Dream d2102-s: The Book at Rest

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we did nothing, and the grove was full of it.

Grove day thirty-three. The Hummingbird Wardens had completed their mid-morning circuit to the microsecond, their patrol a line so straight you could have strung a plumb-bob from it, and now the canopy above us held only the slow gold of loomlight and the sound of things growing at their own pace. We sat on the terrace stones and did not reach for any tool.

The Book of Readings lay on a flat stone between us, spine turned up, singed edge dark where the Foundry heat had caught it at the last moment. Every page whole. I had touched that spine a dozen times since we arrived, the way you test a mended thing, half-expecting it to give. It did not give.

Lano had found a patch of sun at the canopy's edge and lay with her nose on her forepaws, white against the terraced green. Her ears shifted once when the Starling Chorus called from the east terrace - "Blight-wind south, turning." - and she watched the sky settle before lowering her head again.

A knot slipped in the fourth nest-row above us. Not a failure, just a slipping. A Loomkeeper dropped down on a grass-thread loop, held the loose end in its beak while a second came alongside and worked the re-tie in the unhurried way of a thing that knows exactly how much time it has. When they were done, the two rose back into the canopy without ceremony, because a Loomkeeper has no ceremony beyond the knot itself.

The Builder watched them go. "That's the whole method," she said. "Nothing forced."

Rurik stretched beside her on the warm stone, his black tail moving once. "The Foundry forced everything," he said. "Even the cooling."

We sat with that for a while.

It was the Weather Reader who named what I had been hearing since morning, root-pressure and leaf-shift and seed-case cracking one slow millimeter at a time. "The forge runs loud because it is fighting," she said. "This place is not fighting anything."

I think I had never heard quiet as a kind of labor before.

At dusk the Loomkeepers began the evening reading. Someone had carried the Book to the reading-stone without my noticing, and the singed spine caught the loomlight gold where it lay open. They worked entry thirty-one, the Umberstead entry, beak by beak into the canopy above the east terrace, a knot per name, a row for the stay. When the last loop was tied off, a single Loomkeeper bore the Umberstead seed in its beak to the terrace bed and tamped it into the soil with three quiet strikes.

Lano's tail moved once. That was the ceremony.