Dream d1531-s: When He Set It Down

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Woodworker's clearing was still warm with the smell of pine resin and the Eye was cataloguing pressed specimens behind the workshop, laying them flat against boards with the methodical patience she always brought to sorting. At the north edge of the property a processing station hummed behind its housing - three monitors cycling feeds, nothing dramatic, just streams of whatever the camera housings in the trees were sending back. Infrastructure doing what it was built to do.

I noticed the Dreamer first because Lano noticed him. The dog stopped mid-trot and sat, watching. The Dreamer was standing at the edge of the clearing with his camera at his side. Not raised. Not searching. Just held, loosely, as if he had forgotten it was there.

In over a thousand nights of walking I had never seen that.

The Philosopher noticed next. He set down a volume from the wagon and watched without speaking, which was its own kind of sentence.

The Builder came around the side of the workshop, ducked under a cable conduit, and stopped when he saw the Dreamer's posture. He looked at me. I shrugged.

We waited.

The Woodworker kept planing. Long strokes. The sound of it - clean, unhurried - was the only sound that moved. Even the processing equipment seemed to quiet itself, though it didn't.

Finally the Dreamer said: "Someone I know is stuck."

He didn't elaborate. He turned and looked north, where the tree line was denser and the cable runs surfaced from the ground in bundled conduit, heading somewhere serious.

"Stuck how," the Builder said. Not a question. The way you state a category.

"The machine works," the Dreamer said. "Nothing is wrong with it."

Lano's tail moved twice. She sniffed north and her ears came up. "Vamos," she said, to no one in particular.

The Dreamer had been with us since the caves. He had photographed the tide marks on the cave walls, the garden harvest, the convergence circle, the Woodworker's hands mid-stroke. He documented. He selected. He never led.

He was leading now.

The Eye came around the workshop with a pressed specimen still in her hand - some kind of lichen, gray and branching - and looked at where we were all looking. "The relay housings," she said. "Someone maintained these recently."

"I know," the Dreamer said.

He started walking north.

The Woodworker set down the plane. The Philosopher closed the volume he hadn't opened. The Builder picked up his bag.

I watched the Dreamer's camera swing at his side, still pointing down, and followed him into the harder trees.