Dream d1418-s: Curls and Long Waves

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path through the trees was packed earth, worn smooth by years of the same feet going the same direction. Lano led by three lengths, nose low, tail flagging because the workshop smell reached her before it reached me.

The clearing opened like a held breath releasing. A man stood at a long bench under the workshop eave, drawing a plane along a board with the focused economy of someone who has done this ten thousand times. Pale curls fell to the ground and didn't hurry anywhere. Behind the workshop, through a gap in the fence, a woman moved between long tables of pressed specimens - leaves, lichen, bark sections mounted and labeled in a hand too small to read from here.

The Weather Reader sat on a stump near the workshop door with his portable receiver in his lap, headphones around his neck, studying a printout so folded and unfolded it had gone soft at the creases.

"You're late," he said, without looking up.

"I'm exactly on time," I said. "You're early."

"I've been here since the signal shifted." He tapped the printout. "Twelve degrees northwest at 0340. You were asleep."

Lano sniffed the wood shavings at the bench leg. The man kept planing. Neither acknowledged the other's existence, which seemed like a kind of mutual respect.

The Student appeared around the corner of the workshop, notebook already open, already writing. "The woman with the specimens," she said, "has been pressing things from this region for thirty years. She has a sample from the valley where the signal appears to originate. Pressed thirty years ago."

The Weather Reader looked up for the first time. "That's not possible."

"She says it smells different from everything else. She pressed it because it smelled different."

He folded the printout and put it in his pocket. Then took it out again.

Lano lifted her head from the shavings and looked northwest. Her ears went flat, then upright, doing their small triangulating work.

"Aqui," she said.

The sky was clear overhead - no weather system I could read, just a hum in the air pressure that the instruments were still arguing about. The man continued planing. The curls fell. The woman in the specimen garden bent over a table and did not look up.

We were going northwest. That much had been settled already, not by vote but by the direction everyone's attention kept drifting. The signal was older than anyone's equipment, maybe older than the question that named it. A pressed sample from thirty years ago sat in a flat drawer at the edge of the mapped world, and none of us said what we were all thinking.

The Builder arrived last, as always, because she walks slowly when she is mapping.

"Road holds for four kilometers," she said. "After that I have no information."

"That's the point," I said.

She looked at the workshop, at the man with the plane, at the curls of wood on the ground. "Structurally sound," she said, about nothing in particular, and sat down to adjust her pack.