Listing to Port

1. Dragons live a long time, and there have never been very many of them. When a dragon is dying, other dragons - maybe most of the dragons that there are, these days - will travel to their cave and set up a vigil, purring low tunes through the day and night to ease their passage from this world. They live in fear of untimely death. Therefore the news of the dragon’s slaying - by one of the little creatures, no less - was greeted with shock and dismay by his community. That year the snow stayed on the mountains for much longer than usual, because the great grey dragons of the North were lying at the snowline and weeping and turning their cold breath up the slopes.
2. The remnants of the dark lord’s army made their way home, bitter in defeat, picked off from all sides by raiding parties from the victorious side. There was talk from the armies of good of marching on their lands and cleansing them of evil. They knew the end of the journey would not be a warm homecoming, but the telling of the bad news to their families. Then packing in the night and flight East, out to the wilderness where, with luck, they might never be found.
3. The kingdom was convulsed with joy at the marriage of the prince and princess. And if it turned out, a few months later, that the web of narrative and enchantment was not enough - that they did not really like each other, that a few heady days of adventure and revolution had not been a good preparation to make a life together - well. With the demise of the evil queen their advisors had worked hard to restore morality to the land. What sort of a message would it send to separate?
4. ‘Fucking fucksakes,’ said the farmer, 'how does that fox even eat so many birds at once?’
5. After the death of the witch, the gingerbread cottage began to rot. Soon there was nothing left but a pile of soggy cakestuff in a clearing, heaving with maggots. It was perhaps one rainstorm from being completely gone when the other members of the witch’s coven came to look. 'Did you know?’ they asked each other. 'Did she really do that? Will they believe us when we say we didn’t know? Are they going to come for us, too?’

1. There was nothing for it but to jump - with a toss of my hat, I released the tapirs and dived headlong into the cosy pudding of all our futures.
2. My two visitors closed up their laptops, locked my mouth with the bronze key, and turned out the lights.
3. And so it was that the African Unity Cup was returned to its not-so-rightful owners, the precious elixir having been decanted into the second hump of my trusty cyborg Bactrian and the mango pulp having been nearly completely polished away by the actions of the very agent who we had foolishly feared for so long.
4. It had not been a woman without legs who had rescued me, but a woman whose legs had been three weeks behind her in the past!
5. Everything was so much better now that everyone agreed on everything.
6. Dear reader, it would be impolite to bore you with the list of changes that have happened since; suffice it to say that the next time you finish up a meal with a fortifying plate of cheese, you should think on me, for it is by my labour that your repast has been saved from the depths of the ocean.
7. The Presidents from further back in history rolled their eyes, but it seemed likely that for one magical night the world would finally see the passing of the Shadow Amendment.
8. For it had been in that one, fateful glance through the hole in the Mona Lisa that I had seen at last the vast animal of my inner peace, and how it might be obtained.
9. We would go through each number in turn, discarding those that we felt were surplus to requirements, until the New Mathematics were quite ready for the reboot of the Universe.

1. There was a Roman trading vessel that became gloriously, giddily lost; lost enough that it rounded Cape Bojador by accident and set off down the African coast in the vain hope of finding some sort of channel that would lead it home. Many of the crew jumped ship near what is now the border between Angola and Namibia. Those remaining, seized with a kind of wrong-headed fervour, sailed the ship on a direct course for Antarctica. Improbably, they made it; the ship froze tight in the Antarctic pack ice and, owing to the vagaries of the local currents, drifted until it was wedged between an ice flow coming down from the continent and a small island. In short order it was completely entombed in ice. The hold was full of clay jars of garum, which shattered by and by. A small, salty under-ice lake of garum formed, complete with its own garum ecosystem. Over time, things evolved there that had never been seen anywhere else. These days one may find the location by a small brown stain in the ice, if one knows where to look. Eventually the glacier will spit the ship out again into the unwelcoming sea, and the seals, all unknowing, will have a Roman banquet.  
2. There was a bus that began its service somewhere on the Atlantic coast of France; perhaps it was La Rochelle, I am not quite sure. Eventually it was sold a number of times, always to the East. It was if it had acquired a kind if travelling destiny. Purchasers began noticing and passing on this information, in initially flippant tones: you might want to keep this bus for a year and then sell it Eastwards, because that’s what all the other owners have done. It was seen in Vienna, then Bucharest, then Krasnodar; it spent a couple of years in the service of a private owner near Samarkand. Eventually the bus, which was increasingly decrepit, found itself operating a shuttle service between the small towns East of Vladivostok, right against Russia’s Pacific coast. Someone had painted the bus’s destiny in large cyrillic letters on the side: This Bus Goes East. But by this time no-one wanted to buy it, East or West. The owners, taking a kind of pity on the bus, drove it to a remote sea cliff, set their backs to the East, and pushed it off to finish its journey on its own. However, being a bus and not a living creature, it sank. I believe, however, that it has become a habitat for a number of fascinating sea stars.
3. There was an aeroplane that was bought by the lesser sort of billionaire, and he did not have any real use for it other than as a status symbol. Shortly after its purchase, indeed, he took his billions and retired to a small Caribbean island, where he mostly stayed inside and received massages. After a few years of this the billionaire developed extremely squidgy muscles and as a result became quite unhinged. Observing that massages are uncomfortable when one has sunburn, he set the aircraft to circling round the island with the hope of drumming up extra cloud cover, or at least a contrail or two. Eventually, he ordered the aircraft to stay up a little too long and it ran out of fuel and crashed. The records were falsified, of course; the paper trail leads to an empty spot in the Arizona desert. Some say that this has happened more than once, and that there is an island with a reef of dead aircraft around it, an island with a perpetual exhaust haze and the lingering smell of Jet A. These people are probably masseurs and you should give them an extra-large tip.
4. It is a little-known fact that there were dinosaurs who sent a probe into space; unfortunately, being a tiny nation obsessed with recycling, reusing and generally cleaning up after themselves, they left no fossils or anything else that could trouble the theories of palaeontologists. Indeed, the probe is all that remains. The cleanliness-obsessed dinosaurs invested its design with near-endless reusability. Eventually, after a good explore, it came to rest on Mars. From Mars, it watched the Earth convulse in the aftermath of a meteor strike; from Mars, it heard the last communication from its masters; and thereafter, from Mars, it sat and observed the silent Earth. Occasionally it slept for a few thousand years, or trundled about to find suitable minerals to mine to replace its aging components. I think at the moment it may be sleeping. Who knows what it will find when it wakes?