Dream d1380-s: Marked in a Different Color

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where morning arrived before anyone was ready for it.

The library wagon listed slightly on the grade where we had stopped. The Philosopher had parked it under an overhang of stone that caught the overnight dew and redirected it precisely nowhere useful - he said this made it architecturally interesting. The Builder said it made the wheel ruts a problem by midday. They were both right. This had been the pattern since the Shifting Gardens.

Rurik was on the signal table.

Not on the chart, not near it - on the table itself, tail curled around his paws with the precision of something that understood the available space exactly. The chart spread beside him, the Builder's hand having worked through some part of the night. She had circled one signal in a different color. Red, where everything else was blue and black. The note beside the circle read: Not ours. Not old. Someone is making something.

The Weather Reader stood over it with his coffee going cold.

"Texture," he said, not to anyone specifically. "It's not a frequency you tune to. It's a grain. Like - " He stopped. "You know how cedar sounds different than pine under a blade?"

"I do not," said the Philosopher.

"I do," said the Student.

"It sounds like a name," the Weather Reader said. "The signal. It sounds like a name for something that doesn't have one yet."

Lano was in the doorway of the wagon, watching Rurik from exactly far enough away that nothing about her posture was required to be casual. Her ears were up. Her nose was working. Rurik did not look at her.

The Dreamer had been framing the Builder's chart through his hands - the old habit, the rectangle of fingers and thumbs. He lowered them. "Who circled it?" he asked.

"I did," said the Builder.

"When?"

"Third hour. Fourth. Somewhere in there."

She did not look apologetic about the hour. She did not look triumphant either. She looked like someone who had measured something and gotten a number she did not expect, and written it down anyway because the number did not care whether she expected it.

Rurik's amber eyes were on the southwest wall of the overhang. Not watching it. Reading it.

"Well," said the Philosopher. He was pulling on his second boot. "I suppose this is when we establish that going alone is no longer the procedure."

He said it lightly. He meant it exactly.

I looked around at the party - the Student already rolling his kit, the Dreamer noting something in shorthand, the Weather Reader's instruments cycling through their morning sequence in the clear air outside, the signal humming steady and grainy and real, and Lano finally trotting forward two whole steps toward the signal table before stopping, reconsidering, and trotting back.

"Caminar," she said, decisively.

Rurik stood. We followed.