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!
The Trap, Part One
With a blink, Nora brought the shutters up, with another she turned on the fizzing neons that faced out into the tunnelway. Their toxic glow caught Chipo leaning against the wall opposite, eyes busy with an inner light of their own. It was quiet in the Trap this early in the spin and the shams were still dim. When Nora opened the door, Chipo swept forward like a ghost of herself, walked past without saying hello. Their worlds had joined together again. This always felt like something to Nora, the moment of not being alone anymore, but apparently it didn’t even warrant a nod.
Chipo walked straight through the shop into the back and started doing something noisy in Nora’s living space, crashing around. Alone again, Nora went about setting up the shop, putting the little stools and tables outside, turning on the ullus. While she was out in the low-ceilinged tunnelway out front, she took a deep breath. It was all the same air, of course, the air she’d been breathing her whole life, but the ancient recyclers all had their unique quirks and she always felt the air was fresher out here than it was in the dark box of the shop.
This part of the neighbourhood was called the Trap. It was mess of tight tunnels where old living quarters had been turned into shops and cafes and clubs. It had always been dark, and dirty, and there were a lot of tight corners where people and things could get lost. On the other hand, the grav was stable and the angle was basically flat, meaning this little corner of the ship had become a bit of a hotspot for creatives and scenesters and drunks. It was a place where there were always people and always things to do, where you could get so bogged down and tangled from spin to spin that you didn’t really need to think about anything bigger.
Nora went inside again, turned on the docks, the small glides along the front of the desk, opened some of the cabinets, turned on the stim display, the internal lights. By the end of her little circuit, the place was a wash of competing lights, a pastel haze. Along one internal wall of the shop hung a row of thick curtains from floor to ceiling. She and Chipo had put them up years ago to cover the enormous glide that sat behind it. She ran her hand across the thick faux-velvet of the curtains and a shard of bright glidelight slipped through the cracks for a moment. Recoiling, Nora let the curtain swing back into place.
Everything tidy, she settled on her stool and started to check the shop's messages on her implant. Orders for furniture or jewellery she forwarded straight to Chipo; any booking enquiries she flagged for her future self; she blinked a swathe of junk into oblivion. Before she got through the messages she was distracted by a noise, a louder crash in Chipo’s crashing, the spiralling racket of a dropped pan lid.
'“You alive back there?” Nora yelled.
Chipo answered in body only, bursting out of the back room with her hands cupped, stuffed full with her latest findings. Her eyes still quivered with light; she was never content to exist in just one place at a time.
“Check it out,” she said, dumping her treasure on Nora’s freshly cleared counter. At first glance it was a little mountain of garbage, a pile of string and metal and wood and other crap, like a fistful of the human detritus that gathered in the vents in the floor of the tunnelways.
“You’ve been busy,” Nora said, poking a little lump of wood with her fingernail.
Chipo lifted it up with something like reverence. “Not at all,” she said. “They’re everywhere, if you know where to look. Dealers don’t know what they’ve got, so they’re selling them cheap. They look at this and see a little shiny doodad, an old ornament.”
The piece she held aloft looked like a section of bamboo, a little semicircular chute of wood, shiny in the gauzy light of the shop. Nora looked closer. It looked like it had passed through a lot of hands.
“Where of course you see...”
“History,” Chipo said, glancing up, eyes still shimmering. “Opportunity.”
Nora picked through the little stash, receiving cutting glances from Chipo if she dropped one or pulled one too roughly away from the others. It was the usual stuff, as far as Nora could see. Fine metal coils, a bundle of small screens glued together, shells and bones and teeth. Chipo had started sorting the trinkets according to her own code, according to the whims of her expert eye. At one extreme of their little desk, all wires, and glidescraps and knotmetal. At the other end, wood and fibres and glass, animal parts. Everything else found its place on the spectrum.
“What do you think it means?” said Chipo, appraising one with her careful eye and careful hands.
“Why do you think they mean anything?”
“I know what they mean,’ said Chipo, “unlike these other hawkers. I’m saying what does it mean? That they’re all here? All at once? The market’s flooded.”
“Maybe someone died? A collector?”
“Neg cheg. These aren’t collection quality,” said Chipo. “No tags, no finders marks. These are the real deal, new to the scene.”
Nora could see that Chipo would pore over these for hours, take pics, upload them to her sites, fight with trolls and con artists all day and night, theorise with the other collectors, and then no doubt panic that someone would come and steal them and pack them away in a hidey-hole somewhere, take all the pics offline, and retreat to her private mind to wonder at the mystery of these things.
Nora’s interest was waning by the time their first customer arrived. A regular, always here at the same time. He placed himself on one of the benches outside, not even glancing in, sure of his routines and of Nora’s part in them. Dutifully, she prepared his stimkit - raspberry riot - and carried it out.
“Good spins Jay?” she said as she planted down the tray.
“Takk,” said Jay, blinking to open his account for the day before getting stuck in to the stim.
The morning rush always lasted a couple of hours. Nora shuttled back and forth from the inside selling stims and falskaff to the punters, sometimes getting bogged down in an enquiry for some of the art they were selling, or someone would ask her to take a look at a piece of music they were writing. One person tried to sell her a fur coat, another a tin of olives, all too expensive. She got into debates with the regulars, and had to chase off some kids trying to leech off the ullufilters. Chipo, meanwhile, attended the counter inside, dealing with some of the more refined customers who came to make a deal or inspect some of the outré items they kept under the counter.
Each time she stepped outside the shop into the tunnelway, Nora took another deep breath. She felt like the air was getting fresher all the time, out here. Chipo said it was an illusion, and that it happened every day. She said the people moving around the tunnels in the morning helped the air get moving, or the kids picking through the vent dust meant the air circulated better. She said it just felt nicer every day because Nora was sleeping in a stuffy little box. She’d sniff the air in the shop when she said that and Nora would turn bright red with the shame of it. They never agreed on anything.
Nora knew something was changing. She knew it when the lights changed. They hadn’t become brighter, necessarily, but something had altered in the quality of the glow they cast off. She noticed it in the late orange slant of the evening, in the whorl of motes as she swept up at the end of a shift. She had never been to Earth, but had always been fascinated by the word earthlike. It was usually thrown around when people spoke about food or art or plants but, when she looked up one day and noticed the lights had changed, the word pinged into her head instantly. Earthlike.
At the end of the rush, Nora couldn’t bring herself to start tidying the place right away. The tables were covered in metal cups and spent stims and there was shit all over the floor and all the racks had been jumbled but she had to just sit for a moment, to convince herself for a second there was a break from the cycle. She hoped Chipo might understand her for once and step in to help, but she was already playing with her trinkets again.
Chipo picked up a couple of the little treasures - a flat red square of metal and a long glinting tooth - and walked around the messy shop with them, ignoring the work to be done, holding the little items to the light. She lifted them up, held them side by side, then one at a time. She walked over to the window and lifted them up against the glass, beyond which the tunnels were quiet in the mid-morning.
“What do you reckon?” said Chipo.
Nora sighed. “To what?”
“Making some money for once.” She held up the little red square. “People don’t realise yet, but these are gonna be big.”
Nora didn’t say anything, but watched Chipo with a sad wariness. Nora’s body was telling her always to stay still, to stay safe and calm and be happy. Chipo craved something else, everything else.
“We can do it like...limited drops. Use the ullus to build up a bit of a stir, and then do a drop all at once. They’ll fly out. Big bucks Nora.”
“Don’t we do enough?” said Nora.
“Exactly! Look how much you’re doing. Aren’t you tired? What even is this place now? A shop? A cafe? Studio?”
“This place is busy now. It’s making money.”
“And it’s killing you to make it. You sleep under a desk.”
“I like our regulars,’ said Nora. “I like the vibe. If there’s one thing this place is, it’s a place for people. I don’t want it becoming a circus every time you want to do a “drop”.
“The vibe,” said Chipo. “Give it a rest. You can’t afford the rent.”
Nora racked up another hundred reasons in her head, a thousand reasons not to change this place. In truth, she feared Chipo’s appetite, she was scared about where these treasures were coming from, scared of the Gliesans who lurked in the dark extremities of the Knot. She was scared, mostly, of change.
Chipo had wandered now over to the thick curtains at the wall and was holding up the trinkets one by one against the fake velvet.
“This could work,” she said, and pulled one of the curtains to the side. From behind it, a blade of blood-red light from the huge glide slipped into the shop, clashing with all Nora’s careful pastels, suddenly illuminating all the dust and the cracks and overstuffed shelves and the age of the place.
“Ahhh,” Nora said, “close that shit.”
The curtain swung back into place and the shop was its gloomy self again. Dark and quiet and timeless.
“Sorry,’ said a voice from the door, clipped and serious. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything. The door was open."
Nora looked towards the visitor. Faux-linen suit, heeled shoes, tidy haircut. Undoubtedly Selman.
Part two coming soon…