Jeff Noon - Automated Alice

"I'm afraid I don't. What does she study?"

"The Mysteries of Time."

"That does sound useful. We must do our very best to find this professor."

"What about an ellipsis? Do you know what one of those is?"

"An ellipsis? Isn't that the sister of an ellipse?"

"Celia, I think your computermites must be on holiday. Oh, if only I'd asked Captain Ramshackle where Professor Chrowdingler lived! But I was in such a hurry to find Whippoorwill. At least I've managed one good job this day!" With these words Alice reached out to lift Whippoorwill off Celia's shoulder. But the parrot was too quick for her: with a flickering fluttering of feathers he managed to fly off Celia's shoulder just before Alice's fingers reached him. He flew above the hedgerows over towards where the lights were flashing.

"Oh goodness!" exclaimed Alice. "Whippoorwill has once again escaped! However shall we find him this time? This garden is so tightly knotted."

"I think I may know a way," Celia answered, taking hold of Alice's hand. "Follow me."

The Automated Alice led the Real-life Alice over to where a small garden shed was sitting in one curvy corner of the maze's centre circle. (I say "sitting" because the garden shed really did appear to be sitting on the grass, and rather awkwardly at that!) Above the closed door, a painted sign read: OGDEN'S REVERSE BUTCHERY. The garden shed was tilted precariously to one side, with many planks missing, and even more of them just about to fall off. From within came a terrible racket: a terrible banging! and a clattering! and then a terrible walloping! and then a terrible cursing cry! and then yet more banging! and clattering! and, indeed, walloping! To Alice's eyes, it looked very much like the garden shed had been dropped from a great height: indeed, she was certain that the shed hadn't even been there when she had first entered the centre of the maze, but how could a common-or-garden garden shed simply appear out of nowhere?

Celia was pounding on the shed's door: "Pablo, Pablo!" the doll croaked, "let me in, please. Stop making that terrible racket!"

And the racket was stopped for a second, as a gruff and angry voice answered from the interior, "But I like making a terrible racket! It's my job! It's my Art!" The shed's door was then flung open with such violence that it almost flew off its hinges, and standing in the doorway was an extremely overgrown man. He was the first completely normal man that Alice had seen that morning, even if he was very, very large, and dressed in a blood-smeared butcher's apron. He was holding a terrible racket in his hands.

(I must add at this point that the terrible racket he was holding was a tennis racket, and it was terrible because the man had obviously been making it that very morning out of bits and various pieces: bits of old sideboards and pencil-cases and various pieces of string and wire and shoelaces. It really did look most unsuitable for the civilized game of tennis.)

"Celia! My little terbot!" the big man cried. "What in the blazing mazes are you doing off your snake-guarded podium?"

"Pablo, may I introduce Alice," Celia calmly responded. "She has rescued me from the snake's hold."

"But that's impossible!" said Pablo.

"Good morning, Mister Ogden," said Alice, on her best behaviour.

"A girl! At last!" sobbed Pablo Ogden. "Another human being! It's been so long... so very, very long... you'd better come in. Quickly, quickly!... before the snakes come crawling!"

Once Alice and her automated sister were inside the garden shed, Pablo pulled the door shut with a vicious bang that caused the whole structure to shake. Alice really did think that the shed was going to collapse around them into splinters and dust, but somehow it kept itself together. It was very cramped inside, especially with the hulking Pablo bent in half over his cumbersome workbench, and with all the tools that were stored there, and because of the large ship's wheel and compass that were fixed to the floor. And then there was Pablo's latest terbot creation, which quite by itself took up more than two-thirds of the room. "Magnificent! Isn't he?" Pablo asked upon seeing Alice's wild-eyed stare. "My greatest work. His name is James Marshall Hentrails, Jimi for short. Well then, young girl... what do you think of him?"

The lumbering sculpture looked like a pile of rubbish assembled into the vaguest resemblance of a man. His legs were made from spindly gutter-pipes; his body from a washboard and a mangle (all covered up with a well-read jacket woven out of discarded book covers); his arms were borrowed from the legs of a long-gone-to-salt-and-pepper chicken, all jointed up with brass wire and ending in a fine pair of puppet's hands; his head was (disquietingly) almost human, a doll's face of blackened skin on the top of which languished a long and shaggy knotted haircut made out of the ripped-up legs of a pair of ebony corduroy trousers. In other words: a perfect pile of rubbish.

"Why is his name Mister Hentrails?" Alice asked, delaying her opinion.

"You know what entrails are, don't you, Alice?" Pablo responded, whilst unfastening a small door in the sculpture's stomach.

"Of course I do," Alice replied, quite embarrassed. "Entrails are the... they are the... well, entrails are the insides of a... the insides of a... a..."

Alice could not make herself say the words, and very relieved she was to let Pablo answer his own question: "Exactly, Alice! Entrails are the insides of a cow! And therefore..." and here Pablo swung open the sculpture's stomach with a flourish, "hentrails are the insides of a chicken!"

"Urghhh!" Alice squealed, "how horrid!" For within the sculpture's stomach lay a knotted mass of blood and flesh.

"This is how a terbot feeds," Pablo elucidated. "Now come on, girl, what do you think of my latest masterpiece? Your honest opinion, now."

"A child of six-and-five-quarters could have made this sculpture!"

"Oh thank you, little Alice!" Pablo cried. "A child could have made this! Why, that's exactly the effect I was hoping for. Only at the age of six-and-five-quarters are we truly at home with our fantasies! The artist, you see, must travel backwards in time. To become, once again, a child of dreams."

"But Mister Ogden," said Alice, "that's exactly what I want to do. To travel backwards in time. Please find a way out of this garden for Celia and me."

"A way out for Celia, you ask?" Pablo muttered. "But that's amazingly impossible! A terbot leaving the knot garden? Why, the snakes would strangle you both! It's the written rulings. No, no and no! Terbots are bound to the garden. Even my latest and greatest creation, James Marshall Hentrails himself, why even he is doomed to stillness once the snakes get hold of him. There's no way out of the garden for a terbot. That's the unliving truth."

"Pablo, why are you making such a terrible tennis racket?" asked Celia.

"It might look like a terrible racket," replied Pablo, "but really it's a guitar. Although, it does make a terrible racket."

"How so?" Celia enquired.

"Watch closely," Pablo answered, slotting the tennis racket into the outstretched hands of James Marshall Hentrails, and then flipping open the top of the sculpture's skull. "Now, all that Jimi needs is a little brainpower." Pablo opened up a drawer in his workbench, and reached in with a garden trowel, to dig out a large scoopful of thick, black soil. "Aha! My lovely beauties!" Pablo announced, shovelling the soil into the hollow of the terbot's head.

"Are there computermites in that soil?" Alice asked.

"Pablillions of them! The tiniest computermites in the whole world! My own invention. Watch closely..." Pablo closed up the skull with a loud and violent squelch, and then turned a switch on the terbot's neck.