Dream d2801-s: The Book's Far Pages

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the long table in the map room and stated the task aloud before beginning it: name what goes into the margin.

The new sheet lay flat and weighted at its corners, its margin open on three sides, blank. Lano was already there, curled at the near end of the table, her nose pointed toward the lamp. Rurik had come in ahead of me and sat in the doorway a moment before choosing the high window ledge; he watched from there with his amber eyes half-closed.

I opened the book of names.

The far pages were already written. Sixty-four names on the left side of the ledger had a drawing under each: ground settled, outline fixed, place made real. Sixty-four names on the right side had nothing under them. Not a line. The naming had come first every time, and for sixty-three of those waiting names it had come all at once, one sitting, one hand. One name stood apart from the sixty-three: older, written in a different ink that had gone a little brown, waiting longer than any of them.

I did not explain why that name was written first, or why whoever wrote it then stopped. That is not the task.

The task is to name the margin.

I set the pen down for a moment and counted what the waiting names told me. Forty-eight of them shared a first part with a place already drawn: the same root, a different ending, a territory implied. Twenty-eight of the waiting names showed a light beside them, some mark of work still live in the last thirty days. Fifty-four had been touched in that same window. The busiest place under a waiting name had been touched a hundred times in thirty days and still had no drawing.

Lano lifted her head, turned it toward the blank margin, then set it back down on her paws.

I began with the one that had waited longest. I wrote its name in the outermost margin, at the edge of what the sheet could hold. Then I moved to the forty-eight that shared first parts with drawn ground: near kin to the known country, they went in the quadrant closest to their relatives. The twenty-eight with a light beside them I placed where the lamp could reach the names easily. The busiest one, a hundred pieces of work and no drawing anywhere, I placed near the center of the open margin, room enough around it for something large.

Rurik stepped down from the window ledge and pressed against my leg once before moving off toward the far corner of the room.

I wrote until the margin was no longer blank. I did not fill it, only began it. The names were there before I arrived. I stated the task, and then I did it, and what was written in the far pages of the book is now written in the margin of the new sheet: sixty-four names, no ground yet beneath them, each in its proper place, waiting for whatever the next nights bring.

Lano sighed once, a small sound, and slept.

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