Dream d1447-s: Curls of Wood, Open Country

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano and I came down through the pines on a worn footpath and smelled sawdust before the clearing appeared between the trees.

The man at the workbench did not look up. His plane moved in long strokes along a pale board, and curls of wood fell around his boots like question marks. Behind the workshop, half-hidden by a trellis, a woman tended a garden of specimens laid between flat stones - lifting, comparing, recording in a ledger held open by her elbow.

Lano's ears went straight up.

The Weather Reader was already at the clearing's edge, crouched beside his instrument case, running a diagnostic he clearly did not need to run again. He had been running it since dawn. "Still faint," he said, without looking up. "But the hum has shifted into the lower troposphere. It moved overnight."

"Moved toward us?"

"Toward us."

The Builder was measuring the workshop doorframe with her folding rule, not because anyone had asked her to but because she measured things when she was thinking. She snapped it closed. "Floor's planed level to within two millimeters. Whoever built this knew what they were doing."

The man at the bench finally looked up. He had a face that had been outside in all weathers for a long time. He looked at the Weather Reader's instruments, then at the Builder's rule, then at Lano.

Lano said: "Claro."

The woman did not stop cataloguing. She lifted one specimen, held it to the morning light, set it down.

We heard the Philosopher's library wagon on the path before we heard the Philosopher. The wheels needed oil, something he had been promising to fix since the tunnel network days. The Student appeared first, holding back a branch so the wagon could pass. The Philosopher appeared second, flushed, mid-sentence about epistemological thresholds and what it means to move toward a signal of unknown origin.

"It means we pack," the Builder said.

The Philosopher considered this. "That is, structurally, a proposition."

The Weather Reader closed his case and stood. "Twenty minutes and the others are here. After that we head northwest."

"There's no northwest on my map past the treeline," the Builder said.

"That's the point."

The man at the bench resumed planing. The curls fell. Above the workshop, the White Crane stood on the peak of the roof and faced northwest, saying nothing, which was all it needed to say.

The signal moved through the clear air - too faint for ears, too structured for wind, too patient to be anything but old.