...And We Will Have Snow

Part 5: The New Ravens

He'll sit in a barn to keep himself warm and hide his head under his wing.

The world turned.

Winters turned to summers, and somehow the winters got longer while the summers got hotter. It isn't the average, it's the extremes, they said. Extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme storms, extreme floods. Parts of the world were being buried under snow, while other parts were getting too hot to live in. Some places had to be abandoned due to floods, while others became too dry for anything to grow.

Still, in the midst of this, many people thrived. Wherever true disaster struck, the UN disaster relief teams would deliver Sun Domes, now the universal symbol of aid. No longer did such aid take the form of a few blankets, a few meals, a few tents, and the squalor of a refugee camp where the homeless could be herded to wait with waning hope for the world to decide what to do with them. Hope now arrived in the form of giant balloons that would descend on the spots where those camps would have been and bring food and shelter, water and power for as long as people wanted to stay in them.

If Sun Dome balloons were the new symbol of hope, the Sun Bottle was the new symbol of freedom. Everywhere people were going off the grid. Homes and whole cities were installing Sun Bottles. With unlimited electrical power came heat when it was too cold, cooling when it was too hot. With power, water could be extracted from the very air, or purified if it came from any other source. With power food could be grown in a local Farm Bottle, or trucked in from another place, along with whatever goods were needed.

Sure, power could be collected from the sun and wind. The Sun Domes themselves were solar energy collectors, both active and passive. But the Sun Bottles were far less troublesome to maintain, delivered far more power from far less space, and never went off line. Everything else was simply backup that was rarely needed.

Old power stations of every type, from hydro to carbon-burning, had been abandoned. Their grids were repurposed for communications, linking local wireless to ultrabroadband longline wires, keeping homes and communities connected, all networked together in the worldwide web. With personal power packs, anyone could choose to be alone, but no one had to be alone. The links were always available.

The world began to seem as close to perfect as it could possibly get. But it was far too complex to be perfect in any absolute sense. There were always intersections of different channels of growth, where one channel would challenge another. Some people took even this as a sign of perfection, or at least perfectibility, as long as the challenges didn't get too physical.

What were the challenges? Ah, that's where our story picks up again. Bear's Sun Dream had done its job. In fact it had gone viral. There was now a worldwide community of Sun Dome dwellers who had adopted the Dream, become quasi-shamans in their understanding and respect for the needs of their domes.

Somehow the story of the Dream's development had gotten out. How could it not? There was really no way to hide it once people began to understand what it meant to access the Q. The world fell in love with the story of how Bear and Xayna used QAR to bring their Dream to the world, and many dome dwellers began calling themselves the New Haida. Bear and Xayna became symbols of this new Dome culture. They were invited to visit some of the domes, in person or in QAR. They didn't disappoint. Their enthusiasm and humility came to represent for many the hope of the future.

Many, but not all. There were those who remained suspicious of the intentions of the backers of the Walden Biodiversity Institute, in spite of the benefits they had made possible. Even so, most of them absorbed the underlying message and took to heart the need for respect and reciprocity in maintaining their domes. They simply valued their new independence too much to jump firmly onto any bandwagon. Most of these went their way quietly, but some were more vocal about it. They began to call themselves the New Ravens. It was known that Bear and Xayna were both counted among the Ravens by the Haida people, and some of the New Ravens called them out on this, suggesting they were traitors to the Raven side. So their roles as ambassadors took on a new flavor, and they went on goodwill missions trying to bring the true scope of their vision to such people. Most of these visits were made by QAR from Xayna's home in Haida Gwaii, where they could use island scenes as their backdrop, but occasionally Bear would make a trip in person. He preferred to spare Xayna the hardship of travel. She still had her duties to Ghandl and her family, so she concurred. She was always with him in spirit.

With this mixed success of the Dome Dream keeping Bear busy, Sedna decided to conspire with Karen and Cheryl on a QAR World Dream, to infuse the dream of Earth with its spiritual aspect, just as Bear and Xayna had done for the domes. It would be the Dome Dream writ large, raising understanding of human dependence on the physical character of the land, air and oceans as well as on the biosphere, with subliminal overtones of deeper relationships. It was her hope that this would ease Bear's task. Sedna, being young and vivacious, would be the speaker for the dream, while Karen and Cheryl would provide technical backup.

As they practiced their presentation, it began with Sedna's introduction, quickly segueing into sweeping views of the planet, plunging in for intimate exposure to storm and lightning, wind, rain, and angry seas, forests at peace or ablaze, as the details were described. Sedna looked young and vivacious, but she began to sound old and wise.

Sedna spoke thus: "Here at the Walden Biodiversity Institute, with the aid of our access to the still-mysterious realm we call the Q, we have been studying the true nature of nature for many years. What seemed the wildest speculation when we began has come to pass. We have a much better understanding of the way things work than we did even a few decades ago. It seems important now to share them with the world. But we want to do so not in the form of dry research papers, but as a shared dream."