Forty Years of Quiet

My name is Abel Renner and I have run the Cold Harbor relay for forty years and in that time I have had eleven visitors. I remember all eleven. You would too. The relay is a small station, two rooms and a transmitter, parked at the dark edge of settled space where the shipping lanes thin out to nothing, and my job is simple. Messages come in from the deep traffic, weak and broken, and I clean them up and pass them inward to the populated worlds, and messages come out from the worlds and I push them deeper. I am, you could say, a man who holds the door. Forty years of holding the door. My wife thought I would last two and she was kind about being wrong. She is gone now, eight years gone, and I have stayed, because the relay needs holding and because I have grown into this chair the way a tree grows into a fence. The view does not change. That is the whole appeal of the view.