Dream d1386-s: Two Degrees

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the clearing announced itself with sawdust - fine and golden, it drifted from the path before the workshop came into view. Lano dropped his nose to the ground and tracked it backward, following the scent to its source.

The Wireman was at his bench, running a plane across a piece of pale wood in long, even strokes. Not cedar. Something heavier, close-pored, the kind of wood that holds light instead of reflecting it. Shavings gathered around his boots. He did not acknowledge our approach, which I had stopped reading as rudeness around the same time I stopped expecting the Builder to knock.

Behind the workshop, the Dreamer moved along a low table covered with pressed specimens: flowers, leaves, bark sections, thin slices of lichen. She held each piece to the light before labeling it, reading the pressed veins against the afternoon. There were forty-seven of them. I did not ask how I knew this.

Lano circled the bench once, sneezed at the shavings, and parked himself at the Wireman's feet.

"The morning reading," I said. "He thinks the signal is still faint. Deep pattern. Not surface noise."

"Nothing I've collected looks like what he described." The Dreamer set a leaf down carefully. "I've been through everything twice."

"That," said the Philosopher, arriving from the tree line with her wagon - which had developed a new squeak since the autumn work - "is the most useful data point we have. Absence of analogy is its own map. It tells you where the map ends."

The Dreamer looked at her. "Or it tells you the collection is incomplete."

"I accept the disjunction."

The Wireman had stopped planing. He was watching Lano.

The plane lay in its shaving, forgotten. I had not seen him leave a task unfinished since the long work on the tunnel relays.

Lano's ears had risen slowly, the way they did when something reached him before anything else in the clearing could. His head tilted two degrees and held, aimed past the workshop, past the pressed garden, past wherever the tree line ended.

"Sí," he said, very quietly, to whatever was out there.

The afternoon light sat still in the sawdust.