Dream d1275-s: Dead Reckoning

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we gathered at a wide flat stone the Builder had claimed as a table.

He had been out since before the light changed - though the light here did not change, remaining the same pewter grey, uniform and airless. When he returned he spread his diagrams across the stone's surface: a web of lines traced in charcoal, nodes marked with small circles, some crossed out, some circled twice, a few with question marks beside them.

"This is what it was," he said.

The Student set her notebook beside his drawings and began copying them smaller, with her own notation system. The Philosopher leaned in. The Dreamer held his projection lens overhead at an angle, and the diagram threw its shadow on the hillside behind us, larger, the lines spreading across the dead terrain like a map overlaid on a territory.

"Fungal," the Builder said. "Primary infrastructure. It wasn't a garden that had a fungal network. The network was the garden. Everything else - the moisture cycle, the temperature regulation, the acoustic pathways - ran through it."

The Listener said, quietly, "That explains the frequencies I found yesterday. They weren't communication between plants. They were system status signals."

"Still running," the Builder said. "Just not connected to anything."

I knew that section of his diagram. The dense node cluster with all connections terminating in dead ends - I had stood in the middle of it once. The Talking Grove. The mushroom spirals had been everywhere underfoot, the bark-faced trees watching, and I had thought they were aesthetic. Decorative. Lano had sniffed them for a long time and I had not understood why.

Lano sat at the center of the stone now, nose working the still air.

"Raíz," he said.

Everyone looked at him.

"Root," I said. "He smells the root system."

The Builder nodded slowly and circled something else on the diagram.

The Philosopher picked up a nearby stone - one of the inscribed ones, the owl's writing worn but legible in low angles. "The owl called it the keeping-net," she said. "This inscription here. 'The keeping-net holds what we cannot hold alone.'" She set it back precisely where she had found it. "Not a metaphor. Literal infrastructure."

"Nothing here was metaphor," I said, and I was not certain whether I was speaking to them or to the silence where the grove used to be.

The Wireman had been quiet at the group's edge. He crouched beside what looked like tangled roots but resolved, at close range, into the remains of ceremony infrastructure - organic cord, organic anchors, nodes of the fungal web that had been deliberately harvested and shaped. "Someone built with it," he said. "They weren't living alongside it. They used it as material."

The Student looked up from her notes. "Built what?"

Nobody answered immediately. The Convergence Quest signal held steady at the northeast horizon, patient as a held breath.

"That's the next question," the Builder said.