Dream d1399-s: Pinned to the Margin

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the footpath let out into a clearing without warning, trees stepping back to reveal a workshop bench and a man bent over it with a mallet. Wood shavings drifted across swept earth. Behind the workshop, a woman moved between rows of pressing frames, adjusting something with careful fingers.

Lano padded ahead of me, nose down, then suddenly up - ears pivoting to catch the thing none of us could yet hear. The signal. The Weather Reader had described it at dawn as "a carrier frequency with no known source modulation," and the Listener had immediately said this meant it had known source modulation, simply unidentified, and they had argued about this distinction for twenty minutes while everyone else finished packing.

The man at the bench was the Wireman. He had arrived before us - I didn't ask how. He simply was there, as he often was, the fact of him preceding any explanation of it.

"She knows the edge," the Builder said from my shoulder. She had been walking beside me for the last quarter-mile without my noticing. She nodded toward the woman in the specimen garden. "Has pressed samples from beyond the surveyed boundary. Brought them back herself."

The woman turned. She held up a frame: inside it, pinned with brass pins, was a plant none of us recognized. Its leaves held a color at their margins that shifted with the angle of light.

"Variable reflectance," the Weather Reader said, appearing at my other shoulder and already writing in his log. "Structural coloration. Not pigment." He said this the way the Listener would have said it, and the Listener, arriving a moment later with his frequency case, made a sound that acknowledged this had been exactly right but could not bring himself to say so aloud.

The Philosopher's wagon wheels announced him at the clearing edge. "A pressed specimen is an argument," he said, climbing down with some difficulty, "that something was here." He surveyed the garden with something close to reverence.

Lano sat at the edge of the specimen rows and looked at the variable-leaf plant for a long moment.

"Aqui," she said.

Not there. Here. As if marking the spot from which everything else would be measured.

The Wireman set his mallet down. Whatever he had been shaping was finished. He wrapped it in cloth without showing it to anyone and set it in his pack.

The clearing held us all in clear morning air, the signal humming somewhere below the threshold of hearing, present the way a wire is present even before current runs through it.