Threads of the Spindle

Tess Varek had learned the lanes like a seamstress learned the grain of cloth: by touch, by listening for the slight give where one fibre shifted into another. She worked in the underbow of the Spindle, a ring-city that stitched itself to the hull of an old, slow star and hummed with commerce the way an animal hums with sleep. From her balcony in the Lattice Quarter she watched the threads of traffic outside the transparent shell — long, pale ribbons of lane-light that tied orbital towers and merchant tugs into the hush of passage. When she closed her eyes she could feel them under her palms, a thrum through boot soles and through the old scar along her left wrist where a docking clamp had once bitten her. That scar still answered when a wrong tune tried to cross a right-of-way.

She had not been born to the Spindle; a childhood unsure and full of cramped cargo holds had taught her to make something steady of motion. She wove courses for medium freighters and patched drift-sails for fishermen who hauled micro-filament kelp from orbital kelpfields. Her tools were small — a thrum-stick, a string of shards that acted like a needle, and a little hand-carved loom that she kept on a hook by the hatch. People called her 'weaver' half in jest, half in pride, because when a pilot came in with the wrong line print Tess could locate the knot by feel and pull the right thread through like a tailor fixing an ill seam.

This morning the market smelled of boiled tuber, hot oil and the faint metallic tang of ion-smoke. Voices rose and fell in six languages that had braided here — the old miners' tongue, a soft trade-dialect, the clipped speech of sanctioned engineers. Tess moved among stalls stacked with drink-bottles and autoprints, exchanging a patch for a coil of filament, flashing a grin to the spice seller who had given her extra lemon once when a little child had sat too close to a hot joint. Her friend Ono, a courier turned tea-seller, called to her from a stall draped in blue fabric.

— 'You still touching the lanes like they are made of wool?' Ono joked, as Tess handed him a small coil of tether.

— 'Only when they pucker,' Tess said, and the coil changed hands.

Above them, hidden behind a haze of atmospheric curtains, the Spindle's Archive rose like a stitched breastplate — the museum to the Loom, the ancient harmonic array that steadied the lanes beyond the ring. People seldom saw the Loom; it lived in the Archive's inner vaults, under tempered glass and Council wardens, a thing of myth and brass. On festival days an elder might hum its old songs through a cracked speaker and children would clap along, and for most of the city's life it was a kindness and a superstition. It kept lanes where lanes should be. It let commerce thread cleanly through the dangerous eddies near the Spine. It had been there forever.

Tess had never expected the Loom to be anything other than a protection — a thing to be grateful for and forget. But she had also never wanted to see those old, safe passages closed to the small folk, leased only to fleets that paid a toll and wore the Governor's seal. She kept her thoughts folded that way, like a needle with its thread. The Archive was a story of care and of complacency. She would go on fixing freighters until she could no longer lift a thrum-stick. This was, she told herself, the honest shape of life in the shadow of the Spindle.