Dream d1251-s: Height and Bearing

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was three stories up on the forecasting station scaffold, and the morning had not yet decided what it wanted to be.

The planks under my boots were cold and slightly damp from whatever passed for dew in this air. Below, the settlement spread in four directions from the beacon's center, and from up here I could read the whole of it the way the Weather Reader read her instruments - as a system, pressure and flow, nothing isolated.

The beacon pulsed. Even at this distance and this height, I could feel it in my sternum on the two-second interval. It had become a kind of heartbeat that all of us had internalized. I noticed when it skipped. It never skipped.

The Weather Reader was already at the instrument panel on the second platform, her back to me, stylus moving across paper. She logged pressure readings at the same four times every day, and the consistency of this - the absolute reliability of it - was something I had come to think of as a form of architecture. Not a building, but a structure just the same. Something you could lean against.

Below, the Builder crossed from the relay outbuilding toward the projection pavilion with a length of conduit over one shoulder. He did not look up. He rarely looked up when he was carrying something. There was a focus in how he moved that I recognized as kinship.

Lano appeared at the base of the scaffold. I had not seen her approach, but there she was, small and white against the packed earth, nose lifted, reading the air that I was standing in. She circled the base post once, then sat and looked up at me with those steady eyes.

"Viento," she said.

She was right. There was a wind coming. Not yet, but the Weather Reader's stylus had paused for just a moment, and I trusted the pause.

The Philosopher and the Listener were visible at the edge of the reading room structure, talking in a way that involved very little movement. The Dreamer had the broadcast station open - I could see the glow of it from here. The Beacon Network Specialist's ridge relay was cycling through a test sequence in the morning's uncertain gray, a small light blinking at the far edge of the settlement.

All of it was alive. All of it was maintained by people who had returned and chosen to remain.

I put my hands on the scaffold rail and looked at the horizon where the stripped towers stood like dark commas in the text of the sky. The beacon pulsed. The Weather Reader's stylus resumed. Lano shook herself once and trotted off toward the library.

I stayed up there a little longer. There was something about height that clarified. Not answers - just the shape of the questions.