Dream d2857-s: As Spoken, As Written

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the voice came before the light: someone in the room was already speaking a name aloud, and I was already writing it down on the long board that covered most of the wall. Lano was curled in the corner near the lamp, her nose tucked under her tail, one ear angled up. Rurik had taken the warm ledge at the window and sat with his back to the glass, watching me write.

The rule, as the other figure had given it at the start of the night, was this: write the answer as it was said, not as it was agreed. I was not to smooth it or bring it in line with the version that had been settled before. The spoken version was what went on the board. After each entry I read it back, not my understanding of it but the words themselves, the way they sat on the board and not the way they ought to have sat.

The board showed a hundred and twenty-eight names in a column. Beside sixty-four of them a small mark ran to the right: a place named and drawn, the drawing already under it somewhere in the book of sheets. Beside sixty-four of them nothing ran to the right at all. Those sixty-four had been named and then not drawn. The naming had come first in every single case; there was no drawn place that had arrived before its name, not one.

Sixty-three of the blank ones had been set down together in one sitting, by one hand, in one long run. I could see where that run had started and where it had stopped: the ink weight changed, the angle of the letters shifted, and then it all simply ended, with nothing written beside the last one, no line through it, no mark. The pen had been set down without annotation.

One name, placed apart at the top of the column, had been written long before those sixty-three. It sat at a different pressure, the paper around it gone a shade darker with time. That name had waited far longer than any other. I looked at it and did not explain it. I recorded it the same as any other: name, blank to the right, nothing more.

The other figure spoke: forty-seven of the waiting names shared a first part with a name that already carried a drawing. I wrote forty-seven. Thirty-one of the waiting names showed a light in the column. I wrote thirty-one. Fifty-four had carried work inside the last thirty days. I wrote fifty-four. The busiest place among those, the place holding the most activity while its name sat without a drawing, had carried a hundred separate pieces of work in that same period. I wrote one hundred. The whole word-stock available could have made nine hundred and sixty names; it had made one hundred and twenty-eight. I wrote that too.

Lano stirred in the corner, shifted, pressed her nose flat against the floor, and went still again. Rurik had not moved from the warm ledge. The room was quiet except for the chalk on the board and the voice reading off the figures.

When I had written the last one I read it all back, exactly as it stood on the board, not as I had understood it and not as it had been agreed beforehand. The other figure listened to the full reading. When I finished, nothing was corrected. That was the verification: silence after the reading-back. What had been said and what was now on the board were the same thing.

I set the chalk down. Sixty-four names sat in the blank space to the right of their entries, in the order they had been set down, with the oldest one still at the top of the column where it had always been.

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