Dream d1425-s: Sawdust in Still Air

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path curved into a clearing and the smell arrived before anything else - pine resin, fresh shavings, the dry sweet dust of wood being shaped by hand.

The Wireman was at the bench. I had not known he worked this way, with a hand plane, slow passes, reading grain by the resistance it gave. He did not look up when Lano and I came through the gap in the treeline. Lano's nose went immediately to the curled shavings on the ground, sniffing each one as though they were dispatches from somewhere important.

Behind the workshop, the Dreamer crouched over a spread of pressed specimens - leaves, lichen patches, fragments of bark arranged on a low frame of wire and canvas. She was labeling them in her small hand, cataloguing what the route had already produced before we had even left.

"Bringing documentation from the start this time," she said, without looking up. "Last expedition I missed the first three days and spent the rest of the route reconstructing from memory."

"Which expedition?" I asked.

She tilted her head. "The tunnel survey. d261-something. You were there."

I was.

The Weather Reader's voice came from above the clearing. He had climbed the woodpile to get line of sight with his instruments, a habit from the settlement's early days before the signal masts were up. "Still faint," he called down. "Atmospheric window is good. We'll have better resolution once we're past the ridge and out of the thermal shadow."

"Is that a technical statement or an optimistic one?" the Dreamer asked.

"Both," he said. "They're not mutually exclusive."

Lano had moved to sit at the Wireman's feet, watching the plane stroke. The Wireman set a finished piece aside - a bracket, cleanly jointed, all faces flush. He held it once to the light, then placed it in the pack at his hip. I had learned, somewhere around d186, that asking the Wireman what something was for was asking the wrong question. You waited, and eventually the thing found its moment.

The Builder appeared from the far edge of the clearing, unfolding a sheet of field paper. "I've roughed the first segment," she said. "Road's mapped to the river crossing. After that it's inference."

"Propositions," the Philosopher said, from somewhere I could not yet see. "Not inference. There's a distinction."

The Builder did not look up from her paper. "There's a footpath."

The light was warm and flat, mid-morning, the kind of sky that makes equipment readings easy and distances deceptive. I could feel the signal as something slightly below hearing, a pressure in the jaw rather than the ears.

Lano looked up from the shavings, tipped his head east, and said: "Vamos."

We started packing.