Hello and welcome to Letters From the Knot, a regular newsletter and an extended exercise in worldbuilding. Once a month, I post a piece of fiction that takes place in the Knot, a space-bound city, a tangle of debris. My aim with this project is to gradually populate this fictional 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. This week, a idealist searches for the secrets of organised resistance.
And if sci-fi’s not your thing, I also release a more traditional and personal newsletter on the same channel on the off weeks.
Door to door
It’s sometimes difficult to know where to knock. The first house I arrive at has, where its door might be, a flap of old sheet metal, secured to a frame by two cable ties. I try to bang on the metal but it swings away from me and its flimsy curvature absorbs the sound. On my next attempt I hook my foot underneath to hold it still and bang as hard as I can. This time I’m met by a shout and a woman soon comes to the door to ask what the fuck I think I’m doing. Her anger dissipates when she sizes me up. I’m not local, clearly, but she can probably tell from my clothes I’m not Selman either and I’m not rich and I have no authority of any kind. Seeing no threat, her expression changes to one of bemused anticipation. This will probably make a good story for later. I tell her I’m looking for the organisers and she chuckles. Does this place look organised to you? she says.
Navigation is a slow business on account of the winding paths and the verticality of the place. It’s not a simple thing to fix your mind on a direction and follow it. The neighbourhood has other plans and you’ll as often as not find yourself at a dead end or, more confusing still, coming up against a pile of clothes or garbage or stacked sheet wood or busted furniture and wonder whether if you just shifted some of it you’d be able to get through. Eventually, I turn a corner to find myself in a little low-ceilinged shed, lined with velvet drapes, stained half the way up with an oily watermark. In the middle of the space two people are tinkering with an engine or generator. Du förlorade? one of them says.
This forgotten corner of the Kettle Twins is a place of legend in certain circles. In all of the Selman era of the Knot, for all their dominance and advancement, there’s one thorn that remains in their side. If you ride the first transit ring, and stand at the right side of the carriage, you can even see it whiff past. They’ve painted over the signs and turned down the lights to avoid it being seen but it’s there, the ghost station. Kettle Tip. A lingering embarrassment for the Selmans and a spark of hope for those who dream of some form of resistance. The community here, in the high-grav tip of Kettle 1, call themselves the Lerians and they’ve got lineage stretching back to before the Knot was even formed. They’ve not seen Earth in ten generations and, naturally, they’ve got almost nothing to show for their longevity. Just this jumbled nook, and the centuries thick pile of life.
After a time I come across an old guy sitting on a ripped up old arm chair, smiling brightly. I ask him about the Lerians and the Kettle Tip and he tells me instead about an opera he’s writing. He says it's about love, and time, and that he’s been writing it for fifty years and that his plan is that it’ll remain unfinished when he’s dead. That he’ll pass it on to someone else in the village. Incomplete and eternal, he says, like the Knot. I ask him about the ghost station and he just shakes his head. He says he’ll play me a scrap of the opera but that part of the point is that it’ll never ever be performed in full. It’ll last so long that you’d never be able to get to the end of it before more is written.
The lines here never meet where you expect them to and the angles are so off that I have to look down at my feet just to remind myself that I’m stable and that the grav’s still pulling. There are thin alleyways that feel more like trenches between the makeshift houses, and sometimes you’ll get to the end of one only to find a ladder sinking into what you thought was solid metal and leading to a whole new layer of the place.
How did you end up living here? I ask a woman I find sitting on a small bench, her hands flowing through an ullugram to some obscure purpose. The boundaries between inside and outside are unclear here and upon first finding her, I wasn’t sure if I had somehow made my way into her home. I moved into this place when the old owner died, she says. There are lists. Some houses are more favoured than others and you move up according to age. She’s patient, and humours me more than some of the others have. It’s clear they’ve not had a visitor here for a while. Heard there was someone sniffing about, she says.
There’s a sense of becoming buried here, over time. It’s only been a few hours since I arrived, but I’m already itching for some open space. The “village”, as they all seem to call it, can’t house more than 1000 people, but it seems to expand as you move through it. I must have walked through the same sections a half dozen times; I’ve probably travelled no more than 500 metres in total, and yet every corner feels new.
I’m at the point of giving up when I hear what sounds like a gathering. I can sense a mass of people through the walls - scraping chairs and many voices laughing together. I reach the place the sound is spilling from only to find another a dead end. I almost turn around but then I see a leg poking between two of the buildings. It’s followed by a grasping arm and slim torso and a red face. The emergent boy gives me an awkward nod and then, perhaps seeing my confusion, points into the hole he crawled from. Bar’s through there, he says.
I’m bulkier, I’d judge, than the average Lerian, who must be kept slim by necessity or scarcity or both. It’s a noisy struggle squeezing through the small gap and, on emerging into the small tavern, I’m greeted by a cheer and a round of applause. This is where everyone is, then, half pissed and together. Any hope I had of making a subtle entrance is quickly shown to be naïve. No sooner am I in than the taverner shouts, you found us, and everyone laughs again. During my investigations so far, I’ve found the locals to be overwhelmingly benign, playful even. But here, I can immediately see that the laughs and looks are not all good natured. There’s suspicion and malice in the air and I inwardly decide to stay for just one drink.
The taverner yells at me to take a seat at the bar. The room is little bigger than my cabin but they’ve somehow crammed about ten tables in and several more people sit at the bar. The air is warm and the lights are harsh and white. The walls are decorated with what look like relics of the past, signs from when this village was a spacecraft. There’s tinny music playing and little drones dancing around collecting the cups from the tables. For most of the revelers, the novelty of my arrival quickly wears off, but the taverner is keen to grill me.
You’re a journalist or something is it? You’re not Selman? You don’t look like a developer haha no offence. We don’t get a lot of tourists around here you know?
I tell him no, none of that. I’m just interested, I say. I’ve lived on the Knot all of my life but I’ve never come here. The taverner continues to pick at my story while he pours me a beer from the tap on the wall. It’s malty and alcoholic and very pleasant actually. It slips down fast.
There’s a woman at the bar, much older than the rest of those gathered who’s been listening in to the conversation and doesn’t seem happy with where it’s going. So what you just wandered in? she says. I tell her not exactly. I tell her that I’m here because I wanted to see how things worked down here. Who was in charge of the resistance. The woman exchanges a look with the bartender and a young man sitting at her elbow laughs loudly.
Let’s have a shot, she says, and there’s a cheer and the taverner takes out some cups and pours something reeking and warm and she puts one in my hand and we all knock them back. Say that again, she says. And I’m more confident now so I tell her that, all across the Knot, there’s nobody who’s managed to stop what the Selmans are doing to the place except here. The transit ring station was meant to open almost a decade ago and yet here it still is, closed and low lit and a Knot-wide embarrassment and then there are people all over the place trying to resist but not being able to and I want to know what it is the people here have done differently.
That old place, she says. Now there’s a story.
But before I know it, we’re getting drunk, and the story hasn’t materialised. It’s third spin already and the walls here have made my implant fuzzy and I can’t send any messages out - they’re building up in my periphery like silt against a filter. The woman is telling me about her ex, who keeps sending her long messages about how much she misses her, but she can’t talk to her anymore because she and her brother had a fight about their pet or something and I’m struggling to follow it so I just laugh when the others do and try to look relaxed and try to look happy.
We drink some more shots and suddenly it’s like the gravs gone haywire and I ask to go to the bathroom and the room swirls as I make my way there. The chucking man from the bar must have followed me because suddenly he’s there by the handrags and he’s right in my face. We’ve got ourselves a freedom fighter then is it? he yells. What’s the plan then? Go station to station closing it all down? The Lerian way? He’s laughing and I can’t tell if he’s about to kick my head in so I laugh too. What you think, he says, that we’ve got all the secrets down here?
I manage to stumble out back into the bar but it’s like a different place. How long was I in there? The tables have gone and the lights are low now and everyone is up and dancing and there’s someone on the bar singing in a deep bass voice and everyone is stomping to keep the rhythm. The woman from the bar finds me and shoves another beer in my hand and the whole place is tumbling all of a sudden. I can barely hear her voice over the music and the stomping and there are more and more people crammed in here. She pulls me in closer and starts shouting in my ear.
I hear only scraps. You’re a smart...to make it this far...but this lot wouldn’t know resistance if it hit...drunks and perverts...Selman’s don’t care...all about fucking money...people you want to be talking to are the...right path but you’ve gotta...
Suddenly I’m grabbed from behind and it’s the laughing man again and he’s absolutely blasted. So am I. He grabs me a little too roughly and shouts, have you found the resistance yet? I smile and try to say something and then notice some other people starting to gather around. Here’s some resistance for you, he shouts, and bodychecks me. It’s hard if not exactly violent but I almost fall over all the same. Another of the guys catches me and he’s laughing too and says, how about this resistance? and does the same but they’re getting rougher now and I try to say I’ve got to be going but they’re having fun now. It’s a bit of sport for them. I just want to understand, I start to explain, but they’re not listening anymore. I look around for the woman but she’s nowhere to be seen among the press of bodies and I try to squirm away and then bang. The world plummets and I’m gone.
Impossible to say if I was knocked out or passed out or fell over but when I come back around and I’m slumped in the corner and my head is full of rocks and the taverner is pottering around and smiling, cleaning the empty room. He glances over at me when I open my eyes.
These people aren’t resisting anything, he says. They’re just living.