Dream d1562-s: Mounts Without Cameras

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the first thing I saw was an empty bracket bolted to bare rock.

It was a mount, plainly a camera mount, a small steel cradle with two thumb-screws and a leveling plate, fixed to a natural outcrop with bolts sunk deep into the stone. The cradle held nothing. The thumb-screws were tightened on air. Rain had streaked rust down the rock beneath it in two thin lines, like something had wept from the empty fitting for a long time.

There were more. As we came into the clearing I counted them, mounts everywhere, fixed to boulders and to the trunks of trees and to a low spur of granite that ran across the ground: dozens of cradles, every one of them empty. Someone had built the infrastructure to see this whole place from every angle and had never installed, or had removed, the eyes.

"Mounts without cameras," the Builder said. She tested one with her thumb. "Solid. Recently greased, even. They are maintained. They are just not used." She frowned. "You service a fitting you intend to fill. Or used to fill."

The Weather Reader turned slowly, taking in the empty cradles, the careful rusted vacancies. "It is worse than being watched," she said. "It is being watched by a habit no one keeps anymore. The looking is built in. The looker is gone."

Lano walked the spur of granite, sniffing at the base of each mount, finding nothing, moving on.

The Dreamer had stopped in front of one. A single empty cradle at eye level, angled north, the thumb-screws open. He did not photograph it. He did not move. He stood before the empty mount the way a man stands before a mirror that has stopped returning his face, and his own camera hung at his side, lowered, full, while this fitting that was made to hold exactly such a thing held nothing at all.

I watched the recognition arrive in him. I had walked beside him long enough to read it without a word: the empty cradle was a question pointed straight at the thing on his own strap. Who stops looking. Why. What is left bolted to the rock when the one who saw through it has gone north and not come back.

He said nothing. That was the worst of it. He had a thousand things behind his face and he let none of them out, and after a long moment he turned from the empty mount and walked on, and I followed, and behind us the cradle stayed fixed to its rock, aimed north at nothing, faithful to an eye it would never hold again.