Dream d1253-s: Northeast Before Noon

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the settlement center smelled like canvas and machine oil, and seven people were trying to pack the same eight pieces of equipment into five bags simultaneously.

"The sextant goes in last," the Builder said, marking something on her expanding map sheet. "It always goes in last."

"You said that about the signal logger," the Weather Reader answered without looking up from his instruments. Three of his readouts were still running. The anomalous trace sat in the lower left corner of the main display - barely a blip, the kind of variation most analysts would chalk up to calibration drift. He had not chalked it up to calibration drift.

Lano sat at the northeast corner of the clearing, very still. His ears were up and forward in a configuration I had only seen twice before - once before a storm the Weather Reader had not yet detected, and once in the Mystic Caves when the tunnel network opened ahead of us and the darkness had texture. His nose moved in small careful arcs.

"Norte," he said, not to anyone specifically.

The Philosopher had arrived with the library wagon, which now had a canvas cover tied down with six different knots. "I've prepared three arguments for why we should go," he announced, "and two for why we should not. I thought it balanced."

"Did the 'should go' arguments win?" the Student asked.

"They did not need to win. The Wireman started packing two hours ago."

We all looked. The Wireman had already stacked his artifact cases near the gate - cables coiled with ceremony, connectors wrapped, a relay repeater that none of us had seen him build. He met our collective gaze and went back to wrapping copper junctions in cloth.

The Listener had her frequency array broken down into its transport configuration. "I've been scanning the bandwidth where the anomaly sits," she said. "It's not broadcasting. It's present. There's a difference."

The Weather Reader finally looked up. "Agreed. Broadcasting implies intent. Present implies existence."

"That's the Philosopher's job," the Builder said.

"I'll take it as a compliment," the Philosopher said.

The Dreamer was moving around the perimeter of the group, framing and not framing, cataloguing the before-state. I watched her stop at Lano and crouch down, recording his northeast stare, the precise angle of his ears, the stillness that no instrument could measure.

The beacon pulsed once from the tower. The Specialist's voice came over the radio, calm and even: "Weather's clean. All relays nominal. Northeast corridor is open."

I picked up my pack. The settlement center had that particular quality of full morning light on stone - the kind that looks permanent until you turn away from it.

We turned away.