Stations and Shadows Statera Perpetua — a transcription of a Craft working map
A map of a city whose subject is not the city but the parts of it that appear on no plate.
The four accepted plates overlap along the north and the east and agree about almost nothing else. Each is true, none is complete, and the surveyors have been publishing irreconcilable views for three hundred years.
The south-west flank. Also everything below the bench, the interior, and the underside of the aprons — which between them are most of the city by volume.
Larger peaks stand off to the north, the east and the south, untouched, and will never be cut. There is nothing in them worth the trouble.
The one piece of chartered ground whose position is set by the workings rather than by the walk — it must be re-laid to stay square to the face. Its heading is south-west, which is the flank that appears on no plate.
West-south-west, out across the open valley floor. The aprons are already reaching along it. This is where the city will be standing when everyone now alive is dead.
What makes it a working map
Its subject is the shadows rather than the city. An assay plate shows you what can be seen; this shows you what cannot — which is the only part of a place worth knowing if your work is to move through it unnoticed, and to know where every ton of it sits.
Held on no paper. This is a transcription, and the fact that a transcription exists at all is the single most irregular thing in the whole record.
The Craft keep the only complete image of any city and they do not keep it written down, because a written thing is a recorded thing and they are the entries that do not exist. Everything here is therefore approximate, undated and unattributed, and should be read as a sketch of a memory rather than a survey.
Distance is a duration
The scale bar is calibrated in beats walked, not in feet. Which is not quaintness: in a city that moves a few feet a year, a measured distance goes stale and a walked one does not. Ask how far the fourth bench is and you will be told how long it takes, by someone who has never considered answering any other way.
The four stations, and what each one is lying about
Plate I · the facing ridge. The terraces and the funicular spine. The most reproduced view, and the one every visitor arrives expecting. It shows the city as a stair, which flatters the engineering and hides the workings entirely.
Plate II · the high notch. The highest station, and it flatters the mountain — from up there the Scales looks like something built on a peak rather than something eating one.
Plate III · the shoulder. Above the workings: cranes, gantries and the tiered plaza. The only accepted view in which the city is visibly industrial, and the assay houses prefer it for exactly that reason.
Plate IV · across the ravine. Lowest and closest, taking in the great domes. The plate on the Scales' own card. It is the most honest of the four and still shows perhaps a third of the place.
Why nobody has simply combined them
Three centuries of trying. The plates cannot be reconciled because they were not made at the same time, and the subject moves — a survey from the shoulder taken forty years ago is a survey of a mountain that is no longer that shape.
So the discipline of combining plates is a real and respected profession in the Scales, it has produced no agreed result in three hundred years, and its practitioners are unbothered by this. Out of true is what they call a composite that will not close.
The Craft do not have this problem, because they are not working from plates.
Type
Map
a drawing, not a document
Status
Canon
Related
Open on this plate
- Who transcribed it, and how it left Craft hands
- The mountain's pre-charter name
- What the composite-makers are called
- Whether the Rail can keep its alignment and stay on a plate