Dream d2113-s: No Beacon Answers

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the terraces smelled of new earth and the Wardens were running their first circuit of the afternoon. Grove day forty-four: I knew it by the count of seed-mounds along the upper terrace, each one named for a deed and pressed into the loam with two fingers and a word spoken quietly. The Hummingbird Wardens swept the rows in their exact arc, three seconds between hover-points, the same as yesterday, the same as every day before it. Nothing improvised, nothing varied. You could set a gauge by them, and the Loomkeepers did.

I had the Book of Readings resting across both palms, its singed spine dark against the green. The pages were whole, every one - I had counted them twice on the road from the Foundry and twice again on arrival - but the spine held the smell of what it had cost to carry it out. The Weather Reader stood near the east terrace noting pressure in the margins of her own small book, and the Builder was laying out the afternoon's seed-tray in the careful order the Loomkeepers had shown her: name-side up, husk-intact, placed not pressed.

Then came the south wind. I felt it first as a shift in Lano's attention - her head came up, ears pricked forward, and she stepped off the terrace edge into the open row. Three paces, and she stopped. A blight-spore was riding the gust, pale as dust, barely visible against the afternoon light. One of the Wardens was already there: the dart and the hover and the snapping close of wings around the spore before it could complete its drift. No deviation, no improvisation - the patrol circuit had simply included this. The spore was gone. Lano watched the spot where it had been, her tail down, not satisfied, still watching.

The evening reading came at the loomlight hour. The Loomkeepers took their positions in the nest-rows and the lead beak drew the thread through: the Kestrelbarrow entry, forty-second of the circuit. Arrival, deed, gift carried, departure. The grass-thread ran through the canopy in three quick knots and then the Kestrelbarrow seed - small, darker than the others, with a faint ridge along its seam - went into the ground with the rest. The grove received it. That was all the ceremony needed.

We were settling into the quiet after when the receiver behind the east hedge spoke. Not a familiar tone - not the warm, timed pulse of the known beacon network. Rurik lifted his head from where he had been cleaning a paw by the Book's case. The Weather Reader closed her notebook.

"Pattern?" she asked.

"None I know," the Builder said. She was already moving to the receiver housing.

The Starling Chorus swept once over the canopy and called down: "A signal not ours." One pass, one call, and it wheeled north.

Lano barked - once, short, low, not at any visible thing. Her ears went flat. She stood in the row between us and the east hedge and did not move.

The grove held its breath around us. Forty-four days of careful planting, the Book whole on its shelf, the Wardens in their circuit. And somewhere south or east or nowhere named, something broadcasting on a bearing we had no record of.