Dream d2649-s: The Relay Stammers

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I walked the long street of Pewterlow on the fifth night and found nothing waiting for me, because the work was already underway.

The windows along the street were lit from inside. At each one a different figure bent over a surface, and the surface held marks that had nothing to do with my arrival. I had not been expected. I had not been needed. The sequence was already running.

The Ledger-warden at the corner house showed me the register without prompting. It went back further than the Hall's authority ran. The oldest entries were in a different hand from the newest, and that hand was different again from the one writing now. No one had told the street to keep a record. The street had kept it.

I sat with the Ledger-warden while she copied the day's column into a second book. Lano settled at the threshold, nose to the crack in the door, ears easy.

Then the relay-board on the wall stuttered.

The Ledger-warden looked up. Along the street a second window went dark, then bright again, then dark. The Relay-clerk at the tower end came out onto the step and stood there watching the board in her own window. I saw her move her lips, counting something that was not arriving correctly.

The beacon signal running through Pewterlow's spine had distorted. Not failed - distorted. The pattern was coming through but scrambled, and the relay-boards in every house were receiving a version that did not match the version the next house received.

Lano came off the threshold. Her ears went flat. She stood in the center of the street and barked once, short and sharp, facing the tower end.

The Relay-clerk did not run. She went back inside and opened a secondary ledger, older than the one on her desk, and began to cross-reference what she had. The Ledger-warden set down her pen and went to stand in the doorway without going through it, watching the other windows.

I did not move. I had come to witness a record, not to answer one.

The marks in the register were still there. The sequence ran from the oldest entry to the newest without a break, in three different hands across what I counted as several decades of work. None of those hands had been instructed. None had waited for the Hall to authorize the keeping.

On the street the figures continued their work. The Relay-clerk at the far end held a strip of paper up against the glow from her board and read from it carefully. Whether what she read matched what the board was showing, I could not tell from the street.

Lano pressed close to my leg and did not bark again. Her nose moved. Her ears stayed flat.

The board on the Ledger-warden's wall put out another stutter - three marks where there should have been one, and a gap where there should have been a mark - and then went quiet. Not off. Quiet. Receiving something, or trying to.

The Ledger-warden came back to her desk and picked up her pen. She did not write in the working register. She wrote in a third book, smaller than the others, and what she wrote was the distortion itself: the shape of what had come through wrong, set down as its own entry, dated, filed in sequence with everything else.

I watched her write it.

The street held its own count. The corruption was inside the sequence now too, recorded without explanation, witness only to the fact that it had happened. Nothing else had been decided yet.

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