Against All Flags by Gallium Ellington

SIX: THE NEW PIRATE VOYAGE

   It was an evening of astonishing beauty. As the sun sank, all the domes, spires, turrets and pinnacles of London rose in inky blackness against the furious red sunset clouds. Virginia Woolf.

   The fashionable Holland Park section of London, on the uppermost floor of a big, cream coloured stucco Victorian house.

   British eccentrics. One in every 10,000 Britons manifests some degree of eccentricity, according to a study. Britain's tolerance of new ideas and its rigid social structure for the non-conformity. He found a British aristocrat who takes her pet lobster for a walk on a leash and brought it a yellow crab as a companion. Eccentrics tend to have been the eldest or an only child who had strict parents and an authoritarian upbringing. (Source unknown)

   The pre-occupation with the use of live, revived and dried flowers on various kinds of art. Very delicate, tactile, ethereal. The freshest flowers of the season, though, were those that looked dead and pressed under glass at Abe Hamilton. Chiffon was printed with brown twig-and-dried-flower patterns. Some of the dresses in tea stained chiffon had a pale blue slip peeping from beneath. Tiny dried flowers poked from a muslin empire-waist dress, and other thin sheaths in pale blue and yellow had hand-cut flowers sewn to them, as if peeping out from beneath a garden. (Source unknown)

   She will send a box of broken, chipped glass from the beach; dead chrysanthemum leaves; dust to get the perfect gray says Galliano. (Source unknown)

   It IS different in London, she says, as we sip tea around a dining room table cluttered with gardening catalogues, long distance phone bills and crumpled London booksellers bags left over from a recent visit. There every street you go down - in the tiniest squares - everyone's got roses or irises. Something lovely. Here you hardly see a window box. Ovid's metamorphoses inspired her to plan a sunny glade full of golden plants to evoke Leucothoe and dark thickets of beechwood and brambles to evoke a wicked king. Her gardening style tends toward rampant, wild planting within a more formal design. Ravenswing; Anthriscus sylbestris. It looks like a really fine cow parsley with kind of blackish filigree. My favourites have always been very dark. Harpers Bazaar

   Boxes of books came from New York. Pouches of documents and maps came from the Victoria and Albert Museum. A steady stream of e-mail moved through the hotel's communications link, gathering until Gallifrey plugged in her exo-brain and downloaded them. And Au, who had never once, in three whole months, so much as even taken a phone message for Gallifrey, was hard at work running the cellular phone to her in the lobby or in the courtyard or running messages to her at The Blues In Orbit. I wish I had time to be suspicious about all of this he said to himself.
   Au had rushed three courier packs of letters and dragged the communications link not to Gallifrey's usual table by the fountain, but to a table in the comer, by the back fence that separated the courtyard from the drinking garden of the dubious banquet establishment on Border Street.
   Wow, you look preposterously exhausted, Au told Gallifrey for large circles as dark as bruises showed up on her parchment skin, and her eyes had dulled and she squinted.
   I didn't sleep at all, she replied. Dear Old Jack was playing like the devil last night and it's the only time that I've ever found the sound disturbing, usually I crave it as a lullabye.
   As soon as Au walked away from the table Gallifrey's bright smile washed from her face and she appeared crestfallen. One of the rats came and sat at her feet, and she reached down and absentmindedly stroked its nose. The rat sank to the ground in a swoon and slept, purring, with its head on her shoe.

   Swayne's Rats & Cats was the best animal act I ever saw. Groucho Marx

   Gallifrey plugged the communications link into her exo-brain and disabled the search magnet. IS IT YOUR EXACT WISH THAT THE SEARCH CATEGORIES "PIRATE" - "TREASURE" - "ADVENTURE" - BE TERMINATED? She wrote yes with her stylus onto the screen of the exo-brain, and shook it a couple of times. She took a knife that had been sitting on the table, unscrewed a side panel from her exo-brain and inserted a gallium arsenide wafer that had arrived in one of the courier packs, screwed the panel back on and turned the machine back on. The operating system and communications software was now being routed through a three dimensional grid representation of London, its topography dissolving momentarily into words overlaid upon other words and then back into the map. She wrote "BEGIN VOYAGE" on the screen and the interface flashed brightly with a skull and crossbones insignia that faded to black and became a long series of dates and names and code names, bank account numbers and references to travel plans. She activated a search magnet, a thousand times finer and more sophisticated than the one that she'd just terminated, and wrote DESIGNATIONS: "LONDON" - "ENGLISH LITERATURE to 1990" - "TRADITION" - "ADDAMS FAMILY".

   Pirates could happen to anyone. Just deliver the letter. They'll send ambassadors from England to explain. Tom Stoppard. Rosencrantz & Guildernstern Are Dead

   Economic conditions in Blackbeard's time were extremely favourable for the rise and growth of piracy. Spain, France, and England had laws which forbade their colonists to trade directly with foreigners. Each insisted that their colonists trade exclusively with or through the mother country. Manufactured goods and luxury items were generally in short supply throughout the New World. To meet this need there arose a smuggling trade which flowered into piracy. One of the important requisites for piracy is a market to dispose of plunder. Unless pirates can find receivers for their stolen goods, they cannot make a profit. Markets for the pirates' goods existed aplenty in the New World. Most colonists were eager to buy goods cheaply; they did not ask the smuggler or the pirate where he got his goods so long as the exchange was fair either in gold or by barter. Blackbeard, the Fiercest Pirate of all. Charles Pendered

   1558 - 1603: ELIZABETH. The Reformed faith re-established. Flourishing state of commerce. Mary, Queen of Scots, executed after a long confinement in England. Destruction of the Spanish "Invincible Armada". Sir Francis Drake, the celebrated circumnavigator. Foundation of the East India Company. Golden Age of English literature: Shakespeare, Bacon, Spenser, Johnson, Beaumot, Fletcher, Marlowe, Drayton. London and its Environs: Handbook for the Traveller. Karl Baedeker. 1898

   Pages torm from history books, travel brochures of London and Wales, print outs of financial reports from the Guardian, papers on Newton's interest in alchemy, the novels of Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen and volumes of pocket editions of Shakespeare riddled with bookmarks, and photocopies of Charles Addams cartoons of Morticia and Gomez and the Addams Family house lay strewn about the floor in Medea’s Sewing Rooms. Young girls with serrated hair and golden limbs like sheaves of wheat fluttered around Gallifrey fitting her with long medieval inspired coats and dresses and skirts in dark colours. Wads of English currency spilled out of an envelope underneath Gallifrey's exo-brain which displayed a complicated, poetically written invoice from Medea’s company on its screen.
   You have captured almost exactly the mood I'm wanting to express, Gallifrey told Medea. A quality quite ravaged and melancholy, yet serene. Have I shown you these illustrations of Morticia Addams, and these photographs taken in another century by Julia Margaret Cameron of angels and saints? It is the sensation of being a scholar but being quite emotionally vulnerable that I would like to embody. It should seem as if my eyes are always misted with the beginnings of tears, as though the world of thought moves me so profoundly that I may weep.
   The transformation was already quite complete. Gaflifrey, who usually walked with a goofy grace, now stood formally, with the composure of someone at a ceremonial occasion. Her voice was unrecognisable now, the measured recitation of someone who had been always English, who had always read Shakespeare aloud. Gallifrey looked coldly at the apparition in the mirror, affecting subtle changes in her facial expression and calculating their effectiveness.
   Her head was bowed and her eyes downcast her face set in the pious expression of a Gothic statue. Her hair had fallen about her face and cast shadows over her eyes. She had crossed her arms, resting her hands on her shoulders as if they were carved out of marble and permanently posed there. Her long black dress was of a monastic simplicity relieved with panels of black lace in a pattern of gargoyles. Her stillness had galvanised the room and the assistants stood back in awe, as if time had frozen them to the spot. She walked with an erect, processional glide across to her piles of papers and extracted several sheets printed out from her exo-brain. She had described the dress as a series of ideas of abstract, immeasurable nuances of personality. She read the list very slowly, looking at herself in the far-away mirrors at the back of the room as she considered each point on the list.
   Yes, this will do perfectly, said Gallifrey, shattering the mood, speaking again in the Georgian accent that couldn't be pinned down to any particular section of Georgia. If I take this any farther I'll be Ethelred the Vile.

   In developing technology for the_future, Kay has looked for inspiration to the past. He acknowledges the influence of a range of computer scientists, psychologists, educationalists, and philosophers. Like a great many innovators, he has synthesised the work of his predecessors to produce ideas that shift the perspective and open up new possibilities. New Scientist

   Computers can whet the appetite for magic, and they can sate that hunger as well. As Bruce Tognazzini, an engineer at Sun Microsystems in Mountain View, California, put it: "Like the magician, the computer appears to be powerful and intelligent. Infact, computers are only capable of responding to yes-or-no commands." An amateur magician, Mr Tognazzini was well aware of the similarities between stage magic and computer programmes when he worked on the human interface design for several generations of Macintosh computers. 'A stage magician uses the esthetics of his performance to distract from the mechanics of his trick," he said. "A software designer relies on consistency to provide the seamless and believable illusion that what is appearing on the screen is a reflection of what is actually happening in the machine. If the lay users didn't believe this to be the case, they'd be paralysed in front of their PCs and incapable of working." Both stage magic and computers require suspension of disbelief, he said, adding that "once you have suspended disbelief in one area, you are ripefor takeover in any number of other areas." New York Times.

   Dino Bravo, do you ever miss living in Las Vegas? Does anything make you want to return, as if you'd left your life there? asked Gallifrey.
   Oh, places are never places, it's only golf courses that count. I weep every couple of weeks about only ever having played Pebble Beach twice, he replied.
   But Dino Bravo, all of the books about you in the music section at the BookStore suggest that the happiest years of your life were those that you spent in Las Vegas. Does a longing to return never overtake you?

   Dino Bravo smiled one of the enigmatic smiles that he used to deflect questions, but, in any case Gallifrey was not exactly paying attention, inside her mind being wrapped in anguish.

   The first trip through Pirates of the Caribbean was tackily magical in the way its manufacturers imagined. The second time, it broke down. The boat stopped behind one of those pirate robots going Yohoho yohoho yohoho. The illusion died instantly - you could see how low the ceiling really was. Finally a very grumpy woman in a bad pirate costume appeared and said, Hold your horses, we'll get you out. (Source unknown)

   When Gallifrey arrived at The Blues In Orbit Dear Old Jack was winding up his triple time test tunes and Exapno Mapcase and the mathematicians were discussing explosions.
   Explosions are as natural as supernovas and our mission is to exploit them in the service of mankind, said Bloodnok, sweeping his eyebrows to the ceiling. The mathematicians all nodded in unison. Eccles puffed his cheeks full of air and squeezed his eyes shut, miming a bomb about to go off. Bluebottle had shaken a large quantity of salt onto the table, and placed a piece of rope in the middle of it. After he lit the rope with a match he put his hands in his ears, waiting for the explosion, his eyes widening.
   Gallifrey sat in the vacant chair next to Exapno Mapcase and smiled at him and rubbed the side of his face, underneath his eyepatch. She paid great attention to the Mathematicians, correcting their formulae and gave the appearance of great happiness but she couldn't meet the gaze of Exapno Mapcase's one good eye. When he left the table to take a telephone call Dear Old Jack came and sat down in his place.
   Honey, what planet you living on? asked Dear Old Jack.
   Are you lost? asked Gallifrey.
   It's you we lost, I want to know where you've gone, said Dear Old Jack.

   One green light squinting over Kidd's Creek, which is near the mouth of the pirate river, marked where the brig, the Jolly Roger, lay, low in the water; a rakish-looking craft foul to the hull, every beam in her detestable like ground strewn with mangled feathers. She was the cannibal of the seas, and scarce needed that watchful eye, for she floated immune in the horror of her name ... A few of the pirates leant over the bulwarks drinking in the miasma of the night; others sprawled by barrels over games of dice and cards; and the exhausted four who had carried the little house lay prone on the deck, where even in their sleep they rolled skilfully to this side or that out of Hook's reach, lest he should claw them mechanically in passing. Hook trod the deck in thought. 0 man unfathomable. It was his hour of triumph ... But there was no elation in his gait, which kept pace with the action of his sombre mind. Hook was profoundly dejected. He was often thus when communing with himself on board ship in the quietude of the night. It was because he was so terribly alone.
   Peter Pan. Sir James Barrie