Letters From the Knot #11: Gravity's Echo

Troubled sleep for a weary tourist.

Hello and welcome to Letters From the Knot where, every fortnight, I post a short piece of fiction. Each one takes place in the Knot, a mess of tangled spacecraft, an inverted city kept spinning to provide some semblance of uneven gravity, a place both figuratively and literally coming undone. This project is an extended exercise in worldbuilding, and my aim is to populate the city over time, creating and discovering new parts of it as I go. Each piece will be different: a story, a dream, a character sketch, a slice of life, a fragment.

And if sci-fi’s not your thing, I also release a more traditional newsletter on the off weeks. Enjoy!

Gravity’s Echo

I can’t sleep. My weight isn’t mine. I get up and check the scales, look in the mirror, weigh myself again, take off my clothes, look in the mirror again. I’m quiet because mum is sleeping in the next room and, if she wakes, her bones will keep her up and writhing for hours on end.

In the mirror, it’s all me. My scattered body hair and scarred knees and rolls of skin. My wrinkles, my weird toenails, my soft hands and tired eyes. I run my hands through my new haircut. It’s undeniably me, but I don’t feel like myself. Every step feels off. I bump into the walls of mother’s little apartment. When I open the cupboards they swing too hard. I’m always too strong or too weak. Walking the streets of the Selma makes me lightheaded; it’s like I’m looking through a screen. The people here look two dimensional, sepia.

I look closer at my face, stare directly into my eyes. They are still my eyes. I check the glit, heavy and awkward in its on my wrist.  

Grav 9.01m/s/s // c.99.92% earthG // 03:63 // 3rd Spin

Before you come to the Knot, they tell you that, assuming you stay on the Selma, you’ll never feel the difference. The gravity is near identical, Cam said. An army of drones and computers and people work tirelessly to keep the spin just so. It’s among the most finely tuned systems in the solar system. The engines are monitored around the clock; everything speaks to everything else. Perfect, Cam said. If you can ignore the lack of sunlight, and the stifling recycled air, and the gaudy brass fixtures, and the nascent authoritarianism, you should be just fine. 

Perhaps I’m just sensitive. Back on Earth, my ears used to pop going down the three flights to the deep mag-line. I get a headache every time it’s going to rain. Can it be that I’m just sensitive to the difference? Cam says I’m a light sleeper. I say I’m attuned to my surroundings.

It’s more than that, though. The Knot itself is wrong, I’m convinced. It’s the argument that defines our relationship, my mother and I. We speak either about the Knot or about her health or, usually, about the two. Sometimes she breaks the routine to ask mean and probing questions about Cam.

My issue is with the gravity, or more specifically, that this isn’t gravity at all. Humans can’t make gravity. This is gravity’s echo. A mockery, an affront to gravity. On Earth, every step I take is a kind of harmony. I feel the Earth’s body with my own body. Its drag is an ancient timeless embrace, my opposing force. We exist in balance with each other. The Earth’s gravity is the gravity of my ancestors. Life’s constant anchor, itself in whirling concert with the rest of the solar system, the centre of an astral dance. Our place. Mum usually tells me I’m getting carried away.

On the Knot, I tell her, there’s only the idea of gravity. A threadbare imitation of gravity. There’s no balance here, just a desperate spiral. On the Knot, gravity is a consequence of struggle and conflict. The spin is forced, ground out, unnatural. Gravity is a symptom. 

I tell her it’s no surprise that she suffers so much or that the doctors don’t understand her condition. It’s not an illness of the bones at all, I yell, but of the soul. This fucking place, I say. She smiles, says I’m not comfortable here, on the frontier. Mocks my groundedness, implies I’m old fashioned, coughs and doubles over and weeps and has to lie down again.

I pull on my clothes and look again at the glit she gave me. 

Grav 9.01m/s/s // c.99.92% earthG // 04:02 // 3rd Spin

Might as well get up. Mother grumbles from the next room so I prepare her injections for the day, queue up the ullu for her exercises. It’s been three months already, somehow. 

No place for humans, here, in gravity’s shadow.