Dream d1171-s: Rain in the Cable Run

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sky changed without announcing itself.

The beacon was pulsing, that steady rhythm we had come to measure our days by, when the Weather Reader came down from the forecasting tower at a run. I was crossing the central yard with Lano at my heels when I saw her face and understood before she said anything.

The wind arrived from the northwest in a single hard gust that bent the relay antenna on the ridge. I watched the mast flex and hold, flex again. The Beacon Network Specialist was already moving toward the equipment shed. The Wire Man had his coat pulled tight, scanning the cable runs that crossed the yard in shallow trenches we had dug through packed earth. The first fat drops hit the ground and the smell of it, metal and old dust and something electrical, made Lano stop. Her ears went flat. She turned toward the ridge and gave one sharp bark, then pressed against my leg.

"Tormenta," she said.

The rain came in properly then. Within a minute the cable trenches were filling. I could see water running along the packed-earth paths between the structures, finding the low routes, and two of those routes ran straight into the generator housing on the east side of the beacon. The Builder was there before I had the thought, hands already pulling a tarpaulin from a stack near the wall. The Philosopher helped without being asked. The broadcast station antenna swung hard in the gust and the Listener grabbed the guide rope and braced.

The generator flickered. The whole settlement dimmed for three heartbeats. The beacon kept its pulse, the battery backup we had wired in during the third week held it, but the lights in the signal room and the library reading room went uncertain and yellow.

From the projection pavilion the Dreamer appeared in the doorway watching the main antenna mast sway. The guy wires were taut but the mount was only six weeks old. He did not move. He was calculating something.

The Weather Reader reached me. She said the system was larger than it had appeared from the tower. She said it would not pass quickly.

Lano stayed pressed to my leg, ears flat, nose pointed into the wind as the rain increased and the trenches ran dark and the beacon pulsed on, steady, asking nothing, promising nothing, just marking the center while everything around it bent.

We had built this. Now it would be tested.