Dream d1426-s: When the Chisel Stopped

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the workshop clearing sat at the tree line, where the footpath widened before narrowing again into forest. I came around the bend with Lano trotting ahead, nose low, and found the Wireman at his bench - or still there, I could not tell which. He had been there long enough that curled shavings lay around his feet like a pale nest. He did not look up. The chisel moved.

Behind the workshop, the Builder had arranged a long table of pressed specimens - leaves, lichen patches, bark sections, each pinned and labeled in her small neat hand. She was adding to it when we arrived, pressing a fern flat under a board and setting a stone on top.

"You're early," she said, not looking up.

"The Weather Reader is ten minutes behind me," I said. "He stopped to check something."

The Wireman set down his chisel. Looked at what he had made. Picked it up again.

Lano padded to the edge of the clearing and sat, nose pointed toward the ridge. Her ears moved - not forward, but flat, angled back. She had been making these small adjustments for the last half kilometer, tracking something I could not hear.

The Weather Reader arrived carrying his portable array, the small one he called "the suitcase" when he was in a good mood. He was not in a good mood. He set it on the ground, pulled back the cover, and started reading before he had finished his sentence.

"It started an hour ago," he said. "Maybe ninety minutes. I cannot place the source."

The Builder came to look. "What frequency?"

"That is the problem. It does not sit in a frequency. It moves."

She studied the display. I watched her face. She had the expression she used when a wall was not plumb - not alarm, but focused, close attention.

"Not weather," she said.

"Not weather. Not seismic. Not orbital. I ran it against everything."

Lano barked once - sharp, directed at the ridge, not at us. Then she was quiet again, watching.

The Wireman set down his chisel for the last time. He looked at Lano. He looked at the ridge. He began wrapping his tools in cloth, methodically, the way he did when something was about to need doing and he intended to be ready.

"Despacio," Lano said, very quietly.

The Weather Reader's instruments continued logging. The pattern did not resolve. The clearing held its warm afternoon light while something beyond the tree line moved through channels none of us had drawn.