...And We Will Have Snow

Chapter 4-11: The Farm Dream

Bear and Xayna worked their way methodically through the entire farm dream several times, each time examining their own experience of it and adding whatever they felt was needed to raise it from a sterile sight-and-sound recording to include more subtle details. Bear would first go to an area of the actual farm structure there on the island, wearing his lenses to link him to the QAR dream structure. The island farm was not a full scale dome farm, but over the years it had been upgraded so that every detail was similar and he could easily imagine himself to be in a real dome. The QAR augmented whatever he was looking at with the appropriate peripheral details of the bigger structure.

When he stood still and felt the movement of air on his skin, sensed its temperature, smelled the mix of aromas it carried, he focused his awareness on it until the QAR had picked it up. Xayna was with him in the dream, would pick it up from him and help him identify the sources of the variations. Ray at his console would feel the new sensation through the feedback from his lenses and often joined them in the QAR farm dream for a moment, revelling in the experience and helping to lock in the recording.

There were more subtle signals, emotional responses that the biological presences evoked, and Xayna often knew better than Bear what to expect and how to bring them into focus in the dream. There was the all but invisible presence of insects, mites and other tiny creatures, in the air, on the plants, in the soil, going about their chores. The even more invisible presence of microbial life was doing its part, adding to the aromas and also adding to the more subtle senses that were available.

Each plant had its own unique personality, its body language, conveyed by its shape, the thrust of its new growth, the stage of its development. Observing these details Bear and Xayna made awareness of them part of the dream. The fish and other creatures had their stages of development as well, their own metamorphoses, and these too were captured in the dream.

Together all this became an orchestra, a symphony, with a powerful emotional impact, each colony of microbes, each flourishing plant, adding its variation to the theme. And the overall theme was simply life, ebullient life, life supporting life, each little ensemble growing, bearing fruit, swelling to a crescendo and then fading, giving way to the next performance of the never-ending choir.

On every level, around every corner, was revealed a new shape, a new flash of color, a new instrument, a new player. It could seem wild, untamed, a cacophony, but there was an underlying harmony to it all, and the theme persisted. Life, pure, exultant life, revelling in the abundant flow of energy to bring unending variety to the self-contained world of the Dome, to make of itself a silent song to the joy of creation.

Bear and Xayna realized that they were done. The Dome Dream in the QAR had become every shaman's dream of the true meaning and purpose of the world. With this dream in place each dome could encapsulate the realm of Gaia, become another seed to bear its own fruit and help the dream flourish.

Increasingly Ray could not contain himself about what he was witnessing, and brought Cheryl and the others into the QAR lab to experience it with him. As they did, they inevitably added their own awareness, their own resonances with the Q, to the wealth of data stored in the QAR dome recording, enhancing the richness available to be added to each scene.

Drake in particular was thrilled, pronouncing it the culmination of his own dreams, the ultimate, undeniable testament to his long held beliefs. Marian was perhaps more pragmatic, but equally thrilled to see the yearnings of her heart made manifest for all.

The field teams too, Dema and Cern, Naga and Juan, Rosita and Ryan, Karen and Jack, were all regular visitors, and helped enormously to flesh out the sense of the entire dome, along with its occupants, as an organic whole. With this sense of completeness the urgency of their demands to let them use it in the field increased.

Tengri too no longer had reservations. Like Drake, the entire Dream was a realization of his own vision, a child of his mind that had matured and couldn't, shouldn't, be restrained from making its own way in the world. Without fanfare, he turned it loose.