Dream d1435-s: Instruments and Instinct

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the footpath curved out of the forest and deposited us into a clearing still warm from the morning sun. A man stood at a workbench set against the tree line, hands moving a plane across a length of pale timber. He did not look up. The shavings curled and fell. Behind the workshop, a woman moved between rows of pressing boards, lifting a corner here, pressing a leaf flat there, cataloguing in a language of plant geometry.

Lano's ears rose before any instrument registered anything.

The Weather Reader had his tablet out before we reached the bench. "Still getting the same faint trace," he said, not to anyone in particular, which was how he usually said things. "Forty-three hertz. Quasi-periodic. No anthropogenic match in the library."

"You've checked the whole library?" the Builder asked, not looking up from the map she was already drawing on the back of her field notebook.

"It's a big library."

"It's not that big."

She had a point. He did not argue.

The man at the bench finally raised his head. He looked at the nine of us - ten counting Lano, eleven counting the Philosopher's wagon - with the calm of someone who had watched large groups arrive before and learned to simply wait them out. He set down his plane. He picked up the timber and sighted along it.

"Headed somewhere?" he said.

"Out past the mapped territories," the Student said, before anyone could stop him. He had a habit of answering questions directed at the group.

The man nodded. He set down the timber and looked west, where the tree line thickened and the terrain changed to something without a name yet. "The old frequency," he said. Not a question.

Lano padded up to the workbench and sat, nose working. She looked at the man. She looked west.

"Quieto," she said.

The Listener crouched beside her, pressed one hand flat against the ground - a habit picked up somewhere in the tunnel network, years back. "She's right," he said. "It's not loud. It's patient."

The woman came around the workshop corner with a pressed specimen in each hand, still reading them like pages. She looked at the assembled party, then at the sky.

"Clear out there," she said. "For now."

We started checking our packs.