Letters From the Knot #2: In Spoken Chains

A glimpse into a dark corner, a story about language and love.

Welcome to this week’s Letters From the Knot. Every fortnight, I post a short piece of fiction from the Knot, the setting of a novel I’m currently working on. The Knot is a 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 takes place in a cave.

In Spoken Chains

Hera checked his can and saw the ullumetre bristling, the pale and glowing pin glitching in and out of existence at the edge of his field of vision. He had overfilled it, pushed it to the very limit, to bursting. If there was another breach, he wouldn’t sacrifice a moment with her.

The shifting gravity was playing with his inner ear and with his guts; it was hard to separate out the effects of the spin from the nauseating lightness he carried with him. He heaved himself off a strut and pushed out, floating, through blackness. One more turn through the tangled innards of the antenna. Up ahead he could see a pale bauble of light within which Lis would be sitting and working.

Their spot was not an easy place to reach. All the major transit points were monitored. The only legitimate exit point from the Larsson was through the Selma and it would have taken him a thousand spins to earn himself even a day’s permit to the capital ship. Lucky for him, the Selman obsession with growth and their civilizing mission had created cracks. The new transit ring, which bored through the Larsson’s living deck as though it were little more than mute rock, had created certain opportunities. And Lis was a person uniquely alive to opportunities.

When Hera finally reached the light, he pushed his way through the first of the rubber membranes, waited for things to equalise, and floated his way through the second, into the cave. It was a private place that shouldn't exist, where the Vilnius antenna collided with the guidestone. The little pocket of air was a kind of miracle, the result of the fusing of the metals of the antenna with the strange compound of the vast rock. When the two objects smashed together all those centuries ago, the cave must have formed by accident, an improbable cavity, a perfect hiding place and, for Lis, a place to listen.

The space was a confused jumble of organic and inorganic forms, half rock, half metal, long since settled into static chaos. In the middle of it, Lis had perched herself awkwardly on a rickety scaffolding. She was surrounded by light. Pastel peach and lilac shards passed over her arms and face, the haptics feeding back invisibly, her eyes alive with another inner light. She hummed as she worked; Hera could see her mouth moving, shaping alien vowels.   

‘Lis,’ Hera said, half whispering. He wanted to impose himself in the space but also to disappear into it, to exist and not exist. 

‘Lis!’ he shouted.

At once the pale pink light ceased flowing and there she was in the gloom. ‘Hera,’ she said, blinking her implants clear. She didn’t look happy. ‘What are you doing here?’ 

‘It’s third spin,’ he said. ‘Fredag. Where else would I be?’ 

She nodded. In the low gravity, her hair swirled around her head, a coiled crown. ‘Turn your oxygen off then,’ she said, before turning back to her glides. The light started up again, a coral shimmer.  

Hera looked down and saw his can was still weeping oxygen into the air. He checked the gauge again and it was more than half gone. Lis’ own tank was propped up by the entrance, more than three-quarters full.

‘Lis,’ he said again. 

The light went out. 

‘What?’ she said. 

‘You seem mad.’ 

‘I’m not mad, I just didn’t know you were coming.’ 

‘I’ve come every week for a year.’ 

‘Yep.’ 

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘Nothing,’ she snapped. ‘I’m just in the middle of something.’ 

Lights on again.

At moments like this he could just about convince himself that maybe he didn't like her after all, that this had all been a period of mania and that, with a single mean word, she could break the spell of the past three years and he would be free to see her as just another person, a poor and desperate child of the Larsson, no better than he. It never lasted though. She would clench her jaw or blink in that way she did and then he’d be back again and hopeless. 

‘How’s it going then?’ he said, conciliatory and sheepish. He hoped he could make his presence inoffensive enough that she would include him in her world. 

The light dropped; she closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Come and have a look,’ she said. 

Hera lofted himself up through the air. He misjudged the angle of the jump and clattered against the scaffold, almost toppling the whole thing. Lis had to reach out and grab his belt when he threatened to careen past. She pulled him gently to the place by her side. He watched her roll her eyes when she thought he couldn’t see. He hated himself. 

In front of her, Lis had a set of six glides and two ullugraphs. The latter she had tinkered with so that, instead of throwing out a contained spectral image, they spewed their unbound light directly into her eyes and onto her body. She had calibrated them to interact with her haptics so the light would chime across her arms and face and neck. She had studs in her lips and nose and tongue to better catch the signals and the noise. Not content to read the information, she had to consume it, to taste it. 

‘I’ve locked into a new passage,’ she said. ‘Listen.’ 

She blinked and the sound that had been private to her erupted into the cave. An awful sound, multi-layered and inharmonious. It was a combination of two sounds really: a kind of pitchy whining scream, piercing but occasionally melodic, combined with a percussive punching sound that rippled in and out of audible range, sometimes complimenting the high sound, sometimes clashing with it. As always, it gave Hera a headache. 

‘You hearing that?’ Lis said. ‘Magic.’ 

‘It sounds the same as the rest,’ he said. 

She rolled her eyes again. This time she meant for him to see it.

‘They’ve changed it again,’ she said. ‘It sounds more...I don’t know what the word is, not desperate. Urging. But also patient, mostly. They want something from us, but they’re...sort of relaxed about it? Like it feels inevitable. Like the urgency is for my sake. Like they’re encouraging me to join them in something they already know is happening, you know what I mean?’ 

‘You’re getting all that from this?’ said Hera.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think I’m getting to it. If you listen enough, it starts to...I dunno, I can’t explain it.’ She fiddled with the glides while she spoke. He felt like he was wasting her time. ‘How come you’re here so late anyway?’ she said.

Hera’s heart leapt. ‘I thought you didn’t know I was coming,’ he said.

‘But when you do come, it’s usually late second, no?’ she replied, glancing at him. He couldn’t read the look. He couldn’t read anything she did. 

‘I took an extra shift,’ he said, ‘and my sister was giving me a hard time, so I had to have this whole thing with her before she’d let me go.’ 

Lis turned to face him, looked at him properly for the first time since he arrived. ‘What did she say?’ 

‘Umm, I dunno. She just didn’t want me to go out. Said I wasn’t doing enough for the floor. We’re behind on zakat again.’

‘That’s all?’ said Lis. 

Hera swallowed. ‘I worry...I think someone might have told her where I’m going. She seemed suspicious and...scared. I think she’s noticed I’ve been taking the gear, or noticed the ox being low maybe.’

Lis was silent for a while. ‘You think she’d figure it from that?’ 

‘I don’t know,’ said Hera. ‘That’s what’s weird. She was talking in riddles and making sort of veiled threats. She thinks they’re tightening security at the terminal. Maybe someone’s seen me by the ring? She mentioned the antenna, which is weird, because, like, she’s never spoken about it before.’  

‘Hmm,’ said Lis. ‘You came anyway though?’ 

‘Of course I did. This is more important.’ 

Lis didn’t answer but went back to her work. The light licked at her once again, glinting off the studs in her face. She stopped blinking and seemed to stop breathing, mouth slightly open. She had turned off the sound again and the glow whorled in silence.  Hera got lost in it, listened to the cave, to its looping inward roar. 

There are cycles in the Knot that nobody fully understands. Movements that scholars have wasted lifetimes attempting to chart. Even at times of controlled spin, the city has an arcane tectonic logic of its own. It moves and groans and seeps. Each ship has its systems for recycling air, for reclaiming waste or for expelling it. Water has to be captured and treated and reused; there are leaks. In the null beyond the walls, these fluids - human, gliesan, machine - become a twirling frozen ooze that spills from the Knot, an effluent corkscrew marking its passage through space. The changeable guidestone responds to the coming and goings of the waste and spacedust and to the proximity of the sun when, every decade or so, the Knot heats and cools according to the eccentricities of its orbit. Its metals expand and contract, buckled by rust and by the lives lived inside it. It’s a place that cannot exist but change. Lis’ cave is a monument to this chaos and has its own internal cycles. It weeps and breathes. There’s something like weather inside it and weather is a thing that Lis has only ever read and dreamed about. The cave is special; there’s a whiff of promise there. 

‘Why did you take the extra shift?’ Lis said after a long silence. 

Hera hadn’t even noticed she was looking at him. His back ached from sitting on the hard platform.

‘You know why, Lis,’ he said.   

‘I don’t need it, H. How many times have I told you?’ 

‘Lis. With all respect, you’re not getting anywhere here. A shis would let you actually talk to them. We could find out what they want. If they want anything. You wouldn’t need to spend so much time here. You could...come back.’ 

‘You’re being naive,’ said Lis. 

‘You’ve been coming here for a year, Lis, breathing this air.’ 

‘You think the air on the Larsson is better than this? Ten times recycled?’ 

‘With a shis you can...’

‘Enough Hera! I don’t want a shis. I can’t use one anyway.’ She had looked away again, tinkering or pretending to. 

‘Do you know how long it took them to translate from gliesan in the beginning?’ said Hera. ‘It was like twenty years before they could even speak to them. More, probably. The first shis wasn’t invented until like a hundred years after the Gs first came. And you think you’re going to figure this out on your own? Coming here once a week to just…listen?’ 

‘I’m coming more than once a week, to be fair,’ she said. 

‘What?’ said Hera. The sting of betrayal. 

‘Nothing,’ she said.

The idea that she had been coming here without him was almost more than Hera could bear. It was a lot to come alone, and unsafe. Who else had she been bringing? What was wrong with him? He hated his sister then, his cramped and meagre life, the fact he had to work at all, the fact he was kept from Lis and hopeless to help her. 

Lis leant back. ‘A shis won’t help H. Don’t waste your money. If I’m going to speak to them, I won’t do it with my tongue in a vice.’ 

Hera sighed. Here we go, he thought. 

‘Language isn’t neutral H,’ Lis continued, ‘Who built this shis you’re going to buy? You getting it on the Selma? From Earth? Who’s loaded it? Whose translation is it? Whose ideas are baked into it? They cracked the translation in the 21st century and we’re supposed to assume that it’s right? That it’s not loaded with the same cancerous philosophies that collapsed their society in the first place?’

‘I know Lis-’

‘Those shis are filled with human exceptionalism,’ she continued. She had turned to face him and was punctuating her point by waving her arms around. The scaffolding was wobbling underneath them with the passion of it. ‘Those machines are a rejection of cultural complexity. How could those people hope to create a translation that isn’t dripping in superiority and xenophobia? They control the translation, they control the narrative. Wake up, Hera. All the Selma wants is to keep the Peg corked, cos they know what would happen if they started mixing us all together. And who knows what language these Gs speak in the first place. The same as they do on the spurs? Something else? Does this shis even work in Swese? Or is it just English as usual?’ 

‘I get it! Fuck,’ Hera was bored of being patronised, scared of being left behind. He grasped at words to hurt her with. ‘You don’t even know if they’re in there. They might all be dead by now.’

‘Then what’s this?’ said Lis. She blinked and the cramped cave bloomed again with sound, screeching, pounding, transcendent. Alien. 

‘Echoes for all you know,’ said Hera. 

Lis shut her eyes, exasperated. ‘Have you even read this?’ she said. She rummaged in her pouch and pulled out a wad of stained paper, coarse and crudely recycled, each page a different size. Across the front was scrawled a title, a phrase Hera had seen before, a phrase his sister had thrown in his face once already that day. 

UNRAVELLING THE KNOT. 

Hera batted it out of her hand and it spun through the air to the far end of the cave. Lis leapt after it instinctively and the force of her jump caused the scaffold platform to topple. Hera was tipped backwards with the platform and lost his grip, tumbled to the ground. In the low gravity, the collapse played out in comical slow motion. All Lis’ carefully calibrated glides fell apart and scattered across the uneven floor of the cave. The hacked ullus spilled their light across the walls and ceiling of the caves; it bounced off the glistening ceiling and the gathered pools in great sweeps of lavender and rose. Lis and Hera each steadied themselves at opposite ends of the pink-washed cave and she gave him a look of total disgust. 

‘You idiot,’ she said, and held up the now damp pamphlet. ‘This isn’t a game H. What I’m doing here isn’t legal. Those high-grav rats don’t want this to happen. Why do you think that is? This has to mean something.’ She gestured to the play of swirling lights. 

‘You’re losing it, Lis,’ said Hera, on the brink of tears. 

‘No! I’ve found something,’ she said. She stretched out her hand and let the light lap against her fingers. ‘This isn’t noise to me, I feel it. I feel them. This isn’t just language, it’s growth, it’s fibre. It feels like grass, like roots. I feel something fertile. I can smell life and moss and soil and stones. I can smell thunder and lightning, open air and barreling winds. It feels like I’m going to be swept clean off my feet sometimes, swept up in something, like I’m not in the Knot at all, but outside it, watching it, surrounded by quiet life. There’s a taste in there like something spreading. Something coppery and unstoppable. They’re speaking to me, H. And not through the lens of some shis, or some ancient defunct translation. I’m not locked to some dead person's idea of how to talk to them, I’m getting this direct. And it’s telling me that I’ve got more to offer than sitting in some metal tank grinding through spins for the rest of time.’ 

‘I know all this Lis,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m here, I want to help, but I’m-’ 

‘Help me do what? Make more money? Move a little higher up grav? Is that all we’ve got? Is that all you want? I’ll rip this whole place apart before I accept that’s all there is to live for.’ 

‘Lis...’ Hera said. I love you, he imagined saying. He wanted to be enough for her. 

‘You’re not helping,’ she said. ‘This is dangerous. You’re putting yourself in danger.’

‘How?’

‘They’re on to us, I think,’ she said. ‘On to me, anyway. They’re scanning the antenna every day. The Larsson is due a smoke out, and if we’re caught on the wrong side...I don’t know what they’ll do.’ 

Hera’s heart skipped. ‘What did you just say?’ he said. 

‘They’re scanning the antenna?’ 

‘You said “the Larsson is due a smoke out”’ he said. 

‘It is,’ she replied. 

‘Those are the exact words my sister used.’ 

Lis’ mask slipped for a second. A moment’s hesitation, a moment’s concern.

‘You told her,’ Hera said and, for that moment, he was happy.