Work Text:
Matteo swings from one rope to the next, his practiced hands catching the looped handles just before the wind blows them too far out of reach. There is an odd sameness to his trip, weaving between hanging spit fires and avoiding the trailing vines of his neighbour’s gardens. He pulls his legs up to stop himself from kicking a threadbare tent suspended from a rusted cable. The next bit is a slalom of clotheslines made from ancient electrical cords and tied-together rags. Matteo has crossed them all too many times to count, and easily avoids pulling shirts from the line or falling into the abyss below.
As a child he would take the cable cars, but the electricity ran out a long time ago. The city didn’t have trouble with electricity in the past, how could it with endless wind and sun? But now the turbines were rusting and the wires had all been stripped of copper to make things that sat lifeless and degrading in people’s homes. Some, when they realized that all their computers were failing, simply pitched the machines into the void with the day’s refuse. Matteo wonders sometimes where the trash went, but no one had ever climbed the mountains to complain. In the past he’d had a fear like the feeling of falling that someone was going to reach the peak and cut the ropes in retaliation for all the waste dropped on their head. Now he knew that there was no need to slice the great old cables, they were almost broken anyways.
Up ahead a colourful rope ladder drops down and Matteo stops suddenly by catching hold of a thick bar between two platforms. Beside him an old woman unzips her tent door and glares out at Matteo with all the force of 80 years. “The Hell are you thinking, shaking my whole house like that?” Matteo shrugs, a tricky feat while still hanging from the bar. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I’ll try to stop doing that”.
The old woman’s eyes narrow as she sees the black bands on his shoulders. “Are you going to work or coming from it? If you’re coming from it, you better be blessing every rope you touch. You’re going to end up burning the ropes, everything in your path will fall. What is wrong with you?”
Matteo carefully stops himself from rolling his eyes. As a net cleaner he is respected, even praised for his work in maintaining the integrity of the ropes. Unfortunately, part of this means cutting old strings and dropping heavy objects into the abyss to stop the city from pulling itself off the mountains with its own weight. Older folks think that once a person starts cutting ropes on purpose, they are cursed and all the ropes they touch are bound to break. In the old days the worst fear was falling from the ropes breaking, that was the terror that made Matteo’s grandparents wake up in the night and need their parents to tell them the ropes would hold. Now the frequent breaking of ropes is more of a given, and the weight of the city makes it all the more likely that hemp would fray.
“I’ll bless them on my way back, and I’ll bless myself at the end of the day. Don’t worry, I’m careful” he lies, as he starts to climb the ladder.
He reaches the top of the long ladder, which is tied to a large platform made from a wooden pallet hung from above by iron chains. Matteo sits down and looks around, before pulling his tools from his ancient burlap backpack. Bolt cutters, scissors, and a hacksaw, plus miles of twine. He has ropes wrapped about his waist, hidden under between two shirts. He’s naturally slim enough that it only makes him look healthy.
The day’s section of the great net is tattered and full of debris. Abandoned tents sway limply in the breeze. Long-dead plants and mildewy clothes hide cluster around an ancient meeting platform, its wooden slats rotted through.
Matteo slips on his climbing harness, usually an extravagance that would get him laughed at by any friends who might see him. A man in a harness is usually one too old to leave his tent, a young man being so over-cautious is a silly sight to see. As a net-cleaner, though, it is an absolute necessity. This part of the net is too dangerous for pride.
The first step is to cut everything off the ropes. The easiest part is cutting the inexplicably damp strings holding the lightest objects, some of them damaged by time to the point that Matteo can hardly tell what they originally were. As he moves on to the tents it gets harder and he switches to the bolt cutters to cut through the old chains. The last part, the meeting platform, requires the use of his hacksaw. He feels a sense of intense relief when the last part drops away, falling far below. He doesn’t worry about hitting anybody, the path downwards will have been cleared beforehand by his colleagues. Whenever a net demolition happens, they start at the very bottom of the city and work their way up, so that at each successive level they can freely let things fall through the column of empty air.
After a few hours he stops, having cut everything but the main ropes. He can’t keep going on the next level, because to do so would be to mess with the team’s schedule and risk a disaster if he drops something when no-one is expecting it. He returns to the first platform and starts walking along the surprisingly new wooden ties of a suspension bridge leading to the next job.
This job has already been cleared, now it is time to repair and replace the ropes. Matteo puts his climbing harness back down and begins to tie new pieces of rope next to the old ones. Once he is sure that the new ones will hold, he cuts the old ropes and watches them fall. This is the part that makes him supposedly cursed, and that gives him a creepy feeling like his grandparents are watching him angrily. As if to confirm the old superstitions, at that moment the awful scent of cremation wafts up from below, temporarily overpowering all thought of work.
They say that everyone in Octavia falls eventually, either by accident or when their bodies are dealt with. The custom of setting the body alight and waiting for it to fall apart and fall is considered disgusting, but is still carried out by people who are scared of the mysterious civilizations far below. They think it is better to let ash fall down than to let a whole body drop onto unsuspecting foreigners.
Matteo considers it all to be illogical, since the city is going to fall someday anyways and anyone foolish enough to live directly below probably doesn’t mind.