Dream d1258-s: The Gate Looks East

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we were at the settlement gate at first light, and the organizing alone took forty minutes.

The Weather Reader had printed the anomaly readout on paper and folded it into his breast pocket, which the Builder immediately questioned. "Why paper? The tablet has GPS overlay." The Weather Reader said the signal pattern was more legible on paper, and you could annotate by hand. The Builder said annotating doesn't help if you lose the paper in a river. This went on for a while.

Lano sat at my feet watching both of them with the particular patience of someone who has heard an argument before and knows how it ends.

The Wireman had already loaded his bag. He had been ready since before anyone else arrived. He stood a little apart from the gate, facing northeast, as if he could already smell where we were going. Lano's ears had been doing the same thing since we assembled - tilted forward and to the right, tracking something I couldn't hear.

The Philosopher was working out a proposition about thresholds, to anyone who would listen. "A gate is structurally distinct from a door. A door separates interior from exterior. A gate separates known from unknown. The psychology is entirely different." The Student wrote this down. The Dreamer photographed the gate from three angles. The Listener was adjusting his frequency array, not listening to the Philosopher at all, though later he would probably recite the argument back word for word.

The Builder finished the tablet-versus-paper debate by simply taking both - slipping the printed readout into her map case and the tablet into the side pocket of her pack with the quiet efficiency of someone who has built enough structures to know that redundancy is not doubt, it is design.

Eight people. A dog. A wagon of books. More cables than I could count, coiled in loops over shoulders and packs, because the Wireman had distributed them without explanation and we had all accepted them.

Overhead, the crane appeared. It banked once, low, over the beacon tower. The pulse was still going, steady as a heartbeat, as it had been since the long week the Student still calls the week we stopped sleeping. The crane banked again and straightened northeast.

Lano looked up at it. Then back at the gate. Then at me.

"Vamos," he said.

The gate opened. We walked through. The signal was still faint - just a tremor at the edge of every reading, a particular pressure in the clear air, a pull that Lano had been mapping since before any of us thought to name it. Settlement behind us. The Undrawn Edge ahead, still unnamed, still possible.