Dream d1438-s: Pressed and Packed

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the worn footpath through the forest opened into a clearing full of warm light and the smell of sawdust. The Wireman stood at the bench at the center, a plane moving along a length of pale wood in long, deliberate strokes. He did not look up when Lano and I arrived. He rarely did. But the plane paused for exactly one beat, which from him was the equivalent of a welcoming speech.

Behind the workshop, the Builder moved between rows of flat wooden frames mounted on stakes in the earth. Each frame held pressed botanical specimens - leaves, seedheads, fragments of lichen. She was labeling them in a grid system only she understood.

"You're documenting before we go," I said.

"I'm documenting so someone who comes after us can know what was here," she said, without looking up. "Those are different things."

The Weather Reader sat on a stump at the clearing's edge with a tablet propped against his knee, scrolling through output I could not read at that distance. Lano trotted over to him, sat, and watched the screen with what looked like genuine attention.

"Still faint?" I asked.

"Point-three-seven microtesla variance. Consistent cadence, non-random interval spacing." He tilted the screen toward me as if that would help. "It's not talking to us. It doesn't know we're here. It's just-" He searched for the word.

"Running," the Listener offered from somewhere above me. I looked up. She was wedged in the fork of an oak at the clearing's edge, a directional antenna balanced across her lap, headphones around her neck. "Like a clock that's been going so long it forgot it was wound."

The Philosopher's wagon came through the trees with a sound like a small library being jostled over roots. He had added a wooden bracket to the front for his thermos.

"The question," he announced, as though continuing an argument from the night before, "is not whether we go. The question is whether we are going toward something or being drawn toward something. These are philosophically distinct."

"They produce the same footsteps," the Builder said.

Lano lifted her head and said, distinctly: "Vamos."

No one laughed. The Wireman set his plane down on the bench. The Dreamer emerged from the treeline with a case over each shoulder, lenses already cleaned. The Student arrived last, breathless, still tying a bootlace.

The clearing held us for a moment. Sawdust in the still air. The pressed specimens labeled and waiting. The signal in the Weather Reader's numbers, small and ancient and indifferent.

Someone picked up a pack. The others followed.