St. Bea was the one who ate the bubbles, and ended up losing everything except the presence of mind to eat more bubbles when she got hungry. Why anyone would smoke something that erased their friend is beyond me, but maybe she seemed to have enjoyed it? The bubbles were definitely alien, and the idea that there were a lot of the planters (effectively, AI-guided sample return missions) kind of hints to me that there are a lot of places, all over the world, where something may have gotten brought back, and maybe was as significant to whoever was around it as St. Bea's Bread was to Little Belaire.
The thing is, I've read a lot of SF, so I'm used to the idea of, say, a technology that overwrites people's minds for a little while, or a drug that extends life and expands consciousness, or a machine that's far more intelligent than a person being sent to operate in space, or a person who modifies themselves to shoot lasers from their fingers, or whatever, and that those things are not the point of the story, but how they change the experience of being a person in interaction with other people (at least for good SF. Bad SF, in my opinion, is all "Gee golly guys, laser guns!" (or worse, cowboys with laser guns) and nothing about being in a novel context).
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St. Bea was the one who ate the bubbles, and ended up losing everything except the presence of mind to eat more bubbles when she got hungry. Why anyone would smoke something that erased their friend is beyond me, but maybe she seemed to have enjoyed it? The bubbles were definitely alien, and the idea that there were a lot of the planters (effectively, AI-guided sample return missions) kind of hints to me that there are a lot of places, all over the world, where something may have gotten brought back, and maybe was as significant to whoever was around it as St. Bea's Bread was to Little Belaire.
The thing is, I've read a lot of SF, so I'm used to the idea of, say, a technology that overwrites people's minds for a little while, or a drug that extends life and expands consciousness, or a machine that's far more intelligent than a person being sent to operate in space, or a person who modifies themselves to shoot lasers from their fingers, or whatever, and that those things are not the point of the story, but how they change the experience of being a person in interaction with other people (at least for good SF. Bad SF, in my opinion, is all "Gee golly guys, laser guns!" (or worse, cowboys with laser guns) and nothing about being in a novel context).