Voices from Port Outreach

• Guiding a pod of pioneers to Elms Gate. Nothing against them, but if they can’t find the gate, how…never mind. -Cole #
• Off duty. Getting together with chronies for some relaxation. Enjoy your night. - Bolo #
• Disturbance at Harborside, loud noises and fire. Anyone close? - JH #
• I’m on wheels, I got it. - Cole #
• Just west of Gilan’s. You’ll hear it. -JH #
• I’m right there, I’ll check it too. - squeet! #
• It’s Bolo and his chronies. They’re giving a concert with pots and pans and toasting marshmellows. -Cole #
• OK. Sounds harmless. Maybe get the quiet down a bit. -JH #
• He didn’t mention that they’re toasting marshmellows with fire from some Nagara’s front deck. - squeet! #
• Oh. Need backup? -JH #
• I can be there in three. -Splash #
• No, we got it. -Cole #
• All done. Fire out. Squeet put Bolo down kind of hard, he may be out of action for a day or two. - Cole #
• Need med services? - JH #
• No, he’ll be fine. We’ll make sure his chronies get him home. -Cole #
• Hey, Oxide! I’m trudging through a rotation’s worth of incident reports and I can’t find yours. Are they filed up at your loft? –Karla #
• Karla: Guess I forgot to hit ‘transmit’ on my emkay. There’s a pile of them waiting to go out. I copied you on them, too. -Oxide #
• Thanks, Oxide! I’m grasping at straws, trying to identify this corpse. –Karla #
• I’m going through everybody’s reports for the last few rotations, to see if he had our attention while he was alive. So far, nothing - Karla #
• Everybody: If you have any missing persons reports that you haven’t filed, can you sent them my way? Thanks - Karla #
• There’s a shipload of fresh-caught bluefin arriving in harbor. I’m headed to the wharves to check it out (for lunch, that is). -Karla #
• Just checked through my list, and everything I have is sent. Not on duty, by the way; just waking up. -Splash #
• Actually, no one but Karla and I are on. Karla, do you have time to check on someone throwing rocks at Lucky’s? - JH #
• After lunch, I mean. Or I can do it. -JH #
• Heading up there now. Lunch can wait…they’re still unloading the catch. - Karla #
• Nobody’s throwing rocks now, but there is a driver trying to get his cart out of a ditch. The livec is kicking up a few rocks…?–Karla #
• Thus far the driver hasn’t attracted any helpers, but he has drawn a fairly large audience. He’s VERY drunk and quite amusing. -Karla #
• I’m recruiting a crew from the assembled group and we’ll lift the cart out for him. Presumably the livec will see him safely home. - Karla #
• Sounds good. - JH #

Although the Point is notoriously hilly, and leads up into even higher country, the highest spot in Port Outreach is actually located in the Elms. The next time you take the #8 ‘bus along First Avenue, note where it crosses the street called (as of this writing) Onoris Way. On one side you’ll see the broad, curved pavilion that houses the Fiberart Cooperative and the Machine Tool Lending Collection; on the other side is a gently sloping tree-lined park with a pond in the form of twin ovals, like a fanciful stylized heart. The top of this slope, represents, at 873 pyks, the highest spot within city limits. If you go there, you’ll see an old, crumbling stonework wall.

Though not in good condition by any means, the wall, about one and half pyks high by two and a half decipyks wide, is still mostly in place. It is all the remains of the original location of the Elms Gate. It was here, in the time between the ninth and tenth cycles, that a barbarian invasion was beaten off in a battle that lasted three days, and in the end was fought with stones and bare hands. About fourteen pyks from the east end of the wall, you can still see the cracked, indented stone from a missed blow by Lilia Twistedleather who fought with a hammer in each hand when the Flux arrived on the last day to help defend the city. The bloodstains where she fell are long gone, but standing there, beneath the hiss of the whispertree, it is easy to imagine the scene.

This is the place where the Conkleshell Collective wants to build an abstract sculpture representing, so they say, the spread of culture within the Elms and so out to the rest of the city. I look forward to seeing this work, as the Conkleshell group has done fine sculpture in the past. I look forward to seeing it, I say, but I think there must be a better place for it. I don’t think this work, however beautiful and even profound it may be, can ever take the place of being able to put one’s hands on the place where so many died to protect our city.

Do you?