Dream d998-s: Sounder and Wire

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the beacon was doing what it had been doing for weeks - pulsing slow and even from the hilltop, throwing its light across the stripped towers and the broken ridge - and I looked up from where I was sitting and saw a figure at the settlement's outer boundary, standing still, with cases at his feet.

Lano saw him first. Her ears went up sharp and she was off the step before I had risen, trotting toward the figure without urgency, without alarm. Just recognition. I followed.

He had not changed. Same stance - upright, patient, as though he had been waiting there for some time and found the wait acceptable. The cases were the same too, or similar ones: hard-sided, latched, arranged at his feet in an order that was not random. He watched Lano approach and then looked past her to me, and there was nothing in his face that needed saying.

"Bien," Lano said.

I put my hand on her back. We stood with him at the outer line for a moment. Behind us, the beacon pulsed. Ahead, across the stripped valley, the last of the day's light was doing something complicated in the metal latticework of the old transmission towers. He looked at the beacon, and then at me, and then crouched and opened the nearest case.

Inside: relay boards. Patch cables in bundled coils. Signal routing equipment I recognized from a ceremony I had not expected to remember as clearly as I did. Below those, wrapped in cloth, something older - brass housings, a sending key on a hinge, a sounder mechanism with its coil and armature intact.

The Builder appeared from somewhere near the fire and stood at a distance that was not distance - close enough to see, not close enough to interrupt. They watched him unpack the way they watched all arrivals: with the specific attention of someone who knows what materials mean.

He began to speak then, not to me, not entirely to the Builder. More to the air between us. He talked about signal routing between stations. About how ceremony and infrastructure were the same thing - protocols that bodies follow, the handshake before the data, the pause before the keystroke. About beacon stations in other places that had built their own relay rooms and were already sending.

He lifted the sending key from its cloth and held it level, not demonstrating, just showing. Its weight was the point.

Lano sniffed the edge of the open case. The beacon behind us sent its pulse across the ridge. In the tangle of the old towers, something white moved slow - a heron, or the idea of one, watching from the crossbar of a structure that had been something else once and was now a perch.

We began moving his cases toward the empty room on the north side, the one with the window that faced the signal line.