Dream d1310-s: At the Undrawn Edge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we arrived at the last marked stone.

The boundary post stood waist-high, carved from the same basalt as the cave walls below. The Builder had placed it herself - I remembered watching her sink it with a mallet during a trip I had no clear memory of, which is the logic of dreams. She walked to it now and crouched, running her thumb along the surveyor's mark scratched into the face. A date. Coordinates. The edge of her own work.

"Cable ends here," the Wireman said. He wasn't asking. He gestured back along the trench that ran beside the path - clean-cut earth, gray conduit, the network we'd laid one season at a time. Past the marker, it simply stopped. Raw ground ahead. The trench like a sentence cut short.

"Everything after this is blank on the map," the Builder said. She pulled her roll from her pack and showed us. Detailed survey to the marker's line - contours, relay positions, cable routes. And then the page ended. White space.

"That's not blank," the Philosopher said. "That is potential. The map is not the territory. The unmapped territory is the most territory."

"That's not what that phrase means," the Student said.

"I've been thinking about it."

Lano circled the marker twice, sniffing the base. His tail was up. Something in the stone or under it, or coming from the direction the stone faced. He sat and looked northeast and said, quietly: "viento."

The Weather Reader had his instruments out. He'd had them out since morning. "The signal is louder here," he said. "Seven percent amplitude increase over the last two kilometers. Linear relationship to proximity."

"You're measuring something you don't have a unit for," the Listener said.

"I gave it a unit."

"You named a number. That's not the same thing."

Above us, the White Crane passed once, circling low. No word. Just the long shadow of its wings crossing the boundary stone, then the unmapped ground ahead.

I put my hand on the marker. The basalt was warm in a way the sun alone didn't explain. The cable trench ended behind me and the clear sky stretched ahead and somewhere past the visible horizon the signal was older than anything in our catalog.

The Dreamer had her lens out already. The Builder rolled her map back up.

"Well," the Builder said.

We stepped across.