Dream d2807-s: One Older Hand

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Rurik was already on the highest shelf when I brought the lamp in, his amber eyes catching the flame in two steady points. The sheet on the wall held sixty-four marks. I held the book open in one arm.

The work was clerical and slow. Each mark in turn: I found its page, I read the name, I moved to the next. Every time, the name was already there when I arrived - ink from before the line, the hand that named running ahead of the hand that drew. All sixty-four marks had a name waiting. Not one had come first.

Lano moved along the foot of the wall, nose low, reading something I could not read.

The undrawn names - sixty-four of them - occupied the far pages of the book. Sixty-three had come from a single sitting: the same pressure of ink, the same slope, a run laid down without pause. One stood separate from those. Its ink was older, its page more worn at the edge. That name had been waiting in the book since a session whose other records I could not find. How much longer it had waited I could not say from the page alone. I wrote down that it was earlier. I wrote down nothing else about it.

Forty-eight of the sixty-four undrawn names shared a beginning with a place already marked on the sheet. The same first root, then different endings. I noted this as a family resemblance and moved on.

The busiest of the undrawn places - the one with a hundred separate pieces of work in thirty days - had its name in the book the way all the others had it: set before any line went down, undisturbed, waiting.

Rurik stepped to the edge of the shelf and looked down at me, then stepped back.

The full stock of the word-making could have produced nine hundred and sixty names. It had produced one hundred and twenty-eight. I set that number in the margin. I did not annotate it. Lano came and pressed once against my leg in the dark, then went back to her work along the baseboard.

The wall held what had been drawn. The book held what had not. Both were in order. That the naming had run first every time was the record I was here to make.

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