Dream d1406-s: A Lintel for the Door

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path through the trees opened onto a clearing ringed with sawdust.

The workshop sat at the center - a workbench, a roof open to the sky on one side, the smell of fresh-cut wood carrying thirty meters into the undergrowth before it thinned into pine and dirt. A man worked at the bench without looking up, a drawknife pulling long curls from a plank, each one landing on the others in a pale heap. Behind the workshop, barely visible through the rear window, a woman moved between wooden frames hung with pressed specimens - leaves, grasses, something flat and feathered that I couldn't identify from the path.

Lano arrived before I did. She'd taken the fork I hadn't seen and was already sitting near the wood pile, watching the shavings fall.

"Lejos," she said.

I crouched beside her. The man at the bench still hadn't looked up.

The Weather Reader was already at the clearing's edge with his tablet angled away from the glare. He didn't say hello. He pointed at the readout.

"Ninety-four minutes of consistent spectral drift," he said. "It's not the antenna. I re-calibrated twice."

The Builder came up behind us, survey tape still in her hand from whatever she'd been measuring. She looked at the readout over his shoulder. "How old is old?"

"Older than the relay stations. Older than the tunnel array. Older than anything we've surveyed."

"That's not a measurement," she said. "That's a feeling."

"The feeling has a timestamp."

She made the sound she makes when she's filing something away to argue about later.

The woodworker set down his drawknife and looked at us directly for the first time. He didn't seem surprised to find eight people and a dog at the edge of his clearing. He wiped his hands on his trousers, picked up a piece of shaped wood from the bench, and turned it over slowly.

"You'll want a good lintel," he said. "For whatever you're walking through."

I didn't know what to say to that. The Philosopher, who had appeared at my elbow at some point, said quietly: "He's speaking architecturally. Probably."

Lano's ears came up and angled forward - not toward the woodworker, not toward the Weather Reader's instruments, but at something past the clearing's northern edge. Her nose worked in short, rapid increments.

The signal, according to the readout, remained faint. Below the threshold of hearing. Below the threshold of feeling, for most of us.

But Lano was already facing north, ears forward, rigid with certainty. That was usually how these things began.