“Hi there, please follow me to the arrival room”, a service robot said. I had just arrived on Ceres, the largest of the asteroids in the Asteroid Belt. Together with a dozen other passengers I followed the robot to the arrival room where our possessions were supposed to be delivered. Ceres is 932 km in diameter and its gravity is therefore very small. Much smaller then I was used to on Mars. So I walked aided by thick metal plates within my boots. They were handed to everyone when we left the shuttle after landing.
We walked through a tube from the shuttle towards the station. I could see the station and the landing dock through the tube windows. It looked familiar, except for the color, here everything was gray. It was almost as if watching an old twentieth century black and white movie. Ceres was a gray world and the station fit in perfectly with its gray concrete and steel. I had been to Phobos once, but that hadn’t made such an impression as what I now saw outside.
The arrival room was very colorful as was everything else in the station itself. Too much gray will kill you, they must have thought so yellows, reds, blues, greens were abundant everywhere. “Shuttle F4534 passengers belongings have arrived”, it sounded through loudspeakers and I saw my traveling bag moving on a conveyor belt. I grabbed my stuff and waited until the rest had their belongings. The service robot then brought us to our hotel, the only one of the station. No Hilton here, most people visiting were miners passing through anyway. We walked through a big entrance tunnel and finally entered that which I had already seen from my shuttle window when we landed: the dome.
The center part of the station was a concrete dome. It was here that everybody lived and worked. It was 10 km in diameter and 1 km high. When I entered through the tunnel I was immediately perplex by its size. I saw plants growing everywhere, I saw water flowing. The inner surface of the dome was one big screen. I was told they experimented with different sky sceneries. Today it was Mars day and the screen created a reddish sky. I felt home immediately.
The dome was build over a 10 km sized crater and I now walked on the true surface of Ceres. The area below the dome was filled with a variety of buildings. I saw some big office buildings in the center, just like the two centuries old financial city centers on Earth. It was still a bit strange to walk with the big mass below my feet. I had difficulty at first to keep my balance.
The service robot took us to one of the smaller buildings near the edge of the dome. On its front, above the main entrance a plate was attached which read ‘Ceres City Hotel’. Here in Ceres City the asteroid mining was being managed. All major mining corporations had offices here and I recognized some names I knew were also active on Mars. But it wasn’t why I was here, I had some other business to attend.
Excuse me, I haven’t introduced myself, my name is Peter Higgins and I’m a first generation Martian. I was born in Schiaparelli City, Mars in 2181. I’ve lived on Mars for whole my life, except for this one year in 2208, where I left and visited Ceres. So I’m not a big space traveler, but I love traveling around Mars. I’ve seen a lot of Mars in my life and I’ve seen it change. More people, more heat, thicker atmosphere, disappearing ice sheets. It was all that was happening on Earth but now for the good. We were changing Mars, terraforming it.
I’ve never been very religious but in the first decade of 2200 I was more in search for answers then I am now. It was then when I met this AI on the net. It had acquired a middle aged male personality. I was in my twenties and it became a mentor for me. This was very common in these days. Different types of AI were set loose on the net. Some even reproduced themselves by combining personality treats. The AI I found, or perhaps it is better to say, the AI which found me was an open source version. It likely mentored more youngsters. It was designed to create a secure communication between him and the individual it talked with. Information was saved on my personal assistant so no central storage was needed.
The AI, which referred to itself as Dave, was designed with all sorts of psychological methods so he was good in providing counter arguments. I still talk to Dave now and then but only when I’m a bit nostalgic. Dave helped me a lot those days and it was him who got me to Ceres. I was not only searching for answers those days, I also had difficulty with choices. Going to Ceres proved to be a good choice.
The Ceres City Hotel was my home for the next month. I was given a comfortable room on the 8th floor with a view towards the business district. Because the city was inside a crater the hotel was 200 meter higher then the city center so I had a good view. My room had everything I needed. I was starting to get used to low gravity. First on Phobos, where I boarded the ship which brought me to the Asteroid Belt. The ship itself had artificial gravity. There were special Lunar, Terrestrial and Martian gravrooms. I spent a lot of time in the Martian room. After 1 month the ship flew past Ceres and I boarded a Ceres City shuttle.
And now I was here and for the first time I contemplated why. It had happened very fast. Dave had been the main trigger. I had been living my life on Mars. Studying areology, something what a lot of Martians do. But my thing was that I didn’t know why I was doing things. I didn’t know who I was, why I lived, what my purpose was. All these questions hammered through my head. Sometimes it was a strong hammering, sometimes it was just ticking.
Dave had given me a lot of feedback. He asked some good questions. And I decided to stop with everything I was doing and go away. Away from Mars, away from my routines, my normal life. Just away for a while. So I went to Ceres. And why Ceres you may ask? Well, I like to drink tea.
Tea has been an important part of my life for quite some years now. It may seem trivial, but for me, drinking a good cup of tea is very important. When I drink tea, I just sit and drink. My mind in the meantime floats and ponders, but I’m mostly aware of the enjoyment I feel with every sip. This being aware of me drinking tea is what it is all about. I feel at ease then, just sitting somewhere, alone with my tea.
When I told Dave about my tea habits he referred to The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura, in which teaism is described. I read it and knew I wanted to be a teaist. So I started to read about people who actively pursue this way of life. They were all living on Earth as far as I could tell. Nonterries were more down to Earth it seemed, which was of course a bit paradoxical.
I first thought about performing a tea ceremony on Mars but somehow it didn’t feel right. I needed to be somewhere alien to me, some unknown location. Next I thought about Earth but I knew I would be getting sick from the large gravity and thick atmosphere. The terrie Moon was also not an issue because I didn’t want to go to the Moon and nót go to Earth. So where would I go?
Then one day I read about the Asteroid Belt and it’s main asteroid Ceres. Its real frontier life there, mostly miner families. Hard, tough people live in the Belt so I was certain no one there would have any interest in a tea ceremony. I would be alone there which I found appealing. Thus I decided to go to Ceres.
The fact that I studied areology helped a lot. I wanted to graduate in economic areology anyway so perhaps I could arrange for a mining excursion on Ceres? My peers liked the idea and I could go, paid for by some interplanetary university exchange fund. So I was to do mining ánd drinking tea.
“Peter, could you explain what’s so special about the quartz vein in this rock here?”. It was day one of my excursion and I was outside the dome with a miner who was asked to be my tutor that week. He would show me the rocks and the structures I could expect here in the Belt. I was very happy that I could experience this private excursion and found it so strange it was all due to me drinking tea.
During the month on Ceres I learned a lot about the Asteroid Belt and how it formed. Knowledge I most certainly could use back on Mars. But I knew all this was not why I had come to Ceres. I had come because of this two hour ceremony I planned to conduct in my room the day before I went home again. I think that is what I learned during this trip: the trivial things in life are as important as you want them to be.
So I made tea, drank it and enjoyed every little part of the process. This process of course was very interesting indeed, making tea in a low gravity environment is an art in itself. I had taken everything I needed with me from Mars: my teapot, my teacup, my tea egg and not to forget my homegrown tea itself. I had brought with me the dried leafs of a tea plant I grew in the university greenhouse.
Back on Mars, writing my memoirs I can still see this special trip lively in my head. If it had been just an excursion it would have been a fantastic experience, no doubt, but because of this meaningless thing called tea I had finally found meaning.
MindStorm says: