...And We Will Have Snow

Chapter 5-5: Cosmos

Karen and Cheryl had slipped quietly into the lounge and taken seats while Sedna was speaking. Now they applauded lightly. Sedna blushed.

Tengri said, "Nice summary. And what you propose to do is?"

Sedna turned to her co-conspirators. They both offered her looks of innocent expectation. She rolled her eyes at them, then turned back to Tengri and said, "We'll carry on. Tell it like it is. But keep in mind as we do that we are walking the knife-edge between Eagle and Raven, and need to stay balanced between the two. This isn't the same as the pseudo-Eagle idea of balance as stasis, a vision of some imagined past or present golden age. This is about a balance that leans toward a future that will be different than anyone can imagine, even Raven.

"The telling must use the QAR to stimulate the Q dream, and open the dreamers to the possibilities available in every moment. The telling itself will celebrate the material, which will look like an appeal to the Raven. But the QAR stimulus will evoke the spirit, and the dreamer's own feedback will engage the Q and what it has to offer in the dream. The dream will become greater than the input, the story greater than the words that tell it, and will be unique to each dreamer. The dreamers will emerge from it with their own dreams expanded and renewed."

Tengri smiled and said, "Go for it!"

Sedna looked at Cheryl and Karen. They were smiling too. They could tell that whatever doubts Sedna had before were gone. The three of them got up and went out the door, talking excitedly, re-energized.

Tengri leaned back in his chair, brought his hands together and raised them to his smiling lips in an unconscious gesture that suggested calm contemplation. His eyes were glowing.

So the making of Sedna's QAR presentation continued. They began to call their project Cosmos, carrying on the tradition Carl Sagan had begun some fifty years earlier. This time the sense of wonder was enhanced by a more subtle dream symphony than had been possible before. In each phase of the production they invited anyone interested to come in and lend their own interpretations to the dream, adding to the richness of the background theme.

As always, Ray provided technical backup and support. Except that one day he did not respond immediately to their call for aid. They went looking for him physically, assuming he had taken off his lenses and wasn't in the loop.

They found him in the lab room adjoining his office. Jack was with him and they had a big box open on the floor, the lab table littered with parts that were hard to describe except that most of them were black. Ray was holding something close to his face. He was wearing his lenses but it was obvious he had blinked them to microscope mode. So that was why they couldn't connect to him.

When the girls walked in the boys turned to them with big smiles and Ray said, "We got one!" His eyes looked huge through the lenses, but he rapidly blinked them back to normal.

"One what?" Cheryl had to ask.

"A droid, a golem, a drone. Whatever you want to call it, we got one!" He waved the thing he was holding. It could have been part of a robot arm.

Karen pushed her way in next to Jack and reached for a part that looked interesting. Jack slapped her hand playfully but she picked it up anyway. "Did it come this way or did you guys take it apart?"

Ray said, "It came this way. Apparently it's illegal to sell or ship an assembled one, so they break them down and sell them as unidentified electronic parts."

Karen turned the part she was holding different ways, as if trying to figure out where it might go. "Did they ship an assembly manual with it?"

"No, but that's easy enough to find on line if you know where to look."

Cheryl asked, "Who's the 'they' you got it from?"

"Not sure, but my guess is he's an ex-military dude. It's like Tengri said, the drones are probably stacked in a warehouse somewhere, so top-secret it's impossible to keep a tight inventory. If a few go missing now and then, who would know?"

"So now you're dealing in contraband?"

Ray grinned. "Yup!"

Jack said quietly, "It isn't the first time." Karen rolled her eyes.

Sedna asked, "So how soon do you think you'll be wearing this to dinner?"

Ray laughed. "I hope I never get that confused. The lounge, maybe. But it could be a while. Assuming we get it all together and everything works, we don't have a mini Sun Bottle. We're told those were all removed and stored somewhere else."

"More contraband?"

"We can only hope. But we'll use batteries if we have to."