Eida replaced the last transceiver on the northern array and tightened the mounting bolts by hand. The new unit was lighter than the one she’d pulled — different factory, fewer redundancies, same connector. She clipped the old one to her belt and climbed down the tower, leg over leg, without looking at the ground.
The relay node was four towers on a ridge above the settlement, placed there because the ridge had line of sight to the orbital uplink. The settlement was small — a few thousand people spread across the eastern slope of a continental plateau. Veridian was not an important world. It had been settled during the First Federation and had never grown past its founding population. The Relay didn’t care about importance. It had put a node here and the node had stayed.
Eida walked back to the utility shed where the maintenance terminal lived. She set the old transceiver on the bench and checked the log. The node had received a message while she was up the tower.
That was not unusual. Messages came through every few days — personal mail, shipping notices, the occasional automated weather data from a neighboring system. The Relay carried everything indiscriminately.
This one was flagged. Eida opened the log entry.
The message had originated from Pellan, a system she had heard of but could not have pointed to on a map. It had routed through three intermediate nodes, covering a total path of roughly fourteen light-years. The timestamp was fourteen years, two months ago.
Fourteen years in transit. That was long but not impossible. During the Long Silence, nodes went dark and messages rerouted through longer paths. The Relay found ways around. That was what it was built to do.
The destination address was local. Eida recognized the name.
Miren.
Eida had known Miren. Not well — Miren had been older, quiet, living alone on the eastern shore in a house built into the cliff. She’d kept a garden and didn’t talk much. She had died when Eida was nineteen. Nine years ago.
The message was still in the buffer, undelivered, because there was no active device registered to Miren’s address. The node had flagged it for manual review. That was Eida’s job.
She opened the message.
Miren, I got a berth on a cargo ship out of Pellan. Pellan-SC-3C1B — you’d know the registration. We leave in two days. I’ll be in Veridian in three months, maybe four if the stops are long.
I’m sorry about the garden. I know you wanted to handle it yourself. I left the cuttings with Naren and she said she’d look after them until I got back. She wasn’t happy about it but she said yes.
I want to see the house before they change the road. I want to see you.
Write back if you can. I know the Relay is slow. It doesn’t matter.
— Lira
Eida read it twice. The message was fourteen years old. Lira had said she’d arrive in three or four months. If she had, she’d arrived thirteen years and ten months ago. Miren had been alive then. She’d been alive for another five years after that.
Eida didn’t know if Lira had come. She didn’t remember anyone named Lira on the eastern shore. She didn’t remember anyone visiting Miren. But she’d been young, and she hadn’t paid attention to Miren’s life. No one had, probably. That had been the shape of it.
Pellan had gone dark. Eida didn’t know when. Sometime during the Long Silence, like a lot of places. The message had already been in the Relay when it happened — already moving through the nodes, patient, indifferent to the silence it was leaving behind.
Eida sat with it for a while. The shed was quiet except for the hum of the terminal. Through the window she could see the ridge and the towers and the sky, which was the color it always was in the afternoon.
She saved the message in the node’s archive and cleared the flag. Then she picked up the old transceiver and put it in the recycling bin. She had two more arrays to service before the end of the week.