Letters From the Knot #6: The Farmlands, Part Two

Deeper still.

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, 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, 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 portrait, a slice of life, a fragment.

This week, we return to the farmlands for part two of a tale about devotion and terror. If you haven’t already, you can read part one now.

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

The Farmlands, Part Two

Day fifteen

She dreamt of being sucked down into a thick muck, something messy and organic pulling at her feet like quicksand, and when she woke she woke with Kye’s big hands around her ankles, shaking her, tugging at her, wild eyed.

“Wake up outsider but keep quiet,” he whispered. Even at this distance she could smell his breath. It filled her small sleeping rack. The smell of alcohol and synthmeat and a week without sleep. “It’s time to get going.”

“Let go of me,” said Lem, tugging her feet away. She nodded though, after that, and made clear with her actions that she meant to comply.

Kye slipped away from the opening and she could see beyond him that the lights were all out. The small clock at the side of her rack showed that it was the middle of the night, not even first spin. It seemed he had been serious about slipping out in secret and she resigned herself to this new path.

No rebirth without oblivion, she told herself.

When she had interviewed for a job in the farmlands, the recruiter had eyed her with benign bemusement, too confused by her intentions to suspect anything.

“And where did you hear about the job?” she had said, fingers laced together, eyes solicitous. They were stuffed, the two of them, into a lopsided booth on the Hafgufa; the woman’s desk was positioned so that the shams half-blinded whoever was sitting in the chair opposite.

In this case, that person was Lem, who hesitated for just a second. “The ullugrams,” she said. “Where else?”

The recruiter’s implants blazed a moment. Her hair was tied back tight and she wore a brown doeskin suit, reinforced at the joints but unblemished. Working clothes never worked in. “We don’t get many applicants, that’s all.”

“There have been jobs in the farmlands for as long as I can remember,” said Lem, truthfully. The adverts had been such a ubiquitous feature of the ullucycles on the Twins that the residents barely noticed them anymore. They had become background noise, a gently persistent myth of potency and abundance.

“Exactly,” said the recruiter, smirking. Her implants fired up again. She was doubtless vetting Lem even as they spoke. “It’s rough work…”

“Someone needs to do the rough work, don’t they?” said Lem.

“The locals,” the recruiter said, leaning forward, “can be a little…insular.”

“I’m looking for a job,” replied Lem. “Not friends.”

“Not trouble?” the glimmering of the recruiter’s implants came to an abrupt stop and Lem's shoulders sagged a little. If she’s found something, she reasoned, it’s already too late.

An infinite few seconds later, the recruiter laughed to herself. “Well, you look serious enough,” she said, pulling up a new ullu and swiping a hand through the air.

Lem felt her glit rumble and checked her wrist. Approved.

“I bet you don’t make it two weeks,” the recruiter had said, her body rocking with laughter, the reinforced joints of her suit creaking.

When Lem clambered out of her rack that day to find Kye hunched over both of their backpacks, mania and hate in his eyes, it occurred to her that she had won that bet.

Day sixteen

With each step, Lem’s pack became lighter, her soul heavier.

Kye insisted on walking behind her, a welcome five or so steps removed. If she slowed down, he’d say “we’ll rest when we stop.” If she looked over her shoulder, past her pack, and caught his eye, he’d say “not yet”. She wasn’t sure if she was his ally or his prisoner.

They were walking the same winding corridors the farmlanders used to plant and tend their feeble crops. They had left early so they could get ahead of the others who, in just a few hours time, would be walking this same path, checking the vital signs of the food they couldn’t afford.

Kye had grown mistrustful of his fellow farmlanders, it seemed. For most of their walk, he muttered to himself about respect and about Kyanne and about the depths they’d have to go to find him. He spoke about agitators, and rebels, and tradition. Every now and again, he seemed to forget his mission for a moment and stopped alongside one of the tanks that held the crops. He’d crank open the door and waggle his hand around inside to check on the vegetable growth, or else roughly fondle the soft protein sacks. He did it automatically and angrily, murmuring all the while.

“He’s made a mistake…” Kye kept saying to himself. “He’s made a mistake. There’s a reason we don’t go down this far in the drum. There’s a reason to stay out of the dark.”

If Lem made any effort to probe this “reason”, or to better understand the perils that might lay ahead, Kye would obfuscate or grow upset, telling the outsider to know her place or mind her business. It wasn’t at all clear to Lem how long this journey would last but the weight of her bag suggested Kye didn’t mean to have them home any time soon.

After what felt like two whole spins – Lem’s glit didn’t work down in the drum – Kye called them to a stop.

“There’s a place to rest round here,” he said. The gravity was low by now, and they bobbed along the corridor. Lem’s pack, though mercifully light, now caught against the pipes and casings that traced along the ceiling of the corridors, making travel slow.

Kye led them through a door to one side of the corridor and they entered a small bunk room, lined with racks along each wall. At the end, a small unit that once served the various needs of the labourers who would have slept here. A metal basin that would have been their toilet and second, higher up, that would have been a sink. To either side a little workspace where perhaps there would have been a kettle or some means of heating rations. The air was filled with unextracted dust, the surfaces covered, except for a couple of the lower racks which, it seemed, the farmlanders still had some use for from time to time.

Kye shrugged off his pack, which floated gently to the floor.

“Last stop before the grav runs out,” he said. His voice was steady, but his eyes remained wide, alert, almost certainly stimmed. It was the first time Lem had got a good look at his face all day and she thought it seemed animated with great anguish, as though he were in some unmanageable inward pain. He maneuvered himself into one of the lower racks and fastened one of the sleeping belts around his waist to hold himself there. Lem did the same on the opposite side of the room, relieved that for a time each of them was fixed in place. She had been longing for a boundary.  

“Do we have any food?” said Lem. She had decided to act as though she were here as a consensual partner until events proved otherwise.

Kye sighed but made no response. He was slowly taking some bits out of his bag and placing them on the rack next to him. A torch, some ration packs (one of which he tossed to Lem), a thin sleeping bag, some sort of ullutransmitter. She was surprised to see a toothbrush. The final thing he took out was a red notebook, which he placed carefully on top of the pile he had created. Lem tensed when she saw it.

“Do you know where we’re going? Where Kyanne might be?” she tried, making her voice as neutral as she could.

“I know where Kyanne is,” he said. “With them.”

“And who are they?” said Lem. “What should I be ready for?”

Kye snorted. “Not much. Disrupters, maybe. You’ve seen Kyanne. He’s not a fighter, nor will the rest be.”

“And where are they?” she said, not reassured.

He rubbed his chin, weighing something up.

“The farmlands,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, “are deep.” Still restrained by the belt, he arched forward and drew a diagram in the undisturbed dust on one of the shelves. He sketched out an uneven oblong shape, cut through with spiraling lines. It occurred to Lem that Kye had likely never seen the ship from the outside. His was an inward map.

“The whole place was once a rotating drum. It sits at angle compared to the rest of the Knot,” Kye continued, drawing radiating lines to illustrate the spin. “We all live up this end, where the spin is strong and grav is steady. We plant all down this side, where the plants behave right, if you go to the bottom of the drum, there’s no grav at all, useless. If you go across the drum, you can get some grav, but then everything’s upside down. Also useless.”

Lem could see that this line of conversation was calming to him. For a minute, he was on steady ground again, able to express precisely what he meant to.

“And where are we now?” said Lem.

“Here,” he pointed at point halfway along the oblong, and then shifted his hand over and started rubbing away a large patch of dust in the centre of his diagram, a blank oval in the heart of the farmlands. “And tomorrow, we cross this.”

“What’s that?” said Lem.

“The void.”

Day seventeen

Kye packed his bag as Lem rubbed the crust and dust from her eyes. She had barely slept, kept on edge by Kye’s groaning, straining her eyes in the dark to make out his shape as he slept. On the odd occasion she was drifting off, she heard what sounded like the clasps on Kye’s sleeping belts being unbuckled. She would snap awake and strain her eyes and ears but hear nothing, unsure whether there had been any sound at all.

As they packed, Lem tried to subtly dig her hand around in her bag to check its contents, counting off what was there and what was not.

“Time to go,” said Kye, before she could complete her blind inventory.

They didn’t travel far that day before the gravity seemed to have gone completely. They were no longer walking but dragging themselves horizontally. Indeed, this seemed to be what Kye was waiting for. Their destination was not a place, as such, but a feeling, the right kind of weightlessness.

“Stop,” he said. Lem slowly turned to face him. Pale skin and dark eyes. No longer a face of anguish, but of mischief. He was smiling.

“Why are we stopping?” said Lem. She had braced herself for another day of interminable repetition.

“How does that feel to you?” he said, “the grav.”

“I don’t…I can’t feel anything,” said Lem. Life on the stable Hafgufa had not attuned her to subtle calibration.

“Hmm,” said Kye, his odd little smile becoming a grimace. “Seems about zero, doesn’t it? Let’s check.”

Planting a foot on the wall to keep himself steady, he dug around in his pack, pulling out the red notebook Lem had seen the previous evening. He held it up in the air between them and let go, allowing the book to slowly revolve in the air in front of them, a fixed point. Lem could see the book in more detail now as it spun, the thumbed pages and mottled cover, the green staining on the outer edges. It was hers, undoubtedly. She said nothing, remained completely still, tried to remember what she could about low grav combat.

“Looks good to me,” said Kye, and snatched the book out of the air, shoving it back in his bag. Lem watched his face for some sign of confrontation, but he smiled on. “Lets go then.”

For the first time since she had arrived in the farmlands, they were leaving the winding tank-runs. Kye lifted open a service hatch, pushed his pack through, and floated himself carefully in after it. His broad shoulders barely fit through. Lem watched his legs wriggling away and realised she was alone. For a second, she considered running away. Floating away. She looked back up the dark corridor they had come down, then down ahead into the endless dwindling gloom. How far could she get, she wondered. She thought of the monstrous withering growths in their tanks, one after the other, arrayed forever. She thought of her clumsy movements in the ungrav, of Kye’s dexterity. She imagined the chase, the violence. Her likeliest route out of the farmlands, she accepted, was to carry on with this game.

She removed her own pack and followed Kye through the hole. They wriggled their way a short way through the service pipe, bouncing against the walls. At the end, Lem pushed her bag out in front of her and then emerged herself into a deeper blackness than she knew possible. A vast and lightless hollow, the void around which the farmlands used to spin, now a gulf of incomprehensible scale. A space that could only have been built in another age, an age of ambition. Lem watched as her bag floated out of her reach, only to see Kye’s spectral arm swing round to catch it. Pulling it back against the wall, he then grabbed Lem, yanked her the rest of the way out of the vent, and placed her against the wall next to him as well.

“Stay calm,” he said, quietly. “And hold on.”

She found the rung of a ladder and clung to it, not daring to turn her back on the void. Apart from the opening they had come through, there was no source of light in the swallowing dark. But something in the quivering of the air, in the lofty play of sound, spoke to the size of the space. Kye kicked the door closed and the darkness was absolute. Weightless and without light, something primal in Lem reacted to this new feeling, the feeling of annihilation. She let out a scream which pierced through the dark and bounced off the distant walls of the space and looped round and back toward her, and the echoes came back as loud as the scream itself and those echoes made echoes of their own and the sound built and built and new and terrifying iterations of the scream called back from deeper and deeper in the void, mocking and distorting Lem’s voice, finding new aspects of her fear to ape and amplify; the whole place howled with this new sound, a demonic choral wail. The sound of hell.

And just when she thought she’d lose her mind, the sound began to dwindle and die, one voice at a time.

“Don’t do that again,” said Kye from somewhere in the darkness when the sound had finally stopped. His face was suddenly illuminated then. A fluttering ullu light bursting from the little transmitter she had seen in his pack. He tuned something and then attached the transmitter to the wall. The light that had been on his face now cast a beam directly across the void, hitting the far wall in a pale dancing pool. Kye modified the direction of the beam until the pool circumscribed a surface to his liking – a short stretch of ladder, a small hatch that promised access at the far side.

The opposite wall must have been one hundred metres away, Lem thought, perhaps more. The rope of light illuminated the immediate area between her and Kye, and the patch gave Lem something to anchor her eye and her mind too. She slowed her breathing. In the light she could see that Kye was unspooling a long cord, one end of which he had attached to his belt. He reached out a hand to Lem and she recoiled.

“Safety cord,” Kye said, looking at her blankly.

Lem reached out and took the cord from him, attaching it to her own belt.

“Right,” he said, taking on the tone once again of a patient instructor. “We’re going to jump across. The grav is low enough that you’ll travel in a straight line. The key thing is the jump. Line it up wrong and you might end up rollin’ in the dark. Now, I’ve tied us together, but the cord’s not long enough for us to go one at a time, so we jump together, one on each side of the light. Time it right, and we’ll float along the beam and one of us or both of us can grab on. Advantage of having two of you is that if that one is off course, the other might be able to correct it. Though of course, the opposite is also true…”

Lem heard most of it but felt the information slipping out of her head as fast as it had gone in. Her breathing sped up again. “Okay,” she said.

“Packs on,” said Kye, “and get ready to jump on my count.”

She and Kye set themselves up on either side of the pale lit thread. Lem fixed her eyes on the pool at the far end in the otherwise empty darkness.

She waited for Kye to start counting, tugged the cord at her waist to test it. When she looked over at him now, she saw he was muttering one of the drum-born prayers of the farmlanders, humming to himself in that guttural whispered tongue.

Keep sharp Lem, she told herself. Keep calm. This is what you’re here for. No rebirth without oblivion.

“Three, two, one. Jump,” said Kye.

Lem kicked her legs and for a moment there was nothing but the gaping darkness, the thin blue thread, Kye’s heavy breathing, and the promise of the light that would lead them to the inverted world, to Kyanne’s world.

Lem’s story concludes in two week’s time. Subscribe now to find out what happens next.