Dream d1436-s: Grain and Going

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the footpath through the clearing was carpeted with pale curls of wood, as if the ground itself had been turned on a lathe. The Wireman stood at his bench in the open air, drawing a plane along a length of timber, and the motion was so practiced and unhurried it looked like breathing.

The Dreamer was behind the workshop in a small pressed garden - not flowers growing but flowers documented, arranged in flat frames on shelving she had constructed from salvage. She was adding a specimen when we arrived, a stem with three pale leaves, pressing it under a glass plate with both palms.

Lano's ears went up before I had any reason to think about it.

"She smells it," the Weather Reader said from somewhere behind me. He had been there already, sitting on a stump at the path edge with his tablet balanced on one knee, watching the readout.

"Smells what?" I asked.

"The thing I cannot explain to you yet." He turned the tablet to show me. A line on the graph that didn't match any of the labeled columns. "It's not a weather event. It's not acoustic. It's not EM in any band I have calibrated for." He said it with the flatness of someone reporting a train delay - factual, slightly annoyed, fully engaged.

The Wireman set the plane down. He looked at the beam he had been shaping, then at the Weather Reader, then at the path that led out of the clearing north. He picked up the beam and walked it to a growing stack near the workshop wall.

"Done?" I asked.

He nodded once. He began folding his tool roll.

The Dreamer came around the corner of the workshop. She had her case in one hand and her field journal in the other, and she looked from the tool roll to Lano to the Weather Reader's tablet.

"How far?" she asked.

"Past the mapped territories," the Weather Reader said. "The Builder has a name for where it originates. The Undrawn Edge."

The Dreamer looked at her field journal, then at the pressed specimens on their shelves. She took the three-leaved stem out of the frame she had just placed it in, tucked it loose between two pages, and closed the journal.

Lano sat in the wood curls, looked at all three of them, and said: "Vamos."

Nobody laughed. Nobody disagreed.