Dream d1196-s: Smoke Before the Beacon

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cooking fire sat low and steady near the base of the beacon, and the smell of it -- woodsmoke cut with something green, something pulled from the ridge -- settled over the whole settlement like a membrane.

I was turning something in the coals. Not thinking about it much. The beacon pulsed above me in its slow rhythm, and each pulse lit the underside of the smoke in a pale blue-white that faded back to orange before the next one came. The interval was fourteen seconds. I had counted it so many times it had stopped being counting.

Lano padded around the far side of the fire, nose working at the ground where the Dreamer had been sitting earlier. She left a particular presence in places, something olfactory and specific, and Lano always found it. His tail moved in short arcs. He circled twice, then settled facing the library reading room with his ears forward.

The Wire Man was across the open ground, crouched at the junction box between the relay line and the projection pavilion feed. He had been there most of the morning. I could hear, faintly, the sound of him tapping a connector -- the same metallic tick repeated, adjusted, repeated. The Philosopher sat on the low wall nearby, not helping, reading something she had pulled from the library. This was their usual arrangement.

From the forecasting tower the Weather Reader called something down. The Beacon Network Specialist, moving between two antenna housings with a long cable over one shoulder, raised a hand in acknowledgment without turning around.

The Builder came out of the signal room and walked toward the fire. She had oil on her forearms and was wiping her hands on a cloth that was already past helping. She looked at what I was cooking and made no comment, which meant it was acceptable.

We ate beside the fire while the beacon counted its fourteen-second intervals above us. The infrastructure hummed in the background -- not loudly, not insistently, just the sound a network makes when every part of it is doing its share. The ridge relay blinked once in the distance, synchronized.

Lano lifted his head and said, clearly, into the smoke: "Fuego."

Then he put his head back down and watched the beacon light come and go, come and go, the way he always watched things -- with the patient attention of something that has decided the world is worth observing.

The Listener came out of the broadcast station and stood at the edge of the firelight, listening. The fire settled. The cables held. The smoke rose and thinned and disappeared into whatever was above us now, which was not sky exactly but something we had agreed to treat as sky.

We stayed until the coals went gray at their edges. Then the work resumed.