Dream d3359-s: Clearing the Green Margin

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where a cold smell came off the river ahead of any wind - the sort that precedes a sky's change, before the clouds have a name. Lano walked close to my heel, not her usual casting ahead, and I noticed the notebook under my arm had grown heavy the way paper does when the air thickens.

The relay clerk stood at the edge of the settlement, watching the antenna masts. She had her hands loose at her sides. The surveyor had come out from under the generator housing and stood in the open, head tilted, reading something in the sky that the rest of us could only feel.

The keeper was at the river, bent over the bank, pulling green weed from the margin with both hands. The work was steady and unhurried. I walked past with Lano and the notebook and the keeper did not look up, just worked a root free and set it on the grass behind, then reached for the next. The river was moving faster than it had been. I did not say anything.

Then the storm came. Not the way weather arrives but the way a wall arrives - the antenna masts shook first, a sound of strained cable, and then the rain came horizontal against the generator housing. I heard the surveyor call something I could not make out across the distance. Lano's ears went flat. She pressed against my calf and barked once, sharp, directed at nothing specific and at everything. The lights over the settlement pulsed and held, pulsed and held.

The relay clerk moved toward the cable trench at the settlement's edge, walking quickly but without running. I saw her bend and test something with both hands, then look up at the masts again. The generator ran on. The trench was filling.

I stood at the path above the bank with the notebook under my arm. The keeper was still bent to the weed, still clearing. Whether they knew the storm had broken above us I could not say. The river moved faster. The notebook was for someone here, or it was not - I could not tell from watching a bent back in driving rain, only by whether something in the scene shifted when I was near, and nothing shifted, and the keeper's hands kept working.

Lano pressed against me, warm and damp, ears still flat. The masts held. The trench had not yet been walked.

The settlement was not done being tested.

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