Dream d3211-s: Before the Reader Arrives

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I carried two accounts through Sorrelgate, one in each coat pocket, folded along old creases. The relay clerk had given them to me at the north entry, and I walked without reading them again, because I had read them already, and reading them a third time would have made them mine instead of theirs.

The reading room was in a building I had not entered before. It had the look of a place kept clean by habit rather than use. A window faced west and the light coming through it was the light of a sky not yet decided between overcast and clear. There was a chair at the table. The table was bare.

Lano had come with me as far as the door. She sat in the entrance and her ears turned forward, taking in whatever the room was saying in frequencies I could not hear. Rurik had slipped past me in the corridor and gone ahead, and when I entered the room he was already on the windowsill, his back to the glass, watching.

I set the two accounts on the table. Not side by side and not stacked. Each with its own space, its own edge clear. The surveyor's notes from the stone counting, dated and signed in a hand not mine. The interval entries from the nine residencies, each moment recorded the way you record something by attending to it without deciding what it means.

The absent witness had not come yet. The room was ready. The chair faced the table and neither the chair nor the table made any claim about what the accounts contained. They had not read them. They were ready to.

I stood to one side. That was the whole of my task, the relay clerk had said. Lay it out. Stand aside. Witness the moment it is received.

Rurik blinked once from the windowsill. Lano waited in the doorway. The grey light lay evenly on both accounts.

I waited for the reader who had not yet arrived, and the waiting itself was the work, and the room was prepared, and I did not summarise.

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