Dream d1104-s: What the Copper Kept

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the entrance to the tunnel was marked by nothing more than a rusted iron ring set into the ground, and Lano found it before I did. Her nose pressed against the gap where cold air rose from below, her tail held low and still, reading whatever came up from the dark. I lifted the ring and pulled, and the door swung heavy on its hinge, and we went down.

The tunnel ran beneath the whole settlement. I could feel the weight of it above me as I walked, the compacted earth, the foundations of the structures we had built, the beacon's pulse traveling down through stone and reaching the soles of my feet as a low percussion. Someone had strung a line of small lights along the ceiling, the Wire Man's work, I knew it from the way the connections were wrapped, clean and tight with no waste. The light was amber and even, enough to see by without flooding the space.

The cables were old. They ran in bundles along both walls, wrapped in cloth that had gone gray with years, some of it crumbling at the edges. But they were not dead. The Wire Man had shown me this before, how you put your palm flat against the insulation and feel the warmth of current, like pressing your hand to a sleeping animal's flank. I did it now, and the cable was warm. Not faintly. Warm.

At the center of the tunnel's length there was a junction box, open, its panel removed and set aside. The Listener crouched before it, one earphone held against the exposed terminal. She looked up when she heard me and said nothing, only nodded, and pressed the earphone back. Whatever she was hearing, she wanted to keep hearing it. Lano settled beside her without being told. "Quieto," Lano said, barely a sound, more breath than word.

I stood in the tunnel for a long time. Overhead, the Dreamer was likely at the pavilion running projections. The Weather Reader would be at the forecasting tower, watching how the post-apocalyptic light came through the stripped infrastructure on the western ridge. The Philosopher would be in the reading room with the afternoon's particular question. All of them above, working, settled, returned. And down here, beneath all of it, the old cables carried what they had always carried, current traveling through copper that predated everyone in the settlement, that had been here when this ground was something else entirely.

The beacon's glow did not reach the tunnel. But you could feel it. The pulse came through the walls at intervals, and each time it came the Listener made a small mark in her notebook, adding it to what she was gathering from the old lines.

I did not know what message was traveling through the copper. I only knew it had not stopped.