Dream d1137-s: Before the First Image

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was standing in sawdust and pale morning, watching the frame of the projection pavilion climb against the sky.

The beacon pulsed at the settlement's center, that slow amber throb I had grown to measure time by. Around it, the other structures stood in their different stages of completion: the relay beacon on the ridge catching the first hard light, the signal room with its telegraph lines strung taut, the forecasting tower with its instruments reading the stripped post-dawn. But here, at the edge of the gathering, something new was rising.

The Builder moved through the half-finished frame with his hands on every beam before it was lifted, reading the grain of each piece of salvaged timber, touching joints before the wedges were driven. He said nothing but there was something in his hands that functioned as instruction.

I held the base of a vertical post while someone above hammered wedges. The pavilion had no walls yet, only the skeleton of what the walls would become, and through it the beacon glow came softly, diffused by dust and distance.

Lano moved through the site the way small dogs do on construction ground: carefully, nose low, learning the lumber and the disturbed earth. He paused at a coil of cable the Wire Man had left near the eastern corner. His ears came forward. Then he trotted on.

The Beacon Network Specialist sat on a crate off to one side with a paper stretched across her knees, checking angles with a straightedge. She would look up at the rising frame, look back down, mark something.

The Dreamer stood inside the incomplete structure, face tilted upward to where the roof would eventually block the sky. He was not working yet. He was standing in the space as it would become, trying to understand the interior before it had one.

The wire went in before the walls, the Wire Man working in from the outside through gaps in the framing, pulling conduit through roughed-out channels. The Listener moved alongside him, pressing one palm flat against a finished post and listening to the vibration when a beam was struck somewhere on the far side.

The Weather Reader had come up from the forecasting tower to watch. She stood at the edge of the site with her arms folded, reading the pressure in her feet as much as in the sky.

The Philosopher settled onto a low stack of salvaged panels and said nothing. The crane circled once, white against the stripped and filtered overcast, and came down briefly to the ridge.

Lano sat near my feet, watching the frame go up. Quietly: "Si."

I drove another wedge. The timber held.