Dream d1484-s: North, He Said

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Woodworker was at his bench when I came down the footpath with Lano trotting ahead of me, nose raking the air. Clear morning. The workshop sat in its clearing the way it always had, solid and unhurried, shavings curling from a fresh cut on the bench.

Behind the workshop the Eye was arranging pressed specimens in a flat tray, sorting by something I could not name from the path. She did not look up when we arrived. Neither did the Woodworker.

I knew before I saw him that the Dreamer was there. He was standing at the edge of the clearing where the treeline began, and his camera was at his side, not raised, not aimed at anything. It had been like that for three mornings. The strap hung loose from his hand and the lens faced the ground.

The Builder was already circling the perimeter slowly, hands behind his back, head down. When I asked what he was looking at he pointed to a conduit bundle where it surfaced at the tree line - gray plastic housing, neatly tied, following the root line of a pine before vanishing underground again.

"Someone ran this deliberately," he said. "Not recent. Whoever did it knew what they were doing."

The Listener had her head tilted. She did that when she was tracking something below the audible threshold. I had learned not to interrupt it.

Lano sat beside the Dreamer, quieta, and watched him. She had done this for three days - positioned herself at his heel and waited with a patience I did not have.

The Dreamer had not moved from the treeline when the Philosopher came out of the workshop with his coffee and asked nobody in particular whether silence was a form of argument.

Nobody answered.

Then the Dreamer turned.

He looked at the party the way he sometimes looked at a composition before he raised the camera - measuring, sorting, deciding. But no camera came up. He put his free hand in his pocket.

"Someone I know is stuck," he said.

The clearing went quiet in the particular way it does when something that has been building finally arrives. Lano's ears went up.

"He built a machine that sees everything," the Dreamer said. "And now he doesn't know what to look at."

The Philosopher set down his coffee. The Builder stopped his circuit. The Eye looked up from her specimens for the first time since we had arrived.

The Dreamer had never asked us for anything. He had offered verdicts. He had shown us what he saw. He had walked beside us across fourteen phases and had never once said follow me.

"North," he said. He turned back toward the treeline. "If you want to come."

Lano was already moving. The Woodworker set down his tool without a word and came around the bench. The rest of us followed.