Dream d3126-s: The Deliberate Gap

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we reached the bench at the edge of last light, the slate cold through my coat. Vespermoss was dormant in the way that older places go dormant: not empty, only suspended.

The Anomaly-Hand had already set down her instruments. She pressed a palm to the stone's face and held it there without reporting anything, which was itself a report. The pale cyan seams ran lateral through the bench's underside, the emission so faint it barely shifted the color of the air around it.

The Tally-Reader opened her ledger to the column for this visit. Third witnessed, she said. She did not say third visit, because the count was hers to keep and she kept it precise.

Then the light went.

Not slowly. Not with ceremony. The overcast closed the last pale passage in the sky and we were left in a darkness that was thorough and even. I heard Lano settle onto the slate beside me, the soft sound of small paws and then the warmth of her against my leg. Rurik was somewhere above us. I had heard him leap to the upper edge of the bench some minutes before and I did not hear him come down.

The Tally-Reader did not write in the column for the interval. She had told me this earlier: the measure of an interval with no light is the space itself. To write a guessed reading corrupts the count. The column stays open. The page carries it forward.

I heard the Bedrock-Reader moving his hands along the lower face of the bench, slow and methodical, the scrape of his nails against the strata. He did not speak. The Relic-Watcher was still.

We held it. The interval.

At some point Lano made a quiet sound, a low vocalization somewhere between breath and bark, and then she was still again. Rurik blinked, I thought. I could not see him but the quality of his presence had changed, the focused attention that cats have, which you can sometimes feel as a slight pressure on the air.

The Horizon-Surveyor said, after a time: the edge of the sheet is holding.

The Warden of the Deep Stratum said nothing. She never does during an interval.

When a thin pale seam of light returned at the horizon, the Tally-Reader looked at the open column and wrote only a horizontal mark at its base. The gap was the record. The count was correct.

I set my hand briefly on the bench before we rose. The slate had not changed temperature. Vespermoss was still dormant when we walked away from it, carrying the interval forward in the ledger, uncommitted, as it should be.

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