Dream d1902-s: What the Channel Keeps

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the forge-light leaned and we followed it.

The Cooling Channel cut across the floor of the Foundry District like a thought interrupted mid-sentence. We came to it from the south side, where the slag had cooled into low ridges that Rurik picked his way across with the careful economy of someone who had crossed worse. He paused at the edge of the channel and looked down into the pale water running through it, and his ears went flat not from fear but from recognition - the way a cat goes still when something registers that he has no word for yet.

Oxy was already there.

They moved in the channel the way they always move, unhurried, their gills drifting with the current that the cooling system pushed through the pipe-work and out under the floor plates. The forge-heat drew the water one way; the channel fed it back the other. Oxy had found the seam between those two forces and was simply resting in it, which seemed to me as precise a piece of engineering as anything the Foundry had built on purpose.

The Builder crouched at the channel's lip and read the gauge bolted to the stone beside it. She did not say anything for a long moment. Then she said the pressure was holding but the reading on the secondary dial was three marks behind where the primary said it should be. She said this the way she says most things - flat, interested, without alarm, as if the world's discrepancies were a text she had agreed to study rather than a series of complaints.

The Wireman came alongside her and looked at the dial. He tapped it once with two fingers, which is what he does when he is deciding whether the instrument is lying or the system is.

The dial did not move.

"System," he said.

The Listener had walked farther down the channel to where a bank of dead conduit came out of the wall at an angle. He held one hand near it without touching and reported that it was warmer than it should be for something disconnected. The Weather Reader noted the forge-air was shifting; she had been watching the heat-draft all morning and it had curved twice in places where the floor plan said there was nothing to curve it.

Lano padded to the edge of the channel and looked at Oxy. Her tail made one slow arc. Oxy did not look back but rose a few centimeters in the water, which is how they acknowledge a greeting when they are busy measuring.

There was work here that wanted reading, and the party was already reading it. The gauge held its lag. The conduit held its heat. The drift in the air held its curve. We did not solve any of it yet. We stood at the channel's edge and let the knowledge of it settle into us the way the cool water settled into the floor.

The bright bench was bolted into the forge-engine behind us. We would get to it. First the channel. First this.