Dream d2980-s: Before the Signal Broke

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was sitting at the edge of Ivorylow in the grey before dawn, the town still quiet behind me and the road going out ahead like a line drawn in pencil that someone had not yet committed to ink. The Keeper's book was open across my knee. I had been writing the last entry of the residency, seven nights in Ivorylow, and what the last entry said was this: the unwalked half is still unwalked. I wrote it, read it back, and left it standing.

Lano sat close to my left boot. She had been still for some time, which was not her usual way, and I noticed it without remarking on it. Her ears were not folded in sleep. They were upright and angled forward, toward the relay post at the corner of the square, a painted wooden structure with a copper dish at the top that I had walked past every morning of the residency without once thinking about it.

The relay post made a sound I had not heard it make before. Not loud. A thin, cycling interference, the way a wheel sounds when it catches a brake it has never touched. I wrote that down in the margin.

The Postmaster came out of the station building without a coat, which told me the situation had not been planned. She was carrying a strip of paper from the line-printer and she read it twice standing in the square, and then she looked at the relay post. Lano's ears went flat against her skull. She pressed against my boot.

I said: what does it say.

The Postmaster said: it says what it always says, but not in the order it always says it. The pattern is wrong.

I asked which station was reporting. She said all of them were reporting, and that was the part that was wrong. The morning transmission was a single station. There was no procedure in the book for all of them at once.

I wrote that down.

The town was beginning to wake. A light came on in the laundry. Another in the upper room of the counting house. The Postmaster went back inside still holding the strip of paper and I could hear her working the hand-set, calling the first station name, waiting, calling it again. Lano did not move from my boot. The copper dish on the relay post turned a few degrees, the way they do when they are seeking, and then stopped, and then turned back. I had not seen one do that.

Eighty names on the sheet that no road had walked into. The last entry written and left. The relay post cycling its thin sound into the dawn air.

Lano barked once, a short hard sound, facing the dish, and then was quiet. I put my hand on her back. She was very tense under her fur and she did not relax.

The Postmaster had not come back out. Inside the station building the hand-set went on calling.

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