Listing to Port

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. Aethelbert’s Torr. This is a negative tower, that is to say, it reaches down into the earth rather than up into the sky, and it is of great antiquity. It is most often encountered in dreams, in various forms. The most common is the dream-trope of a familiar building with extra structures, in this case the extension of a staircase or lift shaft down into the earth beyond its usual limits. Aethelbert’s Torr is thought to have originally been associated with dreams of barrows and mortuary houses, but has diversified into many other forms over the many years of its existence. However, there generally remains a suggestion that something dead may be in its unusual depths.  
2. The Tower of Dornock’s Drift. This otherwise-unremarkable tower has been noted as standing on cliffs overlooking the sea in several old chronicles. When cross-referenced, however, it is notable that at least ten different cliffs are mentioned; and no tower, or remains, are visible at any of those locations. There also remains a curious account of a hermit at Beachy Head that the tower was seen to rise into the sky on a pillar of flame on New Year’s Eve, but had returned the next day.
3. The Necessity Lighthouse. The necessity lighthouse is an odd enigma. It only appears in moments of uttermost darkness; although some of its features seem to suggests that it was intended to appear to those on states of deep spiritual or emotional trouble, it has only been observed in literal states of lightlessness. Thus those in trouble in caves, shuttered rooms at night, or in some cases out on very cloudly nights have occasionally seen its distant beams. Its appearance has also been reproduced in the laboratory in a specially-designed light-free chamber. There are thus some who hypothesise that the necessity lighthouse is in fact just an illusion caused by the eye’s reaction to complete darkness. Less well known is that the subject of the lighthouse experiment claimed to have been able to approach the lighthouse and walk round it, noting the phrase ‘You can do this’ in purple paint around its lower levels. The subject was not observed to move during the experiment.
4. Many examples of clocks featuring elaborate automata, donated by Western emissaries during the Qing dynasty, may be seen in the hall of Clocks in the Forbidden City in Beijing. Less well-known is the Clockwork Tower, a somewhat over-elaborate but fully-inhabitable mechanical tower with many fascinating automatic features. It is thought to have been a gift from a rather over-enthusiastic Venetian noble in 1760. As well as extending, in a not-at-all-phallic way, from three stories to seven at the push of a button, the clockwork tower was also able to scuttle sideways on ten mechanical legs. Observers described it as looking a little like a top-heavy crab. Unfortunately, one day it managed to scuttle right out of beijing and was never seen again. One assumes it must be hiding out somewhere in the Chinese countryside.

1. There was once an assassin, although she didn’t think of herself that way. Really, she was just doing what she had to do. The war, when it came, was someone else’s fault entirely and would have happened sooner or later in any case. Better to pull the thorn and start it now, rather than hanging around basking in the growing bad-feeling. Not only that, but it was more or less an accident that anyone died anyway. To be sure, she was there with the gun and the grenades. She had phoned in the bomb threat that left the cavalcade stuck on the old road. But she had more or less decided not to do it when an acorn fell on her head. Everything happens for a reason, you know. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do. The acorn, unregarded, fell into a patch of soft earth.

2. They say that the lifespan of an oak tree is three hundred years growing, three hundred years living and three hundred years dying. The acorn’s questing shoots had no idea of this saying, or that it was not normally true. The earth went round the sun once, then once again. The war was still far off. It became a sapling, then a mature tree. The woodland flourished for four hundred years, basking in steamy, sap-smelling summers and sitting through mild, damp winters. Someone seeded the ground with landmines then, a hundred years later, robots came to dig them up. The tree survived. Beetles ate out its heart, but it remained standing. A small town grew up in the greenwood beside it. Two hundred years later, twenty thousand refugees came to stay, and the town stretched out its limbs into the woody valleys around and became a city. Nine hundred years later, the husk of the old oak, surrounded by black tulips, lay at the centre of a genteel square.

3. At the death of the old year (which was in those days in the yellow height of summer), a parade of swimmers hung black ribbons on the oak as they processed down through the steep streets to the lake. Perhaps this year there were more ribbons than usual; it was a very hot summer. In any case, the last remaining branch of the oak snapped free and fell down over the road. A group of teenage girls came down from the silent houses on the square and stripped it of bark, which they used to make masks.

4. The masks hung in the silent houses for a hundred years more. A kind and gentle age came over the land.  People ventured out across the borders again. One could walk in the mountains without having to watch for drones. There were people digging in the black moorlands of the old cities, and finding old technologies, and bringing their secrets back to life. The silent houses found themselves full of families who could not help but laugh from time to time.

5. There were five children who grew up on the square, and they were all writers. It was a good time for writers, because now the war was over there was finally time to twist its stories into something beautiful or strange enough to hang an audience’s attention on. They thought that they would travel to the mountains and live on ice water and berries and dried meat, and that each of them would write a play, and they would come back to the city on a glorious wave of Art and be some kind of famous Set or other. And perhaps when they were setting out their minds were wandering further, oh further! on to the days when they would attend academic seminars about their journey, but in thrilling disguise.

6. In any case, it did not go quite as they expected. They made it to a remote valley, where they were only moderately hungry.  On the third day they caught a wild pig, which they drained of blood in the hope of making black pudding. Someone brought out a bottle of a thin green herbal spirit. They wore the masks and made a forest out of twigs set in the earth to act out a scene someone else had written that morning. There were refugees, and a bear. Two hours later, the fifth of the travellers went for a scenic piss on a cliff edge and did not come back. In a panic, the others scrambled down the cliff half-way to where they could see a pale shape in the darkness below; then they fell too. A warm rainstorm washed out the river valley two days later, leaving no trace. In time, the empty campsite was found, with its masks and blood and bundles of twigs, and formed an enduring mystery that captured the attention of the age. Someone even wrote a play about it.

7. A bottle and some bones and a packet of verses were swept with the floods down into the caves below the mountains, where they meandered through various ghastly sumps and narrow caverns. Eventually, they made it to the sea, washed up into the open door of an old lighthouse. Someone must have been living there then, although I am not sure how. They took the drifting objects and put them three floors up, near the lamp. In those days the lighthouse ran on energy from the decay of radioactive isotopes, because the land around it was not deemed habitable. But this was a generous age, and for a further hundred years the light gradually wound down, and travellers came to live again in the old villages by the sea.  

8. At some point they found the verses, but they could not read them. These travellers had a story, which was that they were the first brave pioneers to come back to this area after the dark age; and so they believed that they had found some great long-lost relic. They made a wooden town and painted it in many colours, and it had a blue tower that one could see for three miles along the coast. Here they kept their relics. In time it, too became a city, and the blue tower sat incongruously in its busy docklands. Scholars came from all around to look at the lost verses. But they threw away the bottle, believing it to be litter.

Mysteries

9872 Mysteries
 -9872.1 Solved
    –9872.11 Using brilliant powers of deduction
       —9872.111 Everyone so impressed by brilliant powers of deduction, nobody thinks to make sure the solution makes sense
    –9872.12 Using the power of lurve
       —9872.121 Everyone so impressed by the power of lurve, nobody thinks to make sure the solution makes sense  
    –9872.18 Solution is obviously wrong in the light of late-emerging data in any case
    –9872.19 Conspiracy theories concerning the mystery are much more entertaining than the actual solution
 -9872.2 Unsolved
    –9872.21 Explanation is obvious, but nobody wishes to admit it, because an unsolved mystery is much more exciting
    –9872.25 Of or pertaining to famous libraries or lost books
    –9872.28 Of or pertaining to remote islands or the far North
    –9872.29 Of or pertaining to caves, the deep sea or volcanos
 -9871.3 Concerning serendipity
 -9871.4 That are none of your business
    –9871.41 This fact occasioning an afternoon-long research binge
 -9871.5 Solemn and ancient
 -9871.6 Whose resolution would spawn two or more new mysteries
    –9871.64 Which must not be solved for fear of the proliferation of new mysteries
 -9871.8 In which the nature of the mystery is itself a mystery