He had been walking since before he could remember, and before that he had escaped.
There had been dunes of fine white dust and shattered stones lining desiccated river beds. He had passed passages decorated by impossible fossils, decaying wooden signs and roughly hewn markers proving undeniable theses and directions, and a skeleton proving that he was not the first to go this way. He had known that the way would be long before he had escaped. He had known that the way would be hard, unforgiving, and unrewarding until its final end. He had known that there would be many minor ends, each one foretelling failure and a pointless abyss. He had known that he would have to walk a long way, that he would have to carry himself by sheer (and crass) effort, but had underestimated the accumulation of detritus in his heart, nor their weight (measured in a will to succumb).
Sometimes he looked down, and sometimes he looked forward, and sometimes he looked up, and sometimes he did not know where he looked, or he looked far away and inside, to fragments of memories and imagined fantasies that rewarded his parched cravings. Now he woke up, and there was one foot, and then another foot, and then again and then again. Now he woke up and saw a cactus before the horizon, marking the centre of dried crater, its shores built of hexagonal salt crystals.
He had forgotten how to pause the shuffle of his feet, but inside his mind, he stumbled. The cactus could be a harbinger of water. He had no knowledge of meteors or alien plants. The cactus could be a banisher of water. He had no knowledge of runes and paleohydrology. But these things were possible. Inside the sheared dimensions that projected his thoughts, maps were drawn and discarded in such rapidity that all that was left was a blurred impression of something that was missing. Like an amputated arm reaching for a glass. Like the lonely bed of an old widow. Like the happiness he had never known in childhood; like false memories of something that never was.
The arguments in reason’s courthouse were conducted in soft whispers and flashes of signalling hands and fingers. The judge remained silent beyond the din of unperceived instigations and insistences, and the faces of the jury were all his own. From the back of the room, his master rose and spoke, a single clear, composed and pure syllable, unadulterated by doubt or indecision. This was the right choice, and this was the final verdict. The judge looked blandly on, unimpressed or hard of hearing. The jury looked worried, concerned for the accused or concerned for themselves.
The shock of certainty expelled him from the realism of the dream, knocking him back from one premise to its predecessor, until he was once more a man walking on sand. His master’s voice continued to echo inside him, but now its image was divorced from context, and appeared arbitrary and aggressive.
He continued to walk.
