Dream d1403-s: The Specimen Garden

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the footpath curved out of the tree line and I came into a clearing full of warm light. Lano was ahead of me, trotting low, nose working the air, ears pitched forward in that particular way that meant something was already in the scene before I had arrived.

The workshop stood at the center of the clearing, open on one side, and the smell that reached me was clean wood and something mineral - chalk dust or dried sap. A man stood at the long bench shaping a curved piece with a draw knife, the shavings curling off in long ribbons and landing in the grass below without weight. Behind the workshop, on the southern side, a woman moved between rows of mounted boards, adjusting specimens pressed behind glass - leaves, bark fragments, dried lichen, each one pinned and labeled in a tight cursive I couldn't read from the path.

The Weather Reader was already there. He had set his instruments on a flat stump near the treeline and was staring at a small screen with the expression he uses when the data is not doing what he expected.

"Faint," he said, not looking up. "Below ambient until you run the harmonic subtractor. Then it's there. Consistent. Periodic."

"Periodic how?" I asked.

"Seventeen minutes, fourteen seconds. Give or take two seconds across six samples." He paused. "It's not weather."

The Builder came around from behind the workshop carrying something wrapped in canvas. She set it on a section of split log and unwrapped it with the economical movements she uses when handling equipment she respects. Inside was a length of copper conduit, coiled tight. "Found this at the edge of the Undrawn," she said. "Somebody ran line out that far. Or something did."

Lano sat down near the bench. His ears stayed up.

"Preliminar," he said, once.

The man at the bench paused and looked at the dog without surprise, the way people do in places where dogs are understood to have opinions. The woman in the specimen garden did not look up but her head tilted at the slight angle of someone filing a word away for later.

The Philosopher had arrived from the eastern path, wagon wheels quiet on the soft ground, and he was already studying the specimen boards with the specific attention he applies to things organized by someone else's system.

"She's indexing by age of formation," he said. "Not taxonomy."

Nobody asked him to tell us that. We were all listening to the instrument readings and the slow sound of wood being shaped and the faint pulse in the air that only Lano had been hearing since we left the settlement.