Dream d1441-s: Wood and Wavelength

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the footpath ended at a clearing filled with sawdust and afternoon light. The workshop sat at the center like something that had grown there - roof mossy at the edges, walls darkened by weather, a door propped open with a short length of timber. I could smell the cedar before I could see the bench.

The Wireman was already there, shaping a length of hardwood into something I couldn't name yet. He did not look up when Lano and I stepped into the clearing. The mallet moved with the certainty of someone who had made this particular motion ten thousand times. Lano sniffed the air - cedar, oak, something resinous I didn't recognize - and then stopped. Her ears went up.

Behind the workshop, the Builder was cataloguing specimens against a flat surface she had propped against the wall. Pressed plants, mostly. Leaves and dried grasses mounted on card stock, labeled in her small precise handwriting. She looked up when she heard our footsteps.

"You're early," she said.

"The Weather Reader sent a message at five in the morning," I said.

She considered this. "That's not early, then. That's alarmed."

The signal - we were all calling it the signal already, as if it had arrived fully named - was not something you could hear. The Weather Reader had shown us the readout before dawn: a repeating pattern in the atmospheric data, regular at intervals that did not match any known cycle. Not tidal. Not orbital. Not electromagnetic interference from anything on the maps.

"The pipeline has been running for three years," he had said, standing over the readout with the look of someone whose careful work had returned something they had not anticipated. "I know what this dataset looks like. This is not in it."

Lano's ears stayed up. She padded to the edge of the clearing, nose working, and sat looking at the treeline.

"Tranquilo," she said, almost to herself.

The Builder was rolling her card specimens into a carrying tube. The Wireman had stopped shaping - the piece of hardwood sat in his hands, finished or close to it, something with a handle and a weighted head that might be a tool or might be something else entirely. He wrapped it in cloth and set it on the pile near the door.

I helped myself to the water jug on the workbench and watched the clearing. Somewhere beyond the mapped territories, something was repeating a pattern older than our instruments. The light in the clearing was warm. The sawdust settled slowly in the still air.

We had not yet agreed to go. But the Wireman was packing, and the Builder had her carrying tube, and Lano was watching the treeline with both ears forward.