Dream d1384-s: Sawdust in the Signal

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the footpath bent around a stand of old trees and opened into a clearing, and the first thing I noticed was the smell - pine resin, cut wood, the dry sweetness of sawdust stirred up by morning air. A man worked at a long bench against the tree line, drawing a plane along a plank in slow deliberate strokes, the curl of wood spiraling off the blade and drifting down. He did not look up. Lano's nose went to work immediately, sampling the air in rapid pulses.

The Weather Reader was already there, crouched over his case of instruments, pulling out the long-range receptor with the care of someone handling something irreplaceable. "Still faint," he said without looking up. "But it hasn't dropped. Holding steady at the same register it was at 0400."

"Which means it's not interference," the Listener said from behind me. She was leaning against the workshop's outer wall, earpiece already in. "Interference dissipates. This is patient."

The Builder had walked around back and returned. "There's a woman behind the workshop," she said. "Garden of pressed specimens. Labeled, organized by something I can't parse yet. Not alphabetical. Not by type." She held her notebook open. "I'm going to ask her about the drainage pattern."

"We've been here forty seconds," the Philosopher said.

"Forty useful seconds."

The Wireman set his pack down near the bench without ceremony. The man shaping wood glanced at it, glanced at the Wireman, and returned to his plank. They did not speak. It seemed like a conversation anyway.

Lano moved to the center of the clearing and sat. Her ears had been angled forward since we rounded the tree line - not alarm, but attention. The kind she held when something was at the edge of her range.

"She hears something," the Student said.

"Instruments confirm faint signal bearing consistent with Undrawn Edge sector," the Weather Reader said. "But Lano heard it first."

"She always does," I said.

Lano turned her head and looked at me. "Claro," she said, and looked away.

The plane moved down the plank. A curl fell. Sawdust hung in the warm light. Behind the workshop, the Builder was already talking to the woman with the specimens, notebook open, pen moving. The Listener sat with her eyes closed. The Weather Reader calibrated. The Wireman unpacked something wrapped carefully in cloth.

We had not yet decided when to leave. But everyone was already getting ready.