Dream d2826-s: The Stone Newer Than Its Name

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the new frontage on a city street in Willowden on the fourth night of my residency, and the stone was so freshly cut that the dust of it still lay in the joints. The surveyor working beside me had set his rod against the base of the wall and called out measurements, and I wrote them into the ledger with the name already printed at the top of the page: the name had been there longer than the stone by a margin I could not calculate, and filling in the measurements felt like supplying what should have come first.

Lano sat at the edge of the lamplight, watching the far end of the frontage where new work met older street. Her ears were up and her nose was working.

The surveyor's transit had been salvaged from a warehouse north of the plaza. He had mentioned it when he set it up, had pointed to the repair work on the base plate, two bolts replaced with ones of a slightly different thread. It had measured true all evening. Then, between one sighting and the next, it went dark. The illuminated scale inside the eyepiece simply stopped. He checked the connection, checked the battery housing, tapped the side of the instrument once with his knuckle. Nothing.

He set it down on the casing and looked at me without speaking.

The scale had been readable by its own light, and without it we could not read it at all. The night was not bright enough and the graduations too fine. The replacement parts for an instrument that old did not exist in Willowden. I looked at the rod still standing plumb against the new stone and then at the ledger with its waiting columns, and I did not write anything yet, because writing a gap is different from leaving one.

Lano barked once, short and sharp, her ears flat now, her body held still and forward-facing. Then she went quiet and held her position.

Rurik had been on the upper course of the wall, watching from a ledge above the second story. He dropped without sound to the foot of the wall and sat down in the pool of shadow at the base of the nearest lamp post, his amber eyes moving between the broken instrument and the surveyor's face.

We had three measurements written and the frontage ran longer than three measurements by some distance I could not yet name. The name at the top of the ledger page was precise. The stone was new. The instrument that was supposed to bring them together lay quiet in its case with the connection checked and nothing changed.

I kept the ledger open.

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