Warmth

There are no forests under the roof, no open fire to be had for the taking, no easy seams to dig and burn. What we have is the warm water that rises from the deep stone, the heat of our own bodies, and whatever we are clever enough not to lose. So we are careless with none of it. Heat is caught, slowed, led where it is needed, lent, owed and repaid. Our oldest contracts are written not in coin but in warmth, and a hearth-debt is a real debt, answerable in a court.

The warm water does not simply heat a room and leave. It is led on a long route — through the fish rooms and the algae trays, the fungal shelves and the wash benches, the surgery, the drying stacks, the sleeping districts — and only when it has given up everything useful is it let go from a civic level. Ceramic valves and panes of cold-glass let anyone see where the heat is and where it is bound, because a system everyone can read is a system everyone can keep honest.

Our food follows the same logic: the sea we can reach, the warm-water gardens we tend, preserved fats and fungi and shellfish, and the seed-stock the South Road brings. We can host a skytrader's whole crew without strain, because before their ship is even moored we have reckoned what they will cost us in warmth and water and salt, and set it against what they carry.