Against All Flags by Gallium Ellington

TWO: THE LETTER OF MARQUE

   In 1913, Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity. It was a full frontal assault on the tenets of Newtonian physics, the theory that had dominated the modern (as opposed to modernist) era with its view of the universe as a sort of stage upon which objects, lumps of matter, are merely players reacting to one another through the exchange of energy. According to the theory of relativity, the distinction between players and stage could no longer be made - space and time exist, he argued, as much in the interaction of matter and energy as matter and energy exist within space and time.
   The most profound puzzle of all is the fact that, whatever we may experience mentally, time does not pass, nor does there exist a past, present and future. These statements are so stunning that most scientists lead a sort of dual life, accepting them in the laboratory, but rejecting them without thought in daily life. Yet the notion of a moving time makes virtually no sense even in daily affairs, in spite of the fact that it dominates our language, thoughts and actions. It is here, perhaps, that new developments lie, in unravelling the mystery of the linkage between time, mind and matter. Paul Davies. Other Worlds.

   I take one day at a time, and I won't put it back, Dino Bravo.

   To say that I have been in Tbilisi for a month is meaningless to me for pirates don't pay attention to the conventions of time passing. I remain still, my refusal to acknowledge time being the only means by which I might fight the boredom that looms between missions and can stretch time interminably. I am waiting, as unmoving as possible, as unfocused as possible, and as far as possible developing no narrative within my life. I have carved out a path to various things within the Bravo District but am mostly oblivious to the city, willing myself to remain so, in the hope that there will be no wrenching sadness about leaving. I want no possibility of this ever seeming like somewhere I could consider home. When the letter of marque arrives time will again become a measurable commodity, with three months, perhaps four, to outline the mission, target the treasure and prepare to set sail and eight months, perhaps as many as ten, to carry out the mission. The pirates of the old world were infamous in character, looming boldly and flamboyantly. Our form of piracy is quiet, cunning and discreet, reduced almost to a form of perverse diplomacy.

   Relativity adopts a totally new perspective on what the world "really" is. In the old Newtonian picture, the universe consists of a collection of things, located here and in other places at this moment. Relativity, on the other hand, reveals that 'things' are not always what they seem, while places and moments are subject to re-interpretation. The relativist's picture of reality is a world consisting of events rather than things. Events are points of space and time without extension or duration. In a world of shifting space-time perspectives, a new language and geometry is required which takes into account the observer in a fundamental way. Newton's concepts of space and time were a natural extension of our daily experiences. Relativity theory on the other hand requires something more abstract, but also, many believe, more elegant and revealing. Paul Davies. Other Worlds.

   Day and night he will work, making many false starts, filling the trash with unsuccessful chains of equations and logical sequences. But some evenings he will return to his desk knowing he has learned things about Nature that no-one has ever known, ventured into the forest and found light, gotten hold of precious secrets. On those evenings, his heart will pound as if he were in love. People were spellbound. Later they were horrified. Here was a human invention that quantified the passage of time. Alan Lightman. Einstein's Dreams.

   About Alan Lightinan: He writes about what might be called the mind of science and the minds of scientists. He has turned to a fictional form to suggest the strange, intuitive light that flickers at the frontiers of discovery. What the Einstein's do is not resolve our mysteries but enlarge them. Lightman has done much more than make relativity visible by seeding it with human stries. He makes his human stories more deeply visible by seeding them with relativity. He spins these fantasies with spare poetic power, emotional intensity and ironic wit. New York Times

   Au was so anxious to improve the tasks that he carried out, and so eager to please, that he modified things before he understood how they worked and his reception desk underneath the stairs is effectively booby trapped. His hair, as tubular and slippery as spaghetti, falls into his eyes and he flips it back like an exclamation mark while he takes phone calls and consults with delivery people. He has the filing system of a lunatic, and keeps track of mail and packages and deliveries by a system of sheer luck and co-incidence. He had been bewildered, but was now intrigued by the fact that in an entire month there had been no phone calls for Gallifrey, no letters and no visitors. Suddenly one day a package arrived for her. Au looked at this package long and hard, as if interrogating it. It yielded no clues, beyond that it originated in London, and was rather water-marked and torn about after going through the security checks at British post offices.

   Letters of Marque or Reprisal: Commissions or licences to fit out armed vessels to be employed in the capture of enemy merchant shipping and to commit other hostile acts which would otherwise be condemned as piracy.

   There are drafted regulations on the use of deception to provide cover for secret programs. National Security Program Operating Manual - setting forth procedures for government agencies and contractors involved with classified programs. Recently the department of defense generated a supplement to the manual for 'special access' (also called "black") programs. Dated May 29, 1992, and stamped "draft" the supplement states: Cover stories may be established for unacknowledged programs in order to protect the integrity of the program from individuals who do not need to know. Cover stories must be believable and cannot reveal any information regarding the true nature of the contract. Cover stories for Special Access Programs must have the approval of the PSO (Program Security Officer) prior to dissemination. Scientific American, October 1992

   BIGOT LIST: The roster of people allowed to know a particular secret, for instance, the existence of a 'black program', a military or intelligence program whose existence is not generally acknowledged.
   CODEWORD: A level of classification above top secret. The really good stuff, since every file clerk has top secret clearance. There are hundreds of codewords, some of them quite lovely like Veil and Tulip. Then there are others like Gamma Gupy, a 1970's program to eavesdrop on Soviet leaders.
   NICKNAME: A meaningless misnomer given to a 'black program' to disguise its existence. Examples from the Pentagon's budget: Tractor Dump, Pilot Fish, Have Flag and Bernie.
   WITTING: In on a secret.
   New York Times. April 10, 1994

   Gallifrey sat in the courtyard garden, with Winsome, having breakfast. Au delivered her package with great excitement but she only looked at it quizzically, with no particular interest, and thanked him perfunctorily. The pyjama jacket that she wore underneath a sports jacket had swallowed her hands and she struggled to free them to find some cash in the pockets of her wide black trousers. She pulled 3 exo-brain styli, old newspaper clippings, pocket knives, and keys to the door of a suite in a grand hotel in New Delhi out of her pockets, all of these objects wrapped in several pieces of currency. She examined the rats nest of objects and paper, decided against trying to unravel it all, and placed everything into Au's outstretched hands. He lingered for a moment, pretending to have other business at nearby tables, and waited for Gallifrey to open the package, but she was deep in conversation with Winsome and ignored it. He turned for a moment to assist a couple at the nearby table with the communications link for their exo-brain and when he turned back Winsome and Gallifrey were gone and the package was left behind, unopened, on her table. His heart is beat with anxiety that she'd pass this off so casually. He retrieved the package and took it back to his crazy little den.

   Do all of these flowers and herbs in the courtyard have some voodoo significance? asked Gallifrey
   Gracious no, that's just Au. Such a dear romantic boy. What an imagination, replied Winsome, who spoke in a soft purr. She spoke as if her mind were unspooling beautifully with a dance like movement. Winsome was a collection of soft surfaces, so soft that she always appeared blurred, as if deliberately photographed out of focus. She unwound her dress and acres of velvet fanned out around her as she stood up and affectionately took Gallifrey's arm as they walked through the courtyard and lobby and onto Royal Avenue.

   Gallifrey thought up notes for the collection of ideas about piracy that she'd been writing into her exo-brain, half concentrating on Winsome, and half willing her observations to memory while she was walking. Winsome was affectionate with her, behaving with the proudly indulgent gestures of a mother. Amazed at the unthinking self assurance of this unlikely creature, Winsome coaxed her into talking about herself but in all that Gallifrey said, however revelatory her statements might have seemed, there was something hidden. In all of her enthusiasm and animation there was something held in restraint. Her clarity was only outward and within were unknowable depths. On the surface one would never connect her with adventure and though she never stopped telling her secrets they were so bizarre and encoded and abstracted that they were taken for descriptions of dreams.

   Eleanor Coppola's diary of the making of "Apocalypse Now" says: freedom from the past comes from associating with unfamiliar objects; none of them possesses any evocative power.

   There is a down at heel grandeur within the Bravo District, a part of the city wrapped in feverish convulsions, a little touched, inherently eccentric. The avenues are a medieval stew of ghouls and merchants and fortune tellers and hawkers of magic herbs and drunken revellers who inhabit both extremes of the scale of good and evil. Rabid new age voodoo disciples shuffle in wordless wonder along streets that have come alive out of their prayers, on weaving trajectories amongst representatives from the convention of Carny's currently being held in Tbilisi. A muppet nun railed about piracy and gloom from the floodlit window of her tea-and-challenge cafe. A man in blue velvet lounge suit slunk along the street carrying a large radio playing Louis Armstrong ballads at an immense volume. Genteel octogenarians in evening dress frequent the restaurants. Knowing collectors make their way through the maze of antique stores looking for the first generation embossed platinum and jewel encrusted difference engines that made Georgia a world leader in luxury consumer computers. Students of ancient software are to be found in these antique stores and these prodigiously tall and pale people, with skin as translucent and waxy as votive candles, and watery eyes with yellow centres amplified to the size of raw hens eggs behind the thickest of eyeglasses, are perpetually in a trance.
   Winsome and Gaflifrey walked through the 'dead' district that runs along one edge of the Bravo District to arrive at the apothecary. It is a zone where only occasional spurts of electricity surge through computers soldered together with beastly apparti in order to generate light and heat. Aristocrats, ancient beauties, prostitutes, pitiless swordsmen, buccaneers, riverboat gamblers, jazz musicians, and people drawn from many unfashionable nationalities populate the streets.

   I wouldn't exactly call it magic, said Winsome. Although it can be magical. I merely leave a few of these trinkets lying around, and say a few little beautiful phrases in my mind and it coaxes to the surface some of my more stubbornly submerged dreams. There's the idea, I'm just ordering my mind. She smiled in a self satisfied way.

   Experts who observe American culture have noticed the resurgence of interest in magic. And many consider it a logical response to contemporary life. "Magic," said Lionel Tiger, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., "is a wayfor an industrial society to recreate a sense of danger without experiencing real danger, and a way of creating the imponderable in full knowledge that a simple gimmick is at work. It is a clear reach into the anthropological past." Sleight of hand and escape artists, spiritualists and mediums appear whenever society feels powerless or overwhelmed, Dr. Tiger said. New York Times

   They re-emerged from the dead zone and into the fanciest section of the Bravo District where grandiose mansions with opulent circular courtyards that once housed the city's founding aristocrats looked out over the Long Thin River. Winsome steered Gallifrey into the apothecary on The Avenue of Georgia. The ancient parfumerie had the ambience of a haute couture salon and the competing aromas of so many perfumes that it made the shoppers practically lose consciousness. Long banquettes, and low crystal display cases were all encrusted with amber glass flacons that held the house perfumes. Winsome walked around the supermarket area spooning nectar of bat, dust of she-wolf, and concentrated drops of the essence of the pure thoughts of Venezeualan killer bees from baskets lined up on one wall into small plastic vials that she placed in a basket.
   Gallifrey lingered by the main display of perfumes, in the waiting area by the door, staring at the old bottles of scent too heady to be fashionable, scents that are sweetly pungent enough to mask the aroma of plagues and pre-Industrial Revolution squalour.
Pirates Blood, a peculiar and intriguing narne for a fragrance she said to herself. She imagined a pirate, in the heat of a mission, slashing a vein, thinning the blood - the black blood of a pirate - and spilling the black blood into one of these crystal flacons. She examined the label; a curious long nosed pirate in a red turban stood in front of a Viking boat flying the Jolly Roger on Medieval tournament banners. She lifted the stopper from one of the heavy bottles with glittering flakes of gold drifting in the pink perfume and caught her breath as a wave of deep tuberose scent passed over her. Catching sight of her reflection in one of the mirrors she stared unrecognisingly at the sad green eyes in the pale face, seemingly not realising that she was looking at herself. She placed the stopper back in the bottle and put it back on the shelf, obscuring its label, which read "Pirate's Gold".
   Young people dressed for a marauders costume party lounged on the banquettes. They had an affected indifference, posing themselves, staged to be seen, dousing themselves in the oils and perfumes said to be made by a company that was founded upon a pirate's booty. Pale and drugged with their limbs disappearing inside enormous puffed sleeves and breeches and hoop skirts, their heads tied in headscarves and stuffed under tricorn hats with outlandish feathers, one eye each obscured by eyepatches, they had so wound themselves up in jewellery that they appeared to be bandaged with gems and consequently moved awkwardly. Several young men, shirtless, their bodies illustrated with tattoos of pirate iconography, squinted from the bright light in the apothecary section and asked earnestly about good luck powder for good health. Gallifrey stared at them all as if they were creatures from another planet. The costume pirates stared dismissively at Gallifrey in her wide black pants and pyjama shirt and 1930�s sports jacket.

   In the minds of many the popular picture of the pirate tends to be a highly romantic one. It is the picture of a flamboyant, swashbuckling seafarer, with big gold earrings, a black eyepatch, a bandana, magnificent boots, a large curved cutlass in one hand and a brace of pistols tucked into a broad belt; the picture of a daredevil, scarfaced seawolf, amassing a fortune in gold and jewels; of a rakehell ashore, drinking and whoring in some secluded cove or pirate port. Pirates of the West Indies. Clinton V. Black

   These early English pirates, like Blackbeard later on, often cultivated their own individual image. John Exton, for example, was well known because he always dressed entirely in green, and 'Black Will' got his name from his black hair and apparel. Such extroverts might be expected to have made the most of the clothes and ornaments that came their way. Kit Oloard must have made a spectacular picture, 'dressed in black velvet trousers and jacket, crimson silk socks, black felt hat, brown beard, and shirt collar embroidered in black silk. Pirate wardrobes might contain clothes, jewellery and other ornaments whose origin was European, African, Mediterranean or even Eastern. In an age which was famous for extravagance in dress, pirates were amongst the most colourful - if not always the most tasteful - of dressers. Pirates of the West Indies. Clinton V Black.

   Trend spotting is the study of surfaces, says Ernest Dichter, the Long Island Professor who is an authoritative voice of Eurocondescenscion. Surfaces are all most people will ever have. Few people will ever do a single brave deed, know true love or the passions of a great cause. Think of affectations as the best clues to the kind of world we long to live in. If you want to know the way the world is going, you must learn to read its affectations. SPY Magazine

   Au lay in wait, in his receptionist's den, for Gallifrey to return from her shopping expedition with Winsome. He had cleared a space on his cramped little reception desk for Gallifrey's package and scrutinised it as if it were an oracle, as if at any moment it might speak and reveal its secrets to him. He was so absorbed in his contemplation that Gallifrey and Winsome were through the front door, past his reception cave and into the lounge, talking with Dino Bravo, before he was aware they'd returned. He ran into the lounge with the package, bobbing and circling around them, lobbing phrases into the middle of their conversation in his eagerness to deliver Gallifrey's package.

   Excuse me, your package.
   I'm not sure that they have the wolf at lunch.
   But your package.
   I don't know what mysteries lurk in the kitchen of Lucky Pierre's, but I'm sure that they could rustle up a wolf or two.
   Your package is here!!!
   Have a wonderful lunch my darling and give my love to Raoul.

   In the skirmish of the greeting Au had presented the package to Gaflifrey who looked at it as though she'd never seen it before and handed it to Dino Bravo while she fished in her pockets for change. Au looked up from counting his tip and saw, much to his dismay, that the package was sitting on the sideboard, unopened, and Gallifrey, Dino Bravo and Winsome had evaporated.

   The apparent existence of a 'now' or present moment. The flow of movement of time from past to future. Let us begin by examining what is meant by the 'now'. The present plays two roles; it divides the past from the future, and it provides the leading edge of our consciousness as it cuts through time from past to future. Like the bow of a ship, the present trails behind it a wake of remembered events and experiences, but ahead lie unknown waters. These observations seem so natural that they must be above suspicion, yet a closer examination reveals several flaws. There cannot, of course, be 'the' present, because every moment in time is a present moment 'when it happens'. That is to say, there are past nows, future nows and now. But without any external quality against which to gauge it, there can be little that one can say about 'presentness' that is not tautologous. Paul Davies. Other Worlds

   Dino Bravo aimed his golf club as if it were a pool cue and slid it onto a ledge behind the banquette at his favourite table at Lucky Pierre's, the grandest traditional restaurant in the Bravo District. It was as dark as a grotto, the waiters teeth and eyes shining bright white like those of nocturnal animals that cower in caves by day and the candles used as decorations for the observance of the Carnival of the Battle of Long Thin River were the only reliable sources of light. (It was eternally Carnival time at Lucky Pierre's.) It was considered the height of insolence to ask for a menu at Lucky Pierre's. The drinks waiter would come to each table, stare menacingly into the eyes of each of the diners as if he were a mind-reader and decide what type of alcoholic beverage they needed. Dino Bravo drank nothing but Black Martini's. The drinks waiter bought Gallifrey something grey and dense and tall that sloshed around as if the glass contained a tidal force and was garnished with crabs legs.

   Georgians conduct their mealtime conversations through toasts: One person, known as the tamadar, picks up a glass and begins a monologue. Afterward, wine or cognac is downed solemnly. Each man at the table then replies. It is considered impolite to chat during the toasts, but you are allowed to drink, so that after an hour or so, the quality of the toasts is undermined by the alcohol. Harpers Magazine. March, 1994

   Time stopped at Lucky Pierre's and Gallifrey and Dino Bravo, absorbed in thought, rarely spoke though seemed to say a great deal to one another. Diners filed past the table, fawning upon Dino Bravo as if he were a dignitary, making comments and asking him questions to which his comments and answers would be received as great wisdom. Dino Bravo would mumble in the mellifluous voice that he'd used as a singer. As the people walked away from the table, gloriously dazzled by their encounter with Dino Bravo, they projected into his mumbles what they wish that he'd said, what they wanted to hear. He had the kind of suave, confident disconnectedness that people were able to read anything into.

   I hear that there is an election soon, we think that you should run for mayor.
   I tell you, there's a man who understands the deep responsibilities of public office.
   We saw you in Las Vegas twenty years ago, on our honeymoon, your records have had such an effect on our lives.
   ... Wonderful, isn't it, how all he sang for was to enrich people's lives. Your hotel is the crown jewel in the Bravo District, you really set an exainplefor the other hoteliers.
   ... I don't know how he finds the time to devote so much attention to keeping watch over how it is that hotels set the tone for the tourist industry.

   Time behaved in Lucky Pierre's as if it were a still pond, nothing ruffled the surface. Night had already fallen when Gaflifrey and Dino Bravo walked out after lunch and they pushed past the first diners arriving for dinner. Dino Bravo stopped outside the door and lined up his golf club behind a take-out coffee cup on the pavement. He hit it with an easy swing and it sailed up into one of the trees. Gallifrey looked at Dino Bravo with awe, admiring his easy detachment, thinking how like a pirate he seemed to be.

   Robert Graves once movingly described 'counting the beats, counting the slow heart beats, the bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats.' Thermodynamics does much the same thing. It reveals the reality of transience in the same irreversible processes that give human existence its poignancy and its meaning, from the aging of our bodies to the drying of our tears. Not that all its applications are quite so richly symbolic, of course. Thermodynamics also explains how steam engines work and why cups of tea go cold. Time is linked by thermodynamics to ideas about Organisation and randomness. The Arrow of Time. Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield

   There is a deep sense in which space and time themselves are constructs. They are not fundamental givens; they are constructs. And if you look again at my example of an electron, what the quantum mechanical view of an electron states is this: it does not exist in anywhere or anywhen. It does not inhabit the space-time construct that we know. So to ask where in space or time this quantum mechanical view of consciousness originates is, I think, to distort the question. Darryl Reaney on the Philip Adams Show

   A clockwork mechanism can be very beautiful and efficient, but the image of a universe brainlessly cavorting its way to eternity like some grotesquely complicated musical box is not especially reassuring, particularly as we ourselves are part of it. Paul Davies. Other Worlds.

   A brilliant idea occured to me. I would make the watch Chico proof, so he couldn't possibly hock it again. I removed its hands. Now the watch was mine forever. I wound it faithfully each morning and carried it with me at all times. When I wanted to know what time it was I looked at the Ehret Brewery clock and held my watch to my ear. It ran like a charm, and its ticking was a reminder to me that I had, for once, outsmarted Chico. Harpo Speaks. By Harpo Marx

   In Gallifrey's absence from the Hotel Rustavelli, Au had delivered her package to her room and it sat on the long glass table with curly iron legs, next to her exo-brain. She eyed it suspiciously, walked around it, called downstairs for tea to be delivered her room, and read a book, glancing over occasionally at the still unopened package. It was a cold and wet night, as thick and black and wet as molasses, the wind pushing the rasping rain sounding like sandpaper against the window. The rain sounded like the rain in ? thought Gallifrey, but where was that? and ghostly figures moved through her mind. A wave of deep sadness passed through her that she forcibly removed from her mind, rubbing her eyes with her fists until the images went away. Finally she walked over to the table and picked up the package, removing a book from its covering of paper. She mechanically opened to page 192 and moved it across her exo-brain. The scanned image of the page broke up into a field of little black dots moving at a furious rate. When the pattern settled it revealed itself to be the addenda to an obscure trade agreement with Britain. Gallifrey glanced through it and sighed. She stayed awake all night reading the trade agreement, making the abstract first notes on a subject that would possess her mind and all of her energy for an entire year. As dawn was beginning to rise she moved to sit on her balcony, wrapped up in a green blanket, reading by the backlit screen of her exo-brain.

   The Blues In Orbit never closed until the last customers left of their own volition so at 6.a.m., while Gallifrey was sitting on her balcony, Exapno Mapcase was padlocking the front door of his wild jazz club and called out to her.

   Hey, Gallifrey, do you want to come to Shakespeare's Hall of Sin and play a few rounds of word poker? It has to be more interesting than what you're reading, yelled Exapno Mapcase.

   I expect so, she replied, coming to the railing and yelling down at Exapno Mapcase. What I'm reading is a bit gruelling. How cold is it, how many overcoats do I need?
   Only one, he replied.

   The two figures turned the comer into the dying embers of the barbarous evening on Border Street. Gallifrey slight and pale, her eyes red and tired, her complexion floury, was shrouded in deliberately unexpressive baggy black clothes that seemed as if they belonged to someone else, a 1920's banker perhaps. And Exapno Mapcase, a benign warrior figure in a kilt and red and white striped socks, and construction site boots, had a patch over one eye and his other eye was deep brown and edged with a little sadness, his long black hair was crazy and disordered. He strode along the street explaining the Battle of the Long Thin River which showcased the skill and cunning of the great pirate El Ned. He acted out the swordfighting and the gunbattles and culminated in standing stock still in the pose of the Statue of El Ned in El Ned Square, by the cathedral in the Bravo District.
   On Border Street, an area of town that parts reluctantly with the night, creatures who are only alive at night glowed sallow under the irregular radiance of the fire tree lamps and sputtering neon signs. Border Street was a confection of moral chaos, of madly entertaining evil. Bars that resembled medieval lunatic asylums were at the end of the twisting crooked alleys that led from Border Street to dead ends. Dark clubs, festering with old-time jazz were tucked into the buildings that faced onto Border Street, and even at this late stage of the evening revellers still hung from the curly iron balconies or sat slumped in the courtyards that are the architectural manifestation of the Georgian love of company and sharing one's life with friends and neighbours.

   I am going to speak to you Beloved of the things which I wish could be told without words. I am going to speak to you of these Houses of Darkness. Fifteen hundred Angels of Death inhabit these places accompanied by the rhythms and sounds of the Devil himself. (Source unknown)

   Visitors from the Carny Convention were milling about, being lured into establishments that displayed the sign "Circus Folk Welcome." Still on the streets at this desperate hour were magicians, trapeze artists, sword swallowers and fire eaters, Lobster Man and Penguin Boy. Gallifrey noticed things only if Exapno Mapcase pointed them out to her. She was not curious about the city, preferring to consider it only the most tenuous of backdrops. She almost walked into walls and the posts of the gas lamps. Exapno Mapcase occasionally put out a hand to steady her, a paw on her shoulder to alter her trajectory.
   Slinky, well-fed and debauched rats reclined in the gutters on Border Street, feasting on the remnants of deep fried fish pieces braised in a series of voodoo spices. Exapno Mapcase picked up the comer of a take-out cocktail glass the size of a vase with his foot and kicked it up into the air. A shower of Meditteranean fruit juices and twelve varieties of rum fell over a series of dead-drunk belching rats whose verminous eyes were rolling uncontrollably.
   In Shakespeare's Hall of Sin the cocktail waitresses were the wenches and wicked types from the major tragedies and at this late hour a lone Lady Macbeth circulated with a tray of cocktails named after natural disasters and weapons. Exapno Mapcase and Gallifrey went straight to the gaming table and began a game of word poker with three earnest gentlemen who had the appearance of having been there for days. The bard dealt a line each from HAMLET and the betting began with modest stakes. Exapno Mapcase sat out the first couple of plays, a barely perceptible cryptic smile passing across his face- like a wave, while the other gentlemen parried minor allusions to madness, Ophelia and a halfhearted reference to Juliet that was disqualified by the dealer as a non-sequitur. Then Exapno Mapcase made his play, shovelling a mound of blue and white chips across the green felt. He launched into a dazzling play, standing on his chair, bidding the Alas poor Yorick!! speech from his hand, and overlaying the measurements of the human skull known to be made in Shakespeare's times. It was a bravura performance, he was seething with charm and sped through phrenology, infamy, alchemy, onto Sir Isaac Newton, then, pausing momentarily for effect, he practically shouted his final bid and gravity is not only a good idea, it's the law! The other players flung down their quote cards in disgust, not needing the dealer to complete his calculations of the points for rhetoric, allusion, association, history and bonus points for intellectual nerve to know that they'd been resoundingly beaten. The dealer solemnly pushed all of the chips across the gaming table to Exapno Mapcase and he loaded them into his pockets, walking out of Shakespeare's Hall of Sin without cashing them. Gallifrey was impressed, and for the first time since she arrived in Tbilisi her eyes were shining with excitement and the adrenalin of a pirate mission flowed through her veins.

   While Gallifrey made her way back to the hotel, Au delivered her early morning bowl of chicory and barley in steaming soy milk. There was no answer when he knocked on her door and as he turned to go he spied the wrapping paper from her package, and the book that was inside it, sitting on the low table on her balcony, with one of the green blankets from the Albatross Suite. Au walked around the table, eyeing the package, deliberating for a moment or two, wrestling with his conscience, before pouncing on it. He was struck with immediate disappointment.
   A book!!! he exclaimed. That's all??? A novel, and a contemporary novel at that. Oh, hell.!! Damn!!!
   The note on powder blue stationery accompanying the parcel read merely: You may enjoy this. I trust you're resting well and that we may see you soon. Clara.
   Au picked up the book and read, without particular interest or attention, a paragraph from page 192 of FISHBOY, before walking away with his head down, another mystery punctured.

   Horse latitudes, said the cook, and the cook wrote that down in his book of poetry in the galley. Every day the cook wrote a poem to his Negress wife and set it adrift in an empty bottle. Stuck as we were in the ocean, the cook's poetry bobbed around the ship. Often in the afternoons Lonny would plunk at the bottles with his rifle shots from the crow's nest, shattering them to the bottom.
   The cook wrote down to his wife There is no bird what not calls your name to me, There is no breeze that you are not fresh upon. We gagged and listened to the featherings and flappings of the giant vultures splattering the deck with equine droppings and regurgitated horseflesh. Fishboy. Mark Richard.

THREE: WIT AND CHARM