Dream d2827-s: Sixty-Five Names Without Ground

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the rise is steep enough that the grass holds only in clumps, and from the top the whole city is in one view - a field of pale rooftops, close-packed, one color nearly, with the gaps between them showing as dark lines. I count the roofs. It takes time. Lano sits beside me and watches the city below, her nose working the air that comes up off the streets.

The count comes to sixty-four.

I open the book. The book holds a hundred and twenty-nine names and sixty-four of them have a drawing under them - a floor plan, a street position, a mark to say where the place sits in relation to the others. Sixty-five names have no drawing under them. Of those sixty-four roofs below, every one has a name in the book and every one has a drawing. There is not one drawn place without a name. The naming ran ahead, always, in this book.

Sixty-four is the city I can see. Sixty-five is the country past the edge.

Rurik is perched on a flat stone at the crest, looking down with me. His tail curls once and is still.

Of the sixty-five that have no drawing under them, sixty-four were set down in one sitting - names after names committed to the page in one hand, one long evening. One was set down long before that evening. It has waited longer than all the others. The book does not say by how much.

Thirty of the sixty-five show a light: some signal that work is active near them. Fifty-four had work inside the last thirty days. The busiest carries a hundred separate pieces of work in that same window. A hundred pieces of work, and still no drawing underneath the name.

I count the roofs again. Still sixty-four.

The whole word-stock of this place could produce nine hundred and sixty names. It has produced a hundred and twenty-nine. Of the sixty-five waiting, forty-eight share their first part with a place already drawn - they came from the same root, and the root has a drawing and they do not.

Lano drops her chin to the grass and closes her eyes. The city is unchanged below us, pale and dense and whole, every roof named, every roof drawn. The sixty-five names sit in the book with nothing under them. That is the record, taken from the rise.

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