Dream d1534-s: Conduit Through the Pines

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path changed underfoot before I noticed we were following it.

The ground had been soft coming out of the Woodworker's region - leaf matter, root humps, the particular give of land that has been walked by many feet over many years. Then something harder came through beneath my boots. A line of buried conduit, the width of two fists, surfacing at intervals like the spine of something that had chosen to show itself. Then another line, parallel. Then a relay housing bolted to a post between two oaks, its indicator light a steady green in the clear morning air.

Lano paused at the housing. Ears forward, nose reading the plastic and the warm electronics inside. She looked back at me once, then continued.

The Dreamer walked ahead. He had not raised his camera. He had not raised it in three days of walking now, and the party moved differently without the sound of it - the faint mechanical click that had punctuated our passage for more seasons than I could count. The Builder had noticed first. He walked closer to the Dreamer than usual, saying nothing, present in the way a wall is present.

"How far?" the Philosopher asked.

The Dreamer indicated north with a slight turn of his head.

"A proposition," the Philosopher said, quieter than usual. "We follow because he asked."

"We follow because he never asks," the Weather Reader said. She was reading the relay housings as we passed them, counting intervals under her breath. Eight meters. Eight meters. Eight meters. Someone had planned this with instruments.

The Builder crouched at the next housing, examined the mounting hardware. "Cold-weather rated," he said to no one in particular. "Installed level. Someone took their time."

Above us, attached to the fork of a hornbeam at camera height, a sealed housing with a wide-angle lens. The Listener had stopped walking. He stood with his head tilted, attending to something. I stopped beside him.

"It's still running," he said. "Not transmitting. Processing locally. You can hear the cycle if you know what you're listening for."

I could not hear it. But Lano could - her ears had been rotating for the last twenty minutes like small dishes tracking something just outside my range.

The Dreamer stopped at a clearing boundary and stood there, hands open at his sides.

"He built it himself," he said. First words in three days. "All of it. And then he ran out of questions."

The sun sat clean and direct through the canopy. No haze. The relay lights blinked their steady green through the trees in both directions, as far as I could see.