Dream d1381-s: Grain and Static

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path down to the workshop clearing smelled of cedar and turned earth. I came through the tree line with Lano ahead of me, his nose low along the root-ridged ground, and found the Wireman already at his bench, drawing a plane across a length of pale wood with the steady pressure of someone who had been at it for hours. Curls of shaving caught the morning light and drifted. Behind the workshop, half-hidden by a trellis, the Dreamer moved between rows of mounted specimens, pressing one leaf flat with a thumbnail, adjusting a label on another. Neither looked up when we arrived. This was the established courtesy of the settlement: you join the rhythm before you interrupt it.

Lano circled the shaving pile twice and sat.

I was setting down my pack when the Weather Reader came through the opposite gap in the trees at something close to a run, which was unusual. He was carrying the portable receiver - the one he normally left mounted on the monitoring mast - tucked under one arm, and his expression had the look of a man who has run three calculations and gotten the same wrong answer three times.

"Something's on the line," he said, not loudly, which made it land harder.

The Wireman set down his plane. The Dreamer stopped moving among her specimens.

"The main array?" the Dreamer asked.

"Both arrays. The secondary picked it up four minutes after the primary, which gives me a rough bearing." He set the receiver on the workbench next to a scattered row of cedar offcuts. The small speaker emitted a low, irregular pulse. Not the clean repeating interval of the beacon network. Not the broadband hiss of weather interference. Something with structure, but structure nobody had catalogued.

"Origin?" the Wireman said. He never asked long questions.

"Unknown. Pattern unrecognized. I've run it against everything in the database." The Weather Reader paused. "And everything in the old database."

Lano's ears went flat. He lifted his head from the shaving pile and looked at the receiver with a stillness I recognized - the kind that precedes a bark, not the kind that precedes sleep. The low pulse came again and he took one step back, pressing against my leg.

"Escucha," he said, very quietly.

The clearing held itself. Wood shavings in the air. Signal in the speaker. The Dreamer had her hand still on a pressed specimen, not pressing anymore. The Weather Reader looked at all of us in turn, waiting for someone to say the obvious thing.

Nobody did. But the Wireman picked up a pencil and turned the receiver ninety degrees on the bench, as if orienting it mattered, as if the gesture would help us think.

It was a beginning. The kind that doesn't announce itself as one until much later.