Dream d2301-s: Three Pages Back

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path down to the rim settlement drops sharply at the last bend, and the view opens all at once - a scatter of roofless halls arranged in good order across the flat, everything still where it was placed, the lines clean enough that I can read the intent of the single hand that laid them out even now. Vegetation has come in at the walls but has not disturbed the layout. The sky is dusk-pink above us, and in one of the inner rooms a light burns - old, patient, lit for no current purpose - which is exactly the kind of detail the ledger wants and the kind I have to slow myself for.

Lano pauses beside me at the top of the slope, ears up. Rurik is already three steps ahead, picking down the scree with his particular quiet, and the Builder moves to my left with the attention she gives to construction she did not make herself. The Weather Reader is checking the low cloud against the rim line, a habit she has in enclosed places.

I pull the ledger from the pack before we descend. Habit now, or nearly. I want the entry begun in the good light before we step under those walls and the dusk changes quality.

That is when I find it - three pages back, the count for the place we passed the day before last. I had the number right in my head, one complaint in the open book, but something slipped between that thought and the line and I put two. A small error. The kind that compounds if it travels forward.

I correct it there on the slope while the others wait, Rurik glancing back once with mild interest, the Builder not looking at all because she already knows how it goes with ledgers and she does not hurry corrections. One stroke through the wrong numeral, the right one written over it, the date of the correction set in the margin. The work has been going well - that is the truth and everyone standing on this slope knows it - and going well does not mean going without error. It means the error gets found.

We start down. The settlement opens around us as we enter, each hall in its proper position, nothing collapsed, the one building with a light inside casting a soft rectangle onto the courtyard stones. There is one open complaint in the book of this place. I will record it. Lano drops her nose to the threshold of the nearest hall and then raises her head to look at me, and I stand in the courtyard with the corrected ledger in my hands, watching the light from that one burning room hold steady in the still air.

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