Songs for the Long Repair

Eleven songs about keeping the lights on. Collected, not composed.

Recorded history

The collection appeared already assembled.

Eleven songs, none of them new, most of them the sort of thing sung by people doing a job rather than performing one: doors kept open, fires kept lit, pumps kept running, radios answered, papers stamped wrong again. They come from different places and plainly from different times. What they have in common is subject matter, and the subject matter is the whole of the point.

Dr. Borschtovsky's name is on it as collector rather than composer, and the archive treats that attribution as accurate. He did not write these. Somebody went round and wrote them down.

Contents

1. One More Through The DoorHospitality
2. Leave a Place by the FireHospitality
3. There is Power in the WireInfrastructure
4. Pump Station NineOn file, see record
5. Up at the RelayCf. the Radio Tower
6. They stamped my Papers wrong againCheckpoints
7. Hot Zone TonightContamination
8. Drop the ToasterProvenance obscure
9. The Stranger with the meterSubject unidentified
10. The Lights at Low HarbourCf. Low Harbour
11. Do not ShakeAttributed to the Doctor

The fourth is the Pump Station Nine ballad, which the archive already held from oral transmission and had been unable to date. Its presence here settles nothing about when it was written. It does confirm the song travelled far enough to be collected, which was not previously established.

The ninth concerns a man who walks into places other people avoid, carrying an instrument that tells him how bad it is. The archive notes the resemblance to a figure on file and declines to draw the conclusion.

The tenth is the archive's only source on Low Harbour, a working port somewhere beyond the surveyed region. The record for it is built entirely from this one song.

Why these songs

Facility 862-B existed to answer one question: when a system fails, how do you make it work again?

Set that alongside eleven songs about keeping a pump running, a wire live, a relay answered and a door open, and the collection stops looking like folklore and starts looking like doctrine: a body of practical instruction that survived by being singable, gathered up by somebody who recognised what it was.

The archive has no document establishing Continuity Directorate involvement in the collection. It records the following instead, and leaves them adjacent:

• The collector claims prior employment at Facility 862-B.
• The Directorate's stated purpose was the recovery of failed systems.
• The songs are, almost without exception, about the recovery of failed systems.
• The collection is titled Songs for the Long Repair.
• Surviving Directorate plates solicited songs by name, and directed literature to be reported to the Doctor.

Assessment

Nothing in this collection concerns a faction, a battle, a holding or a boundary. Across eleven songs and an unknown span of years, no army appears.

What appears instead is a baker, a medic, a relay operator, a harbour, a night shift and a great deal of weather. The people in these songs are not fighting over the Wasteland. They are running it, largely unnoticed, in the gaps between the events this archive otherwise records.

The archive files the collection as the most useful corrective it holds to its own emphasis.

Archive notes

• Eleven pieces. None composed for the collection; several predate the war.
• Attributed to Dr. Borschtovsky as collector. Composers unrecorded.
• Includes the Pump Station Nine ballad, previously held only by oral transmission.
• Continuity Directorate involvement is suspected and unconfirmed. The archive records the coincidence and nothing further.
• Recording in circulation: doctorborschtovsky.bandcamp.com