Jory Fenn had the ridge of soot up against the bench slats at Mallow Platform before the plaque was dry. The 7:40 had come in with its celery-green door shut and its stack working, and the soot had settled where it always settled, in a soft black line under the new lettering. The lettering said the Meadow Line left the air kinder than it found it. Fenn read it the way a pony reads a notice screwed in over his own broom, tipped the first pan into the bucket, and went back for the rest. By the time the speaker started, the bucket had been emptied once.
The speaker was Luna Starlight of the Office of Shared Ways, and the paper in her folder was the Circuit Compact's friendship report on urban conveyance. Twelve market towns, Ponyville among them, had been scored. The report declared the score a completed kindness. Shared carriages, it said, had replaced the old habit of a private cart and a private stack for every errand to market. A cover plate showed Rarity Hoof on the cloud-cable tram, scarf lifted, with the portrait steps soft behind her. The sentence under the plate was the one Starlight read aloud: a town that shares a carriage has already done the harder kindness.
The number under that sentence was an average. Printed, it came out four-fifths kind.
Ember Flint, who files the night receipts at Hale Street Depot, had been sent the same average and asked to certify it for Ponyville City Council. The method was attached on a half sheet. A departure counted as clean if its door had been painted within fourteen moons. A departure also counted as clean if a passenger opened a window before the second stop. The cloud-cable tram was entered once for each of the twelve towns and then divided across the weekday runs, on the ground that kindness available anywhere in the Circuit was kindness shared by all of it. Flint turned the half sheet over. The back was blank. She stapled her receipts to the front.
The receipts put 1,240 pitch barrels through the Circuit depots last moon. They put lamp oil through as well, decanted into drums carrying a daisy seal and the words meadow-gas, which the report listed with the clean departures. Pitch and meadow-gas stay on the wagons. The cloud-cable tram runs a nine-minute loop between the pamphlet bindery and the portrait steps. The cable has been slack since Frost Moon. On days when the Compact takes a plate, a weather pony pulls it. On the morning of the report the tram held the photographer, the weather pony, and Rarity Hoof's scarf. The wagons ordinary ponies ride leave from Mallow, Hale Street, and the market cut, and they leave burning.
"I can certify a door," Flint said, at the depot counter, receipts still stapled. "The barrels come in the same gate as last year. I sign for pitch. The drum says meadow-gas over the top."
Sela Moor drives the 7:40 and the 8:15. She had held the 7:40 past the switch while the scarf was arranged, because the stack throws forward when the door is the one in the picture. "They wanted the green by itself," she said. "So I waited. Then I brought it in. Ponies still had to get to market."
Fenn was on the second bucket when Starlight finished reading. He stayed with the buckets. The soot from the 7:40 was in the first, already by the drain, and the 8:15 was shouldering in with the same door color and the same working stack.
"Same ridge as yesterday," Fenn said. "The plaque's new. The soot isn't."
Ponyville City Council entered Flint's receipts as an attachment and left the average standing. The Compact's afternoon note praised the method as part of the lesson and set the barrels aside as depot business. Rarity Hoof, asked about the plate, kept to the scarf. "It read well against the door," she said. "They told me the sky was arranged." The daisy-sealed drums remained on the clean side of the ledger. At Hale Street the night gate took another pitch delivery after the note went out, and Flint signed the slip in the space the form had left for a certification.
