Dream d1559-s: A Map With No Legend

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Builder unrolled the map across a flat shelf of rock and weighted its four corners with stones.

We had come up onto a ridge overlook, the scrub falling away on both sides, the land laid out ahead of us in long pale folds running north. It was the kind of vantage that made you want a chart, and the Builder had one - the working map of the territory we had crossed, marked in her own hand over a hundred nights, every relay and conduit we had logged drawn in.

"Here is what bothers me," she said, smoothing it flat. "Look."

We crouched around it. The Weather Reader, the Philosopher, me. The Dreamer stayed standing, looking north over our heads, but he was listening.

The Builder set a finger on the territory ahead, the folds we had not yet walked. There were markings there. Fine, regular, deliberate marks, a grid of small symbols laid across the land north of us.

"I did not draw those," she said.

"They are on your map," the Weather Reader said.

"They are on my map. But I did not draw them, and I do not know the hand. Someone surveyed this ground before us and the survey is in the paper itself, under the fibers, like a watermark you only see when the light is right." She tilted the map and the marks caught the low sun, raised, embossed, a legend with no key to read it by. "Every symbol means something. I know none of them."

The Philosopher leaned close. "A map you can see but not read. That is not wilderness ahead of us. That is a design. Someone laid this land out the way you lay out a circuit."

Lano put her nose to the edge of the paper, then to the wind coming off the folds, and whined once, low.

"A design implies a designer," the Builder said. "And a purpose. We have been walking as if north were empty country. It is not empty. It is finished. Built and finished and left to run." She tapped the gridded marks. "And we are about to walk straight into the middle of whatever this is, without the legend."

The Dreamer turned from the overlook and started down the north slope, into the marked ground.

The Builder rolled the map. "Well," she said. "He has decided we read it by walking it."