Letters From the Knot #8: Cathedral

On architecture and the quick passage of time.

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 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!

Cathedral

There’s a building I walk past each day that, by glanced increments, has turned from dust to substance before my eyes. 

On the way to pick up Betty each morning, I ride the hand-tubes three quarts down and walk through the Oblest Plateau to take in the view. Mel told me this whole part of the ship was once exposed to the vacuum. Where the apartment blocks are now used to be big hollow chambers where the cargo ships would sidle in and dump their loot and change their crews before they loped back out again to the Moon or wherever else they were going to mine or trade or in some other way add to the riches of humanity. Now the whole thing is covered over and civilised but, in the back passages, behind the blocks, you can still see the marks the sailors used to make after a long journey, scrawling their names and ages and where they’d been. Mel says that, also, that’s where the prostitutes and lace bars used to be, and it's funny to think of that. Funny to think of that sort of thing going on when you’re sitting in the bakery or watching the ullus with the kids. Funny to think it’s all just the same chambers, and that in a few more thousand spins, there’ll be who knows what else going on down here. More bodies, variously used. 

Now the plateau is all trees and public art and there’s a woman who’ll read your implant for you if you’ll blink her a few bits. On my left as I walk it each morning, that’s where the apartment blocks are. They fill the space from top to bottom, butting up against the ceiling where the shamsuns glitter. Balconies jut out into the moaning space, laden with dainty plants or drying laundry, old furniture, jetsam, the outward extremities of a thousand lives.

They’re built of pale timber, the blocks, inlaid with a filigree of glass, as was the style at the time, when the Knot first settled after the war, but before the Selma arrived with its gaudy prefabs and great brass slabs. The street outside is hard brown metal, and you can still see where all the old tools and braces were removed after the war; the holes have been filled in crudely with silver metal and generations of footsteps have polished the whole thing smooth so that, if you bend down and sweep your hands across it, you’d never know it wasn’t all one thing, spacecold and ancient.  

This building, then. I walk past it every day, at the far end of the plateau, and it must have taken them ten, fifteen years to build. I remember when the old market used to be on that spot every few spins and then I remember when they cleared it all away despite the complaints of the locals and put up the fences, and then they started with the foundations and then, bit by bit, they’ve been building it ever since, willfully ignoring the yells and the protests. 

To the right, as I walk along the plateau, the edge of the street stops abruptly and drops away and down below is the reservoir. A happy accident, Mel says. When the Knot first got itself all tangled together, there happened to be an ice-trawler in dock, stopping off on the way to Earth, and it got stuck here, and they knew there were only so many months until the whole thing would melt so they - the people trapped here and already starting to call it home - spent their time welding watertight the lower half of the docking bay for all the meltwater to slosh into. And now it's one of the nicest spots in the Knot, Mel says. People here are always talking about the price of houses, because if the spin increases, and the grav with it, the weight of the water will be impossible to hold and the bottom might fall out of the whole place and suck us all into the null. And then if the grav drops then the water will break its bounds and rise up and everyone will be flooded out anyway. Try telling that to the locals though, they’ll not leave. 

This new building, so. I look at it, I’d guess, for about thirty seconds a day when, as I approach on my walk, the whole thing slowly comes into focus. More often than not I’ll be thinking about the day ahead, about where I’ll take Betty or when I’ll have to drop her off at her dad’s. But the building always catches my attention. I like to look at all the little details, the timber frame and leaning scaffolds and the tools they use, ever more obscure and expensive looking as they get further into building it. The shamsuns mimic Earth days so, in the morning, there’s a pale bluewhite light blooming behind the building and, early on in construction, the glow would pierce through the frame of the building like bleached bones and I’d watch as the craftspeople swung this way and that, sweating and adding their shouts and calls to the shouts of the protesters and to the unending rolling groan of the Knot. 

Now it’s almost finished, it seems, and the blue light glances across the angles, making a feature of the odd shape of the whole thing, and the strange grainy metal they’ve put all over it, the flourishes and the like. It’s a perplexing place and in all these years I’ve never quite figured out the purpose of it, all turrets and buttresses, and carvings that swirl out along its walls. Small gargoyles with glinting glasswork eyes. Thin weathervanes punctuate the roof even though there’ll never be a breath of wind in the place.

You see, it’s played a trick on me, this place. I’ve looked at it for thirty seconds a day, or less. Every day. It occupies only that much of my time, and of my mind, and so by stealth it’s become a building, all of a sudden. Some fifteen years have passed but, at the same time, it feels like minutes, to me, since it was just gathered rubble, and good intentions and a groundswell of local feeling. It feels like minutes since the now gleaming towers were nothing but suggestions of towers. The fine glass lines have spread in seconds like spilled blood. All from nothing. In the blink of an eye. It’s played a trick on me with its slowness because, in the time it's grown from dust to substance, young Betty’s all grown too, and the Knot is coming undone. 

On the day they finished building the cathedral, it was defaced. Scrawled letters in white along the face of it, paint dripping into the finely chiseled grooves.

Your gods won’t follow you here, it says.