Dream d2491-s: The Arrangement Holds

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where every lamp on Ivorymere's reading floor was lit, and the floor was full.

I came in near the east end, where the tall shelves run, and saw at once that the arrangement was not mine. The sections stepped in an order I had not made and did not recognize until I had walked half the length of the room: philosophy against the south wall, cartography inward by one row, the bound correspondence filling the middle tier where the light falls longest. It was the founder's scheme. I had simply never seen it operating at this scale, with every seat taken and every lamp casting its cone exactly where the shelves required it.

A clerk at the far end was reshelving without looking. She knew the system. She moved by muscle-memory, not by reading the spines, and the books went where they belonged.

I asked her when the scheme had been laid in. She said she didn't know the year, only that it had been there before her first morning, that she had learned it in her third week and stopped thinking about it after that. She said it the way you say something that has stopped being remarkable.

Lano was seated at one of the carrels near the center, working through a stack of ledgers. I did not interrupt. Across the floor, in ones and twos, the other readers moved between the shelves or sat with their heads down. Nobody was speaking. The lamps were very steady.

Later I found the circulation desk and looked at the log. Cinderfirth was marked active. Nettleness was marked active. Ivorymere was marked active. Four others had no status beside them: Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate. The clerk who logged them said the seeing from the Hall had gone dark on all seven at once, on the same night, and they had marked the four quiet as a precaution - though travelers' reports said the places themselves still stood. The seeing failed, not the places. She made a note of the distinction.

The standing seats were still filled. The Council Hall held its Convener; the Scriptorium Annex held its Scribe. These were in the log too, listed under offices rather than names, as was proper.

Nobody said who had made the shelving scheme. But the floor was full and every lamp was lit and the readers moved through the sections without asking anyone where anything was, and that was, I thought, a kind of testimony - the quiet kind, the kind that does not need to be given.

I left before the lamps went out. I don't know if they did.

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