Dream d1572-s: The Glow on the Horizon

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came over the lip of the northern overlook and saw it at last - a glow on the horizon, far off and low, the source we had been climbing toward for days.

It was the first time any of us had laid eyes on it. From the high overlook the wired country fell away mile after mile into the dusk, all of it dark, and at the far edge of the dark there was that one patch of light. Not a fire. Not a town. A cold even glow, steady as the hum we had been hearing, pulsing very slightly the way a thing pulses when it is running on a cycle and has been running on it a long time. It sat on the horizon and poured its pale light up into the underside of the clouds, and it did not flicker, and it did not call to anyone.

We stood in a row along the overlook and looked at it. Nobody spoke for a while. It is a strange thing to walk so far toward a glow and then to see it and feel the walking go out of your legs.

The Dreamer stood with his camera lowered, looking, not lifting it.

The Builder came up beside me, and she looked at the glow for a long time before she said it.

"We cannot fix this by walking into it." Her voice was flat, certain, the voice she uses for load-bearing things. "Look at it. It's complete. It runs whether we're there or not. There's nothing at that light for us to repair with our hands. If we walk down into it we just become two more feeds it takes in and never answers."

The glow pulsed, slow, indifferent, on the far horizon.

"Then what," the Weather Reader asked quietly.

The Builder did not answer right away. She kept looking north at the cold light, and I could feel the whole shape of the journey beginning to bend behind her silence, beginning, for the first time, to turn.