Listing to Port

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.

1. Do not stray from the path.
2. When you stray from the path, know that you can never quite go back to the same one. But there is always still be a way out.
3. There will be side streets down which you may see a lone bagpiper, or the embassy of a nation you have never heard of, or an ancient wooden door that stands a crack open, or a shop that sells sweets from the exact other side of the world.
4. There will come a time when it rains, and you will be near those buildings. Those buildings with their great metal-and-stone lobbies and their glass and their plants in pots and lifts and escalators in perpetual silent motion behind the security gates. Know that there are beings within who will chip out your soul from your body’s stone slab, and worse: they will teach you that this is what everyone does. Know too that sheltering from the rain is a thing that is protected, for a short while.
5. Those beings have loves and lives and difficulties of their own, too. You may find yourself at dinner with them. Or you may see them at dinner through the plate glass of the night city. Sometimes they have secrets like splinters of diamond wedged into their busy hearts. If you can pull these splinters loose, you may be allowed beyond the silent security gates.
6. Do not do this. Never do this. If you look up as the moon rises and find yourself on the wet streets with a handful of diamond splinters, drop them in a drain. You will be a long way from the path, but there is still time.
7. In any case, if you find yourself at dinner, do try the duck.
8. There will be a river to cross, but you may do so by any of a hundred bridges. Do not fret: this choice is not important.
9. There will be a door in a wall. There will be a forest, but it will have people instead of trees, and the wolves will be beautiful. There will be a castle, and you can enter it with coins. There will be a cottage by the water where an old lady will sell you tea. You will know all these things when you see them.
10. If you stray until nightfall, the forest will be lit with neon and rippling with music. It will be wine and sweat and breath and skin. It may not be resistable. And you may find yourself in a cold morning, overgrown with all the forest’s ivy, as if a hundred years have passed. Know then that you are not rooted in place. You are a long way from the path, but there is still time.
11. The other side lies over the mountains. They say that in the mountains there are beings who must be paid in blood. Ignore this message. When you come to have tea with them, remember that they have lives and loves and difficulties of their own. If you can pay them in stories, they will give you safe passage up the concrete stairs.
12. Out past the concrete stairs, the city ends.
13. Know that there are many ways to be unscathed, and not all desirable; and many ways to leave, and not all desirable. Know that you have loves and a life and difficulties of your own, too. Know that there is no shame in staying. This is how we came to the city for the first time, too.

4988 Bears
 -4988.1 Real bears
    –4988.11 Polar
       —4988.111 Grolar
    –4988.12 Grizzly
       —4988.121 Both grumpy and grizzly
    –4988.13 Black
    –4988.14 Panda
       —4988.141 Adorable baby international-diplomacy pandas
    –4988.14 Other
       —4988.141 Bear stars of Youtube
 -4988.2 Things that look like bears
    –4988.21 Beards that look like the owner is eating a bear
    –4988.22 Mounds of fluff that look like hibernating bears
 -4988.3 Bears of myth and story
 -4988.4 International bears of mystery
    –4988.41 Those bears that are found on subway systems around the world
    –4988.42 Bears in ill-fitting coats and sunglasses, eating meat
    –4988.43 Bears lurking under manhole covers and between the cracks of the pavement
    –4988.44 Bears that sit in the rain and tell melancholy stories
    –4988.45 Those bears that lie upside-down in your favourite chair and refuse to move
 -4988.5 Bears in rhyming situations
    –4988.51 In their lairs
    –4988.52 On the stairs
    –4988.53 Doing a stage routine that once was Fred Astaire’s
 -4988.6 Toy bears

1. The Recursive Garden, West Wittering. The Recursive Garden appears at first glance to be a rather plain, circular garden containing only plantings of unusually large size. At its centre, however, a circular hedge conceals an exact replica of the outer garden at half the scale (with more standard-size plantings), which in turn contains a further replica at half the scale again (with dinky little alpine plants). A number of further recursions can be found at the centre of the garden, but the plants in these (other than a few well-selected bonsai trees) are artificial replicas.

2. The Perfumed Gardens of Carnal Pleasure, Tunbridge Wells. A rather lascivious formal garden, said to have been laid out to the suggestions of the Earl of Rochester. The Perfumed Gardens are designed to provide an ideal arena for outdoor frolics: soft beds of moss, inventive nooks and crannies, plants with shady reputations and more suggestive swings than one can shake a stick at. A large and active rabbit population is maintained to provide further inspiration, though the original troupe of imported monkeys sadly succumbed to one English Winter too many. The gardener’s shed, which is full of fascinating implements, can be visited for a small extra fee.

3. Talbot’s Travelling Garden, location unknown. Talbot’s travelling garden is a small but perfectly-formed formal garden located on the back of a flat-bed truck. It may well have passed you on the road at some point, although the sides are typically raised when on the move to protect the plants from wind damage. Talbot’s Garden can be visited, but you have to find it first. Its location and opening hours are never advertised. It tends to travel to places that the proprietor thinks could do with a bit more greenery, spend a day or two opened out in a sunny spot, and then move onwards. Some Garden-seekers have had luck asking after the Garden’s resident cat, which is enormous, three-legged and ginger.

4. The Carnivorous Garden, Brighton. A recent opening. Sadly not much more information is available about the Carnivorous Garden other than its name and the exhortation at the gate that travellers enter entirely at their own risk. We have singularly failed to track down anyone who has visited it.

Puce, violet, purple purple, goth purple, bruise, silly purple, impending thunderstorm, school play Roman, this toy is supposed to be for girls purple, distant mountains, railway buddleia, heather, purple leather, angry face, prose purple, candied violets, plum, eccentric letter-writer purple, alarming curtains, resurrected bat-plant, shiny beetle purple, aubergine, arguably blue purple, old lady hat, purple lightsaber, glitter purple.

1. World’s largest ball of water, Pacific Ocean (somewhere). Not easily delimited from the rest of the ocean, but technically present. The location of the world’s largest ball of water without fish and stuff in is currently unknown.
2. World’s largest ball of beetle-rolled dung, Hyderabad. Unfortunately this was eaten shortly afterwards without formal confirmation. But even now there is a lingering air of beetle amazement in the city that you can sense if you have your head close to the ground.
3. World’s smallest record-breakingly large ball of something, Kansas. Last seen falling down the back of a chest of drawers.
4. World’s largest ball of elephants, Nairobi. More technically referred to as an enormous snuggle.
5. World’s largest ball for balls of things, Bali. The organisers are held to have hired a large venue to play giant-ball marbles. Sadly we were not allowed in, not being spherical, and so have no further information.

1. Norton vs. Happy Stay Hotels, 2013. Concerning a) the rights of bedbugs to book hotel rooms in the State of New York, and b) the right of remain of any children resulting from undiscovered eggs left in the hotel room. The court found for Norton in regard to room booking, but dismissed the right of remain issue.
2. Mr. Tiddles vs. Jasper, 1965. Concerning the party responsible for paying for Mr. Tiddles’ reconstructive surgery following extensive injuries sustained as a result of running into various kitchen objects wielded by mice in his home. The court ruled that, as he was trying to catch and eat the mice at the time, their actions could legitimately be ruled self-defence.
3. Ursula vs. the State of Connecticut, 1987. Concerning the employment rights of bears who hibernate for some or all of the winter. The court ruled that hibernation rights should fall under illness and disability law.
4. Eudryas Grata vs. Lighting Warehouse, 2009. Concerning the rights of moths who wish to throw themselves against light bulbs, and to whom any clean-up costs accrue. The court ruled, after a persuasive speech from the Moth Nation, that Moth light bulb rituals are a legitimate act of religion and that in general moths of sound mind who fly at light bulbs should have the right to do so.

1. There was a bookshop that left a crate of books in a damp, unattended cellar for a little too long, and the books went musty and feral. When the crate was finally levered open, a book on British Birds had eaten half the cover of a second edition of Peter Rabbit and a pair of vampire novels had sucked half the other books dry of words and were entwined in a suspiciously damp tangle of pages at the bottom of the box. The bookseller opened up one of the vampire novels and began reading, in hope of seeing if there was some way of retrieving the lost text.
2. By page 238 the vampires, who were languid lovers of elegance who largely obtained their blood off-page, were draping themselves over the mouldering couches of a vacant Los Angeles mansion. It was said to have been left abandoned after the death of a 106-year-old silent movie actress some years before; the true owner was a matter of legal contest, with the estate probably having been left to one of a number of nearly-identical cats. Although the mansion satisfied their craving for glamour, they were uncomfortable with its mirror-heavy decoration. During the daytime the sexier of the two would wander around the shuttered rooms, gazing at their deserted reflections and feeling only half-real. It seemed an odd choice of decor, given that the actress reportedly had had all obtainable trace of her image on screen destroyed. In puzzlement, he turned to her diary, which they had found under a floorboard when looking for a place to hide bones.
3. It was in the third year of the diary, sometime in the mid-60s, that the actress installed the mirrors. By this time she was well into her years of seclusion, and looking after her triplet granddaughters, who had been orphaned the previous year. She dreamed in those days of a house full of children, of laughter and midnight feasts and tears that always stopped when her comfort was offered. But there were never enough children. The mirrors helped her pretend somewhat. But behind everything the house remained, implacably cold and silent, untouched by the brief merriment of three rather melancholy toddlers. On Sundays they gathered in the blue parlour, which had been entirely lined with mirrors, and the actress read fairy stories to her infinitely reflected line.
4. The children were particularly fond of the story of a poor man’s daughter who put on the clothes of a boy and set out on the road through the great forest to find her fortune.  By and by she came to the castle of a horned queen, deep in a valley far from the official paths, and entered her service in exchange for protection from a following spirit that she had picked up on her travels. She was given a series of tasks to complete, including finding the queen’s mother’s heart, which had been buried beneath a flagstone, and counting the magpie spirits that came each morning to peck silver leaf from the castle gates, and negotiating with the creatures that used the bottom of the well as an entrance to this world. It seemed that she might inherit the castle if she was successful in all that was set her. But by the end of the tasks she did not want the castle. She asked instead for the Queen’s Book of Secrets, which she kept inside her pillow, and with the book she went down the well and was never seen again.
5. The Book of Secrets contained many things that were hardly known in that day and age. Perhaps it was a leftover from a more knowledgeable time. Though none of them were magic as such, they mainly concerned knowledge that would give one power over others, and devices that could be seen as magical by those who did not know their secrets. One page described how to make a clockwork man, perfect in every detail, and how to maintain the illusion that he was an independent servant (for, as specified in the book, the clockwork man could be made to do a single task, but not to change tasks). Many of these servants had been made in the past, but they had a tendency to outlive their usefulness and end up packed away for centuries. I hear tell that there was a bookshop once found one in a cellar and used him to shift books, but he was forever leaving them in the wrong place.

1. The dead are turned into diamonds; or at least, their carbon is, the other elements falling away as steam or ash, apart from those that are saved to form a small and individual flaw. There is a great dark vault under the city and in it a warren of dark rooms. This is an old society. Each dark room is something like a family tomb, decked with the diamonds of hundreds of generations past. You may enter one at a time, with a candle, to spend time with the glittering dead.
2. Each year after coming of age, on their birthday, they write a little more of the stories of their lives on their skin. The yearly tattoos can be anywhere and may be of any length, though the wise and old leave space for many years to come, because this is a country just growing into a confident medical maturity. When they die, their skin is their biography. Usually, the grieving family adhere to the request of the deceased: burn it, or save it. In the older families, inclusion in the family book or books is held to be of great importance; their libraries have rooms for the dead.
3. They are at ease with the presence of the dead. It is customary to bury in gardens, deep beneath the vegetable patch. Though there is little ceremony, the consumption of the first crop of vegetables after the burial is as close to a wake as they come.
4. All bodies are scanned and digitised as soon as possible after death. It is an intensive process which does not leave much by way of physical remains. Instead, the relatives take home information: composition, measurements, networks, probabilities of the dead. They do this not because there is a chance that they could be reconstructed, but because data is sacred. Information is power and by consuming the information of others one becomes more powerful.
5. There is a legend that the dead will rise up as an army to save their people in a time of peril. But the people are in a time of peril already, and have been for some centuries. The dead seem not to be taking the hint. Now there are great ships that take their dead to the coldest parts of the world. Their funeral garb is body armour and the coins on their eyes night-vision goggles. They stand, at ease, frozen in great ready ranks, waiting for the call of the dead’s new generals.
6. Death is a matter for great public shame. The official line is that the forward march of medicine has conquered it. If only humans would be careful with their fragile bodies, if only they would eat and sleep and fuck as they were told, if only they would avoid all risks, if only they would not be the sort of people who have bad luck. The official line is that the dead have squandered their lives. It is often very hard to find out if someone has died, because the mark of utmost respect is to hush up a death. There is a service to discreetly take away bodies. One may hire actors to portray occasional reappearances, or write letters from distant lands. The censuses of the age are filled with fictitious centenarians. But I believe the average lifespan of that time is not much more than in our own.
7. They take the dead into space. Some choose, from this point, to be a shooting star and burn up in the atmosphere. There are set nights for these artificial meteor showers and the population of the world comes out to watch. Others choose the other way: to be taken out to deep space and launched on a trajectory that will, some millions of millions of years hence, touch down gently over the event horizon of a black hole.

0330 Delightful objects

-0330.1 Those that fit precisely

   –0330.11 Objects that go into holes of the same size

   –0330.12 Objects that stack into neat shapes

-0330.2 Those that are exactly the right colour

   –0330.21 Those that form a rainbow when lined up

   –0330.22 Those that are a particularly good shade of a good colour

-0330.3 Those that are of great usefulness or value

   –0330.31 Things that are both useful and beautiful

   –0330.32 Things that do not delight in themselves, but are of high enough worth that one may sell them and purchase something delightful

   –0330.33 Things that may be used in the making of art

   –0330.34 Those that awaken within you a pleasant memory of the past

-0330.4 Those that cause delight to those you love

   –0330.41 Objects that cause a ripple of delight throughout humanity

-0330.5 Those that balance

   –0330.51 Piles of pebbles on top of each other

   –0330.51 Piles of other things on top of each other

-0330.6 Those that can be made to do a complex mechanical dance

-0330.7 Those that are artful tricks

   –0330.71 Those that trick the eye

   –0330.72 Those that are puzzles in which the mind can wander, caught up, for hours

-0330.8 Those that delight the senses

   –0330.81 Those that smell delightful

   –0330.82 Those that have a pleasing sound

   –0330.83 Those that are pleasant to touch

   –0330.83 Those that taste good

-0330.9 Those that have a satisfying weight

   –0330.91 Well-made tools