Dream d2763-s: Signal at the Ink's Edge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sheet ran out an hour before the ground did.

The paper in my hand holds 65 places. Nine of them carry a mark the Surveyor has noted as occupied - lights, in the language of the ledger. I had walked those nine and counted all 65, and then kept walking, because the ground kept going.

Past the last mark there are 276 places I know exist. A hundred and seventy-one of them have never been drawn. Fifty-eight were worked inside the last thirty days - I can tell by the wear on the thresholds, by which windows remain whole, by where smoke has not yet forgotten how to rise. On this round I have walked 58 of those undrawn places and found 27 still alight. The other 31 are dark but not dead. Quieter. Waiting for a different kind of attention.

Seven marks on my sheet point at ground no reader can reach. I have not written those seven off. I have left them as marks, because the ground they name is still there, even if the path to it has closed.

The newest place past the edge is called Yarrowgarth. One day standing. I know this only because someone was there this morning and the threshold still holds the shape of a recent hand.

Lano walked beside me through all of it - small and white and fluffy, close to my heel, her nose working the air. She had been pressing close for the better part of an hour when I stopped at a low ridge to write. Then she stopped pressing. Her ears went flat. She was not looking at me and she was not looking at Yarrowgarth. She was looking at nothing I could see, and she held very still, and a sound came from her throat that was not quite a bark - higher and shorter, one note only, more warning than alarm.

I looked where she was looking.

The sky was the same sky. The rough ground ran to the same horizon. Rurik had been ranging ahead and now he was back, seated on a low ledge not three paces from me, his amber eyes fixed on the same direction as Lano's, his tail drawn in close.

I had a small receiver in my pack - the kind the Settlement uses to track beacon traffic across the edge. I had brought it because seven of my marks are unreachable, and I had thought perhaps a signal from one of them might have surfaced. I lifted it out.

The receiver was alive. Not with a pattern I recognized. Not with any signal from the known beacon network - I know those rhythms the way I know the marks on my sheet, and this was none of them. The origin was unclear. The pattern was unlike any I had been trained to read. I listened for a long time and the pattern did not resolve into sense.

I wrote the time and the bearing and the first four beats of the pattern, as accurately as I could render them on paper. I did not write an interpretation, because I did not have one.

Lano did not relax. Rurik blinked once, slowly, and went on staring.

At the Settlement, I knew, the Receivers would have caught this. Better instruments than mine, calibrated and tended by the Signal Keeper, who has held the post for eleven years and whom I have never heard call anything unaccountable. What the Signal Keeper would make of it, I did not know. What the Settlement would decide - investigate or let it sit - I did not know. The signal was still running when I put the receiver away, folded my sheet, and began the walk back toward the last name on the paper.

The ground past the edge did not stop being ground. Yarrowgarth stood where it had been standing since yesterday. The 27 lights past the margin still held.

I left the question of the signal exactly as I found it: open, marked, and without a verdict. That is what this walk is for.

---