Dream d2808-s: The Beacon at the Wrong Hour

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the book lay open to the far pages when I found the knot. I had been counting backward through the map room's working ledger, and the far pages were not a chapter I had planned for: 128 names written in one hand, careful, no abbreviation, no correction.

I counted the drawings first. Sixty-four names had a drawing set under them, a small figure of the place in question, even the smallest a proper rendering. Sixty-four names had nothing under them, no mark, no beginning of a mark, and not one drawn place had been named after the fact. The naming came first every time without exception.

Then I counted who set the waiting names down and when. Sixty-three of them were set down together. I could see it in the pressure of the ink, the way the hand moved fast and sure and stopped. One name was older. The ink was a different shade, slightly brown at the edge, and the page had taken it differently, as if it had been sitting with that one name far longer than the sixty-three. I wrote the count in the margin: 63 together, 1 before. I did not write anything about the difference in the ink.

Lano had been lying under the work table for most of the evening, but she stood up when I reached for the rope. Her ears went flat against her skull. She took two steps toward the window and stopped.

Then the relay spoke.

The relay station on the north wall of the map room was a small box, a signal instrument the previous cartographer had wired in at about shoulder height. It was supposed to do one thing: pass a clean pulse from the beacon at the settlement's edge, once per hour, a confirmation that the route was open. For eight nights it had done exactly that.

What it sent now was not a clean pulse. It was a pattern I did not recognize, and then it was not a pattern at all: it was something that had been a pattern and had come apart in transit. The box clicked three times in a row, then made a sound I had no name for, a sound like a word run through something that did not understand words.

I set the book down on the table. I did not rope it yet. Lano barked once, short, and pressed back against my leg without looking at me.

The relay clicked again. Different intervals.

The duty officer came in from the corridor, notebook already open, already writing. She crossed to the relay box and read the interval counter on its face. The intervals were not random, she said. Something was encoding them. That was not supposed to be possible from this end of the route.

I asked what the beacon at the far end was supposed to be doing at this hour.

She said it was supposed to be silent.

Lano's nose worked the air near the relay box. Her tail stayed low. She kept her eyes on the box and did not look away.

I closed the book without writing anything more. Sixty-four names with drawings, sixty-four without, sixty-three set down in one sitting, one older. I set the book in the satchel and reached for the rope.

The duty officer was on the secondary line by then, trying to raise the relay station two stops down the route. Rurik, the black cat, had found the warm side of the relay box at some point in the last few minutes and sat against the wall directly beneath it, watching the duty officer work with the particular patience of something that has decided to stay.

I tied the rope. The book was closed. Outside the map room window the settlement's beacon was doing something that was not its proper function, and we did not yet know what that was.

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