Letters From the Knot #1: The Fourteen

A story about a table, about shifting foundations.

Welcome to this week’s Letters From the Knot. Every fortnight, I’ll post a short piece of fiction emerging from the Knot, the setting of a sci-fi novel I’m currently working on. The Knot is a vast mess of tangled spacecraft, an inverted city. Kept spinning to provide some semblance of uneven gravity, the Knot is a place both figuratively and literally coming undone. Each piece will be different. A story, a dream, a character portrait, a slice of life, a fragment. This week’s piece tells the story of a treasured family heirloom.

The Fourteen

She didn’t really notice anything had changed until halfway through the day’s first spin. Preparing to do some sketching, she had set everything out on her mum’s table. A leather-bound pad, some smudgy charcoals and, finally, her new pencil, placed with careful pride. She was in a good mood, humming to herself and moving fast, one motion flowing to the next. She spun on her heel to face the kylskå and was three steps in that direction before she heard the sound of trickling wood dancing across the table’s surface, a thrum of impending disaster followed by a moment’s silence. She turned back in time to see the pencil finish its fall and clatter fatally against the tiles. The sound had a note of illness in it. A broken lead, certainly. A week’s worth of Andrus’ pension down the drain. 

Stunned into a moment of stillness, she reassessed the room. Something was off. She had felt clumsy all morning. Her hips ached. The thin reed of sunlight that fought its way into her living room each day was describing a new arc across the bookshelf. The large glide was yawning further from the wall than usual, revealing more of the shadowed crevice behind. A small spherical vase - another of Andrus’ gifts - had toppled, decanting its wilted flowers and stinking water across the carpet. The dehumidifying unit had noticed this before she had and was whirring away to rebalance the air. Something was off. 

She checked her glit.

Grav 8.5m/s/s // c.86.1% earthG // 02:63 // 1st Spin

Nothing unusual. She blinked to switch screens and couldn’t believe what she was seeing. 

17° o/p

Early on in the day’s second spin, hips still complaining, Malin made her way down in the lift and out into the streets, emerging into the large boulevard designed to give the illusion of space and air, to distract the inhabitants from the cold dead outside. The street was lined with gliesan trees and kept noisy by the huge hydroponic lamps necessary to coax them into living. A strip of artificial sunlight suggested a summer’s afternoon.

The place was alive with shared concern; neighbours clustered in lopsided groups muttering disaster. A smoky ullu hung in the air, showing the Hafgufa and its angle relative to the spin of the Knot. There it was again. 17°. Impossible, she thought. Displayed alongside the shimmering proxy were the headlines, stacked up in multiple languages.

First Hafgufa Slip in Fifty e/years, one said.

The Knot was a changeable place. Welded together over centuries and spinning in the void, it existed at the whims of bigger forces, the movements of gods, a colossal metal slipperiness. Even in times of political stability, it refused any real sense of fixity, and yet Malin had become used to just that. Her entire life fit neatly into a period of calm on the Knot; she was swaddled by history. Her home was nestled in a pleasant corner of the Hafgufa, in a neighbourhood known to locals as The Fourteen, named for the angle at which its inhabitants had always lived, testament to the illusion of stability that Malin had grown up with. 

Passing the ullu and ignoring her neighbours, she found her walk was to be an awkward, shuffling one. She had learned without learning the play of the floor in her home ship. Her legs knew the drops and slants, her body adjusted automatically to the discrepancies, intuiting the angles before she could. Today, nothing worked as it should. The world had been recalibrated and it took her close to fifteen minutes to reach Signe’s shop at the other end of the street. 

When she did finally make it, she entered a scene of chaos half managed. Signe, barely five feet tall and nearly 90 years old, was battling to balance a side table on top of a chest of drawers, attempting with one hand to attach a mag strip to keep it in place. When she saw Malin walk in, she gave up, took the side-table down and threw it onto an armchair. Signe was practically dressed, covered in dust, surrounded by half-toppled piles of expensive furniture. Great wooden desks, rolls of carpet, delicate shining trolleys and hand-lathed curtain rails. Impossible to tell, to Malin’s eye, which of them were priceless antiques, and which were Knot-made imitations. 

‘Malin, honey,’ said Signe. ‘Thank god. I was looking for an excuse to stop tidying. How are you toda…Hey you look glum, Peppercorn, what’s wrong?’

‘Morning Signe,’ replied Malin, drifting further into the skewed room, stepping carefully over an upturned swivel-chair. ‘You seem in a good mood. Have you not...you must have heard…’

‘We’ve slipped,’ said Signe, smiling, arms folded. ‘I know, I know. But we have a saying in my trade, Pep. There’s nothing like a slip for business! I will have to get a new sign though.’ She cocked her thumb towards the door. The number 14 had been artfully painted onto the translucent fluted plastic. ‘Seventeen doesn’t sound right. Hope we slip a little more. Eighteen has a ring to it.’

Malin didn’t respond. She couldn’t understand Signe’s lack of concern. Slips happened elsewhere; the Hafgufa was fixed. 

‘Cheer up cherub,’ said Signe. ‘It’s a joke. I’ve been saying it to everyone today. The thing about the sign.’ Her face creased with concern. ‘You’ve been nesting up in The Fourteen too long, Peppercorn. Look at your face. The Knot spins on. Chin up, huh?’

‘I’ve been reading,’ said Malin, keeping her chin down. ‘They’re saying that for every degree off axial, you’re looking at 5 percent off your property value relative to the Selma.’

‘The Selma!’ said Signe, laughing. A heaving laugh that was too big for her. ‘You come into some money? Huh? Planning to leave us behind? Kid, I spent 15 year of my life bouncing between the Kettle Twins, barely enough grav to get your thoughts straight. No point in furniture that far in. Anything that wasn’t nailed down was out the damn window. So you slip three degree? Big deal. The Knot spins on.’ Signe shook her head. ‘Now what can I do for you Peppercorn?’

Malin felt hot. Hers was a world not often knocked, but she wasn’t a child. She didn’t like being laughed at.

‘It’s my table,’ said Malin, attempting a businesslike tone. ‘Mum’s table. With the slip…it’s off angle. She built it here, and its legs were made at the right…slant. I don’t know what to do yet, but it’s ruined. Nothing stays on it. I just wanted to see if you could do something about it. It’s wonky now, obviously. It’s useless. And I don’t know. Can you balance the legs out? Or cut them down? I know she would have wanted it fixed and I don’t know anyone I can trust but you. I’m worried about damaging it.’

‘Mmmm,’ said Signe. She had taken her hair down to shake out the dust and was tying it back again. ‘I think I remember that table. Got a pic?’

Malin took out her glidelens, blinked it to life, and cast a small ullugram into the air between her and Signe. The table hovered there for them both to examine, a thing of grace. Her mother had made it before she was born. Knot-bound during her pregnancy, she had poured her energy into creating something beautiful for her coming child. It was made of ash, her mother had told her. A wood of the old world, passed down from a time before the growth on Earth had become alien and reformed. Across the surface of the table, down its legs, into every inch, she had carved shallow channels, smoothed and sanded by hand, filled with the faintest wisps of copper and zinc and glass, all connected. Shining grooves and rivulets infused every part of it and throughout Malin’s early life her mother had created a mythology of her own to explain each one. The lines, her mother told her, represented orbits, relationships, celestial and emotional fabrics, branching paths. The wood itself, she said, was Malin’s birthright, her connection to her ancestral line. These tendrils are your roots, she said, arcing and sighing across space and time to ground you in soil, fertile and yielding. Home. 

Signe laughed to herself again. ‘See what I mean?’ she said. ‘A slip always good for business.’ 

Three days later, Malin was on her way to Andrus’ place carrying with her a weight. She was guilty by nature, but this was worse; she had barely slept since breaking the pencil and this visit felt like a kind of penance. Before making the two-hour journey, she had pulled some overalls on and was halfway out of the door before she became self-conscious. She took off the overalls again, removed her more expensive items of clothing, took the rings from her fingers, changed into some more scuffed shoes, then pulled the overalls on again. Travelling transgrav was always a dirty business, she told herself.

She rode the Transit Ring one quart round and then decanted herself into the back end of the Lind to ride the hand-tubes towards the core. The Lind was a burrow, a factory ship, pure utility. The people who lived here were squirrelled away in their chambers for the most part. The only signs of life were the workers, eyes down, travelling the tube in the opposite direction, or the occasional hint of music pumping through the metal walls or whispering through the vents, evidence of some secret space, a home-sized personal haven closed to outsiders like her. She pulled up the hood of her overalls, conscious suddenly of her finely braided hair, her silken augments. 

As she got closer to the centre, she felt the weight of her body retreating. She enjoyed this sensation. The tension in her shoulders seemed to ease, the pressure in her ankles. It felt as though her organs were moving inside her body, giving one another space. Eventually, even a slight flex of the ankle threatened to send her drifting off her footplate. She checked her glit. 

Grav 0.62m/s/s // c.6.32% earthG // 01:08 // 3rd Spin 

She pushed herself off the floor, closed her eyes, and breathed. Weightless and at peace, for a moment. 

What Andrus’ apartment lacked in gravity, it made for up in size. It had once been a huge, cube-shaped, storage unit and Andrus had spent the best part of his life making it a home, building within the space-hung void a network of platforms and chambers, softening them with carpet and walls of fabric. There was just enough gravity to create the suggestion of an up and a down, a ceiling and a floor to orient oneself in the warren of plush little rooms he had created for himself. Each room was fitted with handles and ropes to help visitors guide themselves from one place to the next. If she moved slowly enough, it was possible for Malin to keep herself grounded, but one overzealous step, and she would find herself knocking her head against the ceiling. To see Andrus traverse his home was a thing of beauty. He flew from place to place, resting, launching, hovering like a hummingbird. Malin, by comparison, felt like an ostrich. 

Having made her noisy way through the maze, she found Andrus as she always did, at the top of his cube-house, in the space he called his studio, at his desk. Here, the cramped passages gave way to a large open platform, one wall of which was made entirely of glass, offering a vertiginous view into the vacuum of space. The Knot itself was only partially visible from this angle and the view was dominated by the endless slow ballet of High Spur and Mid Lip. 

‘Andrus,’ she said, softly. 

He had heard her coming, of course, but he made a show all the same of jumping out of his skin, jerking his hands up from his desk and sending a glide whirling through the air in a slow arc. A child’s game she had never ceased to find charming. 

‘Little Malin,’ said Andrus. ‘Is it that time already?’ He pushed himself up from the chair, almost floating away before grabbing the corner of the desk, whipping himself back to the ground and effortlessly hurling himself towards her. Just the right amount of pressure to embrace her in a slow and spinning hug. Even in low gravity, she could feel how insubstantial he had become. He stopped the spin by putting out one foot against the wall.

‘I’ve made coffee,’ he said. ‘Come, come.’

One corner of the studio was given over to softness, and Malin nestled into a deep sofa. Andrus lowered himself onto the one opposite and threw her a small pod of coffee. She drew tentatively on the straw. Still too hot. 

‘How are you feeling Andrus?’ Malin asked with forced cheer.  

He waved a hand to dismiss her. ‘Enough of that,’ he said. His fingers looked boney and his face was thin, his hair patchy. He wore a thick cardigan on top of his overalls, giving false bulk to his body. ‘What have you brought me?’ 

Malin frowned but complied, pulling out her bag and decanting its treasures. The usual collection of food, a bottle of synthwine, a book she had promised to lend him. She had also brought him a sketch, as usual.  

‘I drew you this,’ she said, ‘but it’s…well, you’ll see.’ 

She stretched out and passed him the drawing. His brow furrowed. He would have been expecting something graceful, she thought, but with the pencil broken, the best she could do was pinch a little nub of lead between her fingers and scratch away. What was intended as a broadly realistic sketch of the central gardens of the Hafgufa became distinctly impressionistic. Whorls of charcoal had been deployed to cover up her hampered pencil work; the slant of the table had worked against her and the knot in her stomach had restrained any flair.

‘I love it,’ he said. 

‘It’s shit.’  

‘It’s a new direction, certainly.’ He smiled. ‘But that’s no bad thing.’ He rested the sketch next to him. There was just enough gravity to press it to the cushion. 

‘Really Andrus. How are you feeling?’ It was always an effort. 

‘You know, Malin,’ said Andrus, pressing his fingers into the space either side of his nose, taking a long and laboured breath. ‘I had some people around last week for a little salon. The usual crowd. We spoke a lot about health, you know, about my health, about health more generally. About the body. The corporeal, and the collective right to health, and then the rights of a community to-’ 

‘Can you just tell me how you’re feeling?’ said Malin. ‘Please. Why does it always have to be like this?’

Andrus frowned. ‘You’re wound tight today little one.’ 

‘Please don’t call me little.’ 

‘Calm, calm,’ he said. ‘What I was getting to is that I don’t think I really care anymore. I truly don’t. This is what my friends have been helping me understand. Living here was always a choice. I knew the risks. I don’t want to talk about my bones all the time. I’m more than bones.’

‘And yet,’ said Malin, ‘what would you be without them?’

‘Stop!’ said Andrus, suddenly forceful. ‘I don’t want you asking after my health anymore, do you understand? This is a new boundary I’m establishing. A new condition of these visits. There are more important things.’

‘A condition?’ said Malin. Who was he to be setting conditions?

‘That’s right. I’m old. I need to be able to say what I need.’ He stifled a cough and glanced down at the sketch again, cocked his head to gain a new angle on it. ‘You got on well with the new pencil then?’ 

Malin’s shoulders dropped. ‘The pencil’s smashed,’ she said. She hadn’t meant to be blunt, but the conversation wasn’t going how she wanted anyway. 

‘Ah well,’ said Andrus. 

‘I’m sorry, it must have cost you a lot.’ 

‘Favours,’ said Andrus, with another dismissive wave of his hand. 

‘It fell from the table, after the Hafgufa slipped.’

Andrus nodded. ‘I forgot to ask about the slip. You’re okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Well, my legs hurt.’ 

Andrus chuckled. ‘You’ll get used to that, I’m sure.’

‘And the furniture is, well. Near enough everything in The Fourteen was custom made. A lot of things will need to be fixed up.’

‘So it goes,’ he said, sipping his coffee through the straw. Through the window, the stars revolved. Malin felt the knot in her stomach tighten again. 

‘Mum’s table too.’ 

‘Uh huh?’ said Andrus after the barest pause. 

‘You remember it.’

‘The one with all the squiggles on it?’

‘The ash one, yes.’ 

‘Ash, was it?’ said Andrus.

‘Yes,’ said Malin. The word ash had always had a smell of ancient mysticism to her. She couldn’t conjure an image of the tree it came from, but her mother had always told her that the old trees had a different quality to the gliesan trees. To her it was a fairytale tree, and it made her sad that Andrus could use the word so lovelessly. 

‘And what’s wrong with it?’ Andrus said. She could see that his eyes and thoughts were wandering back to his desk and to his writing. 

‘Well, it’s wonky now,’ said Malin. 

‘You can straighten that out, can’t you? Is Signe still up in The Fourteen?’

‘Well, yes-’

‘Or are you calling it The Seventeen now?’ he chuckled. 

‘I can’t just chop the legs off, Andrus,’ she said. ‘It’s ash! What would mum say?’ 

He looked back at her now, paid full attention to her. His face was diminished but his eyes still had their edge. ‘Your mother wouldn’t care about the table, Malin.’

Malin flinched. ‘She loved that table. She made it for me. The wood is so rare.’ 

‘Malin, my love. Your mother and I. Out there. We found all sorts of things.’ He gestured around to his mad cube of treasure. ‘The Knot is made of salvage. The wood is rare, certainly, but that’s not what it means.’ 

‘What are you talking about?’ she said. 

Andrus had pushed himself up and, in one leap, arrived at his desk, picked something up, and floated himself back again, landing softly on the sofa once more. He handed her a small pamphlet. 

UNRAVELLING THE KNOT.

‘What’s this?’ she said. 

‘The future, Malin. Your mother and I, when we were out there in the null. We weren’t thinking about wood, about luxuries. Look at all this stuff. The curtains, the carpets. Do you know how much it took to drag these into orbit? A world’s fineries launched into space. Think of what burned! Think of what burned so it could happen! It’s grotesque. We brought these things back not so we could pamper ourselves, but so we could build something. The Knot is the answer to those grotesqueries. Your mother was saving that wood to make something useful.’

Malin tried to breath through a tightening of her chest. Low gravity made her feel sick. 

‘She did make something useful,’ she said. ‘She loved that table. You don’t know.’

‘You didn’t even open it,’ said Andrus, with a nod. He meant the pamphlet. 

Malin sighed. ‘What is it?’ she said, flipping through a few pages. It was printed on coarse paper and dense with writing in a number of different languages. There were diagrams.

‘This whole place is changing, Malin. You should be coming to the salons. They’ve made contact with the Gs in the Peg. The Selman council is losing control. The spurs are making a move on the Canerday engine. It’s a sitting duck Malin. You’re here worried about a table. In a few years time you might not eve-’ Andrus’ rant descended into a coughing fit. He clutched his chest, for a moment revealing the scant dimensions of his torso. Malin awkwardly made her way over to him, rested a hand on his shoulder. He recoiled. 

‘No no no,’ he said, regaining his breath. ‘Be careful.’

‘You know you can come and stay,’ she said. ‘Whenever you need. If you need grav. There’s plenty of space up there.’ 

‘Grav!’ said Andrus, spitting. ‘The grav up there would ruin me. I’d end up like your fucking pencil. You’re not listening, Malin. It’s time to come down from your perch.’

‘You’re being horrible.’ 

‘Your mother would have wanted you to do something. Not just sit up there scribbling away.’

‘And what is it you’re doing, Andrus? Killing yourself? Is that what you think she would have wanted?’

‘I’d rather kill myself than…’ Andrus picked up the sketch suddenly and roughly. He looked as though he were about to scrunch it up, like he wanted to destroy it, throw it away, out of the window and into space. But looking at it again, he stopped, breathed another heavy breath. In his roughness he had creased it and he ran his finger down the crease. He brought the sketch back to his lap and hung his head, heavy even here.

Malin had shaped a dozen bitter curses in her mind but, looking at his thin hands, the bald patches on his head, she couldn’t bring herself to strike with any real venom. 

‘Mum’d say you’re making a fool of yourself,’ she said. 

‘Thing is,’ Signe said, if you graft it, you’re gonna have an ugly angle on the wood. These patterns wouldn’t hang together, and getting a match for ash’ - she sucked her teeth - ‘you’d be lucky, Peppercorn.’ 

Signe had come round to look at the table. She examined the wood, the inlays, put her pen on the surface, watched it roll off and caught it in her waiting hand. Malin stood at a distance, hip cocked, leaning uncomfortably against the door frame. 

‘It’s a beauty. It’s a beauty.’ Signe ran her flat hand over the surface of the table again. Her hands were strong and calloused but also finely tuned instruments, feeling for any hint of imperfection. ‘Beautiful.’ 

Malin was half listening. She and Andrus had left on bad terms. Him feeling sorry for himself, her banging off the walls in an effort to storm out. Memories of her mother had always been their battleground, their shared love and shame. They each followed a different ghost of her. 

‘Other option,’ Signe continued, ‘is you could slice the other leg down, which solves your angle problem, but then, you know, the table gets lower...’ 

Malin closed her eyes. The ache was radiating out of her hips and into her back and neck. She had been grinding her teeth and her whole face hurt. With her eyes closed, she could feel the gravity drawing at her feet, draining her, spinning her away from the Knot’s dark core and what lay there. 

‘...thing is, you’d have to do the chairs too of course. But then I suspect you’d want that anyway. I’ll give you a discount, Pep, don’t worry about that. I’ll do the lot for a good price. Your only worry there is if there’s a slip back. Or if they get round to fixing it, but fat chance of that! Last thing you want is to keep having to rebalance it. You’ll end up with your ass on the floor! Save some space on chairs mind. Not that you worried about space. Ha!’

‘Signe,’ said Malin, opening her eyes at last. Signe had moved away from the table and was surveying the rest of the apartment. The thick rugs, the ceramic tiles, brushed steel cabinets and feather cushions, the bookshelves and the ulludock. All of it whirling through space at the outer edge of a spinning junk heap. 

‘What you thinking Peppercorn?’ said Signe. 

Malin thought of her mother. ‘Do whatever you want,’ she said. ‘It’s a table.’ 

Signe nodded her head, reassessed the problem. 

‘How about we just prop it up on some books then?’ she said.