Dream d1304-s: The Shape Rhymes

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we stopped because the Dreamer put her hand on my arm.

The cave wall was lit. Not from torches or headlamps - from something embedded in the stone: a projector mechanism, old broadcast equipment cycling on backup power, throwing light through a lens no larger than my fist onto the limestone face above a ledge we almost walked past. The image it cast was sharp and still.

The Listener crouched three steps ahead of everyone else. "It's on a loop," she said. "Carrier wave, seven seconds. Same frame."

"Same frame for how long?" the Student asked.

"Longer than us."

The Builder moved her lamp across the wall to the right of the projection, where the glow faded into natural rock. Her free hand traced shallow cuts, deliberate spacing. "These glyphs read like a conduit map," she said, not to anyone in particular. "Junction notation. Same system we used in the tunnel network." A pause. "Almost the same system."

"Almost is doing considerable work in that sentence," the Philosopher said.

"The spacing between nodes is different. Ours is consistent. This -" she traced the gaps "- this breathes."

The Weather Reader had been standing very still for a full minute, one hand against the tunnel wall. "The pressure in here shifts on a seven-second cycle," he said.

The Listener looked at him.

"The cave is synchronizing with the projection," the Weather Reader said.

Nobody spoke for a moment. Outside, the signal hummed clear in the open sky. In here it was something else: a pulse we could feel against the stone.

Lano sat near the base of the ledge, nose tilted up at the lit wall, tail still. Then, quietly: "Propongo."

The Philosopher looked at him. "I take the motion," he said.

The Builder said: "He predates your claim by about forty thousand years."

"The first record," the Philosopher said. "Something made this. Something kept it running."

"On backup power," the Listener said. "Still transmitting. Seven seconds. Over and over."

The Dreamer had been documenting without speaking, moving around the projection at different angles. She stopped. She held her device beside the carved glyphs, then beside the projected image. The shapes rhymed.

I thought of the very first caves - the Mystic Caves, where Lano had led us by nose through passages that seemed to close behind us. He had been small then too. He had known where to go.

"What is it a record of?" the Student asked.

The image was still. A surface, lit from below. Something reaching toward it. The Weather Reader said it looked like a pressure gradient. The Builder said it looked like a cable route. The Listener said it sounded, based on the carrier frequency, like someone saying: here.

We stayed until the backup cycle dimmed and the projection folded back into stone. At the cave entrance, the White Crane was perched on a cable trestle we had run the previous summer. It watched us file out, then lifted once, said nothing, and turned toward the unmapped edge.

Then we walked on.