Dream d1379-s: Departure Without Occasion

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the projection pavilion smelled like cedar and ozone, the way it always did after the Dreamer had been running the equipment for hours. On the wall: documentation of a journey I was still inside of. The harbor apartment in its first winter. The caves. The ceremony fire. Every junction we had crossed, rendered in the Dreamer's particular shorthand - not nostalgia, just record-keeping.

"I'm leaving it running," the Dreamer said. He was already packing.

Nobody asked why. The Dreamer documented things so they could be revisited without the visitor being required. The projector would run until someone turned it off, and the images would move through the pavilion wall and into whatever morning was outside.

Rurik walked the length of the pavilion once, tail low, reading something none of our instruments could reach. Lano tracked him from the far side of the room - ten feet of empty floor between them, maintained by mutual agreement. When Rurik reached the southwest door and sat, Lano sat too, facing the opposite direction.

"She's not admitting he's right," the Philosopher observed, "but she's not leaving either."

"Same thing," said the Builder. She folded her chart with the finality of someone who had decided. The new signal - circled in a different color, annotated in her particular cramped hand - disappeared into the fold.

The Listener stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. The Wireman was beside him, saying nothing, which was how we knew he had decided too. Staying was its own kind of going. We had learned this somewhere in the tunnel network - that the ones who hold the signal in place are doing as much work as the ones moving through it.

"The relay will need the Listener," the Weather Reader said. He was checking his instruments. He had checked them four times in the last hour. The bearing had not changed.

"I know," said the Listener.

The Wireman touched the doorframe once, briefly, with two fingers. Then he stepped back inside.

The Weather Reader shouldered his pack. Lano's head came up. Her nose worked the air toward the door, toward the bearing, toward whatever the cat was already reading.

"Vamos," Lano said.

The projector kept running behind us. The harbor apartment rotated in light on the pavilion wall. By the time we reached the first ridge, the settlement was still visible - beacon pulse steady, the Listener and Wireman holding the node in place. Rurik was already four steps ahead, reading the terrain the way the Weather Reader read a pressure map: looking for the thing about to change, following the gradient toward where something was being made.

The Philosopher fell into step beside me. "In formal terms," he said, "we are following a cat."

"Yes," I said.

"I want that noted."

"The Builder will put it on the chart."

"Already done," the Builder said, from three paces ahead.