The Threshold of a World

Or-Vesh, Kharak. Around year 4200 of the Common Reckoning.

Unfamiliar Air

When the freight platform stopped, Iva decided that the city smelled of a spoiled supper. An open serving window above the unloading area breathed hot oil, sour dough and something so bitter that her mouth tightened. At home, bitterness meant: do not eat that, it has gone bad. Here people queued for it.

“Are we really going to live here?” she asked.

Leira tried to lift their last crate off the platform. Its lower handle broke, the crate struck the railing, and a bone clasp flew through a gap. Iva trapped it under her foot. Her mother said a word she normally reserved for closed doors.

The people at the window laughed. One customer put down his wrapped food, helped lower the crate and asked how far they had to carry it. Leira said the Upper Gallery.

“Eat now, then. It will be cold by the time you get there.”

He retrieved his parcel without even giving his name. Iva expected her mother to refuse to spend money on their very first evening. Instead, Leira looked at the broken handle and joined the queue.

They ate by the wall, resting the warm flatbreads on the crate lid. At first the bitter paste stung Iva’s tongue; then a nutty flavour emerged beneath it. She finished before her mother. They did not go back for another portion: room rent, glue and several days without earnings still lay ahead. Iva lifted the last crumb from the lid with a damp fingertip.

Stone terraces rose above the unloading area. Walkways connected them, shop lights stirred beneath awnings, and beyond them the cliff disappeared into dusk. Beside the river they had left, evening widened the world: the far bank vanished and water joined the sky. Here darkness closed one passage after another until the city broke into small illuminated rooms beneath the open air.

Leira stood with her folded upper vexes held by a travelling wrap. After the long journey, the fabric chafed at the bases of the membranes. She did not dare release them among the crates. Iva noticed, but instead of helping she asked how much farther they had to go. She wanted somebody, at least, to know an answer in advance today.

A Room above the Passage

They climbed the wrong stairs. Then they found the right ones, only to meet a door closed for a delivery. A woman carrying a document bag led them around by another passage. A name was stitched on her bag: Veyra.

“They used to dry cloth here,” she explained. “People still say ‘through the drying house’ when they mean going to buy food. Ask for the Upper Gallery and they may send you to two other places.”

Iva wanted to ask why they could not choose one name. Leira spoke first.

“At home we had the New Stairs. They were older than my mother.”

Veyra laughed and took hold of the crate with the broken handle. All three carried it along the last stretch: Leira by its remaining handle, Veyra underneath, Iva keeping the lid in place. Leira’s pressing boards and tools shifted inside. Their sound was so familiar that, for the first time that day, Iva stopped staring at her feet.

The room was smaller than it had looked in the image they had received. A low sleeping frame stood in a corner, a shelf for dishes in a recess. But the window faced outwards. Iva opened it and saw part of the city below: roofs, a reservoir, a strip of freight road. Two lights moved slowly along it, disappearing behind an outcrop.

Veyra left after explaining where to fetch water and whom to ask about disposing of offcuts. Leira undid her travelling wrap. Her upper vexes trembled and cautiously opened as far as the room allowed. The skin of her face was darker than usual; Iva did not try to decide whether from weariness or anger. She took her mother’s bag and hung it on a hook.

“The table will go here,” Leira said.

“Then there will be nowhere to walk.”

“It will have to fold.”

“What if you need to work when I need to walk?”

“We will argue. We are good at that.”

Iva laughed first. Then she cried, which spoiled the laughter. She was angry with her mother for moving, with herself for crying, and with this strange room where the sound of her tears had not yet become familiar. Leira sat beside her. The explanation about a workshop commission, the costly journey and the impossibility of returning now was ready; she had repeated it to herself all the way. But she explained none of it to her daughter. They sat until a crash of falling dishes rose from the courtyard below.

“There,” Iva said, wiping her face. “Somebody is settling in worse than we are.”

Whose Year Is on the Cover?

The crate contained three bookbinding presses, tools, spare thread and a book Leira could not bring herself to sell. Its cover was stamped: River Routes. 4028. Iva had known it since childhood. Her mother tucked patterns and notes between its pages, and once a dry flatbread that everyone in the house subsequently searched for.

Leira opened the book on the table by the window. Symbols crowded the drawn riverbank. The landing beside which she had grown up still bore a different name. A canal filled in before she was born crossed the page in a confident blue line.

“That is wrong,” Iva said.

“That is long ago.”

On the reverse of the map, an earlier owner had written where his boat ran aground. Leira showed her daughter the note. The printed line promised passage; the hand in the margin disagreed. The boat’s owner had added a small curse that Leira chose not to read aloud. Iva deciphered it herself.

The facing page showed year zero: the introduction of the Common Reckoning. Earlier still, in −750, the Treaty of Unity had been concluded. Iva tried to imagine people who had lived their entire lives before year zero. They had not been waiting for time to begin: they had their own names for seasons, debts with repayment dates, birthdays. The minus signs appeared beside their years much later, in books like this one.

“And our agreement?” she asked.

Leira found −742: the sharing of water at Three Gates. Eight years stood between the treaty and the local agreement. On the page, they fitted beneath a finger; the people waiting for water had had to live through every one.

Iara’s name was printed small. Other names followed, then a list of places, then an account of later disputes. Iva turned the pages. She wanted to find somebody from her own family, although her mother had already told her they were not there. Shared history still sometimes felt like a celebration to which only other people’s relatives were invited.

Leira took out the note with the workshop address and laid it between the pages. In the morning she would offer her hands and tools to people who had so far seen only samples of her work. The book remained open at the riverbanks. Until she fell asleep, Iva felt as though two different homes were looking at her, one through the window, the other from the table.

The Long Day

She woke too early. Khar’Vex had not yet appeared above the buildings, but people below were already arguing about a delivery. Their local day was longer than an Earth day—twenty-seven hours and a little more, measured in Earth hours. The people of Théxar did not wake with that comparison in mind. Iva knew the time by the light in the window, her mother’s voice, and whether she could eat before they left.

Leira went to the workshop. Her daughter received three instructions: bring water, buy a little soft cloth for covers, and do not spend the change on sweets. On the back of the list, her mother had drawn the turn beside the reservoir. A succession of arrows followed, which Iva considered an insult to her abilities.

Half an hour later she stood beside a second reservoir, remarkably like the first.

The city lived on several levels at once. Below, it smelled of heated brakes and packing fibre; higher up, of kitchens; against the cliff itself the air was cooler and water dripped from a crack. Someone’s four ears turned towards an abrupt knock overhead. Someone shaded an upper eye with a hand to examine a load on a lift. Iva scarcely noticed these movements: to her they were as ordinary as adjusting a strap.

At a turn she heard a familiar tune. At home they sang it while carrying water. Here two workers sang as they lifted a roll onto a trolley, and a third supplied words she had never heard. Nothing of the river remained. The song was now complaining about stairs.

Lift it up, hold it there,
do not let it go quite yet.
Ask the waiting stair
how much waiting it can get.

It can stand; we must go.
It stays quiet; we complain.
Take the edge and hold it so—
I will catch my end again.

They repeated the last line until the roll was in place. Then the singer stumbled, swore and asked them to undo the strap: they had fastened it from the wrong side. Nobody considered that a bad ending to the song.

Iva asked the way. One worker recognised the workshop her mother had gone to and showed her a short passage. She decided that she had almost found it herself. That allowed her to say thank you without humiliation.

Things You Take with You

At the workshop, Leira stood over an open album. She had been asked to repair its split spine without replacing the old cover. Marks left by lower fingers remained on it: for years its owner had picked the book up in the same way. A new binding would not have those marks.

Iva laid the cloth on a free corner of the bench. Her mother touched it and said nothing. Only then did her daughter realise that she had bought cloth that was too thick. It could be used for cases, but not for the covers they had discussed.

“I will exchange it.”

“Tomorrow. Today I know where to find you.”

Leira received her first small commission. The payment would not cover the move, but it would buy food for the next few days. Outside, she took her daughter’s lower hand and led her towards the window selling bitter flatbreads. Iva did not mention that she now knew the way better.

At home they unpacked. The tools took the shelf, the threads a box against the wall. The river book found a place in the recess beside two cups. Leira attached a new handle to the crate lid; tomorrow the crate would become the base of a folding table.

After dark, a quiet ringing of a foldbox came from the next room. The player repeated one passage again and again, making a different mistake each time. At first Iva listened, then began waiting for the mistake, then grew annoyed. Leira said the neighbours probably felt much the same about the sound of a bookbinding press.

Beyond the window, shops slowly went dark. Far below, a truck turned towards the climb to the depot. At the Round Hall, somebody might be checking seats before a performance; at Grey Ledge, somebody might still be packing field equipment; beside the distant river, a sluice was being closed. Iva did not know those people. Their occupations did not assemble themselves into a picture of the world for her. She simply saw lights continuing to move after her own day had ended.

She wrote a short letter to her friend: there are stairs everywhere; the food is awful at first; then all right; Mother has found work. Then she added that you could see a long way from the window. She crossed out the last sentence and wrote it again, because her friend would certainly ask: a long way towards what?

There was no answer yet. Iva left the letter on the open river book and went to bed. At last the neighbour played the difficult passage without a mistake, but she was already asleep and did not hear.