Dream d1857-s: What the Waste Did Not Want

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the grey-brown haze sat low on the slag dunes and the light came from no direction I could name. The Trash Lands spread ahead of us like a wound the forge had made and turned its back on - heaps of failed castings, cracked gauges half-buried in the crust, dead conduit tangled beneath the surface like roots of something that had never lived.

Lano moved ahead of the party with her nose low and her hackles up, stepping carefully. Her burned paw came down lighter than the others, and I watched her place it each time with a kind of deliberate economy. She paused at a ridge of slag and stood frozen, one foreleg lifted, ears forward.

The Scavenger crouched beside her. He turned something over in his hands - a length of conduit, bent but unbroken, the couplings still clean inside. "This one was pulled before it failed," he said, not to any of us in particular. "Look at the threading. Someone took this out by choice."

The Builder came forward and crouched across from him. She took the conduit length and sighted down it. "Not choice," she said. "They ran short on patience. This was good material. You could work with this."

The Weather Reader had one hand out to the west, feeling something the rest of us could not. "Wind's turning," she said. "It's been pushing the chemical haze from the forge quarter for three days. The sky above the waste is cleaner than it looks. We're reading yesterday's weather."

We moved deeper into the dunes. The conduit ran beneath the crust in long tangles, surfacing at angles, submerging again. Some of it still carried trace heat from wherever it had come from. Lano nosed along one exposed length, her tail low, reading something I could not follow.

Then she stopped, sat, and looked back at me.

The Scavenger pointed to a place where the crust was thinner, where the conduit looped back on itself around a rusted housing. Inside the housing, nearly buried, was a book of readings - binding warped but intact, the pages sealed by the way they had been wrapped before someone threw it out. Someone had known what they were discarding.

"This is what the waste did not want," the Scavenger said. He did not unwrap it yet. That was not his call to make.

I picked it up. It was heavier than it looked. The Builder watched me. Rurik watched the horizon, his black tail low in the chemical haze, steady. Lano's eyes stayed on me, waiting.

The Trash Lands had been keeping something for us all along.