The fuel shed at Pier Nine got its third door before the ink on the extension was dry.
Tansy Pell watched the carpenter hang it from the crate she uses as a desk. The wharf was loud in the way it is on mornings when the stacks are lit, and the stacks were lit. The new door was wider than the two already in the wall. Its work order sat under her stamp, charged to the Leaving account, the same account the Purse had just extended for four more seasons. A barrow of coke stood on the new boards. The boards were still pale at the edges. The barrow was not.
Harbeck's Purse extended the Leaving Bonds at second bell. Minister Sable Venn stood under a banner reading THE LONG TURN and said Series C would exceed Series B. The buyers would be the inland desks again, plus two houses in Las Pegasus that had asked, after Series B, for the day a stack would go cold. Venn offered them a report instead of a day.
The report came from the Friendship Office, in the large type that office uses when it hopes a sentence will be received as a feeling. Venn read it with both hooves on the lectern. "A realm leaves a hard fuel the way one friend lets another finish a story," the report said, "by staying in the room until the ending is kind." It was a sentence that ended in a lesson. Below the last word the printer had set a small heart, in the place where Series A had carried a date.
The eligible-use schedule was the document the houses had actually requested. It ran forty lines, and Pell had copied it at the crate before the banner went up. Lines one through twelve were coke, graded by hardness. Lines thirteen through twenty were pitch. Lamp oil was twenty-one. At line twenty-two the schedule introduced a pale additive gas, called companion vapor in the prospectus, to be sprinkled over the coke so the coke could be reported as accompanied. Companion vapor does not hold a flame by itself. Footnote six said so. The report did not cite footnote six.
Venn took questions with the schedule already on the lectern. "Reliance is the reason a leaving takes time," she said. "You do not take the shovel from a pony and call that a farewell. You stay beside the shovel until it is ready."
Lark Minton, who is asked to speak when a policy would like a voice from upwind of the grate, had recorded a short reading of the report for the luncheon rooms. "I think we should be very proud of how gently we are still burning," Minton told the guests. They applauded into their napkins. On the schedule Pell had copied, Stack Four was marked continuous, during transition. It has carried that mark since Series A. Series A was sold as the start of the exit. The stack has kept the hours it had before the sale.
Pell enters the uses. She stamps the requisitions. She keeps the ribbons the Purse sends down whenever a stack is declared to be in a new condition. Four ribbons lie in the crate's drawer. Each one says transitioning. The ribbon on the rail of Stack Four has hung there since spring. The side toward the heat has frayed down to threads. She held the rail ribbon out on a hoof and let the soot on it answer first.
"I can file a leaving," Pell said. "They sent me the same burn, with a longer date and a card. The new door is on their account. It fits two carts. One is the vapor, in a barrel. The other is coke. I enter what arrives."
The houses in Las Pegasus asked again that afternoon for the column in which a stack is retired. The Purse returned the table before dusk. The retired column was blank. The operating column listed Stacks Two through Nine with their hours, Stack Four first, still continuous. Door three was already hung when the table went out. The first cart through it carried coke, and Pell stamped line twelve, because the grade on the cart was the grade on line twelve.
