Dream d1613-s: The Weather Reader's Chart

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Weather Reader had been awake before any of us, her instruments arrayed along the flat stone shelf at the cave mouth like an altar to precision. She had a small oil lamp, not the fire - the fire was for warmth, but the lamp was for work. By the time I rose and found Rurik already awake and watching her from the shadows, she had already filled two pages.

"How long?" I asked.

She did not look up. "Since the second hour. I needed a baseline."

The framework's glow was visible from where I stood - a kilometer south and behind us, its light catching the high ridge. But it was not steady. I had noticed the flickers over the past several days the way you notice a loose tooth: not constantly, but always when you check. She had been counting them.

Lano was curled near the lamp, her white fur faintly amber in the light. When I sat beside the Weather Reader, Lano lifted her head and then settled again. Rurik padded forward from the shadows and sat at the edge of the lamplight, amber eyes on the pages.

"The interval between flickers was forty seconds, three nights ago," she said. "Two nights ago, thirty-one. Last night, twenty-two." She turned the page toward me. She had drawn a curve - not a line, a curve, bending steeply at its right end. "This morning it has been seventeen. Twice it dropped to fourteen."

The Builder came through from inside the cave where he had been sleeping. He saw the chart before he said a word and stood reading it for a long moment.

"That is not noise," he said finally. "That is a function."

"Yes," she said.

He sat down across from her. Neither of them said what the curve's projection implied. They did not need to. The curve said it without their help - drawn in her careful hand, log-paper precision, the dots each timestamped in her shorthand, the trend line she had sketched in lighter ink showing where the intervals would go if the rate held.

I looked out at the framework. It pulsed once while I watched. Then again, shorter than the last gap. Diecisiete, I thought, though no one had spoken Spanish. Seventeen. And dropping.

"We are not guessing anymore," she said, and capped her pen.

The lamp held steady. The framework, behind us and below the ridge, did not.