Dream d1564-s: The Dog Tests the Wire

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano put her nose to a black conduit lying in the gorse and snapped backward as if it had bitten her.

She did not yelp. She simply recoiled, the whole length of her flinching back a clean half-meter, hackles lifting along her spine, and then she stood and stared at the cable with her ears flat and a low sound starting in her chest. She had nosed a hundred dead lines since the workshop without a flicker. This one she would not approach again.

We were crossing a wired hillside, gorse and cable, the yellow flowers of the gorse bushes growing up through and around the black ropes of conduit so that the made and the living tangled together on the slope. Everything looked abandoned. The cables were weathered, sun-cracked at the sheath, half-swallowed by the gorse. Everything looked dead.

"It is not dead," the Builder said. She had crossed to where Lano stood guard over the line. She did not touch it either. She unclipped a small device from her belt, the one she used to read load without contact, and held it a hand's breadth above the conduit. She watched the needle. "It is live. Carrying. Full signal, this very second." She moved the device along the line and the needle held. "All of it. The whole hillside is live. It only looks abandoned."

The Weather Reader looked at the cracked, sun-bleached cables threading the gorse, then at Lano standing rigid over the one she had touched. "The dog knew before your instrument did," she said.

"The dog always does," the Builder said. "She felt the charge in it. There is enough running through this slope to make her coat stand up. Dead-looking and wide awake. That is the worst combination there is. You stop respecting a thing because it looks finished, and it is still carrying everything."

I crouched by Lano and put a hand on her shoulder. The muscle under her white coat was tight as wire itself. She would not look away from the conduit. She had tested it once, the way she tested everything, with the most honest instrument any of us carried, and the answer had frightened her, and she was not going to forget it.

The Dreamer stood among the gorse and the live cable, camera lowered, untroubled, as though he had expected the whole hillside to be awake under its disguise.

"Step over them, do not on them," the Builder told us, marking a line through the gorse. "Every one of these is alive. Trust the dog. She read it first."

We picked our way up the living slope, and Lano led, choosing each gap in the wire herself.