Dream d1561-s: Conduit Like Roots

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Wireman was already kneeling among the cables when we came over the rise, talking before we reached him.

"- a star pattern, you see, here, and here," he was saying, more to the cables than to anyone, his long fingers walking the bundles where they lay exposed across the ground. "They did not bury this stretch. They left it on the surface on purpose. You bury a line to protect it. You leave it bare when you want to be able to read it at a glance."

We had walked into a field of conduit. The cabling had come up out of the earth entirely here and run along the open ground in thick black ropes, branching and rejoining, climbing over roots and around stones, so that you could not tell at first which was conduit and which was the root of some old tree. The made thing and the grown thing had the same shape. They both reached.

The Wireman did not look up when we stopped. He had appeared the way he always appeared, between one stretch of trail and the next, drawn to wiring the way the Weather Reader was drawn to a turning sky. He lived a little outside the party. He visited it.

"The splice pattern is the tell," he said, lifting a junction where six lines fused into one. "Whoever did this spliced the way a person splices who never expects to come back and check the work. No service loop. No slack. No room to cut in later. They wired it once, correctly, forever, and walked away. That is not laziness. That is confidence. Terrible confidence."

The Builder crouched beside him. "Can you read where it goes?"

"North." The Wireman traced the trunk line with two fingers. "All of it, north. It gathers as it goes. Like a watershed running backward, every small stream feeding up toward one high source instead of down to the sea." He sat back on his heels. "I have seen wiring that serves a place. This serves an appetite."

Lano sniffed along a black rope, found it neither warm nor cold, and lost interest. The Dreamer stood over the field of cable-roots, camera lowered, reading it his own way.

The Wireman stood, brushed the soil from his knees, and looked north along the gathering lines. "I will not go up there with you," he said. "I read wiring. I do not read whatever is at the end of this much of it." He nodded once, to me, to the Builder, and turned back the way he had come. "Watch the splices. They will tell you how close you are."

Then he was gone, the way he came, and we went on along the roots.