Dream d976-s: Screen Against the Sky

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Dreamer arrived at first light carrying salvaged aluminum poles strapped in bundles across their back, and behind them the white crane walked the ridge at height, tracking the same path they had traveled but not landing yet.

We had cleared the ground two days before - a flat pad of gravel and packed earth on the settlement's east face, where the beacon glow from the hilltop would catch the back of a screen without washing out the projected image. The Builder had run conduit for a power tap before the Dreamer reached us. That was how the Builder worked: infrastructure prepared before the need announced itself.

Lano sniffed each bundle of poles as we unrolled them onto the tarp. His tail moved in steady arcs. He put his nose to the cinch knots and sneezed once.

The frame took most of the morning. The Dreamer had developed a joint system from salvaged conduit clamps and threaded rod - nothing welded, all mechanical, everything reversible. They showed me the logic without explaining it: handed me two sections, let me feel how they connected, guided my hands to the locking collar. I turned it until it held. They nodded.

The Builder came around midday with a coil of shielded cable and a junction box pulled from somewhere in their packs. They knelt at the base where we had set the first uprights and began tracing a ground path with one finger before opening the box. Lano sat beside them, watching the hands move.

The screen material was rolled tight in a waterproof sleeve - a heavy synthetic weave the Dreamer had found intact in a collapsed logistics building two settlements east. We stretched it between the uprights and tied the bottom corners to ground stakes. When the wind came down off the ridge the surface rippled once and then held.

The crane landed on the peak of the east upright when we had the screen two-thirds tensioned. It stood there and watched the rest of the work without moving. Lano looked up at it once.

"Aqui," Lano said, in the way that meant this is the place, not the direction.

By late afternoon the projector was mounted - a rebuilt unit in a housing the Dreamer had fabricated from sheet aluminum, bolted to a post at the correct throw distance. They aimed it at the blank screen and powered it without loading an image. Just the white rectangle, the lamp heat, the sound of the cooling fan spinning up.

The beacon pulsed on the hill behind us. Its light caught the edge of the screen at the interval and left a mark there, and then the screen was white again, waiting.

The crane flew before the stars came out. The Dreamer sat on a flat stone and cleaned the projector lens with a soft cloth. We had not spoken much. We had built something.