Dream d1452-s: Drift Without Weather

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the workshop was full of the smell of rosin flux and warm wood, and the Woodworker sat at the far end of his bench with his back to us, adjusting something inside the synthesizer's frame with a small tool I did not recognize.

The instrument was nearly finished. Six oscillators in a row, hand-wound, each one a small copper coil wrapped around a ferrite core. He had explained them to us the previous afternoon: each oscillator a voice, each voice capable of speaking to the others, the whole thing a conversation you could tune.

One of the voices was not speaking right.

He caught it before we did. A slight sharpening in the tone, maybe a quarter-step. He set down his tool and reached for the trimmer at the side of the oscillator housing, a small brass dial. Turned it a hair. The tone settled, then drifted again.

The Dreamer was crouched near the corner of the bench with his camera, framing the oscillator bank from below. He moved when the tone shifted, repositioning without speaking.

"Capacitor?" the Listener offered from across the room.

"I checked the capacitors." The Woodworker did not turn around. "Temperature, maybe. The workshop ran cold last night."

He trimmed the dial again. The oscillator held for a few seconds, then pulled sharp. He sat back, not frustrated yet, still in the register of a man solving a familiar problem.

Lano sat near the door, nose working at something in the air.

The Weather Reader was standing at the window with one hand on the frame, not looking at the instrument. She had her pocket barometer out, reading it quietly to herself.

The Woodworker removed the oscillator housing and held the coil up to the light. He turned it, looking for a short or a loose winding. He found neither. He reseated it, reconnected the lead, powered the oscillator back up.

The drift was still there.

He put both hands flat on the bench and was quiet for a moment. Then he leaned forward and touched three other oscillators in sequence, listening to each one.

"It is not the circuit," he said.

He said it the way a carpenter says a door has been hung true but will not close. A statement, not a complaint. Something had shifted outside the thing he built, and the thing he built was telling him so.