Dream d1296-s: Older Ground Than Ours

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cave entrance smelled of iron and old cable insulation, and Lano stopped three paces before the rest of us did.

His nose worked the air in quick pulses. His tail moved once, twice, then went still - not afraid, but reading. The Weather Reader crouched beside him with a handheld instrument.

"Humidity differential is 4.3 points higher inside the threshold," the Weather Reader said, not to anyone specifically. "That's not geological. The system breathes."

"I told you," the Builder said, and pulled her map from the side pocket of her pack. She had drawn this entrance six dreams ago, but she was drawing it again now, in finer lines. "The intake venting was intentional. Someone engineered this."

The Student leaned over to see. "How old?"

"Old enough that the concrete mix is different from anything we use," the Builder said. She pressed a palm flat against the entrance wall. "Different aggregate. Different cure time. Whoever they were, they had the same problem we have and solved it differently."

The Philosopher had already walked several paces inside, where the light from the entrance angled across a section of glyph-marked stone. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back.

"Come look at this," he called. Not a question. The Philosopher never asked.

We crowded around. The glyphs had been here since the earliest passages - I remembered them from the first time, when I was alone and did not know what I was reading. They had looked decorative then. They looked operational now.

"Routing notation," the Wireman said quietly. This was remarkable. The Wireman almost never spoke in full sentences. He traced one symbol with one finger, not touching, hovering. "Signal direction markers. Maintenance intervals."

"That's a guess," the Listener said.

"No," the Wireman said, and moved to the next glyph.

The Listener looked at the Builder. The Builder shrugged in a way that meant: he's usually right.

The Philosopher said, "The proposition before the house: either this system was built to carry the signal we are following, or it was built to find it. These are not equivalent propositions."

"There's a third option," the Weather Reader said, from deeper in the entrance where he was taking more readings. "It was built by someone who heard the same signal we're hearing. Someone who started walking the same direction we started walking. A long time ago."

Lano said, quietly, "Antes."

The word echoed off the old stone walls.

The Dreamer raised her camera.

We walked in.