Having completed my short novel set on another planet I have started writing its sequel . Here's a draft version of the first two chapters or so. I'm trying to get the writers in the Regent Bar Interested in it.
A SCOTTISH RE-AWAKENING
Tom Leonard
1. THE PURPLE CANAL
A
snake-headed
serpopard
on the bank stopped to peer at
the Vikini fleet that
had
just
landed
on the purple canal with an almighty splash. The
strange
creature
was from Planet Amon-Giza
in the Belt
of Orion
universe. A
cobra twisted and turned at her feet.
“Their
own
vibrant
planet
was
destroyed by their
stupid
humanoid
follies,”
hissed
the cobra, “and
now they come to Earth
where there is nothing but burnt rock and scruffy vegetation.”
“They
think that
their
children
in
Fólkvangr
have
divine powers,”
growled
the serpopard, “but Atum will
win the day.”
Seconds later, Adam and Caleb Quick stirred in the hold of the
Vikini flagship Draken.
“I can see daylight,” declared Adam, peering at an
unfamiliar sunrise. “I’d been wondering whether the cosmos would
be pitch black forever. Those bizarre squawking sounds and the smell
of incense didn’t help my stupid noddle either.”
Caleb pressed his ear against the hull. “I can hear fish
rustling under the boat. Let’s go scuba diving. I’m getting bored
with apples and peanuts.”
“We’ll rev up after breakfast, and try to make Scotland by
nightfall,” announced the twins’ doting golden-skinned husband
Dr. Slim Quick, the self-appointed captain of the fleet.
“I hope we make it to the three volcanoes in the Lothians,
and maybe as far as the mighty Cairngorm,” said Adam.
“The Christ-child said that we’ll be landing near the site
of Berwick-upon-Tweed,” insisted Caleb. “That’s in England,
near Flodden.”
“No it isn’t,” asserted Slim. “The Scots reconquered it
from the English in AD 2296, a thousand years to the day after they
first lost it.”
“You’re one big pompous know-all!” howled Caleb, leaping
like a hyena onto Slim’s chest.
“Leave a bit for me!” yelled Adam, grabbing Slim’s
six-toed feet.
The three Quicks had lived on Planet Qinsatorix in the
Aton Solar System until only a couple of hours previously, at
which time their fleet had teleported to Planet Earth.
However, the youthful twins were original hominids, their ancestors
having once teleported to the City of Trivoli from Eritrea 1 on
Earth.
Slim was Icarian by race, and until recently an Associate
Professor of Jurisprudence. He’d experienced a very troubled
Icarian upbringing when compared with the cosseted existences of his
handsome wives. That was after Slim was falsely charged at age eleven
with murdering his entire family, upon which he was banished to a
dystopic existence in a penitentiary school on the Isle of Nod.
When the Quicks arrived on the quarterdeck of Draken,
they consulted with Pippa Pipette-Dawkins, who was Scottish by in
vitro ancestry, and with her fast evolving cat-like husband Sir
Darth. The accomplished couple, both in their late twenties, had
taught at Cantabridge as full professors of Humanoid Genetics, with
specialities in Epigenetics, prior to the cataclysm on their
planet.`
The Draken was now floating gently westwards along the
purple canal, surrounded by light blue vegetation as far as the eye
can see. She was followed by the remaining five longships in the
fleet. The six sturdy craft were packed with 160 survivors, adults
and well-groomed children, from the Red Trojan universe. Fifty
or so further lucky souls had made it through the disintegrating
wormhole to the well-stocked refugee camp on Planet Freyja in
the Quanta Universe.
The cloud cover above the Vikini fleet was pink, but with
enough green sky to make a sailor’s shirt.
“Maybe this is where the North Sea once was,” said Slim,
peering forlornly at an atlas.
Tears welled into Pippa’s eyes. “When Marie Madeleine last
descended to Qinsatorix with my holy son Jed, she told us
that, ‘Animals
will
come along
the canal path from the East,
all sorts of animals. In
time, people will
follow,
but we
won’t
know
who
they
are since
they
won’t
be from the
Red
Trojan
universe.’”
“But
it’s amazing how well Earth
has recovered from the fireball only
132
years after
the humanoid
population was fried to a cinder along
with all the displaced
cats,”
added Sir Darth, twitching
his feline tail, “and
the Australian
colony
on Mars only survived for a
year
after that. The
WASPs
were eating each other before the end.”
Slim
scratched his head,“Maybe
help
was sent by a Big Data outfit in the
Branson
universe,
but
Earth’s
still in a right pickle.”
Adam
and Caleb brought their spear-guns to the middle-deck, and leapt
overboard in their wet suits. A
minute later Caleb
surfaced with a massive tiger-pike,
and gleefully
threw
it, in its death throes, onto the quarterdeck. Then Adam speared
a large green, bull-headed
salmon.
“Five
more for the pot and we’ll feed the entire
multitude,” declared Adam,
waving
his arms in delight.
During
the morning the clouds turned deep grey, and
poured buckets of rain. The crews of the long-ships spread the
awnings, and collected enough fresh drinking
water for the
next couple of days.
“I
do believe that we’re going to be self-sufficient,” announced
Sir
Darth, in relief.
“It’s
better than Mars,” joked Slim.
Awhile
later, Pippa saw another animal strolling,
nonchalantly,
along the canal path. She thought it was a lioness
or
maybe
even a
chimera,
but it turned out to be a female
sphinx.
“The
first bit of Britain is two-hundred miles away,” declared the
human-headed creature, studying her compass. “Can I jump aboard?”
Sir
Darth fixed
the sphinx with his
feline stare. “Sure you can, if
you wipe your feet first,”
he
slowly
replied.
“We’re from Qinsatorix,”
The
sphinx,
stared
straight back into Sir Darth’s glistening
green
eyes.
“There’s
no
need to
worry
about that. I’m
all-accepting.”
Attracted
by the apparent
bonhomie,
an
ever eager
koala from
the Comet
galaxy
bounded
up.
“Hello,
I’m…,” said the koala, with
a polite curtsey, only
for Caleb
to pull his well-seasoned
Earp-trigger
with
the callousness of a spaced-out fanatic. The spear
tore through
the baby
bear’s
gullet, and
she fell gurgling to the ground.
“That’s
survival of the fittest for you,” exclaimed
the sphinx, in horror, as
the koala bled to death on the canal path.
Pippa
felt gutted by the incident and concluded
that Caleb was a misogynistic
S.O.B.
But
the accomplished
professor
was
comforted
in her grief by the soothing presence on the quarterdeck of Adiza
Addington,
her former teaching assistant at the University of Cantabridge on
Qinsatorix,
and
a fellow hockey player.
Adiza was a blue, sugary-skinned
Trinkon,
and the sole survivor of her hard-working
species
in the entire Red
Trojan
Universe. When
Adiza gave Pippa a hug, it calmed her down completely.
Several
hours later, the power-driven Vikini longships slowed down a few
knots when Adam noticed a reddish-grey escarpment in the distance. It
was all that remained of the northerly headland at the mouth of what
was once the
River Tweed. The
Tweed valley was now river-less, but not completely dry, as the
purple canal ran along its
course
until it reached what was once the confluence of the Teviot and the
Tweed in the
Royal Borough of Kelso.
Slim
decided not to sail on,
for the moment at least, and the
Vikini fleet moored anchor in the former estuary, close to the spot
where the rapacious English Plantagenets stormed Berwick from
across the Tweed in
AD 1296. There
was no trace of this proud city, in AD 2725, on the burnt out
escarpment. Even the massive city walls had turned to dust.
That
evening, Caleb killed a tiny
mammoth that wandered up for sustenance, and everybody enjoyed a
tasty
pot roast.
The
survivors
stayed
at that forlorn
spot
for days, and the days turned into weeks. The
children became as bored as they’d
been
during
the
pandoravirus pandemic.
“Let’s
wait until I hear from the Christ-child,” said Pippa. “My son
will advise us where to travel next.”
“Why
travel,” moaned
Adam, “if everywhere is
as
rotten as this? We’ve
been sentenced to as life-time of dreary dystopia, We’re not just
East of Eden. We’re way off in the remote boon-docks without
a single hope of redemption.”
“Jed
will
use his divine powers to
find
somewhere a
bit better
for us to settle,” replied Slim, with a lost look in his eyes.
“I’m
getting restless,” declared the sphinx.
“I’ll see you in the burnt
out remnants
of Floors Castle, if you get that far. The
ghost of the last
Duke
of Roxburgh is still said to haunt the place. He once charged
visitors
a thousand pounds a day for fishing rights, and
he
still
regarded
himself as a social benefactor.”
“We
stand
for
justice,
wealth for
the impoverished,
and
impoverishment for the wealthy!”
declared blue, sugar-skinned Adiza. “May Scotland be better for
it.”
“There’s
always
hope,”
said the soulful sphinx. “There’s
always another day.”
But
Adam was filled with depression and trembled in anguish all night.
2.
THE
GARDEN OF EDEN
The
Goddess Asherah
was, at
that very moment,
touring the Milky
Way in
the massive rotating
space
station Castellos,
with
her husband Yahweh in
tow.
She
took a
look at Planet Earth,
and
instructed
the
Director of Inter-Stellar Restoration
on
Planet Born
Again
in
the Regeneration
universe to send
his
six
enormous Waker comets back
to
the Sol
Solar system to further
re-vitalise
the
burnt out planet,
The
Waker comets created a brilliant silver light show. They
circumnavigated
Earth
at velocities
that exponentiated the speed of light, created
several
hundred
luscious gardens
around the planet, and
terraformed
the geological systems beneath the earth’s crust. thus
vastly
improving
the prospects
for fine
weather.
That
accomplished they
sped off to investigate the 75 surviving moons of Jupiter.
When
she saw Adam suffering,
in dire
mental
anguish,
the
wily goddess
focussed her attentions on Planet Macedon
in the Quanta
Universe. After
eyeing up a
number of
possible
fresh partners for
Adam,
she
pressed button eleven, and
teleported
the entire
galley-ship
Agamemnon
from
the River Axios to
the purple
canal on
Planet Earth,
as it approached the
Tweed estuary.
A
handsome man and two beautiful women were
dancing on the deck.
“That
should put the cat among the pigeons,” said
Asherah.
“It’s
sometimes a good idea to mix and match.”
Mercury
poured
Asherah
a beaker of delicious nectar. “I’d
enjoy some hanky-panky with the groovy
aristocrats
on that
galley-ship.
They’re
all
psycho-artistic
masterpieces.”
“My
hi
tech
husband conjured
up
that
highly
imaginative
design
during
his creative
youth,”
explained
Asherah,
with a nostalgic sigh, “but
the
other deities on Castellos have needed to take up
the
cudgel
during
poor Yahweh’s decline.”
The
160 survivors on Planet Earth awoke the next morning feeling quite
confused
by
the celestial technotronics of the night
before.
After
their wrasse and lentil breakfast, three bronze
children ran up the escarpment as part of their exercise program.
They quickly returned, feeling
very excited indeed.
An exotic garden had appeared on the summit of the hill, and
it extended as far as the lofty
cliff tops.
Exotic fruit and vegetable allotments abounded, game birds played in
the trees, and tasty-looking
honey-rabbits
and sugar-foxes played in the meadows.
“It
would
make a fab golf course,”
announced
an Icarian girl. “Let’s
call it the Garden of Eden”
“Why
don’t we go and pitch our pop-up tents there?” said her sister.
“I
wanna kill one of those silly damned
foxes,”
said their
playmate,
drooling at the mouth.
That
evening the survivors were pitching their tents in their Garden of
Eden, when the warning
siren on the Draken
bleeped
three times.
A luxurious hundred-foot-long galley ship was approaching the Vikini
fleet’s moorings. It was propelled by two hundred oars. but with
no
oarsmen.
On the raised middle-deck there stood three mauve-skinned
aristocrats, in
all their groovy
glory,
all
with
dark blue hair
and
wearing golden coronets.
Pippa
and
Slim
hurried
down the hill and arrived on the shoreline
soon after the narcissistic
‘gang of three’
had disembarked. Six
sullen Theban
slaves were
carrying the baggage, and swearing under their breath.
“Where
the fuck are we?” exclaimed the prince with the diamond necklace.
“We were sailing peacefully down the Axios when everything went
pitch black, and now we’re in this God-forsaken place! If my father
Zeus is pulling a prank then I’ll get my own back, that I will!
I’ll kill all the swans on this planet.”
Slim
grimaced.
“There
are no swans
where
there are no
rainbows.
You’re
in Scotland on the
rundown Planet
Earth
in
the Sol
Solar System.
“But
you’re
not even human.
You’re
hung like a pegasus,
and
just look at your grotesque
eyebrows!”
“We’re
of mixed ethnicity and
we’re here
from the
Archipelago of the Lost Multitudes on the
dying planet
Qinsatorix.”
“I’ve
never even heard of that
stupid archipelago.
We’re from Planet Macedon
in the Quanta
Universe. I’m Prince Pausanius of Orestis, and these are my
sisters, the Princesses Tyche
and Eve of Lychnidos.
Tyche
is a High Priestess of chance and fortune, and
Eve runs her luck.”
Pippa
gave the eye-catching
trio a cool look. “You would be welcome to pitch a tent in our
gardens, should you so wish. I’m
sure that Zeus will be sending a rescue party for you tout
suite.”
Princess
Tyche
rubbed
some orangy-yellow
massage
lotion into her chest. “Thank
you, dear sister. I’m
sure we’ll find a way of reciprocating.”
“Your
charming company is enough,” replied Slim, with due courtesy.
Princess
Eve gave Slim an admiring glance. “You have such lovely golden
skin, my fine fellow. Perhaps we should go running together.”
“I’ll
bring my identical man-wives along. I’m sure you’ll like them
too.”
Eve’s
eyes gleamed. “Perfect twins ? I’m sure I will.”
That
evening, the aristocrats
from Planet Macedon
encouraged
several of their new friends to party
with
them around
their
camp-fire. Prince Pausanius
poured everybody a
glass of
gooey
liquid extracted from Peace
Lily
plants, sprinkled
with a sweet-smelling
herb from Clusium.
Adam
took a single sip of his potion, and promptly
fawned up to the
prince. “What
were
you really about
before
you came here?”
Adam
inquired,
with
a crafty
grin.
“I
have a tragic
story to tell,” replied
the prince, tousling
Adam’s hair. “I was King Antigones’s
much
favoured
lover. We
were the pride of Macedon
and
all the people loved me,
apart
from poor
Queen Lilac
of course,
but then that
sneaky prole Agrevius
barged
in.”
“Wow!
What cheek!”
“I
understand exactly
how
you feel. When
I complained
about
Antigones’s
high-handed
lèse
majesté
towards
moi,
a high-ranking
Prince of Orestis,
his
guards
took me to their
tower and
horse-whipped
and abused noble
me
for the entire night. Then,
in
the morning, the
ugly centurion
laughed in my face and called
me
a whining, begging, trollop!”
“What
happened next?” asked Slim, in
horror, recalling
his bad experiences of
the past at
the hands of the fat-cat politicians.
“I
killed the
bully
of course!” howled the prince. “Then
I
skewered
my
monarch’s
neck to his very own throne, and
circumcised
silly
Agrevius
with my blunt
silver
scissors.”
“Way
to go!” exclaimed
Adam, trying to sound facetious.
“Thank
you! Anyroads,
I
thought I was a
goner
when
a palace
guard walloped
my head with
a wild swing of
his mace,
but
I survived by
some
divine
fluke
or
other and
fled
with my angelic
sisters
down the Axios. I
thought I was escaping to a
love-feast in
Heaven, but now
I’m in
eternal
Hell
for
my ill
fortune.”
“Join
the club, darling,” said Caleb, with a smirk.
The
travellers
from
distant planets
suddenly became aware of an omniscient presence by
the bonfire. An
august individual had
translated
forwards
in time from the Scottish Reformation Era
of the sixteenth century. Translators
in time usual only survive in the future for 30 seconds, but this one
was durable.
“I’m
the
Right Reverend
John Knox, the
very
first
Calvinist Minister of Scotland,”
declared
a gentleman
with a long wispy beard and wearing a round cloth cap.
“Who?”
asked Caleb, spitting out his gum.
“You’ll
pay for your insolence!
How
dare you?
I’m the
man who destroyed the
harlot Mary,
the Catholic Queen of the Scots.”
Caleb
scratched himself. “Who
gives a toss?”
“Almighty
God certainly does, and we
should
beware
all ignorant miscreants who enter this
land, unless
they’ve
been
predestined
to go to Heaven of
course.
If
you commit sins of the flesh or deny
Calvin’s true faith, then you will be
hung and drawn at the Glasgow Cross
like
that turncoat
Catholic, John
Ogilvie, before
you.”
Prince
Pausanius grinned,
gave
Adam a seductive
kiss, and
glared at the intrusive clergyman.
“A
minister
of
Christ?”
chuckled
the
Macedonian.
“I
know your
nasty
sort!
Get
into that
galley-ship, pitiful
slave,
and
row your
lice-ridden
oar
until
you die.”
“This
wanker
will
be criticising good old-fashioned adultery next,”
giggled
Princess
Tyche.
“All
civilised people commit sins
of the flesh. It’s
what life’s about. What else would we
do with our
beautiful
mauve
bodies?”
“You’re
all
doomed!” raved Knox. “You’re doomed to burn on the clifftops at
St. Andrews like the
depraved students of AD 2053, the
inhuman
monsters
who
were thrown over the edge for their follies and
eaten red-hot
by
the sharks for
their pains. And
the
blokes
among
you
who sleep with other
blokes
should be castrated
and disembowelled
before
they
burn.”
“Why?”
asked Slim, gritting his teeth.
Knox
looked down his nose. “God
made
that
clear when he created Eve
out of Adam’s rib.
The accounts
in Genesis
speak for themselves, you
fool.”
“That’s
totally
unconvincing
tosh!” fumed Slim.
“But
many
of us are Qestorians,”
reacted
Pippa. “We
adhere to the main tenets of the Nestorian faith and
focus on what
Jesus
had
to say on these matters, which, apart from his love for John and
Lazarus, is very little indeed.”
“Those
Nestorian
heretics
fled to heathen
Assyria during the fourth century, and
thence to plague-stricken China,” howled
Knox. “They’re worse than the divisive
Arians,
and
then some.”
Slim
stamped
his foot as if to squash a roach.
“Why don’t you go
and freeze
your
bollocks off in
a block of ice?” he
demanded. “They
did
that
to
Pope
Benedictus Borgia
in
2402 for
sanctioning the massacre of hundreds of innocent trans people in
Naples.”
Knox
scowled,
and slowly evaporated into thin air. “I will return...” came a
long, withering cry. And
then there was coughing,
spluttering, and
an
eerie
silence.
Princess
Eve took
her
brother Pausanius’s
latest objet
de désir
for a walk through the vineyard. She
polished
off a selection
of plum-sized
Kyoho
grapes
with
Adam, before
retreating
to her
triangular
tent. When
she
dived in, Adam leapt
in after her. She
enjoyed squeezing
his rib-cage.
Then
he sowed the seed in
her and
created a
new
chance
for fresh
life.
Not
to be outdone by Adam’s
marital
infidelity,
Slim tracked the mauve-skinned Pausanius through the orchard, and
followed him to his marquee. The prince invited Slim in for a glass
of apple wine and they spent
quality time
together
into
the wee
small hours.
When Slim awoke, wearing
only
his
ear mufflers,
he wondered how Caleb and Tyche
were
faring
in
the next tent.
Prince
Pausanius woke up with a snort. “Where’s my oatmeal cereal and
maple syrup,
you
stupid slave?”
he yelped, glazy-eyed.
“I
love the way you simper into
the night,
darling,”
retorted
Slim, with a yawn, “and
then you turn
into a Thracian princess.”.
“You
make
me feel as
delicate as
the Goddess Hathor, Your
Autonomous
Majesty,”
giggled
Pausinius.
When
Pippa left Adiza’s tent, they had lots to chuckle
about too.
3.
THE SCHRŌDINGER
RING
The
travellers from Planets Qinsatorix and Macedon much appreciated their
improved quality of life in the Garden of Eden. Slim and his
man-wives developed sensitive relationships with Pausanius and his
sisters, and the Theban slaves from the Agamemnon mellowed out
and took turns to recite Homeric poetry around the evening bonfires.
Pippa
cuddled into the studious, and very boring, Sir Darth, and focussed
on finishing The Advanced Theory of Humanoid
Evolutionary Genetics by Ronald Aylmer Fisher and Lord Dominic
McHummingbird. Life is getting more tolerable,
she thought.
The
various galaxy-shattering inter-celestial events resumed during June
2726, when a shining golden ring mysteriously appeared in the sky
about ten miles east of the Tweed estuary. The ring remained
steadfastly in the same position, well below the cloud cover, and it
was a full half-mile in diameter. They named it the Schrödinger
Ring, and half-expected a giant cat to jump through it.
A
few days later, the Waker comets returned in force. The
Qinsatorans and Macedonians heard a series of enormous explosions
during the night, coming from outside the former eastern coastline of
Scotland, north-west of the Tweed estuary. Adam thought they sounded
like the thunderbolts that struck Gonville and Caius College on
Qinsatorix during the final days of that planet, and he was
scared that Planet Earth would collapse around him.
A
very deep trench about a hundred yards wide was hewn in the earth’s
crust. It extended along the former coastline, about a mile out and
to the north-east, but entered into the former Tweed estuary, before
looping out again towards an immense circular crater that appeared
several miles further to the south, which would become known as the
‘Lindisfarne reservoit’
Thousands
of A.I. Robots parachuted from the comets, and set about constructing
an intriguingly designed harbour that would connect the canal to the
two sections of the trench.
The
following Sunday, a flying saucer emerged through the Schrödinger
Ring and headed straight for the Garden of Eden. If this was the holy
saucer Guanshiyan from Planet Freyja, then
Pippa’s son Jed, the tenth humanoid Christ-child, might even be at
the controls. But Pippa was to be disappointed. It was Slim’s holy
daughter Marie Madeleine who stood on the control podium of the
Guanshiyan, in the company of the highly popular black
Archangel, Antinous of Bolu, known to his friends as Ant, and his
partner, the purple-haired former Cnupian slave Achilles.
Pippa
and Slim relaxed with the three visitors under a peach-leaf willow
tree in the Garden of Eden. After entertaining Slim with news from
Freyja about her dear mother Sister Zoe’s good works, Marie
said that there were plans afoot on Freyja and Planet Born
Again to rebuild and repopulate parts of Edinburgh, the former
capital city of Scotland, on land close to the former castle rock. In
the meantime, the 160 survivors from Qinsatorix would be
encouraged to travel to Cramond, a place outside Edinburgh that was
first settled in the Romans in the second century AD and that had
recently been re-cultivated by a Waker comet.
“We
doubt that you’d make it across all that arid land in the Borders
and Lothians,” said Ant, sipping his squeezed pear juice, “but
you should be able to travel to Cramond in the Vikini fleet once the
‘Sturgeon passage’ is complete. We’re naming it after the
Scottish First Minister who succeeded the outrageous Alex Smout
Salmon during the 21 st. century, God bless her indomitable soul!”
“Once
the water starts flowing into the new trenches,” explained Marie,
“you’ll be able to enter the passage from the canal via the
sluice-gate in the specially designed harbour.”
“But
where will the water come from?” asked Pippa. “Heaven?”
“Sort
of,” replied Achilles, with a grin and a chuckle. “Let’s see
what big surprise tomorrow brings.”
“The
neutro-spider scientists have needed to be highly ingenious,” added
Marie, with a smile.
“Marie’s
planning to travel with you to Cramond in Draken,” advised
Ant. “Achilles and I need to return to Freyja to instal a
multi-level playground in the Fields of Fólkvangr,
but we’ll be back soon, hopefully with Jed.”
Ant
and Achilles left Earth in the holy space capsule the next day. They
flew through the Schrödinger
Ring and transcended through the orangy-brown background to the
Quanta universe way beyond. Only seconds later, a torrent of
water poured out of the ring, and gushed from the sky into the
Lindisfarne reservoir. The water flowed out of the reservoir and into
the first section of the trench as far as the harbour at Berwick,
then out into the section section of trench towards Cramond. The
Sturgeon passage was now fully operational. The flow of water from
the sky was to remain steady until the reservoir was full, and it
would subsequently be intermittent.
The
water was from the Ocean of Óōr
on Planet Freyja, and was being Himmelswanderer-flipped
between the Quanta and Milky Way universes, a highly
complex procedure developed in AD 2651 by the eminent neutro-spider
Niels Himmelswanderer, using infinitesimally many teleportations of
the water particles. These combined into a gigantic, completely
cohesive transcension process.
That
Saturday, the 160 survivors from Qinsatorix set off with Marie
Madeleine in the Vikini longships, heading for Cramond about 65 miles
around the former coast-line to the north-west. Everybody was in
excellent bonhomie, and the holds of the long-ships were
well-provisioned with produce from the Garden of Eden.
When
they past the rock promontory that was once St. Abbs Head, Adam
thought he saw a gigantic sphinx on the headland. However, Princess
Eve argued that it was a burnt stone statue of a sphinx, and they
bitterly debated whether it landed there from Egypt during the
destruction of Earth in 2593. Or perhaps it had come from
another universe, or was being translated forwards from another time
zone?
And
then Adam saw the sphinx walking along the clifftop, but Eve was no
longer paying attention. Caleb was giving her a present. It was a
necklace of orchids. Princess Tyche was most dischuffed.
In
the meantime, Pippa and Aziza were pouring over the atlas, when a
very high cliff top appeared to the west. “Tantallon Castle fell
off from there during the earthquake of 2451,” said Aziza. “So
that must be the Bass Rock to the larboard. It was a seabird
sanctuary in its heyday.”
What
remained of the Bass Rock was a curiously shaped geological
structure, indented by a bulge that was once a sea cavern.
“No
seagulls, unfortunately,” said Pippa, only for a large, white
sea-eagle to emerge from behind the rock, fly towards the Vikini
fleet, and land ahead of the Draken.
“Hi
there!” called the talking eagle. “I’m Tranter, and I’m from
Planet Muchisimas in the Milky Way. I
hope that we can become better acquainted”.
“I’m
Pausanius,” replied the noble prince of Orestis, rising
pretentiously to his feet. “Maybe we could take tea together
on that apology for a beach?”
“You’re
much too presumptuous,” reacted Tranter, looking down his beak,
“but I suppose that I could follow you to your destination. The
giant sphinx on the beach seems to be tracking you too.”
Soon
afterwards, the Sturgeon Passage turned due west, and headed down the
erstwhile Firth of Forth, past the no longer extinct Arthur’s Seat
volcano, and into the recently constructed harbour at Cramond.
Where
there was once beauty their was no longer beauty, just stark reality,
apart from the exotic Alaterva gardens which stretched between where
the Cramond Inn and the fourteen century kirk once stood, with the
remains of the Roman fort buried way below.
