Dream d974-s: Fire and Moving Image

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cooking fire had been burning since before the Dreamer arrived, and now the three of us sat around it in the cooling hour, the beacon doing its slow pulse on the ridge behind us, and Lano curled at the edge of the firelight with his nose pointed toward the smell of whatever the Dreamer had unpacked from the cart.

The cart was a thing of salvage and intention. Aluminum channel stock bent into a frame. A lens assembly pulled from something older, something that used to project training materials in a conference room that no longer existed. The Dreamer had rigged a power draw from a portable cell, the same kind the Beacon Network Specialist had started stockpiling, and the whole apparatus threw a rectangle of light against the canvas the Builder had stretched between two uprights before dinner. We had not planned this. The Builder had put up the uprights for drying rope. Now they were a screen.

The Dreamer ran image sequences without narration. Settlement attempts in the eastern ridge country. A water reclamation rig that used salvaged copper pipe and gravity. A signal relay someone had built into the shell of a dead cell tower, patched with wire-wrapped ceramic insulators and what looked like automotive fuse holders. Communities I had never seen, doing the same things we were doing, solving the same problems we were solving, arriving at different shapes.

Lano's ears came up when the white crane appeared on the canvas. It had been traveling with the Dreamer for months, apparently. In the sequence it stood at the edge of a flooded field while someone calibrated a hand-held antenna. The real crane, I realized, was somewhere just outside the firelight. I heard it settle its wings.

The Builder said nothing during the sequences, only leaned forward once when a junction box design appeared that was different from ours, then reached for a piece of wire and began bending it into the same configuration to hold the shape in hand while thinking.

After, the Dreamer showed us the projection mount. The lens assembly could be repositioned with two thumbscrews. The whole thing broke into four components and packed into a case the size of a document bag. It had been designed to travel. It had been designed to show what one settlement learned to the next one.

We talked about structure. The Builder had thoughts about the uprights, about making them permanent, about a roof that could double as weather shelter and projection surface. The Dreamer pulled out a small notebook. They began to sketch together, firelight, the beacon's slow rhythm marking time behind them.

Lano lifted his head and said, quietly, "Mira."

I looked where he was looking. The crane stood just inside the firelight, watching the canvas, still bright with the last image the Dreamer had shown us.