanted to guide them on their way and show them their beautiful world. Everything seemed quieter in the blue land, everything but the calls of the dragons and the song of the wind.
The children of Terra Two unconsciously softened their unrestrained vigor and assumed the reverence one finds in the depths of a cathedral as the blinding radiance of the sun descended upon them through the thick sky and wrapped their shoulders in light like in a blanket.
The unrelenting brightness of the solitary sun didn’t feel that unusual to the sisters, who had grown up on Earth, but it felt very intimidating to the tanned and care free children of the tropical forest born to warmth and rain and they missed the rosy chocolate skies and the gentle gems of their two suns like one misses the roof over their head when one has to sleep under the open sky.
Soléa’s sky made them restless and overwhelmed them with its vastness like an unknown depth of a sea and sometimes when they were almost asleep they were jolted awake by the feeling of falling in it.
