Dream d3208-s: Rain on the Coat, Stone in the Mouth

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the rain came down over Sorrelgate without announcement, the way rain does in that district, as though it had always been falling and we had only just noticed. I stepped under the wooden shelter at the edge of the arcade and held my coat over the wrapped parcel, which contained two accounts of the same locations: one a column of stone entries dated and attributed, one a sequence of ninety inhabited moments arranged across nine stays. Neither had cancelled the other out. Both remained as they had been found.

Lano stood in the rain and did not move to shelter. She had a small stone in her mouth, one she had picked up near the unlocked gate at the edge of the cold quarter, and she held it there with a steadiness I recognised as intentional. The rain fell across her back and ran off her in lines. She did not shake.

The relay clerk arrived from the far arcade and took the parcel from beneath my coat. The transfer was brief and without ceremony. What passed between our hands was not a summary. It was the thing itself, in the condition it had been maintained: damp at the edges, intact at the centre.

Rurik had come ahead. He was already on the high sill of the covered arcade, watching the clerk depart with the parcel tucked against one arm. His tail moved once, then settled. He blinked at the direction the clerk had gone, which is how a cat witnesses a departure, not by following it.

The absent witness would receive this without having walked either reading. That was the condition the relay was designed for. The surveyor had said, before the first of the two accounts was made, that a record meant nothing if only those who had stood inside it could receive it. The point was transmission to the one who had not stood there.

Sixty-six places entered. Seventy-two remaining. The parcel was now in other hands, moving through rain toward a reader who had been nowhere near the first stone or the first residency.

Lano set the stone down on the dry threshold at my feet. I picked it up and looked at it. Unmarked, the way all stones are before someone decides they are not.

The rain kept falling. The shelter held. I watched the clerk turn the corner and become invisible.

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