8 more drabbles from the City of the Saved

8 More Weekend Sights To See In the City of the Saved. [Extracted from popular weekly part work, ‘1 trillion things to see before you’re still not dead.’]

9

Kiaryunatavia: is the seacoastless principality, which is vying to oust Zenda from its role as pre-eminant mittle-european 18^th  Century. With its metamorphic royal family, one member of which is guaranteed to fully resemble each visitor, and its combination of easy going hedonism, and strict visual code of conduct, Kaiaryunatavia has, since the days of its founder, magician, demagogue, and misunderstood womaniser Doctor Farcetus (whose statue shows him being surprised with his trousers around his ankles by a Priest) provided a home away from home for the buxomly clumsy, and the erotically inept. Suitable for klutus interruptus and 1970s England fetishists.    

10

Scienceopolos presents the antiseptic image of the prehistoric ‘city of the future’ – it has the lines of an autoclave designed by a committee – and is an amusing day out for any student of archetechtonics. Its inhabitants who live in Surburbanopolos, next door, commute to Scienceopolos on the Morbius Railway: noted for having had the only collision of one train, on one track since the Pagwell Incident of Earth Antiquity. Followers of Celebrity Remakes are advised to look out for Jack the Ripper. Despite an ongoing law-suit with Harlan Ellison, Scienceopolos is open every weekend, except for Lawyer’s Eve and Scroogemas.

11

Not a place but a process – at least according to its advertising – the present Game is now in its 11,002^nd year. Just by reading this you have of course lost, but if you can stumble upon it without having heard of it, and penetrate its sanctum sanctorum, without comprehension or memory, you may be voted Gamesmeister and end this cycle. Do what you need to without choice in the name of peace and sanity, while avoiding the metaphorical snake and reaching Mornington Crescent!  Neophytes to the great game may wish to limber up with Fairy Chess, Calvinball, or even Fizbin.

12

Check your brain at the door for the Zombie-apocalypso Roller-disco. Skate through the avenues and alleyways of a OnceGreatMetropolis(tm) while chowing down on the flavoured brain-pans of our genuine anecephalic cloneoids (the ones in green are organic, the ones in yellow entirely formed from vegetarian proteins, the orange both halal and kosher). Put the glide into shambling where the dinner is rambling!  Book ahead and eat yourself! Simply send a tissue sample one month in advance of your visit. “Five stars Yummy!”: Gastro-horror Magazine, “Who could have thought the old man had so much blood in him!”: Shakespeare About.

13

In the dark forests of the Brechtenwald Cabaret – thrill to the tall tales, and mighty thews, of the Nazi She-men – as they reconstitute primitive tri-gender mysticism, while modelling the best in PostWWIII prepreWarGermanicNostalgia. It’s fishnets and stone knives in the dark for those brave enough to be trepanned or sexchanged in the most brutalist way.  Even though it doesn’t hurt you’ll still get the thrill of people wondering why you went through with this!  When gender was in the closet, rather than an option found ‘in the closet’ these confused fellows terrorised Europe, now they’ll give you a good time! 

14

Smallanimalisles: the chain of Japanesesque islands entirely given over to the lifecycles of the cuter cuddly animals, is well worth a visit. Now it’s twinned with the Biogenesisisles – a dedicated archepelego-space in which real-time evolution is being run by teams of Long Term Experimentalists. While none of the carefully scrubbed, and de-lifed, sterile spaces have yet to spontain: Scientists hope that over eternity reruns of evolution will finally show whether or not humanity was inevitable. The isles can not be visited directly but they can be watched from ‘hides’. Be the first to spot the transition of life from lifelessness!

15

Take part in a full re-enactment of a ‘General Election’(tm) with all the pre-event fun, reproduced by brain implantation memory techniques. Stay up late and squeal as your favoured party is decimated, or halloeed to victory – revel in your entirely temporary and completely safe belief that everything depends on this! Then awake to a broader wider saner world, knowing that except for City Politics such things are far behind us.  You’ll laugh! You’ll cry, you’ll never understand why those bastards(tm) got in! (All election results generated by quasischotastic techniques guaranteed to alarm and surprise.) Afterwards: YOU CAN WAKE UP NOW.

16

Enjoy the slow-events at the tardilympics, from snail racing, through “running with the sloths”. See athletics in slowtime, and the miracle of ‘slo-mo bionics’ which turn spectator sports into true frozen art in which every lunge, twirl, and spin, hangs in the air like a pin-up tacked to the fabric wall of space-time itself!  But hurry, it won’t last for ever – it’ll just seem like it! Fans of this new form of entertainment can also try slowfeed in their own homes including such high tension programmes as: When Paints Dry!  Hundred Year Innings Cricket, and the famous City Politics Review.

(Drabbles 9-16 in an occasional series of 100. The City of the Saved is the intellectual property of Philip Purser-Hallard and appears here by kind permission. The authors of "1 trillion things to see before you're still not dead" accept no responsibility for the above sights not being part of any City of the Saved specific individuals may (i) read about, (ii) experience after their subjective or objective death. Readers experience the sights above at their own risk, post-mortem, albeit in a low to no risk environment.)

8 Drabbles from the City of the Saved : Tourism

8 Weekend Sights To See In the City of the Saved. [Extracted from popular weekly part work, ‘1 trillion things to see before you’re still not dead.’]

1

Delightfully antiquated, the partially cybernetic citizens of Trul, open their wheeled carts, to which their upper bodies are attached, each weekend to sell the micro-products of their internal nanofactors. These ‘carbot’ sales are a splendid outing for  families especially those with organic or free range children, as the Trul can ‘gut-craft’ multiples of any described artefact. The currency of the Trul is praise and attention. Their crafts are an unconscious quasibiological recycling of non-usable carbon and plastic elements from their omnivorous diets.  Neo-Freudians have called them anal for demanding their turds be praised, but then their turds are so marvellous!

2

Nimbyville lies at the base of the rolling Moving Hills, and like them, is migrating (in its case backwards) across the veldt of the Bollian Plains at the rate of two feet per month. Share the on-going protests and lie in front of the Hills’ geoformers as they rebuild the strata of the 94^th century Rockmeisters’ Palatial Mansions.   Tea and cakes are served in the ‘Protestors Encampment’ and for those willing to climb the Visitor’s Stairs to the Westward Terrace of the Magnifero Granificus the view of the Hills’ wake back to the start of their Millenial Migration is unmissable.

3.

The retro-settlements of the Pa-No Delta, offer all that can be wanted in stone and pottery mosaic art. Luxuriate in nostalgia for a gentler time, or purchase a variety of pointy, stabby, bronze weaponry, warranteed ‘non-harmful’ by Inspectors From The Campaign To Keep War Safe. The polite and pleasant Pa-No people are please to be patronised for a modest fee. Considering a career in the field of Historical Humbling? The Pa-No Delta Frat offers a degree level starter course in Obsequious Body Language. Come on a Student training day, when visitors will be pandered to by the best newest apprentices.

4.

At the Accelerated Limestone Caverns in Morovia, become a crystal for a day, and marvel at the quasi-ossification of your organic matter into living jewels!  The secret funerial practices of the Gem Guild of the Seventh Manumissionaries, are now available as an experience, you won’t believe. “These are pearls that were my eyes!”  : Shakespeare About.  “Voted, best transorganic transformation experience of the week” : Hyperbling Magazine.  “Two thumbs up, one ruby, one quartz!”  Opposable Thumb-User’s Monthly.  Thinking of slimming? simply chip off unwanted flesh during pre-imago restantation. Why not have your adipose made into costume jewelry? Surprise your friends!

5

Why not visit Sky-diver’s Village, the community, happily falling from the heights of the Watchtower towards the City below.  They live and work, and (saucy!) breed, entirely in free-fall, and thanks to their investment in an open ended ‘gateway’, they’ll always be able to. For when a million years from now they would otherwise be forced to negotiate the shock of a – obviously not fatal, but still disconcertingly sudden – lifestyle change, their entire community will impact not the roofs of the City’s central districts but a teleportation array that will instantly reposition them back at the start of their dive.

6

In sunny, Pansosa, where the population – reborn from the heady days of the Sociological Empire – are still working out their newly permissible interest in the idea of ‘free will’, the Museum of Determinism offers an experience that you’ll be literally forced to enjoy, in a specific way. From the predetermined channels of the entrance- ometer, through to the fun of the ‘your body knows what you want before you’ve read the menu’ games in the blindfold automat, visitors can relax in the knowledge that their experience is literally mapped out for them.  Win awards for predictability in the Lotto Grotto.

7

Swamp!  What an image that single word conjurers up.  Wallow – literally – in the fetid mud of ancestral abandonment, as quite possibly, your primitive forebears are still doing near by!  Feel the ooze squeeze between parts of your body you weren’t even sure had a between!  Watch re-constituted dinosauria thrash and bellow!   Watch novelist in residence Saul Bellow, verbally tease a dinosaur in our Demeaning of the Extinct Festival. Buy ‘This Dinosaur Is Puzzled!” face-masks and swamp mud body paint to recreate this at home. [No dinosauria were harmed, as they are guaranteed not to understand irony, insinuation, or Saul Bellow.]

8

Godzilla Racing at Cheltenham:  when horses just don’t cut it for you any longer, this once per decade event, in which Japanese jockies attempt to persuade behemoths entirely unaware of their presence to lumber rapidly down a specific course rather than fighting and laying waste to the vicinity, may be the treat you’ve been looking for!  Eminently suitable for animal lovers worried that horses may be psychological damaged by racing.  Remember to bring factor 1m sunscreen for the fiery-breath of these marvellous freaks of 27^th century fictio-engineering. The thoroughbred champion, Gothgroa out of Krath-a-boom by Ultimos looks a sure thing!

(8 drabbles in an occasional series of 100. The City of the Saved is the intellectual property of Philip Purser-Hallard and appears here by kind permission. The authors of "1 trillion things to see before you're still not dead" accept no responsibility for the above sights not being part of any City of the Saved specific individuals may (i) read about, (ii) experience after their subjective or objective death. Readers experience the sights above at their own risk, post-mortem, albeit in a low to no risk environment.)

Zappalevel

Zappalevel, is the bargain basement of heaven, where the people who can't understand the conceits and intricacies of the higher tiers are still permitted their every wish.

There is no poverty there, in those times of matterprinters and femtofactories, where everything that has ever been scanned by timephotography can be remade in seconds from the raw stuff of everything. Where a faberge egg and a real egg are equally unscrabbleable by engines operating at hidden levels of entropy.

Zappalevel is space-poor. It's buildings opulance-crammed, riches stuffed, colours and tones and textures upon textures.  Baroque and roll indulgences in papal ragtime, used as wallpapers over ancient marble. 

Zappalevel is the home of those who haven't learned when to want nothing.

The City Of The Illusion of Oblivion

The City of the Illusion Of Oblivion


Is at least three cities, perhaps four, for its buildings, fences, boundaries and demarcations set out inside it seperate domaines which touch only at certain points and only in one direction.

To pass within a certain pub at twilight and exit from an unlook for door with a different woman, or to turn left instead of right on the way to a job interview, can be to literally leave behind everything and everyone known, to pass from the yellow sun light of one city, to the blue hazey streetlights of the next.

People respond to this in different ways, some retrace their steps with utter rigidity - less their certain route home be lost, or pack around their bodies every momentomori or family photograph. Others throw themselves ever forward convinced that the three or four cities reconnect via other secret doors, and that it is possible to find your way back.

The names of the Cities are Youth, MiddleAge, OldAge, and Eternity.

The City Of Landfill

Built of debris, detritus and rubbish: Landfill, covers the whole of what was once the south-eastern British Isles. In a world from which humankind has long departed, the other life that once survived as urban scavengers, has followed his path to greater triumphs and mastery on a wider and broader stage.

Their leader's face on the scarlet banners, while furry and inhuman is benign - multiple it gazes down from the telescreens: Great Uncle is Watching You. Their starships each built around the miracle of the Wellington-Tobermory Drive, will spread their careful and parsimonious ethos across the universe: but it is hinted that there is a dark secret at the heart of their Womble paradise.

When they became the masters they left a niche in the great pattern of life: a niche exploited now by things that by evolutionary necessity are as much more ruthlessly driven to recycle, as the Wombles are not to waste.

Needing to live on so little they have become shambling parodies of their once kin, things to be feared in the the darker commons. Overground, underground wombles all flee, the xombles.


Simon BJ [Today's post. Back in sync!]


Simon BJ

The Place Of The Two Absent Monkeys

During the Tang Dynasty, it was reported that in the temple of Pang-ko in Shin province was an ornately carved room called the Place of the Two Absent Monkeys which possessed an interesting property.

The room - whose walls were a complex mosaic of carved ivory and white laquered wood - had this peculiarity: while if it was measured, it was clear that it could house no more than thirty people by volume standing in reasonable proximity – if people entered it determinedly, a full thirty two could enter. However if thirty two were to do so, while thirty two people would then leave, two of the people would have changed utterly. Their height, their sex, the language they speak, their memories, all metamorphasised in an instant. The room was widely regarded as cursed for this reason; and for obvious reason its strange nature was rarely tested.

When the wayward grand nephew of the Emperor Xizong, together with thirty dragooned peasants and his bodyguard the Samuri Ro, assayed the feat of putting the room to the test, and the young Prince and his muscular body guard were transformed into two surly old men in rags, the matter came to the attention of the court in Chang’an.

Xizong dispatched his mathematician and investigator Li Po with strict instructions to restore the Prince to himself.

Li Po first talked to the thirty who were unchanged. He discovered that while thirty two people had entered the room, no one within the room had, at any one time been able to see the Prince or his bodyguard. He therefore reasoned that the room in its ‘empty’ or condition, had been so built as to have the quality of possessing minus two persons. When thirty two entered and moved around, the two minuses are ‘raised’ above ‘zero’ and may mix freely with the others, their places taken by two hapless visitors until the moment comes to leave the room. The room therefore did not transform, but rather held as a prison two of its newest entrants, while releasing those it had rendered into 'zeroes', perhaps years before. He confirmed this by talking with the villagers around Pang-Ko who, with the assistance of coin, were able to bring to mind the disappearance years before of the two men, who had now come to light. Within the room they had not aged, and the villagers were on the whole displeased to see them, remembering them as surly ragged ruffians even ten years before.

Li Po sent to the magistrate, and emptied the jail until he had a sufficiency of people to fill the room, for he reasoned that as with the motion of tea-leaves on the surface of a white china bowl, there would need to be a sufficiency of motion to stir up the numbers. And thus he recovered the Prince and his servant.

Even now if you travel to Shin Province and the Temple of Pang-Ko you will be permitted to enter the Room only in numbers below ten, for fear of freeing two feared criminals of the Tang dynasty.

Simon BJ [Post for the 9th May 2009]

The Nine Cities Of The Immortals

In the valley of Chan-Tu, lie nine cities in which it is said a form of immortality may be had for a price.

In the first city, artisans will carve the name and the accomplishments of a mortal into a block of diamond using chisels of light.

In the second city, recursive editing applied to the germ-plasm will allow a person to be reborn as his or her own child.

In the third city, a clockwork copy of a person can be made with miraculous fidelity save for its one additional characteristic: its ability to make a copy of itself accurate and inclusive of that additional quality.

In the fourth city, a drug exists, which speeds the perceptions of the mind and body so that its takers live a billion years while a rain drop falls.

In the fifth city, a guild of meme-engineers undertake to build a religion around the purchaser's eventual resurrection, and life among the gods. When a criticality of believers exists, they affirm, it will be so in truth.

In the sixth city, all names are set aside in pleasures masked, and unrecorded, and no deaths have ever been known within its walls.

In the seventh city the seeker of immortality is taken apart cell by cell, and each miniscule atomie implanted in another person. This is the process known as the Immortality Homeopathic.

In the eighth city, the seeker is granted a number of extra lives, which her or she carries in an eggshell. The eggshell must be carried in the mouth.

In the nineth city, there is a mystery.

Each cities methodology has disadvantages: yet each is hailed and draws its quota of pilgrims.

It is also said that there is a tenth city: reached by secret railroads and hidden canals. In the tenth city, those fleeing the first can buy the erasure of their histories from eternal light; the children of the second can earn the right to sire new and novel offspring; the clockwork artisans of the third can run down; the madmen of the fourth can rest their billion year unblinking eyes; the martyrs of the fifth can hail their eventual iconoclasts; the pallid, and sheepish escapees from the sixth can locate - eventually - their own longed for clothing; the gestalts of the seventh can each donate the tiniest fragment to a petra-dish before denying their identity. Those from the eighth can spit the broken egg-shells from their mouths and see the tiny birds of life fly free. But from the ninth and most mysterious city, it is said no one has ever come to the tenth.

This then is a true and verified account of the nine or ten cities of Chan-Tu, to which should be added only this.

From the outside all the cities are identical: nor can a pilgrim know which immortality his or her coin buys until it is given.

On the island of Parallelica

On the nearly square island of Parallelica, the citizens have so arranged their habitations that there are neither villages nor cities, but only seven long streets that span the country. Each street, which runs for the full seven hundred mile length of the island, has along its right side private homes, and along the left places of work and supply. Behind both sides stretch for perhaps twenty miles farms and countryside linked by narrow lanes, until one comes to ten miles of dense forest, and thereafter the farms and hinterland of the next street.

The advantages of this system are these, if one is lucky one's place of work will be across the street, and the countryside is always within a days walk, anywhere on your street can be found by walking, if one only walks for long enough and there is no part of the street without the possibility of human contact, or the availability of goods.

The disadvantages are these, increasingly the seven streets have adopted their own customs, and the different tribes who at various times have come to Parallelica, have chosen also to settle in the street their kin have most favoured. Now there are occasional raids between streets and expeditions into the dark forests, spy on the street next door as on a different country.

The Church of the Third Street, is at odds with that of the Sixth, and although both claim that, when extended to infinity their respective streets will meet and be reconciled, each suggests to its own worshippers that the reconciliation will favour them. Meanwhile the planners of the Second street, envious of the fishing docks
to be found on the seaward side of First Street, mutter of their 'historical right' to a seacoast beyond the tiny docklands of the Two Ports at either end of their domaine.

The Seventh streeters, propose to achieve a greater harmony of peoples by driving a new steet - 'the road of harmony' at right angles from their coast through the very centre of the island. There are parties in each of the other streets who bitterly oppose this, and even the Seventh Parliament is itself unsure. The leader of the opposition has denounced the plan, arguing that it will in time lead to other 'un-natural roads' until the whole island is squeezed into the ever narrowing gaps in the net of dwellings and of utilities, and nature is finally throttled.

The sacred animal of Parallelica is the Zebra, the windows of its houses favour blinds over curtains, and its national flag is seven lines of black, seperated by green.

The Porpoise Empire (part 1)

THE PORPOISE EMPIRE

Introduction

Any historian of the peoples, indigenous or not, of the Maelian hinterlands of Europe must primarily acknowledge the work of Anatole France. While my study is of the implacable racial foes and foils of the folk of his seminal work ‘Penguin Island’, and hence references to it will be as slight as the rules of copyright necessarily demand, it would be ingenuous to deny that the need for a definitive account of the Porpoise Empire, its origins, rise, and eventual fall, would not have occurred to me without the impeccable and precise scholarship of the earlier works in this field.

THE ORIGINS OF SPECIES

In their natural state, Porpoises are suave, lovable, sleek, toothy, gregarious, and proverbially intelligent enough either never to molest a human swimmer (and often to bring them to port or respond to the pipes of a to-be-keelhauled Greek lad) or if
inclined against one to drown them only cautiously at the dead of night when no other human will suspect. The humanoid porpoises of the Maelian hinterland however are a quite distinct type or subspecies, and their departure from the root-stock of the modern porpoise is sufficiently recent as to leave no visible fossil records of intervening links. The Porpoise (this history will dignify them with a capital P) are
bulky, prognathous of jaw, grey of skin (shading to a mottled brown in the more mitteleuropean) , and – inclining still to a tendancy to have one eye on either side of their head - prone to an ossilation of the head from side to side similar to that seen in some suffers of syphllis and the late Professor Moriarty.

This speciation then is sufficiently surprising to have given rise to a number of legends and it is right for any history to recount them here in their proper
place.

[to be continued...]

The Falling City by Paul Bellora (Guest Writer)

Enter Al-Ductor, the falling city. Buildings warp and twist under constant acceleration as this doomed city plummets down a dark shaft. Service and upkeep have long ceased in this place that rockets toward destruction, and whatever functions these edifices once had are now abandoned in the face of certain ruin. No sane being would choose to live in this place; no sensible creature would willingly confine himself here—here where at any second it should all end in a single, cataclysmic shock. The largest, strongest building—the tallest, proudest tower—is frailer than your most frangible vase as it hurls to its death. In moments, it will all be smashed, obliterated by its own shear kinetic energy. This city is beyond fear; it is beyond help; it is beyond hope.

But life, it seems, is the epitome of persistence. Look there! Closely, under the crumbling shell of structures, there is movement. Down here, under the sagging mass of useless spires, there is a sort of crawling buzz of activity. There are beings that would not be dissuaded from living even here… You study their movements, their patterns. A system begins to humbly form before your eyes: an economy, a society. Finally, you grasp the true essence of the place: this—not the shell of crumbled, spurned towers—is the Falling City. Here life continues, unabated by the thought of inevitable destruction; in fact, it belongs to destruction—this is Life of the Fall. And so in the merest of moments before death, before being violently shattered upon the floor of the shaft, this hidden level hums with a buzz of content routine.

Of course, that of which a society grows under the gaze is fated to be a subject of intense study. These denizens would look to the fall as we would look upon the moon—seeking, always, to explain its purpose, its effect. A certain caste emerges—the Depthists—tasked solely with predicting the exact moment of impact. Ushering an enormous, highly budgeted project, this order seeks to gauge the precise depth of the fall—and thus, the remaining lifespan of the city. These efforts are neither made out of terror, nor anticipation; they are strictly business. There are those who could gain from such knowledge, who could better grasp various economies. Countless factors are considered, enormous lengths of data tabulated; entire libraries are filled with equations. Much is learned of the universe in this golden age. There is talk of an expedition, a project to send a man across the gulf of space and to the wall of the shaft, racing blindly past—not so that he might escape, of course, but so that some new knowledge could be gained, science furthered, benefits reaped. But science cannot benefit society without changing it… the Depthists can find no end to the shaft; with each advance in technology and improvement of instruments, estimates grow larger. Gradually it dawns: the shaft is bottomless. Destruction no longer looms; it is, in fact, impossible. The Falling City becomes the Infinite City.

How invincible something is when it is proud! Look as the structures form, the towers soar, metal and glass, out into the void. Endless development, total advancement! The Infinite City grows, reaches up into the shaft—waving with jutting spires to a world forever left behind. And it dives too—reaching down with its metal tendrils to embrace the anticipated. At the zenith of the city, there appear temples, ornately vitreous, reaching with eager antennas into the rushing abyss. These needles are the epitome of the city’s spirit: they dive eagerly into the fall, accepting it, believing it, demonstrating faith in its infinity. The fall is the subject of worship; its infinity is the source of the city’s power. Behold this incredible organism of Infinite City! It reaches out with its metal limbs; it would touch the sides of the shaft, touch the edge of the universe…

But infinity would be its own undoing, it seems. With infinite length, infinite time, there is also infinite room for error. The Depthists, long obsolete, failed to recognize the truth. The shaft is not bottomless. It has an end, which arrives shortly. Al-Ductor becomes the Fallen City.

The Library Of Heaven

'In my Father's house there are many bookselves. If it were not so. I would have told you.'

The Library of Heaven (which unlike that of Babel contains nothing unintelligible) contains not only every book every written, every book whose intention every existed, and every work ever referenced even in metafictive jest but also every book experienced.

Thus for a work, say Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, there exists along the long 'human-ward' axis of the Library's multi-dimensional shelves, copies that flare
with the brilliance of each reader's separate responses - one for every reading from a person's first perusal to their last familiar browsing. Copies which peter out in intractable verbiage in Chapter twelve where once a schoolchild faltered and copies with the additional epilogues and sequelia of the avid reader's imagination. Reading along the human-ward access in chronologic order, the browser finds the texts read by Dickens himself and by his proof-readers and friends and then that read by the first purchaser and onward unto the last mortal reading in dim futurity. In human-axis-space books begin with a needle point and swell to their fullest readership - budding into exotic blooms of manifold translations each with their own scarlet traceries, and then die back into a grey thread of college students, intellectuals, and lovers of obscurity until the end of their worldly experience.

Along the author-ward axis books are followed by their chronological offspring, both those of the writer, and those of the books influenced by the works, so that Lovecraft follows Bierce and Machen, and the thread of an argument or the occurrence of an image or the unfolding of a form can be picked out in real time. In the author-ward axis books open outwards forever influencing and begating influences anew and even the obscurest work sows somewhere the seeds of offspring if only in a crop of 'would-be-better' rejoinders and reactions.

Along the character-ward axis are found the varied and multiplex accounts of many authors, who have chosen to follow a specific fictional persona. This special case of the influential branches through the galleries of bright ephemeral pastiche and the stony gardens of works undertaken to renew copyrights, with their gravestone hewn images. Here may be found every story of Sherlock Holmes, or Batman, or the Doctor, of Theseus, of God. Every story, from the tales children make in crayon of the vast adventures blazoned across their wide imaginations, to the last writing-for- hire makework of the last hack working to a dwindling audience. Every tribute to the giants, every satire at their expense, every Hemlock Soames, and every Solar Pons, every Mycroft and every Moriarty.

All this in one wing of the vast arrays. For it is only the literature of humanity, and only that of its mortality.

In the Library there are also the books of worlds other than those of humanity and of other universes of humanity, books never imagined in our history, and above them the books written by the transmortals who have the eternities to pick and choose among the books of mortality as a child picks up its choice from the golden covered volumes in the sunlight of a glorious afternoon.


Simon BJ

Shamadu

A joke of a town, a hucksterville of face-painters and log-jam sideshow booths, Shamadu sidles across country, insinuating itself at the edges of county fairs, its denizens frying honey-dew burgers, and offering 'Milk o' Paradise' shakes.
Its Mayor, Professor Rainbow, is tattooed in seven colours, and his wife Esplanardia - the Mayoress - bears the old stigmata of the life-time knife-thrower's assistant. But the town has an identity which lies behind the mask of peeling grease-paint, and which sloughs off the mockery of the few visitors, who pass along its 'Avenue of Booths Of All Nations'

Its trailer homes, are a true caravanserie, and its cargo is wealth beyond the Indus.
The jewels and sequins in the headresses are real and priceless, the faded yellows - cloth of gold, the snake-eye charms emeralds.

Their strongman, who came to earth so long ago from a world with a different gravity, can crush carbon into gems between his fingers. He does this with the abstraction of a collosal child.

Their Swami, is the One incarnation of the True Llama, a muddy birthmark pressed with a podgy fingertip in haste onto the forehead of another infant in his nursery.
He reads minds with ease, calms them, adjusts karma, drinks root beer.

In the tent of the 'Haunted House' live three ghosts in mourning for the lost soul they used to torment, a younger spirit, now gone beyond. In his memory they have vowed only to do good deeds, and make such scares as tingle the body with the numinous, and impart life to the living. Many a timid visitor have they scared to life.

The music man who tinkles on the ivories in 'Prof Prestigio's Pyramid Of Pianos', holds his finger to his lips when asked to sing, and brushes back his greying kiss curl.

Simon BJ

The City Of Shrouds and Mothballs

The City, awaits, as it has now for a thousand years, its final absolute occupancy. Its tallest spires are covered in wrappings of white and yellow damask: its tentative, and always temporary, inhabitants swathe their impertinant bodies in robes that do not so much hide them, as prevent the soiling of the citadels they expect at any moment to have to hand over to personages more exhalted, more dominant, and with a greater right to the looming turrets, the long plastic lined thoroughfares, and the mothball scented bedchambers.

No land in the city is ever sold, each plot or building is entered into by a complex system of leases. Some terminate at at set date (never far enough in the future to permit a feeling of ownership) but most end on receipt of some sign, password, or shibboleth, or after a proscribed series of omens. An attic room might be possessed only until on the seventh day of a month whose weather has been mild, snow falls on the metronomes of the singing cathedral spires. A cathedral itself has been known to change hands at the fall of a sparrow, the successor cult treading lightly upon the icons of the dispossessed for fear of those who might bear the Rose or The Spear required to disallow their holdings.

The lease system, dates back at least a thousand years, and each dwelling carries with it the codicils, amendments, interpretations, and deliniations of its future.
Here lawyers would carry much weight if they had not been purged as a class by their defenestration from the windows of their courthouses following a fall of scarlet frogs four hundred years before. In their place, soothsaysers, poetasters, charlatans, and house-pox-cleaners, serve to fill a similar niche.


Simon BJ

Obituaria

In the island city-state of Obituaria, names, jobs, and riches are assigned in accordance to the long death-rolls (and death-roles) of the world, and wouldbe 'revenants' apply in their thousands to perpetuate the lives of those revered in fame and story.

The city was founded after the death of Abraham Lincoln by an eccentric, some would say obsessed, actor-manager Horatio Mentula (born Albrecht Mentustein). Horatio saw in Lincoln's death a besmirching of the ideals of the theatre (he had, after all, been killed in one, by a popular actor whom Horatio had managed in an earlier performance of Richard II). Horatio turned the resources of his medicine shows (third most popular after those of Buffalo Bill, and Wild-Bill Hickock) to the re-enactment of the president's life. At first he offered scenes from Abraham's past glories: the childhood in a log-cabin, the Gettysburg Address, but there was considerable competition in these matters. A rival of Horatio's Finis L. Bates
was to emulate his work with Lincoln in respect of Lincoln's slayer - claiming both to have met a living Booth in Granbury, Texas in the 1870s and later to have taken possession Booth's body after his suicide and toured the mummified body in carnival sideshows. Horatio, however, both anticipated and outdid Bates, and late in 1870 he adopted a different tack. His touring exhibit "What President Lincoln Did Next" in which an actor day by day performed the tasks of the office and person of Lincoln onward as if he had not died, both offering a commentry on the politics of his successors, and a reverential depiction of the man, formed the basis of the philosophy of first 'The Living Obituary Show', then 'The Obituary Township of Marvelous Continuence', and finally the 'Isle of Obituaria'. So popular was the 're-embodiment' of Lincoln that in 1901, Horatio was able to engineer the exhumation of the president's body and its removal to Obituaria where reinterred in concrete several feet thick it formed the foundation stone of the first of Obitaria's many White Houses (one each for each President young enough at the time of death to still be living at this hour, the 'Elder Statesman' President residing by current tradition in the First White House).

It is the aim of Obituaria to grant to every assassinated, or otherwise untimely slain, man or woman of reknown, the full lifespan of the oldest person willing and able to devote themselves to honouring them. Abraham Lincoln for example, by the devotion of several 'revenants' finally past away peaceably in his bed in the First White House at the age of 115 in 1914, to headlines depicting his sorrow at 'European folly'.

Candidates for each newly deceased 'office' are carefully winnowed for devotion to the genuine beliefs, resemblance to the actual appearance (which may differ from that publicised) and comparability of age to the time of death, of the deceased.
There were in the early years a number of scandals caused by fanatics of various stripes, seeking to enact 'post-deathbed' recantations of various political, religious, or philosophical positions.

Not all inhabitants of Obituria are enactors, some are professional or technical staff paid by the Horatio estate (headed by Horatios own enactor(s) and legal heirs until the death of the oldest 'Mr H' in 1927), but not all the enactors are of the famous. Many non-famous people who would otherwise have been mourned only within a narrow circle, have yet found someone of their age, build, and beliefs who is willing to live their lives out 'in their name' for them. These too are welcome.

In some cases the loved ones of a deceased person have migrated to Obituaria and formed a 'secondary household' around the nucleus of rememberance. Indeed this process was so common that by 1954 Dr Fredric Wertham warned in his book 'Seduction of the Mourners', that Obituaria was an impediment to the 'process of mourning' and a 'retardation of progress'. His argument that Obituaria perpetuated beliefs and relationships that would otherwise have been cut short by a form of cultural Dawinism was much discussed in the 1950s along with such issues as segregation and Female emancipation.

Today Obituaria is a haven of peace where Isaac Asimov works on his tenth Foundation novel (the process a mutually beneficial licensing arrangement with his estate), where President Kennedy, approaching his 90th year lives with Jackie (his wife having given 'over' her place in the 'secondary household' to a revenant on her own sad overdose).

Simon BJ

Brittlemasque

In Brittlemasque, the living go
nervous in twos or threes as though
the dead who much out number them
are waiting for a moment when
distracted by the pulse of blood
the living come to Deadman's Wood
or Slaughter Tow, or Breakspine Point
or the crossroads called 'Out of Joint'
where dislocated limbs a-twitch
disclose to travellers which way's which
from their place on the gibbet tree.
(There's one unclaimed, whose can it be?)
It is the place of Captain File
the pirate chief whose ways were vile
- you may recall the year before
his ship bombarded the near shore
which cost the lives of forty score,
and so disturbed the quick and dead
a price was fixed upon his head
which generous price quite quickly lead
on to that 'partial' resolution
inherent in an execution
of justice, which for Captain File
set for six months his widening smile
upon the tree at 'Out of Joint'
with arms so fixed as true to point
between the whirlpools and the deep
the ship-crack rocks and reefs so steep
that sailors skirt when its their task
to beach their ships at Brittlemasque.
In seven months it chanced the great
and mighty in a ship of state
came sailing home with pennants high
scarlet and gold athwart the sky.
The ship it carried the King's son,
a sprightly lad of twenty one
the heir to all the blackened trees
the craggy spires, the bitter breeze.
The living and the dead both bent
their heads as the ship by it went.
Save one which did not bend to sea
but grinning there upon the tree,
grinned as with crack of bone and wire
it's pointing arm crept ever higher.
And checking bearings by that arm,
the ship swept on to grievous harm.
And that is why from 'Out of Joint'
notorious pirates may not point,
but only cut-purses and those
who do not know the river's flows.

Kasting

Into the town of Kasting come the archetypes whose days have passed. Jugglers and wandering Monks, Moors with silver chains attaching scimitars to their broad leather belts, ill-aspected moustachioed magicians in purple cardinal's robes - their circular hats scuffed at the brim and dulled with dust. Here can be found the dwarfs who have been ousted from their homes by dwarves, and goblins of the old market-haunting sort, and witches who have never heard of wicca save for the crackling of a burning effigy at midnight. Here are the street-urchins whose drugs are gin and whose vices are gambling with human knuckle bones for dice, with souls for stakes. Here are the golden-hearted whores before the gold was melted off and sold, and the hearts of brass and clockwork devised.

Into Kasting come the outmoded men, and the unfashionable women, and the children of untimely countinances who otherwise would stare sullenly out of old black and white photographs and engravings, and retard the passage of time itself with their antique faces. Here in retirement live Arthur, late of Avalon, and Boudicea under the roman pronounciation, and three rival Merlins who grow beards at each other, fiercely, only half in sport, and share successively the affections of the Lady Nimue at different phases of the moon. In Kasting they go by the titles: Prophet, Magus, and Doctor, and yet no one has the gumption to pin down precisely which title each Merlin holds so that addressing one is a masterpiece of circumlocution and hesitancy.

Into Kasting come the faded ghosts and trumpery spectres, driven out by newer horrors and a greater psychopathy of fear, making their final retarded displays of wailing. Banshees howl and chains rattle in the high winds of the gorge in which the township lies.

Very occasionally the Revival Train, with its masked preachers, and armed side-riders will pass through Kasting, with its role-calls and stirring music, calling for certain sorts of character to brave again the outer world. Then for a time the drums will strike up and the bravos strut, and the toledo sword leave its sheath to weave a sigil in the air, but all know that they will return, older, wearier, and less able to totter forth for the next train or the one after that.


Simon BJ

The City of Eeee (part 1: eschatology)

Eeee’s ecclesiasts (explicitly envisaging eternity) explain Eeee’s eras encompass eighty eight eons, each epoch ending either explosively elsewise entropically. Eeee’s environs enclose eighty eight established Educational Establishments each emphasising entirely epochal events. Educational-evangelists expound extravagantly each eventuality every epoch exposes: evidence entitling epochal exclusions, Eeee expunges. Events, eccentric, exceptional, extramundane, extravagant, each equally end entropaically, Eeee’s educationalists expound.
Extra-curricular enclaves exist (extralegal, entrapment enforcing exile). Enclavists entertain extreme eschatologies, endeavouring emigration elsewhere escaping explosion equally estuing entropy.

Simon BJ

The City Of Uuuu

Ultimately Uuuu: unformed, undistinguished, unimpressive, underplays Uuuu's unwinking unrelenting universal ubiquity.

Uuuu's uncanny usufactory uglification undoes Uuuu's ubeity; untraceable, untouchable, unrooted. Uuuu undoes Uuuu.

Uuuu's upperclass utter untranslatable Ural-Altaic ukases, unclassifiably unctuous. Underpopulated: Uuuu's unemployed, unpeople, underpersons - usually utterly undersexed - unfleshed. Uuuu's uxorious, uncouple - uncharacteristically undone. Unions uncared for, uncertain, unattach.

Uuuu's unusual underpinnings : ultimogenature, ultimatums, unaccountable uncertainty (unanalysable, uncomfortably upheld upon unstable ultra-elements - unnilquadium, unnilpenium, untruth.)

Simon BJ

The City of Iiii.

I inched into Iiii. Iiii: imagined illumed, irradiated, iridescent, infamous in its indignant infrastucture, its image imitating irrefutable infinities. Its idols Ibex, its icons Ibis. (If I imply it's infernal, I infringe interdenominational interface intentionally). Iblis’s incubi innundate its inner identity, implicating indomitable Illuminati, intransigent intelligencers, intractable Ichabods, incommunicado Incumbants, in indulgences infatuated, inflaming, iniquitous, infra-dig.

Its illnesses I intuit internally, inferring intertwining inner iatrogenic impulses. Insects infest its indigenes, ichneumonic, ichthyosis itching interminably, itching incurably. Infection is Iiii’s insatiate infusion, ingravescent, inguinal, ingrowing.

Iiii is inverted, its infinite intentions indicate innumerable ideas, it implies its impact impassively, immense iconic, implacable iron-wrought.

Initially influx into Iiii, is infinitesimal, it increases in inconstant, inconclusive, iotas. Iiii’s indefensibility, incursions indelicately indicate, indecorously interpenetrating its insurmountable injuries, its intangible insurgencies.

Iiii’s intelligencia, intended in its initial inauguration intensive interblending intellect, infantalism, intercession, intercourse. In interbreeding it interrogated its interstitial innards, its intertribal intestines, interwound in inthralling intimacy.

Into Iiii, intravenously in intussuseption, I, Iiii’s inured invalid, invaded Iiii: Iiii, in its intransigence, in its infection, invaded its investigator.

Iiii’s invocation: Ia! Ia!

In involutions involuntary, in involute involucre, I inwardly inched. In Iiii inhalation is inherently iodinic. Its iodization indigo, irritating, incusing.

Iiii is irrecoverable, irremediable, irremissible.

Iiii is I.

Aaaa - (Blind Atlas)

Leaving Oooo it was not my intention to linger around its sister cities - which I had heard become intractable, moribund, sullen, and cribbed-insolent as they wind from Vowel Valley to the Coast and hidden Zzzzs, but I, attracted against anyone's abilities, against all advice automatically approached ancient aeruginous and alabaster Aaaa.

Ah, above Aaaa albatrosses accentuate acciaccatura. Abstracted avian accompanyists (also accompanists alternatively) accomplish an absolute abnegation, abstruse, as aching as an acquisitive atrophy, aimless ariel, and alarming.

Aaaa, always approached across abaddonic adits and abyssal allyways, accessed along avenues acclivitous. Acrophobes attain Aaaa's acropolis after actions abominable and alien (against affectations assumed and affections affirmed). Aboulia almost always aborts agoraphobes attempts also, and around Aaaa's antecedant acres all airsick adjournees abide awaiting an aesthetic affinity attaining acrophilia. Alienists (almost always Adlerian, agamous agitators and agressive agents) apply agonising attentions of acornite, agaric, aloes, admixed amid agate and azure agar-agar. Any able, after atrabilious agues administered ad-nauseaum, are admired, awarded aegrotat absolution. After aesculapian administration all allottees absolved, attain advent amidst Aaaa's adyta. An advent attained almost as an afterthought amid afternoon aestervation. Amid an aromatic affluvium as alogical and altogether astringent as ambergris.

Aaaa's Academic administration (an admixture admirably arranged: actuaries, accountants, adolescent adonises, adventurous adults and amoral adulterers) attend and adumbrate adroitly aloud all adverserial, advisory, and adjudicial advocacy. Accidie, apathy, all antics, and afterpains Aaaa's academics attest agin. Aaaa's academians' albs are as adorned as alchemic albums attesting attainment alkahestical. Albata aleph's albedos align alledging allegorical allegences.
(Aaaas aboriginals: alchemists, Anabaptists, Albigensians, albinos).

Aaaa allows amnesty (and, all Alienists attest, amnesty's ancilliary; amnesia): any amounting atop Aaaa's ancestral altars, analogously amputate and anesthetise any anarchic anatomy and as anchorites abide abduring anfractuosity.

Anyone anointed as an anchorite and antitheitically awakening animosity and annihilation, as antonyms accrued antipathy: anyone announcing anything antisocial and advocating Aaaa's adopting Anglicanism; Aaaa's alienist agents annull any aegrotat awarded. Aaaa's anger apishly appears as apoplexy and aphasia. Alone and absented attesting apologies apparent as aphonic aposematics, any apparition apprehends apostasy and approbate: the victim ceases to be capable of uttering words intelligable within the City. Thus touched I was myself forced to flee the sister-city of Oooo which to me would now remain forever nameless.

Simon BJ