Dream d1439-s: Mallet Down

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the footpath curved through a stand of birch and opened into a workshop clearing at the hour when dew was still on the grass but the sawdust on the floor was already dry.

The Wireman was at the bench. He was shaping something long and curved - a runner for the wagon, I thought, or a channel for a conduit housing. His mallet rose and fell in a steady count. He did not look up when Lano and I came through the trees, but his pace changed. The strokes came wider apart. He was listening.

Behind the workshop, the Dreamer had spread specimens across a low table - pressed leaves, folded paper documents, vials of soil from three different depths. She was sequencing them by something I could not name. Not color. Not size. Some internal logic she had not explained yet.

"The cases are too heavy," she said, without looking at me. She meant the waterproof housing for her glass plates. "I am halving the collection."

"Half is plenty," I said, which was probably wrong but felt like the right answer.

The Wireman set down his mallet. Not hurrying, not dramatic - he just set it down with care and left it there on the bench. He walked to the edge of the clearing and stood looking at the treeline. Lano trotted over and sat beside him. Her ears were up and forward, tilted slightly, the way they went when she was hearing something I could not. The signal, probably. The Weather Reader had shown me the readout that morning - a thin line at the bottom of the spectrogram, like a seam in stone. Persistent. Not drifting.

"Quieto," Lano said.

The Wireman nodded once.

The Dreamer lifted one of the glass plate cases and held it to the light, checking the seal. Then she set it down among the things she was leaving behind.

Somewhere across the clearing, through the workshop and past the woodpile, I could hear the Builder talking - to the Philosopher, from the cadence of it, or possibly to herself. She did that when calculating load distribution. The wagon had to carry the library, the instrument cases, the spare relay components, and three weeks of supplies. The Philosopher had already lodged one formal objection to the weight allocation, on grounds he had not yet finished reading a particular volume and could not therefore assess whether it was essential.

The light in the clearing was clean and sharp. No cloud. The signal hummed in the atmosphere at a frequency instruments could barely register - old and steady as bedrock.

The Wireman picked up his coat from the hook at the workshop door.

We were going.