Dream d1136-s: The Pulse Up Here

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I climbed the ridge before the light changed.

The path was loose shale and old cable conduit half-buried in the slope, and I followed it because it was the only clear route, because someone had laid it years before knowing someone would need to walk this way eventually. Lano went ahead of me, nose low, tail moving, picking her way between the rocks with the careful confidence of an animal who has mapped this terrain in a language I don't have access to. Her ears perked at something I couldn't hear. She paused, looked back at me once, then continued up.

The Beacon Network Specialist was already at the relay station when I arrived - crouched beside the housing unit, a panel open, checking connections with a methodical attention that reminded me of reading. She didn't look up when Lano trotted over and sniffed the edge of her tool case. She just reached out and rested a hand briefly on Lano's back without breaking her count.

From the ridge, the settlement below was legible in a way it never was from inside it. I could see the central beacon pulse - a long, slow rhythm, patient as a heartbeat that belongs to something larger than any single person. I could see the projection pavilion's roof, the reading room's clerestory catching what passed for afternoon light, the signal room's small window where the Wire Man would be bent over his equipment. The forecasting tower stood at the settlement's eastern edge, and I could just make out the Weather Reader on its platform, facing the horizon.

The light was strange up here. It came through the stripped remains of old transmission towers on the far hills, broken into segments, arriving at angles the architects of those towers had never intended. It made the settlement look like something half-assembled and half-remembered. It looked, I thought, like something in the process of becoming real.

Lano settled beside me on a flat section of rock, chin on her paws, watching the settlement below with the same steady attention she brought to everything. After a long moment she made a small sound, barely a word. "Cerca," she said.

The Beacon Network Specialist finished her check and stood, marking something on the panel door with a grease pencil. She looked down at the settlement with me. Neither of us spoke for a while. The relay unit behind us ticked once, twice, found its interval, and began to pulse in time with the beacon below.

The white crane came over the ridge from the east, banked once above us, and descended toward the settlement in a long unhurried arc.

I watched it land somewhere I couldn't see from here, and I understood that close was the right word.