Dream d1962-s: The Bench and the Gauge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we were back at the Cooling Channel for the second pass, residency thirteen of this crossing, and the forge-light was still that deep arterial red that turns iron the color of old wound and new hope at the same time.

The bench was the problem. It had been the problem since the first pass, a small bright thing bolted into the forge-engine's lower flank, and what we had seated from the Trash Lands still rested true on one side. The other side sagged. Not catastrophically. Not yet. But a sag is a sag and the Channel had shown us, once already, what happens when you let a small wrong accumulate.

"We do not touch what is seated," the Builder said, not as a warning to anyone in particular, more as a reminder she was setting down for herself. She crouched at the low end and studied the gap with the flat of her hand, not touching, only reading.

The Wireman had already found the problem. He held up a short length of corrugated shim that he'd pulled from a rusted conduit along the western wall. "This fits," he said. "I think this fits."

"Run it past Oxy first," the Listener said.

Oxy was in the cool channel alongside the bench, their frills fanning out in the slow current that moved through the gauge-trough. They turned one dark eye toward the shim, then toward the low point of the bench. Then they moved.

They ran the load through the gauge. We all watched the needle. The Weather Reader named the reading as it climbed: "Forty. Forty-two. Forty-three and holding."

The count held. The needle did not waver past the mark.

"It holds," the Scavenger said from behind me, and there was something quiet in it, the way a person speaks when they have been surprised by a good outcome and do not want to jinx it by saying too much.

Lano had been watching from the channel wall. She turned her ears toward the gauge, then back toward the bench, then she sat down with a small compact thump and her tail moved once across the iron grate.

The Builder set the shim. She did not need help with that part, but the Wireman steadied the frame from the other side anyway, not because the Builder asked, but because that is what you do.

The forge pressed down around us. Slag cooled in long orange veins along the floor. Somewhere in the upper chambers, pressure was moving through old pipe, making that sound like a held breath about to release.

The bench was level. The count had held. We were thirteen crossings deep into this place and still, somehow, solving things.