Eye of the Beholder

Chapter 1.5 The plan

Cern, of course, was Sedna's father, and was still quite protective of her, even after all her experience flying her drone all over the world. And of course he also knew that she was her own great-grandmother Sedna, Dema's grandmother, who he remembered well. But still, he could not feel other than fatherly toward her, and her high-spirited approach to life sometimes gave him pause. So it was that, even though it was only a drone she'd be flying to the Moon and Mars along with Newt, he wanted to be as sure as he could be that she would be okay, and hadn't overlooked anything important. So he tried to ask all the hard questions.

"Now, your plan is to go to the Moon first to learn what you can about the caverns there, and then on to Mars to explore the possibilities that they present, have I got that right?"

"Yes you do, Dad," she answered. "And we'll be fully prepared to abandon the drones if we have to, if they get buried in a tube cave-in or something extreme like that. We'll be fine. And we'll see you here every day, so we'll keep you up to date on how it's going."

At this point Marian spoke up. "Sedna, Newt, I have to ask. I'm a biologist, not a space scientist, so I've never pretended to understand how this business of flying drones to Mars is supposed to work. Visiting the space gardens and even the Moon doesn't seem too much for me, but Mars is a lot farther away. Even if you fly there when it's as close to us as it gets, it's going to get a whole lot farther away than that before it comes close again. Won't that make it really hard to stay in touch with your drones?

Newt said, "Marian, I am a space scientist, or at least I've been pretending I'm one for a long time, and I can't really answer your question very well. When I went to school, we were taught that nothing could go faster than light, and even light can take over an hour to get from here to Mars and back. But now we have QAR, and in the Q there's no time at all. I know that's true, and we can count on it, but actually how it can be that way is beyond me."

Ray spoke up. "Most computer people think the Q is a search engine. But if it is, no one has cracked how the algorithm works."

There was silence in the room for a while, as everyone contemplated this mystery that in a few short years had changed everything, realizing that they were still adjusting to it.