Dream d1071-s: Where the Image Lands

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the projection pavilion was half a skeleton against the afternoon light. The ribs of the frame rose from the ground in parallel arcs, pale timber notched and bolted, and I stood at the edge of the site watching the Builder move along the scaffold with a level in one hand, calling measurements down to the Philosopher who marked them in the foundation ledger with deliberate strokes.

The beacon pulsed from the center of the settlement, steady as always, its light catching the dust that rose whenever someone drove a peg or shifted a beam. I had learned to read the settlement by the sounds of it - the telegraph clatter from the signal room, the faint hum of the broadcast station warming its components, the metallic tick from the forecasting tower as the weather instruments adjusted in the changing pressure. The Beacon Network Specialist had climbed the distant ridge before dawn and we had seen his lantern winking twice, then three times: confirmation, the relay holding.

The Wire Man moved cable along the southern edge of the pavilion site, feeding it through the conduit they had buried the previous week. He worked without speaking, but he paused once and looked up at the frame and nodded as though it satisfied some calculation he had been running privately.

Lano found me standing there. She trotted out from behind a stack of timber planks, nose working the air, and circled my boots twice before sitting at my heel and watching the site with the same attention I was giving it. After a while her ears pricked toward the center beacon and she made a soft sound, not quite a bark.

"Aqui," she said, and I understood it to mean here, all of this, right here.

The Dreamer had set up a temporary test rig at the far end of the site, projecting a faint wash of pale light against the unfinished back wall to check sight lines. The Listener stood twenty meters back with both hands open at her sides, feeling the field of it. The Weather Reader had placed a small instrument on the foundation slab and was reading something from it, occasionally looking up at the stripped transmission towers that stood beyond the ridge, their lattice structures catching the post-storm light in long thin shadows across the ground.

The Builder came down from the scaffold and stood beside me without ceremony. "Alignment's good," he said. "Three more days for the roof frame."

I looked at the pavilion taking shape - the ribs, the cable, the faint first test of light against bare timber. The white crane banked once overhead and continued south.

The settlement was adding another room to itself.