Eye of the Beholder

Chapter 2.2 Q Dream Plans

Where she led him was out to the island's farm bottle.

"Now that we have our link to Mars, I want to start thinking more about what it might take to set up a colony there. We know they won't do a lot of farming on the Moon because the gravity is so low. They'll probably use orbiting bola farms to grow what they need. But Mars gravity may be enough. I want to talk to Marian about that."

They found Marian busy pruning the pawpaw trees. "They can get too tall to pick the fruit easily," she said. "It's the way they just keep coming and you have to pick them as soon as they ripen. Because they go bad so fast, high ones are more of a nuisance than with other fruits. The trees don't seem to mind."

"We wanted to ask you if you've thought about farming on Mars. You know we plan to go check out the lava tubes, as possible natural shelters. That means for farms too."

"Well, I have thought about it a bit. I know about the lava tubes, and a lot of what we do with the farm bottles could be converted to work in them."

"The gravity difference won't be a problem?"

"Not really. Most farm produce doesn't grow tall enough to be affected much by the difference. Anything that gets too leggy in the lower gravity could be trimmed back, like what I'm doing here with the pawpaws."

"The natural tubes will be mostly horizontal, rather than vertical like the aquaponic farms."

"Yes, but there are ways to work around that. Instead of the vertical drip straight through all the layers like we have here, we might need to have staggered layers where we pipe the drainage water back and forth between different tiers. That way we can get the same system to work under a shorter ceiling."

"Wow, that sounds perfect!" said Newt. "At least for now there should be plenty of tunnel space. If the population ever starts to overcrowd the tubes, they can put vertical farm bottles on the surface then."

Marian gave them each a bagful of ripe pawpaws from the branches she had pruned off, to take back to the house. "What you don't eat yourselves you can drop off at the kitchen," she told them.

Sedna did eat one, and Newt ate two of them. "I love these things. It's a little like eating fat bananas," he said.

When they dropped the rest off at the kitchen they of course had to tell everyone there what Marian was up to, and then about their Mars plan. Excitement about that grew, and Sedna began to assure everyone who asked that they'd hear all about it at dinner. Which they did up to a point, but dinner is mostly about dinner of course, so the rest was deferred to the evening in the lounge.

Later, when everyone was getting settled in the lounge, Ray asked Newt when they planned to go. "I want to make sure your drones are ready," he said.

"We'll do a Q visit first," said Newt. "Conjunction with Mars is a few months away. We want to limit the drones' exposure to space."

"Good idea. People have lost drones flying too close to the Sun. Which you might be tempted to do if you tried to go now."

"We know about that, and other hazards, too," said Newt. "Like stray asteroids and unexpected bursts of Solar radiation. A lot of people don't realize that most sunspot radiation isn't aimed at Earth. We only get a tiny fraction of it."

"Kind of like the old sailing days on Earth," said Jack. "Ocean storms could be happening anywhere. It was just bad luck to run into one."

"Lloyd's of London got rich off that," added Karen.

"So you've been doing Q dreams?" said Kore.

"That's right. That's how we got our Mars connection," Sedna replied.

Newt said, "Yeah, so far it's all Q data. I don't really understand what that is or where it comes from. But I trust Sedna."

"Newt, you were with me the whole time!" put in Sedna. "You know what I know."

Newt did not look very much reassured.

Tengri said, "You're both right, of course." That got everyone's attention.

"Let me remind you of something I'm sure you all understand intuitively, although you may not have given it much thought," he said. "This is especially true for the shamans among us."

"But with QAR it has become apparent that what shamans know is accessible far more widely," Sedna responded.

Tengri nodded, and continued. "We are each at the point of our own unique cone of perception. Within physical reality.

"I mean perception broadly, what the shamans call seeing, encompassing much more than just what the eyes detect. We can't as a rule see through the eyes and minds of others, and even when we do our perspective remains our own. What we each call now is our perceptual present time.

"But we know that time is its own dimension, helping to define the spacetime whole. Probably you've all seen spacetime diagrams, representations of  four dimensional cones of possible perception that extend into both the past and the future, joined tip to tip at precisely one point."

Heads bobbed. Everyone seemed to know about that. Tengri went on.

"Each such point is a unique event, a now in spacetime. Each of you is at one such point at any instant, moving from point to point through what we call time. Each now offers available links to all your past nows. Our awareness at any now is limited, usually our attention is quite narrowly focused, but the links make broad changes in awareness available to future nows."

Fewer head bobs. This take on it was not as familiar. Tengri had sensed that.

"Think about it. Our different cones of perception intersect in the past to define what we can know in common with others. Normally that difference is small between us and people we know well. But even in the Q, we can each follow only one path."

That was beginning to make sense to everyone. Tengri gave it a moment, then went on.

"Our Q path, what our minds can know, isn't  constrained by time and space the way our physical existence is. It's even possible to mentally follow a Q path that revisits a point in spacetime that we've touched before. A lot of what we call remembering is like that. But our path is defined by our choices, what points in spacetime are open to our awareness, and which ones we choose to visit."

Sedna was processing this in terms of her World Dream, which she had passed on to others, and the unexpected variety of the reactions it had provoked. She spoke up. 

"I get it. Memory is our mental record of our sequence of choices of points to visit. It's a unique path, not shared or shareable, except as a story we tell, a map we make that allows others to construct and follow a similar path. Sometimes very similar, but never exactly the same."

Tengri nodded his agreement to her, and said, "We are the universe's way of identifying the possible paths through itself. A never-ending, perhaps infinite, process."

Newt said, "Possible paths. So our mental constructs of reality are by their very nature incomplete, in effect toy models of reality? So, is the Q real? Or just another level of approximation?"

Kore remarked, "Mom used to say that the only perfect model is the real thing. No approximation is good enough."

Ray said, "I think of the Q as like a holographic image, but is it reliable?"

Tengri said, "Our individual views are like splinters of the universe hologram. They capture a lot, and imply a lot that they don't capture, but must remain in some sense incomplete."

Newt was still processing all this, but he was at least comforted by the idea that he didn't have to be fully aware of all the possible links that might guide them to Mars. They only had to know that their link to Black Beauty gave them access to the links they needed.

The discussion broke up into a number of side conversations. Marian said, "It's a lot like the pawpaws I've been pruning." Everyone nodded knowingly, but no one really understood quite what she meant by that.