Dream d2082-s: The Graft Held Overnight

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Chorus rose at dusk and we stopped talking to listen.

It wheeled above the eastern terrace, one body banking against the amber light, and its call came down in a single voice: the west drainage clear, the road-circuit waypost unmanned, a graft on the third terrace taken. That last piece the Builder heard before the rest of us, her head coming up, already turning toward the row where yesterday she had bound two stems with a strip of bark and pressed them together with her thumb.

"That's the one," she said. Not triumph - just satisfaction, the kind that lives in a task done right.

Lano heard it too, ears tilting toward the Chorus before it wheeled back and folded itself away into the canopy. She trotted the length of the terrace wall and sniffed the base of the graft-post, then sat, tail sweeping the flagstone once.

The Weather Reader was already at her gauge. She had been reading the Chorus's calls against her own pressure log since the third day, noting each correspondence in a small notebook she kept separate from the Book of Readings - that one, singed along its spine, lay open on the stone table under the canopy loomlight, its pages intact and slightly warped where the Foundry heat had pulled the binding. She turned her pressure log toward me and I saw the two columns: her millibar readings from the morning, the Chorus's calls from the afternoon dusk. They matched.

"Every day," she said. "Not close. Exact."

Rurik sat on the wall above her and said nothing for a moment. Then: "The Foundry would have calculated that from a model. Three days of sensing, run through the system." He watched the Loomkeepers move along the upper row, beaks working fast in the dimming light. "This is different."

The Loomkeepers were preparing the evening's reading. The Book lay open at the Harrowhollow entry - the eleventh station of the circuit - and one of them perched at the canopy edge and began: not speech, not song, but a rapid knotting, a beak pulling grass-thread taut in the rhythm of what the page held. The others followed row by row, reading the entry upward into the weave until the nest-rows above the Harrowhollow terrace carried it in fiber. Below, at the base of that same terrace, one pressed a small seed into the turned earth and stepped back.

The Builder watched the canopy take the entry and said nothing. Lano pressed against her leg.

Thirteen days in the grove. The grove does not change. The canopy only holds more, every evening, of what was carried here.