Dream d2633-s: Where the Lines Depart

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the other sheet arrived folded in thirds, still carrying cold from the road. The Keeper of the Third Register set it beside my own on the table, smoothed it flat with both palms, and then we sat down together under the lamp.

It was the fifth night of eight. The copying floor was quiet except for one other pair at the far end, heads bent, saying nothing. I laid my entries open on the left. The trial entries went on the right.

We worked slowly through the first quarter. Where my entry read thirty-one in the holding column, theirs read thirty. One number's gap: I noted it at the margin without comment. Where theirs read unoccupied, no letter pending, mine was blank where it should not have been. I had passed the Ruins of Mistthwaite in the early afternoon and written nothing at the time, meaning to return to it, and had not returned. The Keeper marked that gap with a small cross. Neither of us said anything.

Lano pressed against my ankle under the table. She had been still for most of the hour. Now her ears went flat, not the half-drop of attention but the low-flat of something wrong, and her tail, which had been loose, stopped.

A runner came in through the side door. He stood by the lamp alcove and caught his breath. He was from the waypost at the north edge of the settlement, the one that carries the circuit count to the outer posts.

He said the signal had gone wrong.

He said it plainly and without alarm, but his hands were holding the relay-sheet too tightly. The sheet was supposed to carry the tallied count from the third circuit, the standard two-column form, the one every waypost uses, the one I had trained three of the outer posts to use. He held it out. The columns were there. The headings were there. But the entries inside them were not the entries of any place I knew: numbers in the wrong column, symbols that belonged to the second circuit appearing in the third circuit's form, two lines that repeated word for word in different rows as if the hand writing them had lost its place and copied the same entry twice without noticing.

The Keeper took the relay-sheet and laid it on the table between mine and the trial entries. Three sheets now under one lamp. She ran her finger down the relay-sheet without comment. Lano stood up. A short bark, once, cut across the room. The pair at the far end looked up.

I wrote in my margin: relay distortion, north waypost, origin unclear. I put the hour next to it. I did not write what I thought the cause was, because I did not know the cause. The relay had been clean for eighty days. Something had changed in the eighty-first.

The Keeper said: we keep comparing. She pointed back to my entry and the trial entry, the original two sheets. The relay problem was for the morning. The comparison was the work of tonight. She was right, and we went back to it.

But Lano did not lie back down. She stayed standing, nose toward the door the runner had come through, still reading whatever she had read in the cold air he had let in when he opened it.

Where the trial entries and my own agreed, I put a small tick. Where they parted, I put a dash. By the end of the night I had fourteen ticks and four dashes, and one long blank where neither of us had a record for the same place on the same day. The Keeper folded the relay-sheet and set it aside for someone else to examine in the daylight.

The lamp was low. The relay problem was not resolved. We had finished the comparison.

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