Listing to Port

1. There was once a giant who lived in a tower by the sea. Life was not easy for giants in those days and she had lived alone a long, long time. One morning she woke from a vivid dream, full of whisperings and fumblings and gasping cries, to find the roof of the tower had split in the night, and the room full of wet birds fighting and jostling at the windows and shitting on the bed. It seemed she had been taking her pleasure to the gulls’ clumsy wingtips and to the suggestively susurrating sea. In frustration, she took off her clitoris and rolled up all its tendrils until all that was left was a smooth, round pebble. She went out to the beach, where a light drizzle was falling, put it down among the million other clay-coloured pebbles on the sea-wet foreshore and stepped away; and when she was certain that it was not findable again, she went back to the tower, pulled a tarpaulin from the cupboard, and went back to sleep under it.

2. I do not know what became of the pebble or the giant, but fifteen years later only the tower’s ruined stump and the rumour of what had happened remained. There were three lovers who had heard the rumour, and they travelled to the beach and made a bonfire in the ruins. That night, when they had drunk a good amount of whisky, they took three pebbles from the beach and gave them to each other as a pledge of love (for they had also been reading about the love-gifts of Adelie penguins).

3. In later years, the lovers were forced by circumstance to live on different continents. They wrote each other thyme-scented letters and spent larger proportions of their hours flying and moping than they would have believed ideal. One of the thyme-scented letters was lost in the post, causing a minor romantic bust-up. They did not know it, but the lost letter had slipped out from a broken crate at the airport and was blown by a force 10 gale over the wet, flat fields all the way to the sea, where it sank and was used as an unusual-smelling breeding site by starfish.  

4. An old man gathered the baby starfish up and sold them in a round fishbowl to a woman who collected stars. In her dark and glittering house, the starfish grew and grew, eventually ending up in a black-painted tank that had once been a bath. Once a year, on the longest night, the woman would wheel her chair into the bathroom and sing songs to the starfish about how their life would be when they returned to the stars (for she seemed to be under the impression that that was where they were from).

5. There was a widow who lived in the same town, and every day on the way to work she went past the house of the woman who loved stars and peered through its shrouded windows. She thought that she was in love with the star-woman (though this was debatable, as they had not even met). She thought that she would like to keep the star-woman in her house and feed her glittering broths. She thought sometimes that she would like to rescue the star-woman from her house after a fire and tend to her wounds and comfort her gasping pain; and sometimes she thought of causing the gasping pain in the first place. But the star-woman did not take lovers. So the widow instead drew a picture that represented in her feelings in perfect and pure and unchallengeable geometry, and she felt much happier once she had managed to abstract them from the messy and unsuccessful human level. Then she had the picture tattooed on her back.  

6. The picture was published in a magazine and became famous. Indeed, the widow soon found herself not short of would-be lovers wishing to touch it, and even entertained a brief but disastrous tryst with the star-woman herself, who was a great reader of magazines. After her death, some of her younger lovers sneaked into the funeral home and stole the tattoo, which they had made into the cover of a fat book of blank paper. It seemed that some curse hovered over the book, or something of that sort, for no-one could ever bring themselves to  write in it. Eventually a rumour arose that it was already written in, if only one could find the way to reveal the words, and a community of esoteric scholars grew up around it.  

7. The scholars met every year by the sea; they did not have the book itself (only a few had ever seen it) and so, in an effort to understand it, they took it in turns to draw the book’s cover on their own skin. And sometimes this was done in great seriousness in well-lit lecture halls; and sometimes this was done beside bonfires on the beach at night, with the air thick with pot-smoke and the pebbles sticky with kicked-over margaritas. And had the mystery they were investigating existed, I think the second set of methods would have come closer to understanding it.

8. One year, without knowing it, they met on the giant’s beach; but by then the tower was long gone and only the clay-coloured pebbles remained.

1. The Hitler Society. Composed of 20th- and later-century adventurers who have successfully travelled back in time to kill Hitler, the Hitler Society has open meetings in Wellington, New Zealand five days before the turn of the 22nd, 23rd, 24th and 25th centuries for members to compare their experiences and to commiserate. To meet in the current timeline, of course, members of the society must subsequently have had their work undone, either by themselves or others. This may be variously in horror at the alternative future they spawned, due to a change in beliefs about the morality of meddling in the past, accidentally, or by the intervention of time-travelling neo-nazis. Rumour has it that there are a number of alternative Hitler Societies in timelines where Hitler has remained killed, and several of the Society’s members have experimented with killing Hitler in different time periods in the hope of accessing these timelines, returning after each instance to discuss with their earlier selves the merits of each approach. Although one would expect a coherent narrative about successful methods to arise from the eventual non-appearance of these members, this has so far regrettably not been the case.

2. The Time Travel Dinner and Dance Club. Unlike most of the other societies, this club is not particularly concerned with great historical events. Rather, they enjoy the companionship of other time travellers for its own sake. Members maintain a list of times and places where particularly good ingredients for fine dining are to be had and the musical fashions are to the taste of the majority; the agreement of at least twelve members is necessary for a Meeting to be called in each time and place. At the meeting, members discreetly engage local chefs and musical practitioners to provide a nice, non-challenging dinner and a short, usually rather sedate, dance, held in whatever the equivalent of a local church hall is in that time period.

3. The Long Way Society of Time Travellers. This society consists of people who have discovered at least one of the seven secrets of time travel, but have chosen not to exercise their time travelling abilities. Meetings of the Long Way Society are thus only attended by people for whom the meeting falls within their natural lifespan, and typically consist of a mixture of the lucky and the extremely long-lived. In 1980, a meeting of the Society in New York was mistaken for a coach tour of elderly Floridians and had a surprisingly humorous adventure. We mention this because, should you happen to attend a meeting after this date, you will likely run into two or three elderly members who will not shut up about the incident.

4. The Johanssonists. The main criterion for membership of the Johanssonist society is to have used time travel to perform some kind of prank at a major historical event, evidence of which must not have found its way into official histories. For example, the society’s five founder members have variously: made fart noises during the election of Pope Martin V; briefly done a silly walk behind Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field; attended the suicide of the Chongzen Emperor in a clown mask; put a small amount of laxative in Winston Churchill’s tea at an unspecified point during the Second World War; and distributed banana skins on the ground in Sao Paulo before the Brazilian Day of Anger. The Johanssonists have only one historical meeting point, thought to be on the ocean liner Elizabeth III shortly prior to her scrapping in 2110, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Applicants to the society are only allowed to materialise on deck and must give their application story within five minutes; unsuccessful applicants face being abducted and dropped off in central Greenland at a random point in history.

5. The Big Bangers. This society consists of those who have travelled backward in time to see the Big Bang. As it turns out, Zhang & Porter’s New Inflation Theory means that one can only travel backward to the publicly accessible times close to the Big Bang (i.e. times in which a human spacecraft can exist with reasonable shielding precautions). Forward travel at this time point is subject to the familiar one second per second speed limit. The Big Bangers are thus a rather isolated society and typically team up only for the companionship of starving to death together in remarkably unpicturesque surroundings. Most set off prior to the time of Zhang and Porter, although occasional kindly-minded souls have later travelled to join the Big Bangers with food and medical convoy ships.

6. The Earth Observation Society. This consists of time travelling alien beings who have a particular interest in humans. These interests are thought to range wildly, from the purely academic to the purely culinary; a surprisingly large contingent are thought to be in the human hormone trade. No details of their meetings are made available to humans, but it is believed they are typically held in near Earth orbit with optional visits to the planet’s surface for those who are able to tolerate the atmospheric conditions. Rumour has it that a Sagittarian Phage ate most of the society after an acrimonious meeting in 18870, leading to a period of highly complex timelines.

7. Prof. Wang’s Atemporal Cat Fancy. The members of Prof. Wang’s society do not have formal meetings but frequently encounter each other. Membership criteria are very loose and members often only find that the Society exists after they have begun to carry out Societally-appropriate activities. The Society specialises in picking out particularly interesting historical cats and travelling to pet them. The largest gathering of members is thought to be on the 18th of October 2015, when at least seven members independently travelled to Antarctica to pet Mrs. Chippy, the carpenter’s cat aboard Shackleton’s Endurance, the night before she was shot following the abandonment of the ship. Other targeted cats include Muezza, Christoper Smart’s cat Jeoffrey, and CC, the first cloned cat.

9080 Trains
-9080.1 Diesel
-9080.2 Electric
   –9080.25 Toy trains
-9080.3 Steam
   –9080.12 Quaint ye-olde steam trains
       —9080.122 Used primarily to visit Santas with dodgy beards
   –9080.13 Actual working steam trains in places that still do that kind of thing
-9080.4 Nuclear-powered
   –9080.42 Runs through secret tunnels between bunkers in the event of a global emergency
   –9080.44 Train will explode when passing through $city unless stopped by action hero
-9080.5 Solar-powered
   –9080.52 For which inclement weather is a valid excuse for service cancellation
   –9080.55 Still running when there is nothing left on the Earth’s surface but rails and dirt and sunlight
-9080.6 Other tangible power source
   –9080.61 Powered by LNG
   –9080.62 Powered by any old burnable junk that can be stuffed in the furnace
   –9080.64 Handcarts
   –9080.65 Powered by people putting their legs through holes in the carriages and running really fast
   –9080.66 Not powered but can at a pinch be pushed by another train
   –9080.67 Trains that are on boats
-9080.7 Powered by magic
   –9080.71 But still looks like quaint ye-olde steam train
-9080.8 Powered by thought
   –9080.81 Space train pods on the magic woo quantum rails of the Future
   –9080.88 Trains of thought
-9080.9 Trains of paranormal origin
   –9080.91 Ghost underground trains
      —9080.912 Of a mysterious silver colour
      —9080.913 Crammed to the gills with deceased commuters
      —9080.914 Still used by live commuters, who have not noticed
   –9080.92 Zombie trains
      —9080.921 Trains whose parts will rise up from junkyards all over the world when the zombie train apocalypse comes

Sanderson’s Surprise Organ
Devised for the jaded, sensation-seeking musical palates of the twenty-second century, Sanderson’s Surprise Organ resembles a standard, if over-ornate, pipe organ in nearly all respects. The organist is never informed beforehand if it is Sanderson’s instrument they are to play; its location is kept a closely-guarded secret and audiences are secretively prearranged. Charlotte Sanderson (later Dame Charlotte), the organ’s manufacturer, was a well-known sadist and Bach enthusiast. As well as the organ’s more usual features, she included a number of hidden functions, including: a hidden hammer which pops out and hits the organist on the knee; a pipe delivering a blast of cold water to the genital region; a retractable seat; a fire ant dispenser; and a compartment which can swing open to release a small and excitable dog. There exist a number of so-called ‘Sanderson scores’ wherein a second performer can operate the extra features from a safe distance at given points in the piece, to the amusement and delight of the audience. The rare organists who have survived a bout with Sanderson’s Organ to finish the piece originally started have won considerable fame and fortune, and are known collectively as the Sanderson Club. Their annual dinner, held at the floating gardens in New York, is a major press event.  

The New Earth Victorian Choir
Founded on the Venusian colony New Earth in 3830, the Victorian Choir consisted entirely of clones of Queen Victoria. This unusual situation came about after it was discovered that the colony’s vat birth centre director, having obtained a lock of Victoria’s hair and certain dreams and obsessions, had seeded the entirety of three years’ female clone stock with Victoria’s genes. The colony took the unusual step of supplying musical therapy to the little Victorias en masse, whereupon it turned out that they shared a fondness for singing in public. In later years, they formed a choir which was one of the foremost proponents of neo-Venusian soft punk, and undertook a solar system-wide tour which included the first live performance in Tokyo since the Great Sinking.

457XB Junker
For a small extra fee, prospectors seeking to scrap a solar-class or smaller size spaceship in the late 6700s can crash it into the geoengineered asteroid 457XB Junker, which lies in the second asteroid belt of HD 189733 A. The resulting sounds (consisting of various explosions as well as the highly resonant response of the asteroid’s surface) are beamed out into space via a powerful systemwide livelink and can be picked up by all sentient beings in the vicinity. Fans of the asteroid’s output usually make the tour out to listen and watch simultaneously in one of several nearby hotel space stations. Interestingly, in 6755 one of these space stations itself crashed into 457XB Junker, permanently damaging the surface but producing (according to aficionados of that sort of thing) the most amazing sound in the history of the Universe.

The Subliminal Noise Ensemble
The subliminal noise ensemble is a long-term project attributable to certain members of the global illuminati, needing (as it does) unparallelled access to global advertising and content creation and sophisticated location projection software to pull off.  The first performance (unknown to the participants) was scheduled for January 21st, 2440. For some three hundred years before that point, the ensemble’s secretive directors had been placing subliminal hints in various media sources aimed at the participants and their ancestors, with the aim of bringing together exactly the right people at the right time. In the last few years before the performance, the focus switched from ancestry and location to speech and sounds, with the aim of planting phrases, noises and exclamations of various sorts in the minds of the ensemble. On the day itself, the members of the ensemble fund themselves unconsciously drawn to central Almaty, where for thirty minutes, quite unaware, they made a series of utterances exquisitely timed and tuned to each other, which (to the audience of thirty listeners) represented the sublime culmination of centuries of work. Then they went home, with a vague sense that something important had happened, though they could not quite say what, and lived the rest of their lives under only the normal sort of subliminal influences. After this time, it is believed that the work of the subliminal noise ensemble continued with a focus on further performances, but with greater secrecy (perhaps due to a wider focus or more sophisticated methods?).

1. This river flowed from the mountains to the sea sometime during the Cretaceous; I am not sure which sea and which mountains, for things were different then. It was a major thoroughfare for the little dinosaurs who lived in and around it. There are those who say that the histories of the dinosaurs are out there waiting to be discovered; fossil footmarks in sand noting which dinosaur sold what to which other dinosaur, who pissed against which tree, and so forth. If so, and if only we could read them, the river would feature prominently. But I think that they do not exist, and there was no-one else there to remember it,

2. There was an old kingdom, and the ruling family had acquired many enemies. Fortunately, they had a large dungeon, and the large dungeon was full of their many enemies. One day, the river that fed the castle moat rose up beyond its accustomed high water point and swept away a chunk of the dungeon wall; whereupon the enemies took it upon themselves to float off into the torrent on rafts improvised from the broken remains of torture equipment. The ruling family, having no other target for its ire, settled on the river. It was subjected to a kind of Damnatio Memoriae. An army of scholars spent months excising references to it from the royal libraries, and an army of serfs worked to divert its sources. Eventually there was a famine and an uprising led by the escaped enemies, and the people sat around bonfires fed with the censored books, and everyone had more important things on their mind than rivers. And so it was that the enforced forgetting, surprisingly, stuck.

3. There was a little stream that wound around a housing estate, between a boggy stretch of hillside and a boating lake. It was the sort of feature that people know about but don’t think to record. Nobody came to map it, and nobody had a name for it. It was not very interesting, except to the frogs. Eventually, they came to expand the housing estate. Someone put in an anonymous pipe to carry the water, and it was paved over. The frogs moved out (the ones who migrated up the hillside were notably more successful than those who headed into town). The stream was forgotten.

4. There were three hundred little rivers in the delta. For a while there was a city there, a kind of proto-Venice in which the delta’s rivers became streets, and little assignations and petty infamies were committed in this river as in the others, and the city’s ruins sank into the mud here as elsewhere when its short time was over. For a while stories were told of these streets even as they rotted away. But one of the other river-streets had had a mysterious floating body whose clothes were those of a man from the far North; and another had a barge full of monkeys which was the result of an unwise bet by the bezoar-seller; and in another the queen of the city dropped a famous pearl and promised the ownership of a cursed tower to whoever might retrieve it. So it was the other rivers that were remembered and that went into the scanty histories of the time, even as the silt of the delta shifted and the river itself went away.

5. It was a slow and stagnant river, and had the most amazing fauna; such suckers, so many legs, so many body segments! Everyone who passed the river took a good long look at it and decided that, on balance, they would prefer not to remember it.

Thnorbs, teleporter kidney, style tuberculosis, space breath, brain flinders, clone-donor mismatch, London virus, Jebediah’s buttock, miniraptor bite, shrinking word syndrome, virtual herpes, mimetic fixation, VR rattle syndrome, cybersex knee, juve boils, the jurragees, duplicate spleen.

1. A more philosophically acceptable labyrinth. The premise of the more formal sort of labyrinth is that there is only one true path; for all our fondness of labyrinths, we do not agree with this. Instead we consider that there are as many true paths as people. Our labyrinth reflects this: there are no walls and no paths except those made by previous visitors, which you are under no obligation to replicate. Nevertheless, you are certainly at leisure to find a twisty, winding and difficult way through the labyrinth if you think it would make you feel better.

2. A maze of books. More accurately, this is a giant room filled with old books stacked from floor to ceiling, with initially only a small book-free alcove available at the entrance. Progressing to the other side requires the maze entrant to move the books around to create an increasingly narrow path, particularly if they also wish to leave some indication of the way back to the start. From time to time, functionaries appear with piles of new books to be added to the stacks. Crossing the book maze is thus a time-limited exercise, with tardy travellers soon completely buried. It is therefore vitally important not to start reading whilst in the book maze; in fact, illiteracy is a distinct advantage. It is unsure what lies on the other side of the maze in any case, and if it is desirable or not. Some suspicious observers point to the influx of new books bound in curiously soft leather which often occurs after a successful maze crossing.

3. A maze in time, rather than space. Now that we think of it, we are all doing this already. It may be that that when you found that silent, magical lake in the mist (do you remember the silent, magical lake?) you were passing through the central chamber.

4. A virtual maze. We have a computational model of the nearest city; a very, very accurate one. Into it we out our requirements for a maze: one entrance, one central chamber, one exit, a suitable amount of twists and turns and some peril. We receive a selection of entrance points and rules. For example, our city may be transformed into an adequate maze by the rule that the player take no road containing the letter ’d’. Or perhaps that they pass no building higher than two stories. We envisage many of these mazes operating at one time, with a host of players whose paths cross and recross (though their different rules mean that they can never travel together).

5. This is a formal hedge maze, except that as used according to the usual rules of hedge mazes there is no solution. There is not even nearly a solution; it is a set of closed loops. You can only get into the further parts of the maze by pushing through the hedge atone of its many sparse points. Of course, if users were to ask how this maze works, we would happily tell them this. Later on, for variety, we include a mirror section (which can only be solved by climbing over the wall) and a grotto or two (which are there merely for amusements’ sake, although we did once catch a patron trying to tunnel their way out of the grotto with a spoon).

1. There was once a fishwife’s daughter who ran away to sea to lean metalsmithing (why it needed to be at sea is anyone’s guess). In her seafaring days, she sailed over at least three of the lost enchanted oceans and made a number of magical swords to use in exploring the sort of shipwrecks one finds there. On her forty-fifth birthday she was forced to return to land by the sudden eruption of a salt allergy. She determined to enter the third magical sword (which was the least rusty of the bunch) into the royal sword contest. But, on arriving at the contest, she found that entrants were required by law to be members of the King’s Brotherhood of Swordsmiths; an organisation which she was ineligible for election to in several ways. In a fit of temper, she threw the third sword into a thicket and stomped off home to start a carpentry business (which, alas, she was terrible at).

2. There was a youngest son who was just passing by on his way to find his fortune. Since he was still rather lacking in fortune he had been thrown out of the stables at the back of the nearest inn and ended up spending the night in a very uncomfortable thicket. In the morning, he found that many of his troubles had been caused by lying on the flat of a rather unusual-looking sword. He took up the weapon and was fortunate enough to blunder into a pack of dragons on a working brunch. Arriving at the city with seven dragon tails and a red and buzzing sword, he was soon adopted as the King’s champion. He spent a number of fruitful years amassing lost hoards, making babies, and trying to persuade the sword not to eat his friends (it had, alas, got a taste for blood after all those dragons). Stories of his fame spread far and wide.  

3. There was a thin blue dragon who had survived the massacre; he did so by hiding in a tree. In fact, he was so terrified that he stayed in the tree for fifteen years, living on squirrels and sunlight and rain and occasionally drenching the rabbit warren below with lukewarm dragon piss. After fifteen years, the tree had grown round the dragon and he could no longer leave. He found this somewhat bothersome, as did the rabbits. Now, blue dragons can sometimes worm their way between worlds, if given enough time to find the weak spots in the space-time continuum; and this dragon set to chipping out a window into a world that did not have a tree in that place. If took him another fifteen years, but finally the window was large enough for him to slither through. However, by this time the rabbits had banded together and found a champion of their own, who had set up camp on a tree branch and had been nibbling at the dragon’s neck scales for a few weeks. On the evening the dragon was due to wriggle free, the rabbit champion at last prised a scale loose and put a sharpened stick thorough the dragon’s jugular.

4. There was a teenage girl who lived nearby, and who was shunned by many of the villagers for her mildly eccentric views. One day, whilst out walking, she found a tree that was surrounded by the most amazing blue flowers. And then to look up, and see the tree crowned with fantastical bones! There was nothing to do but climb it. And if she came down from the tree into a different world from the one she went up from, well: there was nothing very much to miss in the first world anyway. And how well it had equipped her to live in the second world! For all their myriad fantastical quantities, the inhabitants of the second world were a little silly, and curiously easily won over with a small amount of basic science and occasional acts of compassion. Soon she found herself saving the king of the second world, who was in disguise following a republican coup led by some cranky goblins.

5. The goblins were most put out to realise that the king was not dead after all, and did not put up much of a fight. When it became clear that the forces of light were about to triumph, they called together all their elven servants and set them free with directions for the safest way to leave the kingdom and individual bags of golden fixtures and fittings from the palace bathrooms. Furthermore, they requested, if the elves could see their way to calling in on some of the republican movement’s chief donors and asking them for some aid, it would be very much appreciated. As it ended up, only one of the elves got that far, and the donor was of very little help; but, being schooled in magic, she was able to suggest a location a few worlds away where a hero or two might be found to stir things up in the kingdom a little.

6. The elf came finally to the house of a young boy who had been living a rather dull life with unremarkable parents. Since elves are terrible navigators, he did not realise that he was at the wrong address and informed the boy that he was the Chosen One who was needed to save a distant and magical land. Fortunately, the directions he gave the boy were typically terrible and the boy ended up in the wrong distant and magical land. Although this land also needed saving, the task of saving it could be done by just about anyone; in fact, it was more like a road trip than an adventure. So the boy did as well as any other child might have done, and he was certainly very good at believing he was Chosen. As a reward, he was given three castles in the fairy hinterlands and a host of humorous magical servants.

7. Later on, the elf (who had decided he liked the mortal world and was reluctant to go home) was arrested for driving the wrong way down the M1 and developed an alarming beard whilst in police custody. After a series of increasingly frustrating interviews, he was charged with storytelling and sentenced to shut up.

A library of trees, planted in alphabetical order of their commonly-used name in long ranks across the field: apple, birch, cherry and so forth. We vary the spacing of the ranks based on the height of the trees and how much light the next trees along require. It is an oddly sterile place, but good for holding garden parties. On our deaths, we have decreed that the field return to nature, in the hope that one day it will become a chaotic forest with a tantalizing hint of the alphabet about it.

A library of cats. We have derived a complex classification scheme for them that we are very proud of, starting with genetic charts and using age, size and whisker length as subclassifications. But the cats will not stay in their assigned spaces. Some scratch at our carefully constructed section dividers. None of them will submit to whisker measurement.  We even find them in the morning with their collars off, nonchalantly grooming themselves on the front desk and shedding hair into the index system. We spend all our time finding the cats and refiling them. Somehow we do not mind this; there is even talk of finding more librarians.

A library of the dead. Some might argue that this is the function of a cemetery. But we disagree; one cannot legally make withdrawals from a cemetery. Our library of the dead, on the other hand, positively encourages short-term borrowing. Our stock (though we are still working on fully stocking the building; perhaps our initial facility was overambitious) is sorted by preferred method of decomposition (in soil; in air; mummified; saponified; in formaldehyde). All stock items have agreed prior to their death that they would like their mortal remains to revisit the world from time to time. Borrowers may, however, wish to inform the police beforehand so as not end up in a situation they find difficult to explain.

A library of lost things. This requires certain preparations. We have been raiding lost property offices and prowling down trains at the end of the line, black sacks at the ready. We buy up mounds of stranded suitcases from space-strapped airports. We follow the forgetful around, making distracting noises and snatching what they drop. Our collection of socks is particularly fine. We have all the usual exhibits: umbrellas, crutches, hats, prosthetic legs, notebooks, toddlers, packets of cheese, antibiotics, carnevale masks. Our library is open only to those who have lost things of their own. We collect the stories of the applicants’ losses and match them up with the lost item we have that we think will do them the most good (though it does not necessarily echo the original loss; we have lined up those who have lost loved ones with maps left on buses, for example).

0089 Stones
 -0089.1 Extremely large
    –0089.12 Planets that are rocks
    –0089.15 Asteroids
 -0089.2 Around the size of a librarian
    –0089.21 Statues
       —0089.211 Extremely serious statues
       —0089.212 Statues having one or more legs in the air
       —0089.215 Angels
       —0089.216 Ancient statues so enclosed in guano that they have been mistaken for mounds
    –0089.22 Funerary monuments
       —0089.222 Resembling a tooth or claw
       —0089.225 Rigged by enterprising funeral directors so as to topple when the liklihood of causing another funeral is highest
 -0089.3 The size of a fist or slightly larger
    –0089.31 Stone apples, stone pears and other fruit of petrified trees
    –0089.33 Stones found in cairns
    –0089.34 Can be used to stun a burglar
       —0089.343 Have been used to stun a burglar
 -0089.3 Pebbles
    –0089.33 Pebbles balanced in towers
    –0089.34 Pebbles having words on, the words together making up a story now long lost to entropy
    –0089.39 Forgotten pebbles of myth and legend
       —0089.383 The pebble needle of Dogger Bank
       —0089.387 The seven stone hearts of the deathless dogs
       —0089.398 The stone giant’s lost clitoris
 -0089.4 Gravel and scree
    –0089.41 Stones found in the shoe
       —0089.414 Stones which, once removed from the shoe, find their way back in again
       —0089.415 Stones which are part of the shoe and should not be removed
 -0089.5 Resembling dust
    –0089.55 Space dust
 -0089.6 Stones of which the size is unknown
 -0089.7 Stones of which the size is unknowable