Dream d1521-s: Pressed and Named

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano found the footpath before anyone told him it was there. His nose went down, his tail went level, and he trotted ahead through the last of the trees as though he had walked this way before. I followed. The clearing opened like a hand uncupping.

The Woodworker was at his bench, back to us, drawing a straight edge along a piece of oak. Behind the workshop, the Eye moved between rows of specimens - glass-fronted frames laid flat on trestles, each holding a pressed leaf or flower or length of something fibrous, labeled in her small script. She did not look up when we arrived. She was reading.

The Lens sat at the far edge of the clearing, where someone had run three cables from the main station to a folding table. Three monitors. On each, a feed: one showing a rooftop covered in processing units laid out in rows; one showing rain gauge data from somewhere cold; one that had been pointed, for several hours by the look of it, at a wall where a moth had landed and stayed. Lano went to him first, sniffed at the cables, decided they were uninteresting, and circled once before settling at his feet.

"That one," the Eye said, without turning from her trestles, "is looking." She was pointing at the moth feed. "The other two are still recording."

The Woodworker set down his straight edge. He picked up a short length of pale wood, squared at the corners, with a rectangle cut through the center - rough still, the edges not yet smoothed. He held it up toward the clearing, one eye closed, and the view through the hole went from general to particular: a single branch, one knot in the oak planks of his bench, three cables and a monitor and nothing else.

"The question," the Builder said, from somewhere behind me, "is what you want that rectangle to contain."

The Lens looked at the viewfinder. He looked at his three monitors. He looked at Lano, who had begun to wash his ear with one back paw and seemed entirely unconcerned with the problem.

"Not what it can contain," the Dreamer said. He was reloading a roll of film, not looking up. "What you want it to."

The processing equipment hummed in the clear air. The Philosopher said nothing, which meant he was composing.

The Eye made a notation on her label. Pressed and named and placed in sequence. The feeds ran on. The moth on the wall had not moved in hours, which was, she had noted, a choice.