Southern Oregon · June 24, 2230 · Parallel scene
Petra did not announce the fire first. She announced the road she could no longer verify.
That was the sentence Renn heard from the workshop doorway, and it was enough to put his son's name into everything that followed.
His son worked the inland relay spur. There were three stations between his bunk and the coast. On a clear day a message could move between them quickly. On this day the western station had gone silent after reporting smoke below its approach. Silence did not say whether a person was hurt. Renn knew that, and hated anyone who began explaining it to him.
Petra was such a person. She kept the coastal-side relay bench, its spare batteries and the paper copies used when the mountain line did not behave. Renn repaired the shutters on her building. They were on friendly terms until friendship began requiring information she did not have.
“Call again,” he said.
“I have.”
“Use the upper—”
“I have.”
“Then ask the port.”
She turned the log so he could see the request already sent to the port message office. The Pacific Relay could carry an urgent inquiry farther than a person could walk before lunch. That did not mean the office at its far end had seen his son. Petra refused to convert the length of the wire into eyesight.
Renn read the request. His son's name, Olan, appeared correctly. Petra had included the station assignment and last expected check, not his childhood nickname. This made the page look official and made Renn feel she knew less than she should.
On the bench lay a parcel Olan had sent on the last confirmed carrier, three days before. Renn had not collected it because there was no urgency to a parcel from someone coming home soon. He took it now and held it against his chest.
Outside, two drivers argued with the posted closure. Their loads had been booked through the mountain spur. The new notice closed that particular approach pending a ground check; it did not close every road east, nor permit an unexamined detour. One driver wanted Petra to put an alternate route on his sheet. She would not. A porter began moving the waiting parcels under cover before anyone agreed whose delay was most important.
Renn worked the string off his son's packet. Inside was the hinge he had asked Olan to find at a salvage bench and a letter containing three complaints about the bunkhouse cook. There was a fourth line about a woman named Edda that wanted to look incidental. Renn read it five times.
He wanted to walk uphill.
Petra said she could not stop him and would not describe the road as passable. The nearest fire-buffer crew had closed its access turn to civilian traffic after a lookout's report. They needed space to move tools, water and people coming down. Going up to search could occupy the road Olan would need to leave.
“That's convenient,” Renn said.
“For whom?”
He had no answer, which made him angrier.
A woman from the freight office arrived carrying a duplicate manifest and a sack of rolls. Her name was Inez, and she brought food whenever a delay lasted long enough for people to become impressed by their own shouting. She handed Renn a roll without asking his appetite. He put it in his pocket beside the hinge.
Inez could confirm that Olan had not come down on yesterday's carrier. She could not confirm why. The carrier's absence list was not an injury list. She left the manifest with Petra so both copies could be checked against whatever next arrived.
Renn hated the careful sentences. He also remembered a winter when a station had reported his apprentice missing because the boy had gone to the wrong yard. For two hours they had searched a riverbank while he slept on a flour wagon. A careless certainty could waste the same road as a frightened father.
He asked what work needed doing here.
Petra did not offer him an invention to keep his hands busy. The dispatch shutter was sticking, and the porter could not get the larger held parcels through without tipping them. Renn had promised to fix it a week ago. It was now directly in the way.
He fetched his tools.
The old hinge was split, just as he had told Olan. He set the new one against it, then put it aside. The screw pattern was wrong for a straight exchange. He could fit it, but would need a backing plate and time. Instead he repaired the old mounting enough to open the shutter fully, with a brace that had to be removed before closing. Petra wrote the limitation where the next shift would see it.
“I'll finish it,” he said.
“Not while you're waiting for a call.”
“I can do two things.”
“Your chisel is in my cup.”
He took it out.
Just after the midday meal, a message came through the northern relay branch. It was from the inland station clerk, copied through two intermediate benches. Petra read the source and time aloud before the contents. Four workers from Olan's station had reached the inland maintenance house on foot. Olan was among them. They were uninjured in the clerk's observation. They had not inspected the western approach and were not attempting the trip home today.
Renn sat down so abruptly that Inez put a hand behind his chair.
“Can I talk to him?”
“Not on this copy.”
“Ask.”
Petra sent the request. The house had one speaking slot available later if its battery held and the traffic allowed. She gave Renn the uncertain time without making it a promise.
He went outside, stood under the held-freight board and cried where the drivers could see him. Neither driver spoke. One moved a sack so he could sit out of the sun.
The speaking slot did not arrive. A later written reply did. Olan said his boots had held, Edda was at the maintenance house too, and he needed somebody to tell the bunkhouse cook not to sell his saved supper tin. The message was ordinary enough to make Renn laugh at the worst possible breath.
He paid for a reply from his own coins. He did not ask Petra to turn a family answer into emergency traffic after receiving the fact he needed. He wrote that the hinge had arrived, that he was glad about the boots, and that the cook would have to answer to him.
He did not mention his tears. He did mention Edda, carefully.
At the end of the shift the mountain approach remained closed. The port's influence had not lifted the smoke or restored the western station. Goods stayed under cover; two delivery accounts would go unpaid today. Petra left those facts on the board beside the workers' confirmed arrival inland.
Renn took the new hinge home to drill its plate. His son was somewhere he could name, unable to come home. For tonight that was an enormous distance from where the morning had left him.