...And We Will Have Snow

Chapter 4-3: Bear's Report

In the morning no one wanted to wait, so while Bear indulged in a long leisurely breakfast, with everyone who was cooking or even pouring coffee offering him a refill, he told them all they wanted to know about his adventures. There was not much for him to add to Ryan's report on swimming with the sea lions, so most of it was about Haida Gwaii and the Haida people, especially Xayna and Ghandl.

Especially Xayna. Everyone smiled at the dreamy look that came over his face when he said her name, were fascinated by the way he pronounced it in the Haida way and made it sound like a ray of sunshine. He held back on the more private parts, but let them into his dream as he walked the shores with her, evoking the gray background of the busy sea. They shared the excitement of inspecting a tide pool where mussels gathered, wheeling gulls raucously reporting their discoveries in the water and rocks below. They heard Bear calling to the seals and getting their reports on what fish were running with the tide, what was hiding in the waving kelp. The listeners turned with him as he looked up at the tall trees foresting the rugged slopes, walking hand in hand with Xayna as they rounded each new point to see what vistas lay beyond.

Soon enough it was done. Bear wiped his mouth with a napkin and turned to Sedna and Tengri as the rest of his audience departed. Sedna busied herself with picking up Bear's dishes and cleaning up the kitchen as Tengri led him away.

The walls of Tengri's office displayed photos of Sun Dome installations all over the world, many of them holographic, several that could be activated to play videos of landings. While Bear looked at them newly Tengri said, "Already there is history recorded here. In your young life the world has never been without the domes, but you have seen them grow from a novelty to an accepted way of life.

"This has happened again and again over the last century or so. Railroads, electricity, automobiles, movies, records, radio, TV, computers, internet, cell phones, drones and driverless vehicles, now Sun Bottles and Sun Domes. Each time it has created a divide between those who didn't know what to make of the newness and those who were born with it and never knew its absence. Each time there has been an impulse among the elders to keep to old ways.

"You are the first of the Dome generation. Even Sedna, who was born with you, is too much her great-grandmother to share your perspective. You are the first to have accepted them without the wonder at their newness the rest of us have. You and your generation accept them as you accept all the newness of the world.

"But many of your generation have been raised by those who have found this newness hard to accept. They need a voice to speak to them in the language of this new world they will inherit. From what you have conveyed of your Haida experience, it appears you have found that voice.

"So tell me if you can, what will it say, and how will it say it?"

Bear considered only for a moment how to respond. These were the questions he had been mulling over all during his long trek from Haida Gwaii.

"What the new voice must say is something very old. But it must be said in a new way, one that speaks to the new people individually, without the distraction or interference of old voices. The old voices will urge caution and adherence to old ways as you said. The time for that is gone. The pace of change is too fast, not all of it man-made. The only constant that must hold is the constant of life itself. Not any particular form of life, not what it has been, but what can be."

"It sounds like you already know how you want to accomplish this."

"I have an idea. But I will need Ray's help to make it work."

"Then you will have it."

Many domes had been deployed in the years since Bear was born, and the WBI directors had frequently called for members of the team to help sort out technical difficulties. Ray kept in touch with all of them via QAR, Q-enhanced Augmented Reality, which he was still refining. The field teams had been expanded over the years by linking up with technical assistants from the companies that built the critical components. Sun bottles, farm bottles, apartment rings, domes and flight systems all had their prime contractors who responded to problems with their units. When problems involved the interfaces between these sub-systems, help usually started with QAR meetings, but often the direct personal touch was still needed. No amount of modeling could substitute for being there and observing the situation directly.

Bear had come to view a dome community as a newly evolved super-organism. He didn't expect other people to want to view it that way, but it helped him understand how the communities related to each other. There were many analogies to be drawn, none perfect. In fact it was the failure of analogies to capture the nature of interdome relations that defined these relations best. His discussions of this with Tengri were helpful, and they began to see how defining them in this light would help dome communities define themselves. It was this that Bear began to explore in QAR with Ray, building a model that others would be able to inhabit and internalize individually, privately, and then share within their own domes until a sense of self and community emerged. As with individual people, this group sense had to emerge from within.