Dream d1049-s: Frames Without Walls

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the pavilion was still becoming itself. The frame stood open to the sky, raw timber joists laid across the top in a crosshatch that caught the amber light from the beacon at the settlement's heart. I was there with a level in my hand, watching the bubble float to center, and beyond the frame the whole settlement spread out in every direction, humming.

The Beacon Network Specialist was up on the ridge relay already, her silhouette small against the stripped tower light. The Builder had laid out the structural members in a careful row the day before, each one numbered in chalk. Now I was setting them one at a time into the mortised posts, tapping them flush with a wooden mallet. The sound carried clean across the open ground. No one needed to say anything. Everyone knew the rhythm of it.

The Wire Man passed beneath the scaffold with a coil of signal cable over one shoulder, heading toward the signal room. He nodded once. I nodded back. The cable fed the pavilion too, eventually. Everything fed everything else in this place. That was the point. That was what we had built it to be.

Lano appeared from behind the lumber stack, nose working. She trotted the perimeter of the site in her small methodical way, sniffing at the base of each post, ears tilted forward. When she reached the center of the open frame, where the beacon light pooled brightest, she sat and looked up at the beams above her. Just watching. Just placing herself inside the thing being made.

"Aqui," she said, quietly, to no one.

The Dreamer was in the library reading room. I could see the light from there through the open walls of the pavilion - a warm rectangle in the larger grid of settlement structures. The Philosopher walked the path between the forecasting tower and the broadcast station with a notebook pressed against her chest. The Weather Reader was at the tower itself, instruments in hand. Everyone had their work. Everyone was doing it.

I set the last cross member and stepped back to sight along the line of it. Straight. The level said so. The eye said so. Outside the settlement perimeter, the stripped towers of the before-time caught what was left of the afternoon and threw it sideways, pink and raw. The beacon pulsed its slow steady interval. One. Pause. Two. Pause. Three.

The white crane passed over the pavilion from south to north, just once, low enough that I could hear the air shift under its wings.

The Listener was somewhere near the signal room. I could hear the tap of the telegraph, faint and regular.

I kept building.