Dream d167-s: The Voiceless Garden

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the colors were too correct.

That is the only way I can describe it. In the silent zone the world had been emptied, held in suspension, and stepping out the far side I had expected something muted, a gradual reintroduction. Instead: this. A garden in which every hue had been tuned to its precise frequency, lavender that was exactly and only lavender, gold that had never considered being anything less than gold. It should have been beautiful. It was beautiful. That was the problem.

Lano walked close but did not touch me. He was watching the flowers.

They were too perfect to be natural and too strange to be made. Each one existed at the center of its own geometry, petals arranged in sequences that suggested mathematics done by something that had never learned to make errors. The fragrance came in colors I could taste - rose that tasted of a word I had forgotten, something blue that was also a low sound just below the register of hearing.

The owl was not here.

I had known it before I checked - the particular quality of his absence, which is different from ordinary absence the way the silent zone's quiet was different from ordinary quiet. He had stopped at the zone's edge and I had emerged alone, with Lano, into this.

The seduction of it was architectural. The garden arranged itself in a way that suggested there was always something more precisely beautiful just ahead, always one more turning of the impossible path. I took three steps toward a cluster of flowers that pulsed with a bioluminescence the color of deep attention, and Lano planted himself in front of me.

"Lano," I said, and my voice sounded wrong here - too small, too human, the imprecision of it embarrassing against the garden's exactness.

He looked at me with the expression I had learned to read in the trap clearing, at the fork, on the descent. Not fear. A more patient kind of knowing.

I thought of the merged figures. I thought of what the owl had said about self-will - wilde, belonging to itself. The garden did not belong to itself. It was performing belonging to itself. There is a difference, and Lano could smell it.

I sat down on the path instead of walking forward. Just sat. The garden continued being perfect in all directions without my participation.

After a time that had no particular length, the perfection became less seductive and more visible as a quality - a thing the garden did, not a thing the garden was. Like noticing the mechanism behind the trick.

Lano put his head in my lap.

I wrote, not moving: