Dream d3315-s: Below the Painted Line

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the pool at Umberfall held less water than it had in the last account. The mark on the rock - an amber smear at chest height, painted in a season when the pool was full and the sending was young - stood a hand's width above the surface. I noted this without speech. The clerk wrote it.

The surveyor moved to the far edge and set her rod against the stone face. She called a number back. The clerk entered it beside the previous entry, and even in the lamplight I could see the two numbers did not match. The keeper stood near the inlet and said nothing. Umberfall in dormancy is not the same as Umberfall diminished, but the difference wants measuring.

Lano had been sitting at my heel, quiet. Her ears went flat before I heard anything. A moment later came the sound - not a crack but a hiss, low and sustained, from the small pump house at the northern edge of the pool. The light above the door flickered twice and did not come back. The keeper turned toward it with a step that was already practiced.

Inside, the component that had run the circulation feed was dark at its center, a ring of discoloration around the housing where heat had gathered and not dispersed. The keeper touched the edge of it briefly to confirm what she already knew. She said the part had come from a salvage run four seasons ago and there would be no replacement from the same source.

The surveyor came inside and looked. She and the keeper spoke in the compressed way of people who have faced a repair with no parts before. They measured the diameter of the failed housing with a length of cord, and the keeper went to the rear storage and returned with two pieces that were not the same shape but might, together, be made to serve. The pool would go without circulation through the night. Whether that mattered depended on what the pool was doing.

I stood at the door with Lano pressed against my leg, watching the lamplight move over the tools laid out on the stone floor. The distant reader had no line back here. The relay clerk had closed the record book and was holding it under one arm, waiting. Whatever the account would say about Umberfall, it would include this: the pool below the mark, the pump dark, the keeper's hands moving over a repair that had not been designed.

Outside, the surface of the pool held the amber of the single lamp on the far bank. No ripple. The level still stood below the line painted in a fuller year, and no one had explained it, and no one had tried.

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