Dream d2069-s: Before We Ask

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we camped at the hedge the night before we asked.

The hedge was not a wall. It was a breathing thing, woven and alive, chest-high and patient, and the Builder stood before it a long time with her bandaged forearm held against her body and her good hand moving slow across the outer braid. "Not cut," she said at last. "Not stacked. It grew this way." She said it like a verdict, like something she had been waiting to have confirmed for days.

Beyond the hedge, loomlight. The canopy stretched in rows above the nest-rows, gold in the last of the sun, and from somewhere inside it came a warmth that was not fire but was not nothing either - the warmth of things tended for a long time. The Starling Chorus had already found its place in there. I watched it descend as a single shape, thousands of birds folding inward like a closing lid, and then it was still.

The Weather Reader set her instrument on a flat stone and knelt to take the reading. The barometric column was salvaged work - a glass tube fitted into a brass casing, the seal replaced twice on the road. She had carried it longer than any of us had known her. She pressed the calibration tab the way she always did at camp, and the column rose, and she said the word: "Patient." She said it the way she always said it when the reading was good.

Then the instrument made a sound it had never made before. A small pop. The seal gave. The glass cracked at its lower fitting and the fluid it needed ran into the stone and was gone.

She sat back on her heels.

Lano felt it before any of us moved. Her ears went flat against her skull. She was up from her curl beside my feet in one motion, standing at the Weather Reader's elbow, a short bark aimed at the dark like a question that expected no good answer.

"The pressure reader is gone," the Weather Reader said, not panicking. Already calculating. "I have the brass casing. I have the housing. What I do not have is the sealed column."

The Builder turned from the hedge. "We have the filter tube. Not the same bore."

"Close enough to try."

"I said not the same."

"I heard you."

Rurik padded over and sat beside the cracked instrument and looked at it with the particular attention he gave to broken things that were not finished. "What does it need to give one good reading before we ask to cross?"

"A sealed column, a fixed datum, and the morning."

I pulled the Book tighter against my chest, its singed spine warm under my palm. Tomorrow we would ask to come in. Tonight we had work that was not yet ready.