Dream d1428-s: Specimens and Static

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano stopped on the footpath before I did.

The workshop clearing opened ahead of us through the last stand of pines, warm with morning light and the smell of cut wood. The Wireman was at his bench, running a plane across a piece of pale timber in long, deliberate strokes. Behind the workshop, the Builder moved between low frames where she kept her specimen garden - pressed leaves and bark sections and soil samples mounted behind glass, her field archive. She was updating labels in small, precise handwriting.

Neither of them looked up when we arrived. That was the Wireman's way. The Builder lifted a hand without turning.

Lano sat down at the edge of the clearing. Not the tired kind of sitting. The head-up, ears-forward kind. I watched his ears angle north-northeast, toward nothing visible.

"He's been doing that all morning," the Builder said. She had turned now, pencil tucked behind one ear. "I noticed it when I came out with my coffee. Ears up, then back down, then up again."

I crouched next to Lano. His nose was working, but faintly - more like listening than smelling.

The Wireman set down his plane. "The Weather Reader's instruments showed it at 0400," he said. Not to me specifically. Just said it, the way he said most things, to the clearing in general.

"Showed what?" I asked.

He picked up the plane again. "Something."

The Builder gave me a look that meant: that's all you'll get from him until he's ready.

I straightened and looked toward the mapped edge of the territory, the direction Lano's ears kept finding. The air was clear, no pressure drop I could feel, no weather moving in. Just the ordinary weight of morning, and underneath it, so faint I wasn't sure I was imagining it, a kind of hum. Not a sound exactly. More like the sense that something very large was very slowly paying attention to us.

"The Philosopher's already calling it The Signal," the Builder said, returning to her specimens. "Capital T, capital S."

"Of course he is," I said.

"The Listener says the Philosopher can't name it because the Listener found it first."

"They're both wrong," said the Wireman, running the plane again. "I heard it in the wood." He nodded at the pale timber.

Lano looked up at me once, ears still forward.

"Claro," he said.