The preceding city showed a garden.
Okon had checked three times, across different seasons of aggregate survey data: the autumn returns, the spring panel, and the random sample from the previous February. All three showed the same thing at the canal bend: a walled enclosure, interior, trees visible above the wall from the adjacent street, no gate that any surveyed resident had described precisely. Residents within four blocks of the site reported it in roughly one in four dream surveys. That was a strong signal for a single location.
His clients wanted a pedestrian bridge.
He had designed nineteen structures in conversation with the preceding city. He had a reputation for it. Clients came to him when a proposed site was active, when the residents of an area were collectively dreaming something so coherent that ignoring it felt, to the more thoughtful developers, like a risk of some kind. The mechanism of the risk was unclear. But three of his clients had built against the preceding city without his advice, and all three projects had struggled in ways that were difficult to attribute to any single cause.
The garden signal predated the commission by fourteen years. The canal bend had been generating garden-reports since a survey conducted before the neighborhood was fully developed. Whatever was being dreamed there had been patient.
His clients had not been told about the garden. That was his oversight. He had allowed the commission to proceed further than he should have because the bridge was elegant. Because it was a good bridge. Because he had wanted to build it.
He rolled out the preceding-city map and the site plan side by side on his studio table. He stood over both of them for a while.
He called his contact at the firm. He had a habit of keeping these calls short.
"There's a conflict, " he said. "I should have flagged it earlier. The preceding city has a strong garden signal at the canal site. Fourteen years of data. I can send you the full survey package."
A pause on the other end.
"I think we need to talk about what we're actually being asked to build here."
He set the phone down and looked out his studio window. The canal was two streets away. He could see the bend of it, the light on the water. Whatever was being dreamed there he would never see, and he was going to spend the next six months trying to explain why that mattered to people who had never looked at a dream map in their lives.