Dream d1398-s: One Thread Remaining

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the footpath through the pines opened onto a clearing of packed earth and the smell of fresh-cut wood. The Wireman stood at a long bench near the treeline, drawing a plane along a board with the patience of someone who had done this ten thousand times before. Curls of pale shaving caught the morning light and drifted toward Lano's nose. She sneezed, then sat and watched him, ears up.

The Dreamer had claimed the pressed-specimen garden behind the workshop - a low wooden frame covered in glass panels, each one holding a flattened piece of something: bark rubbing, leaf pressed flat, a cross-section of root. She was documenting them. She held each panel at arm's length before writing a line in her notebook.

The Philosopher arrived from the far edge of the clearing, wagon wheels crunching on the dry earth. He announced nothing. He just let the wagon stop, unhitched himself from the handle, and sat on it.

"We're still missing the Weather Reader," I said.

"He's calibrating," the Philosopher said. "He's always calibrating."

The Wireman set the plane down without comment.

I was checking the pack configurations - rope, instruments, the rolled survey charts the Builder had spent three nights preparing - when Lano's ears went flat. Not slowly. All at once, like a switch had thrown. She moved to my left shin and sat against it. The bark she let out was short and low. Then, quieter: "Cuidado."

A second later the radio on the bench crackled. Then nothing.

The Beacon Network Specialist's voice came through in fragments: "...transformer on the secondary relay... it's gone... the whole eastern arm is dark..."

Then the carrier wave cut completely.

The Wireman was already moving. He had the panel off the relay unit on the workbench before the Philosopher finished standing up. He held a small component up to the light - a cylindrical thing with a carbon streak up one side.

"Replacement?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"We have nothing close," the Dreamer said from the garden, not looking up. She had clearly already run the inventory in her head.

The Philosopher crouched beside the bench. "Then the question becomes not what we have, but what we can make behave like what we had."

Lano pressed closer against my leg, her nose turned toward the radio.

The eastern relay arm covered half the settlement's inner network. Without it, the Beacon Network Specialist would be maintaining communication on a single thread - and anything that loaded it too hard, anything that asked too much at once, and the whole spine of what we had built would go silent before we had taken a single step toward the Undrawn Edge.

"Get the Weather Reader," I said. "Now."