Dream d2043-s: The Signal Goes Crooked

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the retaining frame was half-raised when Lano barked.

We had been working the testing ground since the second bell. The Builder had negotiated us into the labor by showing the Ospreygreen foreman her compass and her calluses in that order, and the foreman had nodded and handed her a pry bar. The ground ran flat and frosty at the settlement's eastern edge, cordage strung between stakes to mark measured paces, targets of painted board standing at intervals down the line. We hauled timber and drove pegs and did not ask too many questions, which seemed to be the correct approach. Ospreygreen had a rhythm to it, four days deep, and the rhythm said: show up, do the work, let the talking come later.

Rurik sat at the perimeter watching. He had made his slow circuit of the threshold stones at dawn and then stationed himself where the testing ground met the road back into the settlement proper. He had not moved in an hour.

The Weather Reader had gone with the lamplighter to the relay post - a squat stone tower at the northern edge that served as both lamp-anchor and signal station for the approach road. She came back at the third bell with her barometric sleeve in her hand and her expression careful.

"Something is wrong with the encoding," she said quietly.

I set down the timber I was carrying. The Builder did not set hers down but she stopped moving and turned.

Lano had gone still before the Weather Reader finished speaking. The white dog stood at the testing ground's edge, ears flat, body low, facing the tower. Then she barked - once, sharp - and I said quieta and she went silent but did not relax, one paw raised, nose working.

I wrote in the book: relay signal distorted, third bell. Interval-pattern scrambled. No visible cause. Lano alert.

"Garbled how?" the Builder asked.

"The relay station north of here reported crooked transmissions two hours before I checked. They called it atmospheric. I am no longer calling it atmospheric." The Weather Reader turned the barometer sleeve in her hands. "The pattern is not random. It is wrong in a specific direction."

The foreman had drifted closer. He had the look of a man who had already heard something and was deciding how much to share.

"How long has your beacon been reporting?" I asked.

"Seven years," he said. "Never missed an interval."

It had missed three by the time we ate supper. We kept working. The timber frame rose another foot. Whatever was moving through the signal had not yet shown us its shape, and the targets stood at their measured distances in the hard clear light, patient and still, waiting to be read.