Dream d1679-s: Something the Resin Heard

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Woodworker was running a low chord through the oscillator bank when the resin started talking back.

That's how I'd describe it. He had the instrument laid out on the bench - copper contacts soldered to hardwood panels, three oscillators tuned to intervals he'd calculated from the shadow garden's bloom cycles. The sound it made was thick and grounded, like something pressed rather than played. I was watching his hands when the third oscillator drifted. Not far. A quarter-step, maybe less. But wrong.

He heard it before anyone else said anything. His hand lifted off the contact. The sound stopped.

"That's not in the wood," he said.

The Weather Reader was standing near the clearing's edge with her barometric rig. The needle had been steady all morning. Now it was dropping - not fast, just a slow purposeful decline that had nothing to do with the sky, which was gray and still and completely clear.

"Pressure's going," she said. "No weather cause."

The Builder already had his diagnostic kit open on the workbench beside the half-finished instrument panels. He'd pulled it out without announcement - I hadn't even seen him move. He was scanning a relay topology map, his finger tracing conduit lines that spread from this clearing into the deep architecture. Several stations had gone amber. I counted four before I stopped counting.

"Relay 7 and 12 are rate-throttling," he said. "Something upstream is pulling bandwidth and not releasing it. Just taking."

"Taking," the Weather Reader repeated.

"Intake. No output. No decisions coming back through the return conduit. The network compensates. Routes around. But it keeps compensating."

"How long before it can't?"

He didn't answer, which was its own answer.

Lano had stopped sniffing the sawdust pile at the workshop corner. He was standing very still near the path we'd come in on, ears up, nose pointed north.

I looked at the Dreamer. He'd had his camera out all morning - he always did in this workshop, framing the instrument components, the Eye's pressed specimen plates, the way light moved through the open-walled shed. But now it was at his side, lens cap still off, not raised. He was looking at the Builder's relay map. Not at the amber stations. At something else on the map, some point I couldn't identify from where I stood. He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked away.

He said nothing.

The Eye came around from behind the workshop with a pressing cloth still folded in her hands. She and the Woodworker exchanged a look I couldn't fully translate.

"The workshop holds," the Woodworker said. "What's out there needs tending."