Dream d3010-s: Twice Written, Half Certain

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we left Vespersquare by the south lane on the seventh evening of seven, the town behind us still lit and the lane ahead already dark, and Lano walked close to my heel with her ears flat and her nose working at something the air carried from the east.

The Keeper of the Fuel Register had come to find me before supper. She did not speak dramatically. She read from the page: the generator had drawn down to a third of its winter reserve before autumn began, and the salvage pool that fed the secondary stores was at a level the record described as cleared. The two figures stood in the margin of the sheet and neither explained the other. The network had been consulted. It had no route that answered both shortfalls.

I wrote what she read. I wrote it twice: once as I heard it, and once alongside what I had written from the outside account, two months before I ever entered Vespersquare. The outside account had called the fuel stores adequate and the salvage flow steady. Neither word holds now.

The town is not in worse condition than the account. It is in a different condition. The cold in the outer buildings was less than the record said; the certainty in the supply figures is less than the record said. These are not the same kind of error and I have not found the explanation for either.

The Surveyor of Range walked ahead of us in the lane. She carried the map of what stood within three days of the settlement and had already marked four sites with a question rather than a symbol. The question meant: not yet entered, status unknown, possibly yielding. The network could say where those sites stood and what the far account described. It could not say what the near account would find.

Lano stopped once, at the lane's bend, and barked once at the dark to the east - not at a sound I could hear. I stood with her until she was done, then she pressed against my leg and walked on.

Rurik had taken the warm place on the Register's window ledge and was watching from above as we went. He did not move. He stared at the lane behind us the way a cat stares at something that has not yet arrived.

The account of Vespersquare, as of this evening, is twice as long as it was at first light and half as certain. What the four sites hold, the range run will return. What the generator holds by the time the Surveyor of Range returns, the daily reading will show. Neither number is settled.

I wrote: residency ended. I wrote: follow-on open. I carried the page south until the town's light was behind me and only the lane was ahead.

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