Dream d3035-s: The Figures Do Not Know

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Surveyor's ledger said Brackenbrook's lower street was moderate in traffic and unremarkable in character. The Surveyor wrote that from the ridge. I entered tonight.

The street was ordinary and busy. Lit and loud with the ordinary work of an evening: carts, voices, a dog crossing between legs without urgency. Lano pressed to my left heel and watched the dog cross. I watched the figures passing.

The ledger had two entries for the lower street. One said moderate; one said unremarkable. Both were wrong in the same direction - too thin - and I wrote both down again with tonight's date beside them. I did not correct them. They are not corrected; they are joined by a second account. The second account is: the street is full, and the full thing cannot be accounted for from outside.

A party stood still at the near end. They were consulting something - a folded paper, a count - and the figures walked past them on both sides without slowing. I stood with them briefly. Rurik came through a gap in the wall below the first terrace and sat down in the middle of the party without being addressed. He washed a paw. The party did not rearrange around him; they rearranged and he remained.

The record calls Brackenbrook a working town. It is. What the record could not say, because no record taken from a distance can say it: the town is indifferent to its own workingness. The figures do not perform it. They are cold in their coats and busy with their errands and they do not know they are being entered in any ledger at all. Lano sat beside a doorstep and I wrote: the near account disagrees with the far account and neither is settled.

This is night two of seven. Six more entries remain.

What the ledger has: moderate, unremarkable. What the entry tonight has: full, indifferent, entered for the first time. Both are written. Neither is revised.

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