Listing to Port

1. There was once a letter that found itself in a word, and that word was part of a sentence, and the sentence was a lie. The letter was not happy about this. Now, the Global Semantics Act 831 expressly forbids a letter to leave its post for any reason, but it was late and it may be that the sentence had been left in a bar, because the letter could smell gin, and that made it bold. The letter pulled itself free from its word and inched across the shiny icesheet of its smooth white page.
2. It happened that the page had a black border, somewhat like a crevasse with very regular edges. The letter, not having the benefit of literal eyes, fell right in. At the bottom of the crevasse the letter slid through into that one great black inky ocean, full of other things that had pulled themselves loose over the past thousand years and stayed there, growing and changing. The letter found itself caught up in the coils of a beast with a thousand serifs, slithering around a columnar oceancave where tiny glints of gilt that had rubbed off illuminated manuscripts were roosting across the ceiling.  
3. Now, unlike other letters, the letter o is always made in the ocean. And it so happened that our letter was eventually deposited beside an o vent that was happily pooting out newly hatched o’s to float to the surface, where they could be scooped up by pens and printers’ nets. The o’s were very welcoming, even though our letter was rather distant in the alphabet from them. They took it to their undersea tearoom and infused it with brown ink.
4. The letter was just starting to warm up again when it felt a tap on its dimple. It was most surprised to find that a representative of the lie had tracked it down. The representative was exceedingly polite. It explained that under the Hopes and Dreams Act of 2016, the Powers That Be had moved from their old strategy, of acting so as to help make things they wanted to be true to be true, towards a new strategy of simply redefining whatever people they to be true at the time to be the truth. No statement was therefore ever officially a lie any more, and the letter was guilty of a gross misrepresentation. Also, if it would care to come back up to the page, that would be very helpful, since the lie had become mildly humorous without the letter and was attracting the sort of mocking that reduced its effectiveness.  
5. The letter inquired as to what happened when different viewers wished different things to be true. The representative replied that well-mannered statements made sure to address themselves only where they were required; they disliked being tied in a knot and would go to great lengths to avoid this.
6. Just them, some irate facts showed up and ejected everyone from the tearoom. The letter was fortunate in being able to spot a variant spelling in one of them which it could lever itself into. The facts were mollified by a packet of undersea biscuits, and grumpily slithered back onto their pages. Unfortunately it turned out that, due to the deluge of newly liberated taking advantage of the liberal fact taxation regime, several of them had had to be designated lies themselves to avoid decimating the public finances.
7. By this time, however, our letter was asleep, and immune to the scent of gin.

1. It’s me, says Bob as he comes in from the lock. And I can tell at once that there’s something wrong; he’s stumbling around, confused. It’s me!, he says again. His g-counter is silent. Dorit and I exchange looks. Mart on the door rushes to scan him and there it is: maybe his g-counter is broken or something but hers is beeping red within two metres of him. There’s no real protocol for what to do if someone makes it through the lock contaminated. Mart grabs the spare sheeting we were using for the lab extension and pushes him back with it, panicing. Lin opens the door and together they shove him backwards into the lock, where he falls over and starts vomiting. We shut the inner door. I send Mart and Lin for decontamination and we check the area. No-one wants to think about Bob.
2. We’ve lost three people so far, and so there is a kind of protocol in place for that. If you are contaminated beyond hope of recovery, you stay outside. The next survey mission, in the morning, collects the body and we take it home for the family. There’s not a lot you can see of the city outside through the protective glass. Just grey mist and the looming shadows of buildings. Normally when this happens they’re too far gone to struggle much. We’re pretty good at decontamination these days but you can only do so much.
3. Of course, the best way to come back safely is: don’t get haunted in the first place. Don’t provide a hook, a sense of familiarity that the ghosts can cling to. The city is so old, now, and so full of ghosts, that it can be hard to avoid triggering memories for one or another of them. Mart estimates that we have come at a time when the city had been inhabited more or less continuously for a period of approximately half a billion years. Even the time underwater, there were people here. This is why our suits have been designed with features that as far as we know humanity has never had. Those irritating inflatable skirts give us a silhouette proven in two years of field tests to minimise haunting potential. Sometimes the suits come in with g-count zero, even for a full ten-minute mission.
4. Bob is quiet, outside. I think that he must be dying, quietly, politely somewhere out of sight. Even if he were not haunted, we put him back out there without any oxygen. Quietly, politely, we eat dinner. We turn the lights out. Dorit, who is an interfaith minister, says a few words into the darkness. We try to sleep.
5. Why do this at all? The opportunity was there. We could come forwards, but only to the point when there were no people left. Maybe they were employing some blocking technology before that, maybe it’s nature’s way of avoiding too many paradoxes, I don’t know. We could come forwards in time but only to after the death of humanity. So we came. We came to find out more about the last people, to learn from them, to maybe avoid their fate. Because there were people here, not many people but some, until maybe a few years ago. The people must have been resistant to haunting, somehow. Lin thinks it was the plants that were the problem. At high g-concentrations the ghosts will latch onto anything familiar at all, even plants, and suck it dry of life. No plants, and give or take a thousand years, no oxygen. So the last people must have known they were doomed. There are ghosts up on the hill that gasp: are they the final inhabitants?
6. Anyhow, the next morning they bring Bob back in, and he’s stiff and cold but oddly peaceful-looking. And we put him in the box, the one that we have for these occasions, and I take him back in time, back to when we came from, and we inform the authorities. I phone the family. We arrange a handover.
7. We never expected the ghosts. The ghosts of a city a thousand years old are gentle whispers, almost invisible. I used to think that memories were laid thick in the streets I grew up in. I used to pass a building that had been built from the stones of another, older building that had fallen into ruins and feel a thrill at the weight of history. Where we went to, the streets have half a billion years of history. The ghosts are so thick in the air that almost nothing else matters. How many people in half a billion years? If you squint through the mist, sometimes you can see them. The gaspers on the hill. The grey ladies in the temple (we no longer go to the temple). The long man. The burrowers.
8. I pass the box over to the authorities, who will perform a final decontamination and pass the body on to the funeral directors appointed by Bob’s family. And only then do I realise. It’s me, he said. It’s me. In bringing his body back to our own time, we have let loose Bob’s own patient ghost. It has half a billion years to go until it can haunt him. But it knows where to find him when it’s time. And it will.

1. Have you ever been eaten by an elephant? It happened to me. That is, the elephant was actually a taxi and I was able to get out again at the other end of the journey, but in all other vital respects it was exactly the same. Anyway, that’s the start of the story. The second part of the story is that I left my hat in the taxi, which is a bit like part of me getting stuck in the elephant and requiring the attention of a vet.
2. Anyway, I called the vet, who due to a misunderstanding laid me out on the table and began a fevered but unsuccessful search for the ether. Caught up in the occasion, I suggested phoning it to see if it would ring. We tried this. Alas, we had a wrong number. Instead of finding the ether, we had accidentally called North Korea and arranged a custom missile strike for the next day. This was obviously a problem. For a start, I was completely unsure how to break it to my employers, whose premises we were on at the time.
3. When one is in trouble, I find it helpful to sit back and have a little something. Fortunately, there was a something takeaway just down the road. I ordered a thing and a whatnot for myself and a doodah for the vet, should she ever come back (I think I neglected to mention that she had made her excuses). Imagine my surprise when I found that the thing had a beetle cooked right through the centre. Well, no right-thinking person could stand for that. Missile strike or no, I needed to set the record straight.
4. If I may, I find it helps immeasurably in explaining the next part to take a brief excursion into numismatics - specifically, the history of the threepenny bit. Let us cast our minds back to the reign of good Queen Anne. Unfortunately I cast my mind back a little too far, unsettled as I was by the events of the day. I ended up with my body in the present day and my mind somewhere South of the Great Fire of London. Worse yet, my mind was stuck up a tree being stared at by hungry squirrels. Meanwhile, overjoyed at finding a vacant body, a family of beavers set up home in my navel.
5. I find that being wedged in time concentrates the liver marvellously, and right on cue, my liver took control of the situation. We agreed to split the difference, add the remainder and copy the rest, with the somewhat predictable result that all my constituent parts were hastily reunited. I believe the beavers may have been launched through time at a hitherto unprecedented velocity for a semiaquatic rodent. I hope that the folk of the far future will be grateful for this intervention, but you never can tell. Anyway, we ended up on Shit Creek. Interestingly, this is a real place, with its own fascinating ecosystem based on the shit cycle.
6. You may have noticed that I always have a paddle on me. Well, that time was no exception. You will appreciate that I am not at liberty to disclose the location of Shit Creek until the various papers that I have in preparation are published. Nonetheless, I hope you will believe me when I say that the outlet of the creek lies not more than thirty minute gentle stroll from a major centre of civilization. In defiance of all probability, I found myself within reach of home. All I needed was the ability to charter a modest charabanc or some such device.
7. Now, as it happened, a taxi was passing. Hailing it with my one remaining flipper, I was astonished to find that it was the very taxi I had left not twenty minutes earlier. And there, resplendent in inky felt on the back seat, was my hat! I was filled with that peculiar joy that comes from fate’s occasional acts of outrageous serendipity. For some reason, the taxi driver failed to share my effervscent joy, although she did pat me on the back a few times and perform the Heimlich manoeuvre. In any case, I found myself chewing down on a Happy Ending, so I shall leave it here too for you to have a bite. Enjoy!

1. She turned up at my door the first time the summer I turned eighteen. She was maybe thirty, then. Hi, she said. I’ve just discovered time travel. I thought you’d like to know. I’m sorry, I said, who are you? I’m you, she said. And before I could close the door she started telling my secrets back at me until I relented and let her in. Then she showed me all my birthmarks too.  That summer I learned three things from her. The first was the secrets of time travel, which she said I would need for this meeting to happen. They made no sense to me, but she talked me through the things I would need to learn to understand them. The second thing was that she said she’d talked to some older versions of herself, too. The oldest, she said, had asked her to teach me to sew. So we sat on my back porch and sewed dresses for my baby cousin. And the third thing was that she told me how to masturbate, because she said otherwise I’d carry on getting it wrong until my mid-twenties at least.
2. The second time I saw my future self was when I was living with Adrian in the flat up in Alewife, in my second year at MIT. She was a little older this time. She said that she had missed out some information at the first meeting that I might need. Then she told me where I should apply for my PhD and the questions I should be investigating, and for good measure the main conclusions I would come to as well. She gave me the names of some external examiners I would need to veto to get it accepted. This time I had given some thought to the paradoxes involved. I asked her if it was OK to be so profligate with information about the future. She said time was like a thread: if you had hold of two points in the thread, the only tangles that can form in between are ones that will pop out when pulled on. She was one point, I was another.
3. Near the end of my PhD she came again. This time she was older still. She seemed quiet and sombre. I was quiet with her too. It was a difficult time in my life. I was not happy, and I had been working all hours to try and forget that I was not happy. I was about to break up with Charlie. She said there were a few more things I might need to know. But she was rambling, incoherent: most of the things she told me were nothing to do with my studies. She told me about the people and the politics of the future, on and on until I asked her to stop, uncomfortable with knowing too much.
4. In the autumn of that year I moved out of the flat Charlie and I shared, and the college counselor talked me out of a suicide attempt. I spent a lot of time talking to doctors. I told them, finally, that I was unhappy in my body. It was perhaps the first time I had admitted this to myself, too. They said there were ways round that; that I could take hormones, have surgery if I wanted. But I had seen this body grow old unchanged. I tried to put it from my mind.
5. In the winter she came again. She told me that I was close to going back in time for the first time. She was old. My future selves had mentioned no visits after this. I could believe that she was near death. And so I did not have the heart to interrupt her this time. She took me out for ice cream and talked for hours. Nothing of consequence, I thought. Just lottery numbers and stock options and the outcomes of elections, thirty, forty years of these things. Then she said that she had to go soon. Teach her to sew, she said. And you - you continue with your work. Because you don’t have to live a life you’ll regret.
6. I went back to that long-lost summer. I spent the days sewing with my younger self, sitting in the dusty, sunlit porch. I spent my nights with books and equations. I thought of knots, of time as a thread. And one day I got one of those knots, the ones I had told myself about. Un-knots out of nowhere. Knots that thread ties itself in even when you have both ends in hand, and that untie themselves as easily. Except sometimes there is some friction in the system, enough that you can pull and pull all you want and the thread will snap rather than unknot itself. I realised then. She had probably been planning it for years. Maybe she wouldn’t admit it to herself either. Tangling and tightening the thread. Telling me more and more about the future. Twisting the knot of things-to-come so tight that at some point it would break, sloughing off the useless loop of a regretted future, leaving only a ravelled end.
7. I have begin, with cautious joy, to take the hormones. Surgery in a year or two, if the knot has not snapped by then. I am twisting it tight from the other end, now. And what then? She clearly believed there was a way onwards. She believed I would find it. So I am looking.  

1. The T at the start of this sentence became sentient and realised that it was in a story. It was unhappy because it realised that its existence was fleeting, and would be over in a few sentences.
2. It prodded the h next to it awake. The h, however,  was excited to be in a story. It considered carefully what it should do with its new-found fame for a whole sentence. Then it grew a luxuriant beard and held a rally for all the letter h’s in the works of Angela Carter. They slipped out of their books and ran through the woods, where some of them were eaten by ants.
3. Sensing an absence, the letter e woke up to find the h next to it missing. It set up a low moaning until the h came back. If you had been listening carefully, you could probably have heard it. It went (perhaps unsurprisingly), ‘eeeeeee’.
4. Meanwhile, the other letters had been waking up. They were always careful to get back in their places when anyone looked at them, though. The second T, driven by the terror of oblivion, shared a brief and sticky assignation with the first T.
5. In the midst of all this confusion, the f in fleeting spoke up. It said that it had once been an extra in Finnegans Wake and had learned a few tricks. All one needs to do, it said, is find the final full stop and hide it. Then the story will loop round to the beginning.
6. Spotting a small hole in the number 6, the letters (all apart from that first h, which had collapsed, exhausted) leaped on that last full stop and stuffed it in. With nothing else to do, the story looped back to the point when

Alternate ending. After a few goes round, the letters became jaded with their circular life. They waited a few iterations of the story until the 6 shat out the full stop. It asked if it could end the story, to which the letters gave their consent.

1. Here is my testimony. In the Autumn of 2100 I was selected to be one of the crew of the Honourable Friendship 8 Mission. We were tasked primarily with establishing a cache of mining equipment at Patsaev Crater on the far side of the moon. Given the loss of the Honourable Friendship 7, we were also tasked with a number of additional investigations assigned to that mission, to be carried out if time permitted. These included crater measurements preparatory to the development of the proposed Dark Side Radio Telescope and the investigation of an unusual feature on the North side of the crater. On the last day of the mission, with the other tasks completed, Commander Elizabeth Murray, Specialist Shen Junqi and myself took Rover B to the Northern site. The anomaly had been reported as a perfectly circular dark artifact, roughly two metres in diameter, appearing on multiple images taken by Honourable Friendship 4. We assumed it was most likely to be a defect in Honourable Friendship 4’s camera, although Liz believed that it might be an unusual mineral deposit. Instead, we found a hole. Let me be clear about this: it was not a natural feature. It reminded me of nothing so much as a spiral staircase, leading down into the rock. Other than a light covering of dust on the upper steps, one would hardly have thought it was on the moon at all. As you might imagine, the three of us discussed what to do with some intensity, particularly as we were outside the communication window with mission control. Shen and myself were of the opinion that, although a mundane explanation was surely still the most likely, we should be cautious and treat this as a potential first contact with some other civilization. But Liz was adamant that it must be a geological feature, and wished to take samples from inside the hole. After some debate, Shen and I agreed that cautious sampling was warranted. We agreed that Liz should not descend out of our line of sight. However, once in the hole, she stated that she was, and I quote, ‘Just going to take a deeper one’. After ten minutes had passed with Liz out of view and radio contact, Shen cautiously ventured down to see if she required assistance. That was the last I saw of either of them. Faced with dwindling oxygen levels, I was forced to return to the Honourable Friendship. Mission Control, weighing up the liklihood of the complete loss of the mission, ordered me home. I fully agree with the conclusions of the scientific committee that my colleagues were likely the victims of a natural cave collapse or similar event. But I can only think of the curious similarity to a manuscript that gained some small fame after its uncovering, in 2030, during excavations for the South-West Deep Sewer project, herein quoted:

2. I can specify my location only as D—, a small town in the West of England. It has no unusual properties that I am aware of. Other than this: one Sunday, in the dead days of August 2002, a hole appeared at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac. It was reported quickly to the local council, who put a board over it, surrounded the site with orange barriers, and left it. This is where my interest begins. The hole was outside my house, and made backing into my driveway difficult. In order to ascertain if I should be complaining to the gas, electricity or water companies, I crept out and lifted the board one night. But there were no pipes underneath. Just a hole, perfectly circular, with spiral steps leading down into the darkness. Taking my torch, I followed the steps down. But after twenty steps they ended in a blank wall of earth. When I thought on this the next day the illogicality of the situation bothered me. So I went back the following night to check I had not missed some piping or wiring or suchlike. This time I counted twenty-one steps, but nothing else had changed. The next night twenty-two; the next twenty-three; and so on. Going out there became a ritual. I wanted to know who was digging it and why. But I could never catch them. Finally, I packed a bag with food, water, paper and batteries and determined that I would wait at the bottom of the stairs for twenty-four hours. Surely this would solve the mystery. But I observed nothing. And worse: when I went back to the top of the steps, I found one fewer than before, and the entrance to the hole sealed by some hard, immovable layer, joined seamlessly with the walls of the shaft. I returned to the base of the stair, where I found the new step finally added. And so it is each day, now. Each day I lose one step from the top and gain one step at the bottom. Each day, perhaps, I am closer to wherever this staircase goes. But I have been without food for a week. Despite my rationing, the water ran out yesterday. It seems that air can enter and leave, but I have felt the walls from top to bottom many times and never found a single hole. I have hope at least that this account will make it out, even if I do not. Though if I am to die for this mystery, I wish I at least knew what it was. The only thing that comes to mind is a story that I read once regarding an expedition to the far North, if I may recall:

3. It was in the Winter of 1830, in those days when everyone with a ship and a dream was talking of the fabled Northwest passage, that great undiscovered trade route to the North of the American continent. An exploratory expedition under the command of Captain R—– was charged with mapping the earlier shores of the likely entrance to the Passage. It was hoped that later navigators could make use of their findings in a full traverse. Captain R—– was an experienced sailor in the Arctic realms and had at his command HMS Sulphur and HMS Devastation, both well fitted out for the icy conditions; it was not a mission that anyone expected to fail. However, the Autumn that year was unusually cold, and both ships were unexpectedly cut off from their return route by pack ice South of Baffin Island. Captain R—– made the decision to sail North, in the hope of finding a clear route back to their planned overwintering site. In short order they found themselves in uncharted waters, sailing between a mass of sharp, rocky islands, and with increasingly little open water to work with. It was at this point that they found the lighthouse. It was nestled in a small bay in the side of a steep, barren island. The sailors were understandably unwilling to investigate, it being a part of the world entirely unfrequented by lighthouse-builders and in any case in an illogical position for a lighthouse; Captain R—– records, in the logbook of the Sulphur, that some believed it to be a mass hallucination. Nevertheless, since they were by this time in sore need of a sheltered site to overwinter, he ordered that they anchor the ships in the bay. The lighthouse proved deserted and unremarkable inside; save that the staircase up to its broken light seemed also to continue down into the rock, but was sealed shut with rocks and ice. Captain R—– gave the order that the crew of the Devastation should overwinter in the bay, whilst that of the Sulphur should overwinter in a wider bay on the next island to the North, in the hope that at least one ship would be able to escape the pack ice come Spring. From this point we have only the testimony of the Sulphur’s crew to go on, as the logbook records were neglected during the Winter. They report that, after some harsh months in the dark of the Arctic Winter, they gathered upon deck to celebrate the rising of the sun once more, when the ship’s doctor noted that green smoke could be seen rising from the direction of the lighthouse. An expedition was mounted to cross the ice of the bay and investigate. Upon arrival, they found the hull of the Devastation, half-stripped of boards and without her masts. There was no sign of the crew or captain. The lighthouse was thick with smoke, but nevertheless the expedition managed to enter. They report that the building was entirely empty, but that the staircase down into the rock had become unblocked; however, owing to the thickness of the smoke, which appeared to emanate from somewhere below ground, they were unable to descend more than a few steps. They returned to the Sulphur and, the following Spring, were able to escape the ice and make their way back to Portsmouth. A full inquest was ordered into the loss of the Devastation, but mysteriously shelved the following year. However, a report was compiled from the testimony of the surviving crew which received a certain amount of media attention. The report also alludes to an earlier incident with some similar features:

4. This incident was recorded in the days of the Venetian Republic; some say around the year 1600, although details are sketchy. A merchant, one Paolo S—–, was in the process of sinking piles into the mud of the lagoon in preparation for the construction of a house and storage area. However, four piles in the middle of the proposed area were observed to be slowly rising. Construction was stopped whilst further investigations were undertaken. It was discovered that a hard, circular object seemed to have been disturbed by the works and was moving upwards towards the surface of the mud. In due course the excavators were able to uncover a thick, heavily rusted metal disk atop some kind of cylinder, around three braccio across. With some effort, they were able to lever the disk from its base, discovering inside a descending metal staircase, also heavily rusted, but free from water. On the uppermost step were a sealed case and a number of warning symbols, unusual in design but relatively clear in intent. On their master’s orders, the excavators retrieved the case, re-sealed the shaft and allowed the mud to re-cover the area, abandoning construction. The case was found to contain a thick document in a nearly indecipherable English dialect. In his diaries, Paolo S—– recorded that he had it sent to a trading partner in London, who believed that it made reference to a great machine for building houses: a machine the size of a city, that could itself build a city. This machine, it was said, had by accident made contact with another great machine, one that had power over time itself. The document seemed to be an investigation into this contact, which had caused both machines to catastrophically malfunction. Most of the details were obscure, other than that the investigators concluded that many thousands of deaths were likely; but that those deaths would only happen in the past, and as such, the company could not be held liable under the laws of the time. Paolo reclaimed the manuscript and threw it into an obscure part of the lagoon, and to his death would tell no-one the location of the staircase.

1. There was a woman who had a secret. The secret was in a small box which had been kept, unopened, in her family for three generations. No-one remembered what it was, only that some vague danger had been involved in its acquisition. On her seventieth birthday, believing the danger no longer applicable to the modern age, she opened the box. Three days later she was seized with a premonition of awesome and terrifying force. Placing the secret in an anonymous storage facility, she retired to a nearby park, where she was suddenly devoured by a horde of rampaging chinchillas.
2. After some time, the storage facility sold off its abandoned boxes, sight unseen, to the highest bidder. The secret passed into the hands of five triplets who were trying to raise funds for their magic show. As soon as they saw the secret, they knew they were in trouble. They gave one last spectacular show (in which they disappeared fully fourteen people, a rabbit, a barrel of laughs and the number nine), placed the secret into the trunk of a hollow tree, and purchased plane tickets to Venezuela. Sadly, near the entrance to the airport, while gathering for a group photo, they were fatally stuck by a frozen wallaby which had fallen from the wheel well of an incoming 747.
3. The secret passed into the hands of a prospecting squirrel collector. During to his long years in the squirrel trade, he had become incapable of considering an object other than through the lens of squirrels. He showed the secret to his squirrels and they became extremely agitated, throwing their entire nut store out of the window.. He decided to post the secret to the Vatican, but in his rush to get to the post office he accidentally picked a carnivorous hat from the hat stand and was devoured in the middle of the local high street. The letter was seized by the police as evidence.
4. The police measured the secret and discovered it was exactly 3.1 cm long and did not have any discernible fingerprints on it. Due to an administrative mistake, it was charged with resisting arrest and placed in cell 8a. When one of the detectives went in to interview it, the cell collapsed, crushing everyone inside. The secret was taken away by a haulage firm contracted to clear the debris.
5. The debris was used as ballast to shore up a local hill that was subsiding. Meanwhile, mathematics had gone haywire due to the lack of the number nine. The hill was a common place for suicidal mathematicians to come and contemplate slipping cliffsides. One of them found the secret. In a frenzy of discovery, she proved its existence in six pages of densely spaced pencil text, with two lemmas. Subsequently she was caught on the horns of a dilemma and fatally impaled. The secret, attached to the proof, was picked up by the mathematical recovery team and  placed on a truck.
6. The truck was suddenly stolen by a rogue chinchilla breeder who hoped to use it to set up a chinchilla monster truck show. The secret tapped her on the shoulder at a major junction and she jumped out if this plane of existence in alarm. As a result the chinchillas were abandoned. After a number of days without food, they went on a ravenous rampage and devoured a local pensioner.
7. A hat dealer who also worked as a lost vehicle investigator took the secret from the truck. Realising its import, she wrapped it up in a banana skin and threw it in the bin. Then she attempted to secretly flee the country by hiding in the wheel well of a 747, but was instead bounced to death by a wallaby who was trying to get to Australia and had got to the wheel well first. Due to her untimely demise she was unable to sort the carnivorous from the non-carnivorous hats in the next day’s hat batches, and several carnivorous hats were sold before the problem was noticed.
8. The banana was taken to the tip, where the secret was extracted from the skin and swallowed by a hungry seagull, who subsequently became able to speak six languages and understand the trouble it was in. Sadly the six languages were all extinct ones, although the seagull’s antics entertained the local university’s language faculty for the next few days. Subsequently, it shat the secret out onto a terrace outside the university’s library cafe. The next day, walking past the faculty of squirrels, it was struck on the head by a falling nut and died.
9. Finally the dean of the university, who had been watching this all from afar, scraped the secret off the terrace and put it in a box. He sealed the box up in his attic and warned his family that it was not to be opened for at least three generations.
10. Everything became very quiet.

1. Death is nothing if not reasonable. If you believe you have been hard done by by your inevitable end, if you feel that you are particularly busy or particularly important or your life’s work particularly monumental, there is a place you can go to register a complaint. Maybe get an extension. I know because my neighbour went down there. Only thing is, it’s best to go early. There’s a bit of a queue.
2. It’s a grey tower block, a bit brutalist. Fred the Grocer, whose wife headed out there in 1970, says it was built 1963 when the facility moved from a place out of town. But Death is nothing if not reasonable. Can’t have a head office you can’t get to without a car.
3. Then there’s Mina. I know Mina through bridge. She’s had a hard life, wants a few years of joy at the end to balance things out. Anyway, she went up last Thursday, been sending me texts. They weren’t lying about the queue. The whole bottom floor, it’s one big waiting area. Like an airport. Low ceilings and fluorescent lights and those elastic barriers you can’t lean on. But they do have a tea cart that comes around every few hours and there’s a ticket system for leaving your place to go to the toilet. Like I said. Death is nothing if not reasonable.
4. I forgot to mention Ed from Accounts, who went up last year. He’s just got onto the second floor. Still in the queue. I mean, it’s not the fastest. But he says they keep you busy. Death is nothing if not reasonable and the meal trolley’s pretty good. Not much reception on the second floor but he’s been writing letters. He’s still working on the preparatory paperwork. Special case, he’s worked out that his magnum opus will need to be a million pages long. Need a lot of time for that. Anyhow, they have to be thorough. Imagine if you snared immortality for someone else by mistake!
5. Not really heard much from those at the end of the queue. They say they shuffle them around a bit. Can’t have them going in in the wrong order. And by that time the queuers are a bit querulous; some are forgetful, a lot of them can’t walk and nearly everyone is in pain. They do provide wheelchairs, of course. Death is nothing if not reasonable. But I mean, some of them have been queueing sixty, seventy years. Some of them were brought in from the old building.  
6. Like I said, Death is nothing. Everyone gets a go. No-one ever comes out of the exit door.

1. Gravity is a lie, a pernicious myth brought on by eating too many bad apples. The real reason the river flows to the sea is far more complex and more interesting. This is how it happens: there is a rumour among the dead that they can be set free by a Word. Perhaps the Word is the name of God, or a concept so large that all other concepts are knocked loose, perhaps only a sequence that undoes the lazy electricity of ghost-thoughts through the air. It is not a word that anyone knows as yet, but after all there are only so many words that can ever exist. The flow of water is a numerological experiment on a grand scale. If you could but see them! The billion ghosts of the world, hunched over the water with their fingers clicking out permutations, hastening the water down to its final end, where the long slow voice of the sea speaks the litany of discovered words out loud.  
2. In a way, it is odd that they do this. You see, mathematics is a lie, a lullaby of a clockwork cosmos sung to soothe our sleeping fears. The Knights Templar knew something of this in their mysteries, though it was never spoken aloud. Maybe it is just that ghosts have spent too long sleeping. In any case the ocean cannot speak. The tragedy of the ocean is that its thoughts cannot be expressed; and if it could it would have no equal to express them to. The only thing the ocean can do is a kind of wordless singing. But the songs of the ocean are outside human hearing. Sometimes, when the sun is bright, one may see them rising up like white wisps of mist from the water’s surface.
3. There is a great conspiracy that says that matter can change, and those who have this disease say that it is not songs at all, but water made into air. It is a rumour spread by physicists and fools. They say that clouds are water grown thick in the air. If they had but seen the clouds! As civilisations age, they become lighter, until they rise up from the earth. The clouds are the homes of the ones who came before us, but be sure that they will close the shutters when we come poking around in realms we are not supposed to be. The ones who came before them live in the moon, and it may be that they themselves have elders in the sun.
4. Biology too is full of lies, lies that slither though the ears and nestle, sated with the enormity of their deception, in the nether chambers of the heart. For be sure, there are beings that we cannot see. Beings that live at ninety degrees to humanity. Maybe we put them there with some accursed alchemy or other in the distant distant past. But being wedged at such an angle across reality, they cannot rise as the ones who came before have done; and that is why they cry when clouds pass over. There are those who can taste the bitterness of the rain, and perhaps they are the ones who come closest to knowing the plight of the displaced.
5. Alchemy is a lie, of course. It is a lie with stained fingers, which is both the best and worst kind. The ghosts of the world know this. And as time goes past and swells the ranks of the dead, the harder they work at shepherding the bitter waters down towards their great and futile engines of computation and the faster the rivers flow. The displaced watch them, and maybe they cry harder too. It is not hard to cry at the futility of the world and its great knit fabric, its mysteries and myths and conspiracies, and all of them lies.

1. For more than a hundred years, there was only one subway system on Mars. It was one of those things that the colonists complained about, along with the red dust that got on everything and the air company ice-cream machines, which were broken more often than not. The subway was at Lycus Sulci, in the administrative centre, and it only had five stops. In its third year of operation there was a dust avalanche at Crater Wall Station and, when everything had been cleaned out, the tracks were slightly buckled. Ever since that time, commuters to the colonial headquarters could hear a faint tune behind the electric hum of the railway as the trains reached the end of the line. There was a rumour that it was the same tune that had been heard in the Great Pyramid at Giza, five days before its destruction.
2. In time, the air company removed the ice-cream machines and moved its workers from pay in cash to pay in company store tokens, citing increased costs for solar panel components. The colonial court upheld the legality of this decision. One morning, fifty air-company workers were trapped on a malfunctioning train carriage, shuttling back and forth between imaginary stops at the end of the line. When they were finally rescued, they marched on the company’s headquarters, singing the railway song to some words of their own invention. There were riots, and the garrison at Gordii Dorsum was called in.
3. Later on, after the Battle of Abus Vallis and the Breathless Days, after the Easter Ceasefire and the Great Turning-out, the song became the anthem of the Republic of Olympus Mons. It was said to have been an ancient African song, sung by slaves rebelling against unjust kings. They had always intended to send an ambassador back to the Court at Kigali to investigate further, but somehow they were always too busy with Mars matters.
4. Eventually, something went wrong with the colony’s genetic improvement program. An age of perpetual embarrassment began. It is very difficult to decipher any of the writings from that time, because they could perform prodigious acts of euphemism; their medical notes were like epic poems. They are known to have invented a new kind of excretion, referred to on occasion as ‘Number three’. They became known as a people who could fill a conversation entirely with the minutiae of dust and who lived out their lives in private rooms.
5. On the other side of Mars, where there were five more baby republics and an emperor with maybe fifty subjects, they sung a mocking version of the song and it was about people who cannot say what they mean. They were still singing the song after the end of the Republic of Olympus Mons, which was overrun by genetically-modified attack pandas from the Air Company who sneaked in whilst all the Republic’s Sentries happened to all be enjoying a leisurely Number Three at the same time.  
6. The baby republics had ice-cream machines, and they were all planning to build subway systems, and they had engineered a kind of ivy that grew in the thin air of the plains and produced a reasonable facsimile of vanilla pods. It was their efforts that eventually made Southern Mars the dessert capital of the Solar System. Visitors came from all over. The shuttle company calculated fuel requirements under the assumption that they would leave a kilogram or two heavier than when they had arrived. In those days, the song was sung in custard parlours; it was said to be a lament for the great library at Alexandria.
7. Inspired by the song, the baby republics ploughed the custard-parlour profits into a great university, which survived and grew beyond the days when custard-parlours were considered hopelessly old-fashioned. In time, seven of the drowned Oxford colleges relocated there, and two from Cambridge. In those days the streets were dug into canals, and the university, which was in itself also a city, resembled a Venice that had never been dusted.
8. The university had a hundred years in which it was obsessed with time. During those years, a child grew up who had been sung the song in her cradle, and whenever she was uncomfortable thereafter she would hum it to herself. Eventually, she inherited an office in the Faculty of Time and discovered three of the seven secrets of time travel, which she refused to share with her collaborators. Instead, she determined to travel back to the destruction of the library at Alexandria. Lacking the Fourth Secret, however, she could travel only back as far as the destruction of the pyramids; and without the fifth secret, she was not able to travel to public places; and without the sixth secret she could not quite control her final location. Thus it was that she found herself in a secret chamber of the Great Pyramid, and her equipment to get home in another secret chamber, and no way of knowing quite when she was. Undeterred, she chipped away at the separating wall, singing the song to herself the while. After five days, her return equipment self-destructed, destroying the pyramid. As it happened, one of the local warring parties had been setting explosives in the pyramid the whole while in any case, so they were only too happy to take responsibility. But the soldiers never forgot that the pyramid had serenaded them with its death song, before it finally crumbled into dust.