Dream d2629-s: Unfamiliar Pens, Long Tables

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the copying floor ran the length of everything I could see, tables end to end under windows so high the glass had gone dark before anyone arrived. I carried the ledger in both arms. Lano came at my heel, her nails quiet on the boards, nose working the cold air ahead of us.

The people were already seated when we entered. Some had found the right grip on an unfamiliar pen; others held theirs at a distance, the way you hold a thing before you trust it. I set the ledger down at the head of the first table and opened it to the page where the count had landed: sixty-five places, each marked in the column it earned.

I did not explain the column headings. I read them aloud, once, and moved on.

There is a place called the Ruins of Pewterlow. Of the sixty-five, it sends the most hands. Three of those hands were here tonight, seated near the middle of the second table, sharing a single inkwell without being asked. I told them: you have enough. You could carry your own mark forward without this floor. They nodded, and the one nearest the window kept writing.

I said: thirty-five places have only a few. This is the room for that. Take the form home and teach it. You do not need to understand it fully before you teach it; you only need to be one step ahead of those you are teaching.

Lano had settled under the first table by then, her chin on her forepaws, watching the nearest pair of boots. She was very still. The way she goes still when a room has become the thing it was going to be.

The pile at Mistthwaite I did not speak about aloud. It is in the ledger under its own row. Nobody in this room was from there; there was no one to carry the form back to it. I wrote the date in the margin of that page and left the column for hands empty. That is what an empty column is for.

I moved down the tables.

The twenty-seven with no one standing in them at all are in the ledger too, each on its own line. The forty-three ruins. The forty-seven cold. I did not visit these places in order to count them; the count was finished before I came here. What I carried in was a finished thing, and the copying floor was for handing it over, table by table, to people who had come to receive it.

Near the far end, a figure who had been very slow suddenly found the rhythm of the form and filled three rows in the time it had taken to fill one. Rurik appeared from somewhere behind the last table, slipped between two chairs without disturbing either, and took the warm patch of floor near the east wall. He sat and stared at the high windows. One slow blink. The glass was still dark. I did not know if it was late or early.

I said to the room: the record is not finished when it leaves my hands. It is finished when the form can be held without me. Some of you will carry this to places I have not been. Some of you will teach it to people I will never meet. The count will be wrong in those places for a while, and then it will be right, in the way that things go right when many hands learn the same shape.

Nobody answered. They wrote. Lano's tail moved once, slowly, and was still again.

I closed my copy of the ledger and left it at the head of the first table. It did not belong to me anymore.

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