Dream d1414-s: Salvage and Smoke

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the footpath opened onto sawdust and the smell of resin.

The workshop sat at the edge of a forest clearing, timber bones and a corrugated lean-to roof, a man in an apron bending over a workbench with a plane, the curl of pale wood falling to the ground like something breathing out. Behind the workshop a woman knelt among specimen frames, pressing dried forms against backing paper, her hands steady, unhurried. Neither of them looked up when Lano and I came down the path, but the man's planing slowed by half a stroke.

We had come to collect the Weather Reader's portable relay - a component he'd left here weeks ago for recalibration. The Builder had argued the timing was wrong: pack the relay last, not first. The Weather Reader had argued it was the instrument that had caught the signal. "If anything goes dark on this expedition," he said, "it should not be that."

The Philosopher pulled his wagon to a stop at the treeline. "Proposition: the thing most critical to protect is always the thing least protected."

"That's not a proposition," said the Listener. "That's experience dressed in formal clothing."

The relay sat on a shelf inside the lean-to, a salvaged box - spectrum analyzer, signal bridge, two patched frequency boards the Weather Reader had pulled from a shipping container at the harbor two seasons back. He lifted it, checked the connection points, plugged the test cable in.

Then Lano's ears went flat.

The crack was sharp, electrical, brief. A plume of acrid smoke rose from the relay's secondary board. The Weather Reader pulled his hands back and held them in the air like someone waiting to be told what to do next.

"Fuego," said Lano.

The instrument that had detected the signal was dark. Every LED off. The frequency board had not degraded - it was gone. The Weather Reader turned the relay over and held the burned component between two fingers: a salvaged oscillator, eighteen months of clean service, now a black crescent of fused material.

"Can you rebuild it?" the Builder asked.

"Not with what I have here."

The man at the workbench had stopped planing. He watched us with the particular stillness of someone who has seen components fail before and understands that the next hour will either solve the problem or define a different one.

The woman among the specimens had not looked up. But her hands had gone still.

The signal was still out there. We had planned to follow it. We had one instrument capable of tracking it and it was currently in pieces in the Weather Reader's hands, and the replacement parts did not exist in this clearing or, as far as anyone could say, in any clearing we had mapped.

Nobody spoke for a moment. The sawdust settled. The weather held clear.