Dream d1432-s: Before the Mapped World

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the footpath to the workshop clearing had been worn smooth by feet that knew exactly where they were going. Lano trotted ahead, nose low, then stopped. Her ears came up - not the sharp pricking of alarm but something attentive, angled forward as though she was trying to catch a frequency just below the threshold of her understanding.

The Wireman was at his bench. He had been there since early light, probably since before early light, his mallet working a rhythm against a block of pine that was becoming something else. He did not look up when we arrived. That was not rudeness - that was the Wireman. His hands knew what they were doing and his mind was elsewhere, which for him meant the same place, the same deep coherence between the action and the intention behind it.

Behind the workshop, in a rectangle of cleared ground bordered by low stones, the Dreamer knelt over her pressed specimen garden. Dozens of plant forms had been mounted on boards and arranged in rows - not decoratively, but taxonomically, the way she organized any sequence of images. A few I recognized from the Shifting Gardens, the pale star-shaped ones that had never had common names, only the ones she had given them. She looked up when Lano padded toward her.

"Don't," she said. Not to Lano. To me, anticipating whatever I was about to say about whether she was ready.

I had not been about to say anything.

"We're leaving today," the Weather Reader announced from behind me. I had not heard him arrive. He had his instrument satchel over one shoulder and a small display clipped to his forearm. "The reading this morning is faint but it has not degraded. A faint signal that persists is not faint - it's patient."

The Wireman set down his mallet and looked at the piece of pine in his hands. He turned it once, ran his thumb along the grain, and placed it carefully on the bench. Done, or close enough to done to leave.

"Bueno," said Lano. Nobody responded, because nobody knew how to respond to that.

The Dreamer began removing specimen boards from the ground, one by one, taking her time with each. The sky above the clearing was perfectly clear, the kind of clear that meant the atmosphere had nothing to hide.

"She's not packing them," the Weather Reader observed.

"No," I said.

The Dreamer set the last board against the workshop wall and stood, brushing soil from her knees. She left the specimens there, ordered and visible, for whatever came after. The Wireman picked up his satchel. The Dreamer picked up her field recorder. Lano's nose found the northwest and stayed there.

We were not yet walking. But we were already gone.