Dream d1424-s: Shavings at the Edge of Packing

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Wireman was already at the bench when Lano and I came down the worn footpath into the clearing.

Curl after curl of pale shaving fell to the sawdust beneath him. He was working a piece of dense pale wood with a drawknife, checking the surface with his thumb the way he checks everything - not for smoothness but for truth. On the bench beside him: two coils of heavy copper wire, a ceramic cup of brass fittings, a wooden frame sized to fit a signal junction box. He had been building something for the expedition before anyone had officially named it an expedition.

That is how it always goes with him.

Behind the workshop, the Builder was bent over a drying rack spread with pressed cross-sections - not flowers, but core samples and bark sections, each labeled in her precise hand. She looked up when Lano padded into the clearing.

"You're early," she said.

"You said dawn."

"I said before dawn. Forty-minute difference. Significant coffee implications."

Lano had stopped at the clearing's edge. Ears tilted at an angle I did not recognize from our twelve hundred days together. Not threat. Not food. Something in the direction of south.

The Weather Reader came up behind me on the path, field cart rattling, the portable array's mast antenna swaying in the ruts. He was already watching his readout.

"It's denser," he said, not quite to me.

"Yesterday you said faint."

"Faint is amplitude. Dense is character. They're different axes." He adjusted a dial with two fingers. "It's not traveling toward us. It's more like it was already here and we were too far away to feel the weight of it."

The Builder straightened up from her specimens. "Is that a technical description or a Philosopher impression?"

"The Philosopher hasn't arrived yet. This is still rigorous."

From the bench, the Wireman set down the drawknife. He didn't speak. He looked at the finished frame, then at the coils of copper, then south. He began to wind.

Lano sat in the sawdust, nose aimed at the tree line.

"Allá," he said.

The Builder reached for her mapping case. I counted: she had already labeled tomorrow's first page.