"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 recipes 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 show them 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.
Chapter Twenty Two
Of the Wilderness
They woke up early and gathered their gear in silence, a little chilly in the brisk morning air. The sun was peeking above the horizon making the edge of the planet glow an intense yellow. The dragons had assembled in a circle around the small group, faithful to their ancestral instinct to protect their young. Seen from above their group resembled a gigantic blue flower with its center swarmed by bees.
They finished packing and as they started towards the living boundary the dragons flew out of their way to let them pass opening a gigantic gate made of scales and wings into the sky. The leader of the pack started a V formation and the dragons took off together to guide the humans on their way.
The light was still scarce when they arrived to the gentle hummock projected on the horizon; they strolled quietly following grade and slowly advanced to the top where they stopped to take in the peaceful mirror of the sea, the wavy contours of the hills, the blue green vegetation softening sharp stony edges. The dragons stopped with them, re-forming their protective circle around the youngsters.
Lily had suggested through the interlink to stop and rest. Her peers were so used to this means of communication they didn't even form fully phrased thoughts anymore, they just advanced their intentions in some sort of shorthand, mixing in images and Purple music and making the condensed language almost unrecognizable.
There was no real schedule of activities for this adventure, they had decided at the beginning of the trip to go where the exploration took them. The dragons made things much easier by guiding them to the places they thought most worthy of seeing based on their interests and instincts: clear waters, shel
tered valleys, thick clumps with yummy things to eat.
The group took some soil and rock samples, fed a tiny schist to Purple so the immortals could perform their own analysis and took a much closer look at the low bristle laying at their feet. The rough foliage resembled junipers but on closer look their entire branches consisted of one singular leaf, fringed like an eyelash and twirling around itself all the way to the top. Every so often the plant grew a spiky thorn on the strand, thorn which was really hard to discern by just looking at them but was immediately made evident to the skin if one had the misfortune to brush against it. The vegetation was all the same, as if Soléa had been too lazy to evolve its plant life. The latter only came in two flavors: bristly blue green low growth and cotton candy pastel Oma trees.
You couldn't help but feel peaceful on Soléa, it emanated peace from every rock, body of water and cloud in the sky, but its peacefulness was cold and sparse, elating and chilling the human heart at the same time. No matter how many people were around on the shining blue gem next to the heart of Scorpius one felt alone, in part because the constant winds impeded conversations by dampening every sound, and in part because everything in the landscape felt so solemn and intimidating one was compelled to silence without even realizing it.
Lily had been dreaming about this kind of adventure ever since she could remember and just another habitable planet in a neighboring galaxy was nothing compared to her lofty dreams of space exploration, but even if she wasn't going to admit it Soléa intimidated her. Every time she caught a glance of the biosphere Gemma had made for Jimmy and Jenna her heart was filled with longing for the warmth of home.
For the deep space traveler it was the night sky that made all the difference and she spent months on end sitting outside to watch the stars, trying to recognize familiar constellations, even if some of them were skewed, backwards or upside down, and charting the new ones as fast as she could manage. She felt like Magellan gazing at never before seen stellar fields, proud to give them names, soon becoming as familiar with many of them as an earthly stargazer would be with Ursa Major or the North Star.
The telescope they had brought from Terra Two wasn't the most sophisticated but it still fed Lily's hunger to see behind the stars in front of her, to wonder at constellations she really couldn't see from Earth or Terra Two, just a few tens of light years past the edge of the 'visible universe'.
She gazed at the places past the veil of physical limitations avid to see if the reality beyond was any different, as if it were what her eyes could see and not the unified laws of physics that organized the structure of matter. The stars beyond the 'visibility horizon' looked exactly the same as the ones next to them, maybe a little older due to the added distance and that disappointed her a little.
For a few months they moved around, surrounded by the dutiful dragons who either showed them the way or encircled their group like a living rampart. The travelers didn't pay too much attention to this detail at first, considering it a peculiar habit of the native species and feeling comforted by their protective instincts, and as time went by they ignored the standard circle formation altogether, much in the way one doesn't question the color of the sky.
"Don't you ever wonder what the dragons are trying to protect us from?" Lily asked Jimmy who was sitting next to her and poked at the little camp fire as the sun was getting ready to set. The young man was startled by the question, his mind was wondering back to the home he missed dearly but he couldn't admit it to the others. During evenings like this when the wind reverberated even louder among the rocky cliffs unsettling thoughts made him restless.
"Protect? No... I don't know! Why do you think they're trying to protect us?" he asked, slightly displeased for having been distracted from his ruminations.
As if waiting for a sign, the dragons took flight together, approached the humans, suddenly picked them up in their sharp claws and held them six or seven feet off the ground to the youngsters' absolute panic. The humans couldn't understand this completely unexpected behavior and would have started reflecting on the recklessness of allowing themselves to sit unguarded next to a pack of flying aliens endowed with fangs and claws but all their attention got drawn to the ground below: the sharp edged greenery uprooted itself as if summoned by an unseen force and moved away really fast, leaving the ground completely bare. It waved across the landscape in one sweeping motion and settled down a few hundred feet away where the 'plants' extended their tap roots into the ground and unfurled their sharp edged fringes as if the move never happened at all. The dragons put the humans down gently and went back to their circle formation.
"What just happened?" Jenna managed to articulate, still in shock.
"I guess we can safely assume the bristle is not a plant," Lily hesitantly replied. "Makes you wonder about the Oma trees, too. I wonder what started them off now?"
"Transhumance," Jimmy postulated. "I guess those sharp thorns are not too friendly to the skin. Judging by the dragons' eagerness even tough scales can't handle them very well." He looked at the blue lizards in an attempt to thank them but the reptiles were all fast asleep with their heads hidden under their wings so that the light of the setting sun didn't get through their eyelids.
"How often do you think this happens!?" Jenna asked, seriously disturbed by the strange phenomenon. Lily would have liked to have an answer to that question as she gazed at the bristle field under the clump of Oma trees back in the distance. They looked so innocently plant like that she paused for a second to wonder if they haven't been subjected to a group hallucination but the proof was right in front of her eyes or rather missing from underneath her feet.
"I imagine this is why they build their nests on the beach, no moving razor wire," Jenna continued aggravated. "I feel like I woke up on the set of the Wizard of Oz during the flying monkeys scene. How did they manage to pick us up, they're a fifth our size! We really should pay a lot more attention to details, what if they were hostile?" she continued blabbing to appease her fear.
Lily didn't answer. Like travelers from times long gone she had set sail into the unknown to discover lands of wonder and unexpected quirkiness, not knowing what they'll reveal or if they'll tolerate her presence and just like the old explorers she relied on pluckiness, sheer luck and the prayers and well wishes of her people to go through her travels unscathed. She made a note to self that the dragons were indeed not vegetarian, at least not in the sense humans attached to the term, and hoped they didn't think she might taste yummy. It took the group a lot longer to fall asleep that night even though everyone was exhausted by the long hike and the emotional hullaballoo at the beginning of the evening. They lay on the now barren ground uncomfortably eyeing the dragons and wondering what the lizards were going to do next, but the dragons were sleeping like rocks, accustomed as they were to the periodic annoyance and trying to regain the energy they had expanded in their effort.
***
The news of animals with roots brought sister Joseph back to Soléa faster than the jingle of the ice cream truck lures children to the front door. In two shakes of a lamb's tail she was right there with the exploration team, loaded with research equipment, solar calendar studies and graphs to track the patterns of the phenomenon.
She had left Josephine on Terra Two out of an unspoken concern the dragon might change its mind and prefer the company of its own kind. The sister had gotten used to having her lizard follow everywhere so she missed her pet and was as she announced to the group upon arrival, not in a good mood.
The youngsters gave her space, respectfully, and went about their business trying to stay out of her way as she deliberately canvassed the planet for months searching for evidence of the bristle displacement until the next migration occurred. A small flock of dragons appointed themselves her sentries and shadowed her wherever she went, just like Josephine, but the sister didn't manage to mesmerize any of them, no matter how hard she tried. She gave up eventually, admitting that maybe she and Josephine were me
ant to be; she missed the latter's conversational screeches and even Sarah's loud protests against the lizard's incursions into the vegetable garden.
What the sister found out at the end of two long years of commuting between Terra Two and Soléa was that the bristle moved like clockwork during solstice and equinox following a circular pattern around the planet, always moving east with the prevailing winds in search of rain soaked land where mineral rich water was readily available. She was very eager to find out if the Oma trees were migrating too but unfortunately she couldn't spend any more time away from her duties.
Anyway, after she contemplated the fact that the 'plants' she had brought to acclimate on Terra Two were most likely already migrating, and that between the fragrant cats, the jumping rocks, the children's experiments with the landscape and the talking ocean there was only so much weirdness a visitor could take she sorrowfully left the treasure trove of exobiology on Soléa and went back home to put together a tourist orientation program before somebody got shaken out of their sanity by eerie events.
Sarah was eagerly awaiting her return in sister Roberta's lab and gave the traveler such a warm welcome it made sister Joseph wonder if the redhead had lost her mind. Sarah had been in charge of Josephine for the entire duration of sister Joseph's research trip and the lizard had run her ragged with its whims and its raids on the garden. She gratefully delivered the healthy and plump five headed screecher to its owner and sighed with relief as she watched sister Joseph walk away with Josephine wobbling proudly behind her.
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