Of the Charter

The old harbor

Before the charter there was a harbor on the west shore of a bay, and above it a quarter of narrow streets that follow no plan anyone has found. A low cloud came in off the water most nights, and it rained most nights, as it still does. The harbor had a customs house, a fish market and a few thousand people, and nothing about it drew attention except the depth of its water and the shelter of its bay, which are the two things a cable company looks for.

The charter

Nineteen years before the Parousia a consortium of cable companies and a sovereign fund bought a charter for the bay and made a city of it. The Nodus Charter created a data haven with its own light law, which was written to be light. Under that law data and traffic in the city were untouchable, and an implant answered only to the clinic that fitted it. The charter was held by a company, the Nodus Charter Company, which ran the city from Charter House as a board runs a firm, and for nineteen years Nodus had a chairman where other cities have a mayor. It kept a roll of the charter’s persons at the Registry on the Great Avenues, where every human was entered at birth or on arrival.

The founders named the city for the cables it was built to receive, since nodus is Latin for a knot, and the root of the word node. The people who came to live there shortened the name to Nod within a year, and so gave the city, without meaning to, a name older than the charter by some thousands of years. The Cainites have never believed that it happened without meaning.

The charter answered to no state. The state whose coast it was leased the bay and the land around it to the Company for ninety-nine years and gave up its law there. The Record does not name it. The only address it gives for Nodus is the one Genesis gives for Nod, on the east of Eden (Genesis 4:16).

THE CHARTER WHOLE, IN TWELVE ARTICLES

The eleven cables

The charter carried landing rights for eleven transoceanic cables from four continents, and all eleven came ashore on the ocean beach west of the bay mouth, which the city calls the Beach and the charter called the Landing. Their names are TETHYS, HALCYON, MERIDIAN, KESTREL, ORPHEUS, PELAGIA, BOREAS, LODESTAR, SIRIUS, HESPER and PHOSPHOR. The last two were laid by the same consortium and named for the evening star and the morning star, which are one planet seen from either side of the night. Each came up the sand into a cable house of its own. From the cable houses all eleven ran inland together in a single trench under the old harbor, the conduit the city calls the Trunk, to the head of the bay, where the Company would raise the one building in which all eleven meet.

The stones

The crews who dug the cable vaults under the old harbor came on foundations older than anything in the archaeological record, laid in courses of black stone and cut with glyphs that nobody could read. The press called them Enoch’s Stones as a joke, after the first city in Genesis, and the name stuck; Old Nod is called the Stones on the street to this day.

The glyphs are marks of the kind Cain cut on himself, one to a stone, and they are the oldest cipher on Earth. Cain “went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod” (Genesis 4:16), which is to say out of its sight, and the city he built there was the first the Throne could not read. It went under with the rest of the world in the Flood.

Within a year of the charter most of the old harbor had been bought, house by house, by a company nobody could see into, Stonecutter Holdings, which paid the asking price for every house, in full and on the day, so that the press wrote it up as a speculator betting on the cables. It belonged to the Cainites. They had kept the location of Nod for eighteen hundred years as the one secret their tradition existed to protect, and when the crews found the stones they came to live on top of them. Their saying about the city is that Nod chose the network.

In the charter’s first year the Company put the city’s name on a roof in the Stones, NODUS in neon letters eight meters high on a board on steel legs, facing southwest toward the sea so that the cable ships would read it from the water, and the charter’s sign burned magenta over the roofs of Old Nod every night for nineteen years.

The tide

The charter’s power came from the sea. Across the mouth of the bay Tidewright, an old firm of sea walls and tide mills that came in the charter’s first year, laid a barrage of concrete with turbine houses along it, and the tide ran through the turbines on the flood and on the ebb and lit the city. Power in Nodus was cheaper than anywhere on the coast, and the datacenters came for it. They went up on the low ground of the east shore, which had been won from the bay inside the barrage, below low water, behind dykes of its own and kept dry by pumps, and the district was called the Flats; the largest of them belonged to Stillwater Compute, a compute house from abroad, whose halls ran day and night on the tide.

The city that grew

The city filled the shores of the bay in fewer years than anyone had planned for. Workers’ housing went up in long terraces on the slope north of the old harbor, and the district was called the Terraces; its southern edge faced Old Nod across a single street. The towers of the new money went up on the high ground north and east, along avenues laid out wide enough to land aircraft on, and the district was called uptown. The Charter Company built a transit line, the Charter Line, whose lines were joined under a round plaza at the head of the bay called Station Circle, and it laid out public gardens along the north shore, the Charter Gardens, where people walked by the water on the few dry evenings. Brightwall, which had lit the streets of other cities for half a century, put screens on every surface the charter allowed, and the charter allowed nearly every surface. The city’s peace was kept by the Company’s own force, the Charter Wardens. By the Parousia about nine million people lived around the bay.

The Wards

Most of the nine million never worked on Chrome Row or in Babel’s vault, and never lived uptown. The Company housed them in the Wards, which it put up in the boom years on the ground north and west of the Terraces and east beyond the Flats, block after block on grids of its own, and numbered; the street gave the neighborhoods names, and the names stuck where the numbers did not. The Kilns were named for the brickworks that made the blocks, the Sidings for the yards where the trams were kept at night, and Turbine Row for the barrage’s crews, who lived along it. High Meadow was the Company’s own name for eight slabs of thirty-six floors whose lifts were out more often than they ran. The Charter Line ran trams down the long roads of the Wards, and the Four, which came down out of the North Wards and turned back at Lanes Top, at the head of the steep streets of the Terraces called the Lanes, was the tram the Terraces took to work, and the one they complained of. The brickworks built its men a club when it built the Kilns, with a bar down one wall, a stage at the end and a sprung floor, and the Kilns held its weddings there and its talent nights.

The dockers, the drivers and the crews of the cable houses belonged to the Harbor and Freight Union, which the crews who dug the cable vaults had founded in the charter’s first year, and which stopped the port for twenty-three days in P-8 over the night shift, until the Company settled. The harbor printed the Tide Table on the quays every week for the boats, as it had before the charter, and most of the city never read it. Most of the city carried a Locket, a phone made in Nodus that answered to its owner and to nobody else. On wet nights, which were most nights, the city went to the Rialto, or to the Cold Store on the harbor, or to bed.

The Row

Under the light law any clinic could fit any implant into anyone who could pay for it, and the clinics came to Nodus as the datacenters had come for the tide. They set up along one long avenue running north from the eastern edge of Old Nod to the foot of the ridge, and the first implant house on it had one word on its sign, CHROME, which gave the street its name. Chrome Row became the place the world came to be altered with lenses and ports, plated hands, grafts and horns, gene-work, and whatever the clinics had learned that week. The world came in through the Company’s airfield on the flat ground of the East Wards, and by the last years of the charter most of its arrivals were booked into the clinics and healed at the Hotel Splendid, halfway up the Row, which kept a nurse on every floor and blackout blinds for new eyes. In the year the first house opened, a noodle counter opened at the top of the Row under a sign of one word, NOODLES, with six stools and a pot that has not been emptied since, and the clinics’ queues formed at it before dawn. Its signs were single words, CLINIC and CHROME among them, and they lit the underside of the cloud magenta every night until the night the sky opened.

The Tree

The law that let a clinic fit a lens let it sell a longer life. Twelve years before the Parousia a firm on the Row called Twelvefruit gave the first course of what the city came to call the Tree, in which a year of gene-work and cell therapy, given again when its hold ran out about three years later, halted the body’s aging and then walked it slowly back to its best year. The street took the name from the tree of life in Genesis, which the Cherubim were set to guard after the expulsion “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” (Genesis 3:22). The firm took its own from the tree of life at the other end of scripture, which “bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month” (Revelation 22:2), and chose it as a boast, as the Company had chosen Babel.

The course was dear at first and cheap within a few years. By the last census of the charter most adults in Nodus were on it, and of all of them, in a city of nine million, eleven died of age in that year. The census counted 3,112 residents past a hundred, on their way to the hundred and twenty years that Genesis allots to man, as most read the sixth chapter, the chapter in which the sons of God take wives (Genesis 6:3); the oldest of them had the body of a woman of thirty. The congregations refused it, the Terraces’ before all the others, and on the steep lanes of the Terraces the old still looked old. Of the eighteen thousand people who died of age in Nodus that year, three in four had lived there. The Company had laid out the Acre on the West Road in the charter’s second year, walled acres of grass for a city that expected to die, and by the last year of the charter only the Terraces’ rows in it were filling.

The world outside

The world beyond the bay bent around the charter within a few years. Under the light law a text held in Nodus was out of every state’s reach, and whatever the world most wanted kept from its governments came to be kept there. The states passed laws of their own about what their people might send to Nodus, and their people sent it anyway, since the cheapest road for their traffic ran through the Landing.

The Tree did more. Nodus sold the course to anyone who came, and the world came for it, until the Company’s airfield took flights at every hour of the night. Some states forbade the course and some paid for it, and where a state paid, its pension funds and its insurers rewrote their tables for lives that age no longer ended. Congregations across the world refused it, as the Terraces’ did. A mind on the charter’s roll was a person inside the Bounds and property outside them, since no court abroad ever entered one as a person, and none of the 1,146 ran anywhere but Nodus.

By the night the sky opened, the world had spent nineteen years arranging its borders, its markets, its laws and its prayers around the bay.