Dream d1450-s: North by Nose

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the workshop clearing smelled of fresh shavings and something else - a faint electrical quality in the air that had nothing to do with the tools scattered across the bench. I came down the footpath with Lano trotting ahead of me, her nose low to the ground at first, then lifting sharply toward the north.

The Wireman was at his bench, shaping a length of pale wood with a plane. He didn't look up when we arrived. The Dreamer was behind the workshop, bent over a low table where dried specimens lay sorted by frequency - not by species, which I'd stopped finding strange months ago. She catalogued by the intervals at which she'd found them, by their place in a sequence she was still working out.

"You felt it," she said, without looking up.

"The Weather Reader sent a relay message at dawn," I said. "His pipeline flagged something."

"His pipeline." The Dreamer smiled at a pressed leaf. "The Listener flagged it six hours earlier. Don't tell him I said that."

The Wireman set down his plane. He picked up the shaped piece, turned it once, and laid it in a canvas roll with his other tools. A movement so quiet it could have been habit, but wasn't.

The others came down from the settlement in pairs over the next hour. The Philosopher arrived pulling the library wagon, which seemed heavier than last time. He was already mid-argument with the Builder about optimal load distribution. The Builder was already sketching the terrain in her field book without looking where she walked.

"There is a philosophically meaningful difference," the Philosopher was saying, "between a load that is balanced and a load that merely appears balanced."

"There is also," the Builder said, "a structurally meaningful difference between those two things, and only one of them matters when we're going uphill."

The Weather Reader arrived with his instruments packed tight and a look that meant he'd been awake since the detection. The Student came with him, carrying a coil of cable over one shoulder and asking questions the Weather Reader answered half-attentively.

The signal was faint enough that no instruments outside the settlement could lock onto it cleanly. But Lano's ears were up - both of them, sharply forward, aimed at a bearing I didn't have a name for yet. The Listener pulled out a receiver and turned a dial. He and the Weather Reader looked at the same reading from opposite sides of the device, and said nothing, which meant they agreed.

"Vamos," Lano said, very quietly, mostly to herself.

Nobody disagreed.