Thing Proposed a name that can be said in any room

Dead Weight Mass without contact

It falls, it pulls, it bends a sufficiently careful weighing — and it does nothing else at all.

What it doesParticipates in gravity. Nothing more.

Passes throughRock, as though the rock were not there

Can beNothing. Not held, heated, burned, shielded, bought or sold.

AgeOlder than the dead city. It was always here.

Detected byAn irreducible discrepancy in careful weighing

Noticed byOne city, because one city weighs carefully enough

Nobody can say any of this

Saying it requires instruments that were outlawed three centuries ago. What this civilisation has instead is a permanent, irreducible discrepancy in every sufficiently careful weighing — and one city on earth that weighs carefully enough to have noticed.

The name is deniable, and that is the point

Dead weight is already an ordinary phrase. It is what any hoistman calls ballast, what any assayer calls the tare, what anybody calls a load that does nothing but sit there. And it came off a dead city.

So it can be said in any room in the Scales and nobody can tell which sense was meant. A line in a Balance Office schedule reading dead weight is either a declaration of ballast or a declaration of the anomaly, and no Balance Master will ever be made to say which.

Which means there are now two candidate explanations for those unexplained allowances — the Craft, and the node — and no instrument on earth that can separate them.

Proposed: it has no plate name at all

Every enduring thing in this world carries a Latinate inscribed name. This one does not, because to Latinise it would be to admit it exists.

The obvious form — Pondus Mortuum — is available, correct, and has never been cut into brass anywhere. In a civilisation where the name is the record, a substance the whole world stands on and no plate acknowledges is a scandal that has been waiting three hundred years to be noticed.

Awaiting a ruling.

Where it is thickest

At every node. The fragment holds a cavity open and the displaced mass is packed into a shell around it, pressing inward and never touching — and the shell lies above the fragment.

Everyone who carries the flinch is pushed away from concentrated dead weight. Not by fear and not consciously: they simply do not go, do not look, do not stay, and if asked will give a perfectly good reason that is not the reason.

At city depth the effect is nil, which is why every city can stand on the ground it was founded on. It bites only when you cut down toward it.