The roof over the third bench in Lower Bend's parish hall has leaked since March. On Tuesday the leak found the new map. Ink from Seat Nine ran in a thin blue vein down the plaster and stopped on the roll book Ruth Keene had just opened. She set the mop against the bench, moved the book to the dry table, and went back to stamping cards. There were 4,186 of them. The Line Bench wanted them done by Thursday.
For six years Seat Nine had held Hollin Parish in one piece. Representative Ivo Marsh kept a desk in the hall on the first Thursday of the month, the day the pump office posted which streets would lose water. He had come up through the levee crews. Ponies in the Bend brought him a failed bearing, a school levy, a mill schedule with the night shift cut. He lost the desk on Monday, when the High Bench on Lines published the corrected map and the Friendship Office published the lesson stapled to it.
The corrected map keeps every street in Hollin. It places them in different seats. Lower Bend, the mill row, and the south levee are split among Seats Two, Four, Eleven, and Fourteen. Hollin's voters come to eighteen percent, twelve, nine, and seven in those seats. Each seat already has a representative who won without those numbers and who lives a day's ride or more from the leak. Seat Nine stays on the chart. Its new body sits in the orchard towns above the ridge, where Marsh's name has never been on a pump.
Lesson Warden Calper read the report from the dry end of the hall and left while Keene was still on the second box of cards. The report runs four pages. Its title is "A Wider Circle of Listening." The second paragraph is one sentence and ends the way these sentences end.
"Hollin has not been reduced," Calper told the ponies waiting with their water bills. "A district drawn so one community can choose its own voice is a door shut to everypony else. Four seats means four relationships. The lesson is access."
Keene stamped. The stamp is new. It reads YOU ARE HEARD in block letters, and it is wider than the line left for a representative's name. On the cards that survive it, that line reads SEE PAMPHLET. She keeps the four real names on a sheet in the drawer for any pony who asks. The pamphlet lists the four representatives and, under methods of contact, a single chair.
The chair stands in the corridor outside Hearing Room Two, in the Seat house, four days upriver when the water is high and three when it is not. A carpenter in the Bend built it to the Office's drawing and billed the parish twelve bits for the seat and six for the haul. Nopony bolted it to the floor. The work order came back stamped complete, the same stamp the Office uses on a finished bridge. Last Thursday a courier ate lunch in it. The report's appendix calls the chair "constituent access, ongoing," and counts it as a visit to Hollin.
Nessa Bird runs the ferry ledger. She had put the June bearing failure on Marsh's desk herself. "He knew which pump it was," she said, watching the ink dry on the plaster. "The card from Seat Two still says 'Dear Resident.' Seat Two starts where the orchards start. I don't know what they want me to do with a bearing."
Marsh had come in before Calper. He stayed, which meant he held the mop bucket against the door so it would shut. The orchard seat is open to him. He told Keene he will not file. His lease on the Thursday desk ended the hour the map posted. The Office offered him the corridor chair on Tuesdays, with no microphone, and entered the offer as continued service.
"I can sit in a hallway," Marsh said. "I can't get a pump onto a bill from a seat that doesn't have the pump."
Keene finished the second box near dark. She stacked the cards into the mail crate, emptied the bucket, and left the mop where the next leak will find it. By morning the post had returned forty-one letters from the Bend. Each one was marked for a district that begins north of the ridge.
