Jeff Noon - Automated Alice

Alice then saw that a single green-and-yellow feather was floating above the Square. "Why, that looks like one of Whippoorwill's feathers," she cried. "Maybe the whole parrot himself is flying around this Square somewhere? I must look out for him!" And Alice did look out for Whippoorwill, but only the single feather of him was to be seen, floating along on a slight breeze. "Whippoorwill!" cried Alice to the single feather (having nothing further to cry to). "If you keep on losing feathers at this rate, why, very soon you will not be able to fly at all!" She then dug deep into her pinafore pocket for her feather. Of course, she found only the seven jigsaw pieces. "Oh flutterings!" Alice howled. "That's my feather floating up there! I must have dropped it getting out of the auto-hearse!" Alice reached up into the air to recapture the feather, but no matter how high she reached, she could never quite reach it.

And just as Alice was reaching her very highest high in order to grab at Whippoorwill's escaping feather, the Town Hall clock started to slowly ding-dong its clanging song of middaying chimes. At the very first of the chimes, Alice felt a soft hand softly stroking at her shoulder. She thought that it must be the paw of a policedogman, come to rearrest her, and she pushed it away, but when she eventually spun around to view the stroker, imagine her surprise to find a normal man waiting for her there. This normal man was utterly and only a normal man -- not a single trace of animality -- and he was jacketed in a deep and blue velvety suit, complete with a deep and blue and peaked and velvety cap. Over his left shoulder lay the straps of a deep and blue and velvety bag. Everything about him was velvety!

"Who are you?" asked Alice.

"They call me Zenith O'Clock," responded the normal man.

"Who do?"

"Time calls me Zenith O'Clock, because I was born upon this very minute exactly thirty-eight years ago, when the sun was at its veritable height." Zenith reached up to point at the Town Hall clock (which was ever-so-slowly chiming its way through the second of its dozen ding-dongs).

"It's your birthday?" Alice cried.

"It is indeed the anniversary of my birth."

"Many happy returns!"

"I sincerely hope never to return to this day."

"Why ever not?"

This is a dreadful day for me, a dreadful day, I tell you! And very sad I am to be living it. Your name is Alice, isn't it? Your full name is Alice Pleasance Liddell?"

"My full name is Alice Pleasance Liddell, but how in the world did you know that?"

"I've seen you before, but only in books."

"Only in books?" asked Alice.

"Only in books, as you say. Only! Books can never be only; they can only be always. Oh, but all this talk of books is bringing back my sadness!"

"But it's your birthday, Mister O'Clock!" cried Alice. "Upon this day you should only be happy!"

"I cannot be happy," Zenith replied, "because I'm suffering from a terrible disease."

"But you look perfectly healthy to me," Alice responded. "I'm so glad to have met another purely human being. Surely you can't be suffering from the Newmonia?"

"I have a more deadly disease: I'm infested with the Crickets, you see."

"You're infested with cricket?" misheard Alice. "The game with a bat, a ball, three stumps and an umpire?"

"Crickets, I said! Not cricket! Cricket in the plural and with a capital C: that ravenous cloud of reviewing insects. I'm a writer, you see."

"And what do you write, Mister O'Clock? Timetables?" (Alice was quite pleased with her joke.)

"No, no," replied Zenith, "I have found it impossible to time a table, although I once tried. A table is much too wooden to make more than a breath of a move, once every nine hours: except at dinnertime, when it may well make a sudden run for the kitchen."

"So what do you write?" insisted Alice. "Fiction or non-fiction?"

"I write neither fiction nor non-fiction. Rather I write Friction."

"And what is Friction, pray?"

"I write in the language called Frictional. I'm a writer of Wrongs."

"Whatever's a Wrong?"

"A Wrong is a book that the Crickets don't consider to be right, preferring their stories to be told in Simpleton rather than Frictional. They rub their dry wings together, these Crickets, making a terrible respond to my work in the noisepapers."

"But what's so terrible about your Wrongs?" asked Alice.

"Well, I've written two Wrongs up to now: the first was called Shurt, and the second was called Solumn. And the Crickets hated both of them. This is why I'm so sad upon my birthday."

"Do you always spell your book titles with too many 'U's in them?"

"I can't help it, I'm afraid. I can't help going wrong. Shall I read you a little passage from one of my books?"

"If you wish," replied Alice.

Zenith then reached into his velvety bag, to pull out a copy of the book called Shurt. It had a bright azure cover, decorated with an illuminated pair of yellow shirts. Zenith shuffled through the pages of his book until he found the passage he was looking for. "This is a love poem called 'Nothing Rhymes With Orange'. Are you ready for it, Alice?"

"I hope so: except that nothing doesn't rhyme at all with orange."

"Excellent! Then I'll begin..."

And this is the poem that Zenith began:

"Nothing can rhyme with an orange

Except the pocket on a kilt,

When a sporran is misspelled

To a sporrange with a lilt."

"What do you think of it so far, Alice?" Zenith asked.

"Well," Alice answered hesitantly, "you told me it was going to be a love poem, but I can't find any trace of love in the words."

"But that was only the first verse."

"How many verses are there, all together?"

"Only two."

"Oh joy!" Alice said (quietly to herself).

And this is the poem that Zenith continued:

"An orange can rhyme with nothing!

The people cry in ignorance:

Forgetting in their ignorrange

That words can be made to dance."

Having finished his poem, Zenith looked at Alice with an expectant gaze. The crowd of Prince Albert's Square was closing in on Alice and she was feeling very uncomfortable, with the crush and the request for yet another of her honest opinions. "Well," she began, "I'm afraid I still can't see why you call it a love poem."

"But I'm in love with language! Can't you see that?"

"Does this love allow you to make up words like sporrange and ignorrange, just so you can make orange rhyme with something rather than nothing?"

Zenith looked rather upset at this outburst of Cricketing, and Alice was beginning to regret having spoken her mind. "But those words are my own creation!" spluttered Zenith. "They are Frictional words; I conceived them; I gave birth to them! I nurtured those words so they'd grow up to be big and strong and powerful; so that one day they could find themselves being accepted into a Simpleton dictionary! That's my desire, you see, Alice: I make play with old words, twice nightly -- why, sometimes even thrice nightly! -- just so they can breed new words. But you -- especially you, Alice -- you must understand my desire, having been such a close friend of Charles Dodgson?"

"You know about Mister Dodgson?" exclaimed Alice.

"I know all about you, Alice," replied Zenith. "I've seen pictures of your likeness in the books called Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Charles Dodgson wrote them both about you."

"I know this already!" Alice explained, impatiently.

"But when Charles Dodgson wrote about you, he called himself Lewis Carroll; having decided, like myself, to hide behind a nom de plume, which means a feather name."

"So you're not really called Zenith O'Clock?"