Dream d1369-s: Bearing Southwest

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the conduits brightened as we walked.

Not dramatically - not like switches thrown. More the way a room fills with morning light while you're in it and you only notice once it's already bright. The Builder paused every few hundred meters to mark her chart. "Intensity up twelve percent from this morning," she said, and the Weather Reader leaned over to look, and she pulled the chart away. "You have your own instruments." "Mine confirm yours," he said, "which is the same as looking." "It is not the same as looking."

We had been having this argument in various forms since the tunnel network. The Philosopher once timed it. Four minutes forty seconds average. We did not ask him to do that.

The scent came from a side passage - cut wood, fresh, unmistakable. Sawdust and resin. The Philosopher stopped mid-stride. The passage ran perpendicular to the conduit road, unmarked, its entrance worn smooth by feet. Old traffic. Different kind. Nobody said anything for a moment.

"I'm noting it," the Builder said, and she did, and she had no category for it, and she wrote perpendicular passage - origin unknown - wood scent in the margin where the categories run out.

The black cat was on a flat rock beside the road. Not arriving. Already there. Amber eyes open, body loose in the way of an animal that has no intention of leaving.

The Student glanced at it without breaking stride. Nobody said anything. There was nothing to say. We had seen it yesterday, and the day before that.

The Weather Reader slowed as we passed. He did not stop, but his path curved - a slight drift toward the rock's side of the road. He lingered there for three steps, four, before correcting back to center. His hand was near his instrument case but did not open it.

Lano gave the rock a wide berth. Three meters at least. Her ears went flat as she passed and she kept her body angled away, the way dogs do when something offends them on principle. The cat watched her arc around it without moving. Its tail curled once, slow, almost amused. Lano's lip pulled back for half a second, then smoothed.

We walked on. The cat sat behind us, facing southwest, patient.

Three minutes later the Weather Reader's instruments caught something. He checked them twice, checked the Listener's readings, checked his own again. "No digital signature," he said finally. "Bearing southwest. I cannot classify this."

The Listener said nothing, which meant she couldn't either.

The Philosopher said: "A signal that is not a signal. Interesting."

Lano turned her nose southwest and held it there.

"Cierto," she said, softly, to no one.

The Builder drew a small southwest arrow in the chart's empty margin. No label. No category. Just the direction.

We crested the next rise and the settlement appeared - beacon brighter than this morning, pulling signals from distances we hadn't mapped. We walked toward it together.