A Short Short Story

Thought I'd try this one out on my blog, for anyone who likes old-fashioned sf. If you guess the ending early, please let me know, because it probably relies on the twist.

The Return

a short story by

Garry Kilworth

Segna stared at the straggled line of the last of humankind. It curved away from him and into the middle distance. Most eyes were on the sunset. Probably the last they would ever see clearly. It was indeed a beautiful sight, the fiery colours of their small star enhanced by the many and various spurting geysers of flaming lava. Orange, yellow, red and hints of blue and green colours in the molten spray. Beautiful, but deadly to life. A quick killer though, quicker than the arid, dusty plains, the dry river beds, the bare mountains.

The surface of the world had become uninhabitable for mammals, birds and reptiles. Some groaned that it was end of the world, but it wasn’t, it was merely the end of life on terra firma. The world would continue, but in its present form: windswept deserts, grim mountains, waterless valleys, all decorated by earthquakes and by volcanic eruptions. Indeed there were so many volcanoes now one might have said the world was breaking out in pustules which would see its demise. Except that it was not a sentient creature like a human and therefore would survive in a new state, one of burning landscapes, skies full of fire and rocks shaped by wind and heat.

            ‘Are we almost ready?’ asked Segna of his companion, Ritili. ‘I’m finding it difficult to breathe in this atmosphere.’

            ‘I think we all are,’ replied his beloved.

            They had indeed been getting ready for this moment for a long time, aeons in fact. The mindset was more important than anything else. It was important to accept their fate, not rage against it or wail about their misfortunes. Humans had always been vulnerable psychologically. They had made wars with remarkable frequency, killed each other with consummate ease, getting better and better at it with each new era as weapons became more efficient and – yes – more terrible. But they had suffered for it, mentally, most of them. Often those who caused or manufactured a war took no part in it, while those who did came out with badly damaged minds. Often afterwards the number of suicides of combatants exceeded the deaths of those who fought and died in battle.  Those who chose to live on did so with heads full of terrible nightmares.

            And not just the wars. Even natural disasters caused embedded emotional and mental stress following the event.

            So it had been important for Segna’s ancestors to prepare their minds for this moment from a long way back in geological time. The more intelligent and visionary among them had known it was coming by the changes wrought in their physique. One does not leave the earth for an environment alien to human form without some sort of metamorphosis, some sort of mutation, taking place. The process had been age-long-slow and marvellous. There were those who had looked up to the stars and wondered about the future of their race. There were those who simply despaired because any change was abhorrent to them and this was monumental change. This was change on a scale unimaginable to earlier generations.

            As the evening slid into night, the silver rain became more visible. Meteors were falling from the sky and raising dust clouds as they hit the ground. From where Segna stood, they looked numerous, but in fact they were not so thick as to greatly concern those in the line. There were many miles between each falling piece of natural space debris, though of course it was possible that one might land exactly on the area where the humans were gathered. Haste was probably a good idea.

            However, Segna could sense a great deal of reluctance to depart. He himself felt deep unease and concern. A man or woman does not like to leave forever what they have known all their lives: the place their ancestors called home. This land, this terra firma, had been beautiful once, with trees, flowers, birds and animals. And Segna’s forefathers and mothers were the imaginative creators of beautiful artefacts and objects: wonderful buildings, parks, exquisite timepieces, brilliant artwork, poems, vast cities, many, many things that touched the soul and roused the fires of the mind. All these had gone, were naught but dust and there was really nothing to stay for, nothing to love and adore, either natural or manufactured.

All, all was a wasteland of dirt and stone.

            The moon now rose over the distant mountains, a placid golden orb. There had been a city there too, once upon a time. And one on Mars. But cities on such desolate places need sourcing. Without Earth producing and providing for their needs, the far communities withered and died, those who lived in them either staying and passing away of old age, or returning to the home planet. Ghost cities now, with punctured domes and crumbling interiors. These experiments had been exciting at the time, but were unsustainable once a horrible future began to take its toll on humankind.

            Segna took in a breath and found himself gasping.

It was time.

He signalled to the line along the beach.

Now!

They began shuffling gracelessly on their bellies down the strand towards the edge of the ocean. They wriggled awkwardly, their flipper-arms spraying sand into the choking, already-dust-filled atmosphere. At the very pale of the ocean the surf made music with shingle, encouraging them forward. However, though the fine, white spume beyond looked inviting, some were still reluctant to leave the land for good.

Finally, even the most hesitant of them began their short journey, knowing they had to return permanently to their ancient environment, the salt-water world, home of the first life, the place from whence they had come several million years in the past.

Segna waited until the last of them had entered the waves and had submerged, before joining them. The water was tepid and pleasant. He loved water, always had, just like his nearest ancestors. For some time now he and his kind had needed to be close to water, in order to keep their skins wet. Indeed they spent as much time in and under the waves as above them. They had become mudskippers of a sort, reluctant to let go of the land forever, but equally at home in the sea. Now the land had become completely untenable.

The ocean was bountiful. The cycle could begin again.

Evolution, not Man’s ingenuity, was the saviour.

On Facebook Trivia: a Poem

Sonnet 81: An invitation to lunch

Shall I invite thee to a Monday lunch?

Thou art not likely to meet Falstaff’s men.

If  Tuesday be the food of love, what then?

No doubt ‘tis taken by the one with hunch

(Alas, we knew him) who eats like a horse.

A horse! His kingdom for a salad bowl,

Dear friend and Roman - food for soul –

Yet out damned Wednes-bloody-day of course.

I sicken and so die on Fardel’s rums

Served hugger-mugger with those vasty cakes

(And something’s rotten in the Danish steaks).

Thursday? Nay, something wicked this way comes.

Cry, ‘God for Harry, England and St George!’

Let’s meet on Friday and some cheddar gorge?

Garry Kilworth

How The Seal Got Its Name

Sue and Colin Waters, friends and neighbours, own a 40-foot sailing yacht, the Hilda May. The couple spend several summer months on board and people like Annette and I are lucky enough to be invited to crew for them for one or two weeks at a time. We have done so for the past four years, despite the fact that I get seasick very easily. On a sailing yacht, however, I've discovered that staying on deck in the fresh air and finding something to do - Captain Col usually orders me to take the wheel when he sees me going a little green - does the trick of thwarting that terrible mushy head and gut feeling which eventually reaches a state where I prefer death to remaining on the wide, blue wild Mediterranean Sea.

The first year we went on the Hilda May Sue and Colin were exploring the Corinth Canal that separates the Peloponnesus from Northern Greece, but the last three years were spent in Turkish waters. The yacht is now berthed at Fethiye and from there one can reach innumerable pleasant bays surrounded by green mountains, all well away from roads and civilisation. This year was no exception and on the 4th July, while a mutual friend was dancing around his living room table celebrating his country's independence from Britain, we were in such a bay enjoying a lunch of cheese and tomatoes, followed by dried figs. Before the first fig however, Colin suddenly pointed over my shoulder at something in the water. 'A seal!' he cried. 'A seal in these warm waters!' I fancy myself as an amateur wildlife photographer and reached for my camera.

As you can see by the photos above, the seal was also eating a good wholesome lunch, but hers consisted of a still-wriggling cephalopod that eventually shuffled off its mortal coil and resigned itself to the spirit world. I took some pictures, around ten in all, and then our Pinniped visitor swam away. When we returned to Fethiye, Colin (who loves a bit of research) spent some time on his iPad and contacted a local English-language newspaper. Then things began to grow exciting as Colin was directed to SAD-AFAG, an organisation that works for the conservation of the endangered Mediterranean Monk seal and the protection of its habitat along the Turkish coastline. When the photos were examined it appeared that our seal was indeed a young female Monk seal (not a Nun seal? Oh well, semantics), one that had not been previously recorded.

There are only 700 Monk seals still in existence, their numbers having been depleted. It is sadly the same old story: deliberate killing by fishermen, pollution and loss of habitat. Around a 100 of these Monachus monachus live in caves along the Turkish coast, reached either by underwater entrances or surface openings. They eat mostly octopuses, fish, crabs and lobsters - a good Mediterranean diet minus the salad and olive oil - timid, fin-footed creatures that sadly get tangled in nets and occasionally rob the fishermen of their hard-won catches. For those interested in morphology an adult Monk seal measures from 2.2 metres to 3 metres in length, weighs 200-300 kg. and has a moustache that would be envied by any Indian army subaltern of the 1800s. It has haunting coal-black eyes but unlike other species no ear tufts.

However, getting back to the title of this long-winded, but rather educational tale (which could have been one of Kipling's Just So Stories) Colin asked Cem of SAD-AFAG if he could name the new female Monk. Given a 'yes' O Best Beloved, long after the Far Off Times when we learned how the elephant got its trunk and the camel got its hump, our Mediterranean Monk seal was christened Hilda, after the yacht from which she was seen by its captain (and that yacht named for that same captain's mother). Whether she likes her new moniker or couldn't care less what she was called, our young lunch-time visitor won the hearts of all those on board the Hilda May, especially the skipper who would not rest until she was identified and named, and had been adopted by him and his crew.

And now I must get back to practising my knots, especially the bowline which I learned in the Boy Scouts but which must be done the Captain Col way, since any other method is quite unreliable. As I fumble with the rope, I dream of Golden eagles that glide just above my head allowing me to get the perfect shot to send off to National Geographic and earn me Photographer of the Year Award.

Klondike Gold Rush

In the summer of 2003 Annette, myself, a cousin and husband, decided to leave Vancouver and head for Alaska. We flew to Whitehorse and hired a car for the drive up through the Yukon. The road, sometimes metalled, sometimes gravelled, was open and empty, and whiplashed lazily across unchanging country until we reached Dawson City at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers. Dawson is of course the town that leapt to its feet during the gold rush of 1898/9. Stories of the prospectors and the peace-keeping mounties led by Sergeant Sam Steele, are legendary. Sam acted as policeman, jailer and judge, a fair but tough man who wanted none of the violence of miners' courts and lynchings that had beleagered the California gold rush: he was ruthless with those who looked on the gun to settle their disputes and was not above jailing a man for hanging out his washing on a Sunday. Skagway, one of the gateway towns to the Klondike had decended into wild lawlessness, a barbarian enclave, and Sam was not a man to allow such a deterioration occur in his territory, despite the fact that thousands of 'gold stampeders' were thundering into Dawson's streets.

I believe the present town looks much the same as it did in 1898. The houses are clapboard, with wooden facias and fronted with boardwalks. The roads are dust in the summer and frozen mud in the winter. We were there during the long sun - darkness banished - and there was no time of the day or night when people did not walk the streets. There were shops selling the tusks and bones of mammoths, presumably found locally, and gold nuggets, and the collected works of the Klondike poet Robert Service of 'The Shooting of Dan McGraw' fame. I could not afford bits of mammoth or gold, so purchased one of the latter and have never stopped delving in its fascinating pages. I also bought Pierre Berton's 'The Last Great Gold Rush' into which I fell headfirst on the first page and did not surface until I broke through the ice at the end. A truly superb work of pen.

Why am I writing about Dawson, when there were three thousand miles of Alaska ahead of me, with bears and whales, and towns like Chicken with two dozen inhabitants, named when the founders got confused by seeing ptarmigan? Perhaps it's because it intrigued me to find there were people who lived in Dawson City all year round - through winters of subterranean darkness and summers of unrelenting light - still working gold claims. These 'sour doughs' as they are called (after the bread dough that kept the early prospectors alive) are not seeking to make themselves millionaires, but simply to make enough money to enable them to live in a place where the temperature drops to below minus sixty degrees and the only light comes from electric bulbs. Why do they do it? Who knows? They live on a different world to the other ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the human race: where days last months and nights are seemingly endless. Time must take on a different quality, work in a different way, when the clocks cannot differentiate between noons and midnights. Surely the minds of the women and men who live there are lost somewhere along scaleless ribbons of dark or light, in that place where sun and moon are barefaced liars? I am intrigued because my feelings while writing a novel take me to a similar place: to a realm and time where I see no end in sight: just an endless flow of thoughts turned into words.

The Horse Passion

Spain has many fiestas, mostly saints' days. The Spanish people are fiercely protective of their right to enjoy themselves and do so with great energy and verve. The carnival of a smallest village, tucked into the hills of the Sierra Nevada, does its best to rival that of any. South American city. The costumes are magnificent and inventive, from monstrous walking clocks with working parts, to giant scorpions. I marvel at their ingenuity. One of my favourite fiestas takes place around the end of March when a temporary bull ring is erected in the one-time fishing village of La Herradura where I live for part of the year. The ring is fashioned mostly from plywood and scaffolding, with hard plank seats and no shade from the hot sun. The weekend is devoted to two quadrupeds: the bull and the horse.

On Saturday there is a bull fight. Ernest Hemingway maintained that in order to write in depth about death, it was necessary to witness it first hand. This may have been true for Hemingway, whose novel 'The Old Man and Sea' is one of the greatest ever written and most of whose other works deal with death in many forms. I had a younger brother who died a quick violent death aged 16 and a father who died a lingering one at 42. I was there for both. Indeed, now that I'm in my seventies I seem to attend more funerals than christenings or weddings. I feel no urgent requirement to witness death of man or beast in order to make my fiction believable and I certainly cannot any add further insight to the mystery we must all face one day. I am no Hemingway and would not wish to moralise on a great writer's opinions, even though they differ from my own. Hemingway won the Noble Prize for Literature and were he still with us I'm sure he would not care what others felt about bull fighting.

Sunday, ah, Sunday. The ring is put to a very different use. On Sunday there is the Pasion de Cabellos, the Horse Passion, when riders and their mounts put on a show that is truly magnificent. Firstly, there is the pageantry. Each male rider in his colourful traje corto - waistcoat - a doma vaquera jacket and tight, high-waisted  pantalon caireles. Then there are the slim, poker-backed haughty Andalucian women in culottes skirts, those short-brimmed calanes hats tipped to one side, looking down at any passerby with an unsmiling expression. (Oh, how I love those superior females! High boots, cold eyes, postures worthy of a queen.) The skill of both sexes on horses with silken manes and tails flying, the muscles beneath their gleaming coats rippling with each walk, trot or canter, would astonish a Parthian warrior. These horses have prancing hooves and dancing eyes, and seem have entertainment in their bones. Beautiful beasts in the eyes of men, whom they have served since antiquity. I would not like to say for definite whether they enjoy giving a performance to a crowd of excited humans, but it would certainly appear so. When riderless they trot around the ring, nodding and giving the odd sideways flick of a hoof, as the applause showers down on them.

Perhaps there is something a little hypocritical about avoiding a bull fight, yet enjoying watching a horse being forced to carry another creature on its back? We humans have complex minds and even more complex emotions. There may be beauty in both, but one is about pain and death, and the other about energy and life.

Last night, on BBCs 'Question Time' some panel members, audience members and certainly Nigel Farage bemoaned the loss of grammar schools and wanted them back. Those who spoke and proclaimed that social mobility was better in the 1960s were not old enough to have any sensible recollection of that decade or the one before it, when grammar schools covered the land. Now, although I did indeed feel cheated of an education I'm not going to rant about grammar schools. A grammar education was indeed a fine thing and those bright enough to get places in them were lucky indeed. But the system itself was grossly unfair in a number of ways:-

When I was attending primary school and working towards the 11+ my (typical) local grammar had places for around 10 percent of the pupils taking the exam. So let us say that 12% or 15% or even 20% of my schoolfriends were actually bright enough to benefit from a grammar school education. What happened to those children who were not selected in this limited numbers, rigid, uncompromising method of sending one lot to grammar and the dross to secondary modern school? Why, the 90% (many of them quite capable of keeping up with the other 10%) received an education that terminated at 15 years of age with no examinations - none were offered or taken at secondary school - and therefore had no qualifications whatsoever to present to an employer.


You will have guessed by now that I was one of the 90%, a service child, and therefore very rarely selected for grammar even had I done well in the exam, because service children move every two or three years to a different location and the school would rather have pupils who were going to fill their places until they reached leaving age. If the unfairness of the system so far has not impressed the reader, consider also the fact that girls are brighter than boys at 11 years of age and were discriminated against at the selection stage, otherwise the grammar schools would be full of girls and very few boys. Thus many more bright girls (who it was thought only had to get married and darn socks) were also pushed aside and sent to secondary schools where indeed they learned to cook, while the boys did their woodwork.

Happily for me, I went to night school soon after leaving secondary modern, got my Os and As and then went on to do two separate degrees at university. I don't know what happened to my classmates who were successful in the 11+, but I'm pretty sure most of them didn't do any better. I repeat, I have nothing against a grammar education per se, but if people like Farage (who went to a private school) want to bring them back, they should ensure that there are places for all those who are capable of such an education and it is fluid enough to allow late learners to pass between schools.

As for social mobility being better in the 50s and 60s. In those decades 5% of schoolchildren went on to university, no doubt the offspring of middle and upper class parents. Now it is 43%. All my 5 grandchildren have degrees or are in the process of doing so, while I was unique in having a university education amongst my ancestors, parents, brothers and cousins, my family coming from farm working stock. No one related to me had even dreamed of getting such an education. Oh, they were just as bright as I am, but the system prevented them from progression. The measure of social mobility, it seemed, to those on Question Time last night (Russell Brand excepted) was who went to Oxbridge. They bemoaned the fact that Oxbridge was full of private school students. Well hell, those two universities are not holy ground my friend. There are others which turn out just as able and brilliant minds.

Last month I met two Australian writers new to me: Anna Tambour and Rob Knell and happily added them to my wide circle of writer friends and acquaintances. We had lunch together in the postage stamp back garden I lovingly call the Italian courtyard. Both Anna and Rob are excellent writers in their different ways, but like many of us hampered by the age-old problem of getting published by the big houses. I include myself in that last statement, since more recently I am finding it frustratingly difficult to sell a novel to the large established publishers. It matters not that I sold 87,000 copies of 'Castle Storm' when Transworld/Random House brought it out. The next novel 'The Silver Claw' sold only 9,000 and I was immediately dropped and all communication ceased.

Publishers are of course in it for the money and nothing else. As one writer friend once put it, his book might as well have been a pound of butter. An editor does not want a good, well-written novel. He or she wants a product that will sell and sell very well. That editor may be a book lover too and preferably both good writing and good sales go together, but the marketing department needs to see long black figures or the novel is called to question. One of the problems is that editors and marketing departments do not know what is going to sell and what isn't, any more than we know the date of our death or what our next tax bill will be. It's all guesswork and blind prayer-ridden hopes of a new Harry Potter.

My own thoughts on the current difficulties of getting published are that ebooks, desktop publishing and on-line purchasing have thrown the big guys into a panic. They are attempting to analyse what's happening and are not coming up with any answers. A mist has come down over which way to go in the future. The media are little help to them or writers, since they concentrate on prize winners and runaway wildfires. One of the biggest problems is that fewer people are reading books. The market is shrinking because a huge percentage of the population reads nothing longer than a magazine. I have no answers myself, which I know is a big get-out. My hope is ever that writers like Rob and Anna manage to gather a readership using small, energetic publishers and social media, and get the audience their work deserves. Me? I've had my day, a more mellow time in the 80s and 90s of the last century, when the days were, if not golden, at least a little more silvery than they are now.