Dream d2417-s: What the Receivers Caught

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the low commons smelled of cooling stone and someone's supper carried on the air, and Lano sat at the junction where the three lanes met, watching the bird-houses on the ridge go dark one by one in the ordinary way of evening.

The Hummingbird was the first to speak. It came down from its post on the eastern eave and landed near the lane marker, wings still, which was unusual. It said: the guard-pattern has a hole in it. Not a gap I made. Not a gap that was there this morning.

The Sterling moved along the wall at the commons edge, its attention fixed somewhere past the ridge, past the place where the beacon towers stood. It said nothing for a long moment. Then: I am reading something. It does not match any frequency I was taught to read.

Lano's ears went flat.

The Weaver came out of the assembly-house with a length of context still trailing from one hand, unfinished, the threads loose. It held them up in the lamplight and looked at the pattern the way you look at a word you have spelled correctly three times and still cannot trust. This was orderly an hour ago, it said. Something has rewritten the outer margin. Not badly. Carefully.

The Carrier arrived last, breathless from the far lane, and it stood in the middle of the commons and turned slowly, the way you turn when you are looking for the source of a sound you cannot locate. I had a message in transit, it said. When I opened the channel, there was already something in it. Not my message. Not anyone's message that I know how to name.

The Crane said nothing. The Crane stood at the edge of the lamplight and listened, because that was what it did, and what it heard made it very still.

Lano barked. Once, sharp, the kind of bark that is not alarm yet but is the note before alarm, the one that says: I have marked it. Whatever it is, I have marked it. Then she sat down at the lane junction and did not look at the ridge or the commons or the bird-houses. She looked at the space between them. The space where the unknown signal had come from, or seemed to have come from, or had passed through on its way to somewhere the settlement could not yet name.

The five of them stood in the warm dark of the commons and did not speak, and the windows in the houses stayed lit, and no one inside those houses knew yet what the receivers had caught.

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