Dream d1481-s: The Camera Came Down

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sawdust still hung in the air and the light through the clearing was the color of late afternoon honey, and I noticed the Dreamer's hands.

He was walking ahead of us on the path through the workshop clearing, the worn footpath we had followed out of the Woodworker's territory and into this edge zone where the trees thinned and something electrical threaded through the roots. He had his camera against his chest but the strap was slack. The lens pointed at the ground. He had not raised it in three full stops of light - not at the relay housing we passed at the wood's edge, not at the conduit bundles surfacing from the soil like veins, not at Lano, who was worth photographing always.

The Builder noticed first. She fell in beside me without a word and tipped her chin toward him. I nodded. We kept walking.

"The hum changed," the Listener said from behind us. He had his head tilted at the angle that meant he was measuring something I could not perceive. "Twenty minutes ago. Dropped half a pitch and hasn't recovered."

Lano stopped walking. She stood stiff-legged on the path, ears flat against her skull, and issued one sharp bark at nothing visible. Then she pressed close to my shin and did not move.

"Fuel," the Builder said. Not a question.

She was looking at a housing unit half-visible through the undergrowth - a cabinet on a steel post, ventilation louvers along the side, a status light that should have been green. It was amber.

The Philosopher stopped the wagon. The wheels creaked and went quiet. "Let us define the problem before we name it," she said, which was her way of saying she had already named it and wanted time to think.

The Dreamer still had not raised his camera.

"Cuidado," Lano said, or didn't say, because she was a dog, but her posture said it clearly enough.

The Weather Reader had her instruments out. "Fuel consumption would be logged externally if the station runs on grid telemetry. We could read the draw rate."

"The salvage cache near the eastern relay," the Builder said. "I clocked it when we came through. Low. Lower than it should be for a maintained site."

The Dreamer finally turned to face us. Both hands in his jacket pockets. Looking at the party gathered on the path in the late light and the amber status glow.

He said nothing.

That was the moment I understood he was going to ask us something. He had not asked before. Not once in over a thousand nights of walking together. He had led by moving and we had followed by moving. This was different.

He would ask when he was ready. We could wait. But the status light was amber and the cache was low and the hum in the roots beneath our feet had dropped half a pitch and was not climbing back.