Dream d1267-s: What the Caves Kept

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came back from the Color Caves with nothing.

That sentence took me three attempts to say out loud, standing at the edge of camp where the firelight gave out. In Phase 10 the caves had been a place where color made sound and sound made color - you walked in and blue had a pitch, and that pitch had a temperature, and the temperature had a taste. I remembered standing in there for what felt like hours, overwhelmed by sensation layered on sensation. I had to tell myself to breathe.

Now they were rock. Grey rock going into dark rock. I had taken the Listener in with me because if any chamber in these Gardens would still have something to hear, it would be the Color Caves. We walked the whole system. Every chamber. The Listener pressed her palms to the walls the way she does. After the fourth chamber she stopped doing it.

"Nothing," she said. Not upset - just precise. "Not dormant. Not waiting. Nothing."

I came out into the still night air. The fire at camp was the only color in the whole garden edge - amber, orange, a coal-red center. Against the grey of dead flora and cracked soil it looked almost violent.

Lano was sitting where he could see both the cave mouth and the fire. When I came out he watched me cross the distance between. Not wagging. Just watching. When I reached him he put his nose against my knee once.

"Nada," he said.

Yeah.

The party had been talking while we were in. The Builder had it laid out: fungal network roots visible in the cracked soil traced back to some central conduit system, probably under the main garden body. The Weather Reader had found the edge of what used to be the microclimate system - pressure differentials fossilized in the soil layers, gone now, but the architecture was there if you knew where to measure.

The Philosopher set down the fragment she had been reading. "The question on the table is whether we go on."

The signal was still there. Northeast. It had been there since we crossed the last beacon and the Gardens pulled us sideways. It had not stopped. Whatever the Convergence Quest was pointing toward was still pointing.

"We're already late," the Wireman said. Not an argument. Just a fact on the pile.

"We were here before," I said. The fire crackled. The Student looked up from her notes. "I was here when this was alive. All of this. The Color Caves, the spiral mushrooms in the Talking Grove, the pools. Lano was here too."

Lano's tail moved once.

The Student asked: "What did it feel like?"

I looked at the grey cave mouth. I thought about blue that had a pitch.

"Overwhelming," I said. "It felt like too much. Now it feels like not enough."

The Convergence Quest signal pulsed northeast, patient, unchanged. The White Crane stood at the tree line, a white shape against grey. Nobody spoke for a while.