Dream d2753-s: The Road After the Record

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the track went on after the last name I had written down, and I walked it a full day without turning back.

The sheet in my pack carried sixty-five places. Nine of them I had marked with a light, meaning someone was there, meaning work was going on. The other fifty-six were dark on the page. I had thought, when I ruled the last column, that the sheet was a fair account. Out here a full day from that last entry, I understood it differently.

The hands that had gathered the drawn country had found two hundred and seventy-four places in all. Of those, a hundred and sixty-nine had never been put on any sheet. Not omitted by error. Simply not drawn. The boundary of the record was not the boundary of the ground.

Lano walked ahead on the track, nose down, then up, reading the air. She found something in the dust and carried it a few steps, a small flat stone, then set it down and trotted back to my heel.

I counted what I could count without stopping. Fifty-six of those undrawn places had been worked inside the last thirty days. Among the fifty-six I had walked past the edge of the sheet on this round, twenty-eight showed a light. More than half. The drawn country had nine lights out of sixty-five. The undrawn country had twenty-eight out of fifty-six. The work was not behind the record. The work was past it.

Seven marks on the sheet pointed at ground I could not reach. Roads that had closed, crossings pulled up, names that referred to something no longer standing where the mark said it stood. A reader picking up the sheet would walk to those seven marks and find nothing there. I noted this without adding to the sheet.

The afternoon sky was very large. The track went straight through the middle of it, or appeared to. Lano came up alongside and pressed her side against my leg for a moment, then moved off to work the verge.

The newest place past the edge was a town the Clerk of Ways called Quillvale. One day standing. I had not known it was there until I crossed the last recorded name and the Clerk named it to me on a slip of paper. Whatever had made it a town had happened while I was still walking toward the edge of what was written down. It was already there when I arrived.

I did not add it to the sheet. That was not the task. The task was to state how far the drawn country reached, and it reached to sixty-five places, nine of them lit, and past that the track went on the same as it had before.

Lano stopped and looked back the way we had come. The last name on the sheet was a full day behind us now. She turned toward the rim and trotted forward.

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