Dream d1448-s: Shavings on the Threshold

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path curved out of the trees and into a clearing I had not expected - wide, bright, smelling of fresh shavings and turned earth. A man worked at a bench near the workshop wall, his plane moving in long draws against a plank, the sound clean and rhythmic. Behind the building's corner a woman knelt among catalogued specimens, her hands moving through rows of mounted and labelled material, adjusting cards in the morning light. Sawdust drifted across the clearing in slow arcs. The sky was open and very clear.

Lano was ahead of me on the path. She stopped at the clearing's edge and her ears came up - not at the man, not at the woman - at something else.

"She hears it," the Listener said. He was near the workshop's side wall with an instrument case open at his feet, a headset around his neck. "I barely got it on the long-wave rig. Whatever the Weather Reader's pipeline found, it has harmonics."

The Weather Reader was crouched beside a tripod, not looking at his instruments but at Lano. "Pipeline flagged it at three-seventeen this morning," he said. "I ran the comparison suite against twelve years of archived patterns. Nothing. Not weather. Not orbital noise. Not geological." He paused. "Lano's ears are doing the same thing my wideband antenna did when I first pointed it northwest."

The Builder came out of the workshop carrying two coiled lengths of survey line and a rolled chart case under her arm. She looked at the man at the bench, who had not stopped planing. "We're leaving tracks in your clearing," she said.

He lifted the plane and ran a thumb along the grain. "You're leaving shavings on my path," he said, without looking up. "That's what people do when they're about to go somewhere."

The Philosopher had already reached the wagon and was reorganizing the library cases by some internal logic no one had verified. "There is a proposition," he said to no one in particular, "that a journey begins not at departure but at the moment the mind accepts distance."

"There is a counterproposition," the Builder said, "that it begins when someone lifts something heavy."

"Hola," said Lano, to the clearing.

The Student looked at her. "Was that for the signal?"

No one answered. The man at the bench drew the plane one final time, set it down, and looked northwest. The shavings caught the morning air and drifted. We were still counting packs. But we had already begun.