Eye of the Beholder

Chapter 1.7 Moon trip

Now that they had their drones ready for the trip, Newt and Sedna began thinking seriously about details.

They were in the room they shared, getting ready for bed. Sedna looked pensive. Newt cocked an eyebrow at her and said, "What?"

She responded slowly, as if she was just arriving from somewhere else. "Tengri reminded me of something."

"What?" again, in a different tone.

"He said all possible concepts of spacetime are potentially available in the Q, without regard to either time or distance. That means we should be able to contact the Moon, or Mars, without the drones."

"Wait a minute. I mean sure, I can pick up my drone again when I've left it in orbit or something, because of the Q link. But that's because I established the link physically before, right? We've been to the Moon with our drones, so maybe we can find that again in the Q now. But Mars? Really? I couldn't even find it in the sky right now without a sky chart."

"I know. We couldn't just bop off to Mars in our sleep. We might imagine we were there, but we wouldn't be sure. Nobody's been there yet. At least I don't know of anyone who has."

"If they have they'd be keeping quiet about it. It would be frowned on by certain people who are afraid of contaminating the place. We have lots of pictures, but no lander has ever come back. It's been a one-way trip."

"You're right, Newt, but pieces of Mars have come to Earth, remember? That might be all the real contact we'd need."

"You think so? I know where one of those pieces is!" Newt was beginning to warm up to the idea.

"You do? Where?"

"It's been a prized possession of New Mexico University for years. It was found in the Sahara, they call it Black Beauty. We could go there and get a look at it!"

"That could work. But let's do the Moon first. That might give us some clues about using a Mars rock."

They went to bed and allowed the dream to come.

As usual, their bodies' first response to the shared lucid dream, what the shamans called "seeing together," was sexual. Newt called it the "mind meld." Whatever it was it made the experience unusually intimate. After a while they suppressed that, or Sedna did and Newt accepted. They turned their attention to the Moon, recalling their previous drone visits, and soon knew they were there.

Newt said, "There's a cave entrance in Marius Hills," and took them to the crater that was the visible surface opening. As they dropped their viewpoints down to cave entrance level, they began to find signs of human - drone - activity. Following deeper into the cave, they found it opened into a huge chamber, illuminated by dark light lanterns.

Their dream vision saw everything uniformly, light or no light, and that included the drone workers and the structures they were assembling. Sedna and Newt divided their attention, following their interests. It looked like the drones were putting together parts of a pretty standard farm and apartment can. Their dream presence was not easily detectable by the drone workers, so they could inspect the activities as closely as they cared to.

Newt was much more thorough than Sedna cared to be, inspecting construction details with interest. Soon she was back in the bedroom, and began caressing his shoulder. In an instant he was back there with her. Now that the Q link was established, they knew that either of them could revisit that Moon cave in an instant from anywhere. Newt let his body urges take over, and Sedna responded.