Jeff Noon - Automated Alice

Alice's first problem was exactly how to get inside the Town Hall, without the Civil Serpents knowing she was there. To this end she had instructed Celia to deliver her to the side courtyard of the building, where a small door marked with a sign admitting DELIVERIES ONLY! was guarded by the unravelling eightfoldness of an Octopusman. This bouncing individual waved his collection of long legs around in a dance of clinging suckers, squelching out with a soapy voice, "What has this young girl to deliver, I wonder?"

"I'm delivering the new mascot for Mrs Minus's election campaign," invented Alice, pushing Celia forwards.

"A vote for Mrs Minus", announced Celia, in her most political voice, "is a vote for Subtraction!"

"Let me check this delivery," over-emphasized the Octopusman; at which he blubbered into a brass mouth-horn fixed to the delivery door's interior passage. A slithering voice answered back to him, and then the Octopusman said to Alice, "You may (carefully!) enter..."

So it was that Alice and Celia gained a careful entrance to the Town Hall of Manchester. It was very echoey and also very cold inside those hallowed corridors; it was a stonely warren of wonderings through which the pair of them echoed like copies of themselves. The strangest thing of all about the Town Hall was that they met absolutely nobody at all along their way!

"I always imagined that a Town Hall would be a very busy building," echoed Alice.

"Perhaps they do their business in secret?" echoed Celia.

Eventually Alice and Celia passed under a sign reading THE PRUNING DEPARTMENT to enter a large echoing room of emptiness.

"Where should we head for now, Celia?" echoed Alice, pondering upon a signpost that sprouted directions for THE TREASURING DEPARTMENT, THE WHISPERING DEPARTMENT, THE TORTURING DEPARTMENT, THE TAXING DEPARTMENT and THE SLEAZING DEPARTMENT.

"I suspect that the department we're seeking won't be signposted," echoed Celia. "We know that the Civil Serpents keep their evidence in the cellar of the Town Hall, so maybe it's THE PLUMMETING DEPARTMENT we need to find?"

"But if a department isn't signposted, how can we find it? Oh, if only I had a single clue!"

At which Celia suddenly cried, "Alice! Look at the floor!"

Alice looked at the floor. "My goodness," she echoed; for the marble floor they were standing on was carefully tiled into exactly twelve over-large jigsaw pieces! And each of them contained a mosaic picture of each of the creatures that Alice was searching for. Miss Computermite was depicted, as was Captain Ramshackle and the snakely Under Assistant they had met in the knot garden and the chicken-thing they had found in James Marshall Hentrails's automated stomach. These last two floor-pieces were painted over with vicious black crosses. ("I wonder what those black crosses mean?" wondered Alice.)

Also pictured on the floor were the Zebraman who had helped Whippoorwill across the busy road, and the trumpeting Snailman called Long Distance Davis. The next four pieces showed Whiskers MacDuff, the Catwoman; the Fishman they had found dead in the librarinth; Professor Chrowdingler and Quentin Tarantula the Spiderboy whose tinier piece they were currently searching for. All four of these last floor-pieces were marked with the sinister black cross.

"I surmise", echoed and logicuted Celia, "that the black crosses mean that the victim has already been murdered. This is why the Serpents call this room THE PRUNING DEPARTMENT."

"But that means that Pablo Ogden's automated guitar-player has been jigsawed!" echoed Alice.

"That's correct. And Pablo is going to be ever so angry about that."

"But the Under Assistant snake's picture is also black-crossed. Why should the Civil Serpents want to Jigsaw Murder one of their own kind?"

"Perhaps he was a traitor to the cause?" echoed Celia. "Perhaps the Under Assistant had decided the means of murder did not justify the end?"

(Once upon a writing time I had considered describing to the reader exactly what the jigsawed body of a snake would look like, but picturing that victim's transformed body became quite a problem to me. I mean to say, how can you possibly jigsaw a snake? There aren't enough bits on it to move around. I suppose you could put the head where the tail was, and the tail where the head was, but surely that would only make a snake pointing in the opposite direction! In the end I gave up; the reader must imagine it alone.)

Alice was busily scanning the floor for the last two pieces. "Look, Celia!" she cried. "There's a rendition of Whippoorwill himself! The Civil Serpents want to Jigsaw Murder Great Aunt Ermintrude's parrot! I simply cannot allow that to happen! But I wonder where the twelfth jigsaw piece can be lying?"

"I think we must be standing on the twelfth and final piece," Ceilia suggested. Alice and Celia then looked downwards to find out whose image they were standing on...

But there was only a hole beneath them! A certain omittance of floor!

Oh no! It's THE PLUMMETING

DE...

PART...

MENT!

Alice screamed out Celia's name as they fell into the yawning gulf of an ellipsis in the marble...

"Ce...

li...

a...

!

!

!

Alice landed (with a soft plump!) upon a gigantic bed of mattresses. "This is quite the softest thing I've ever landed upon in all of my adventures!" Alice observed to herself, as she bounced up and down. She was so comfortable with her new world, until she realized exactly where she was...

Snakes alive!

Alice was in the cellar of the Town Hall, and her soft bed of mattresses was really a vast seething ocean of Serpents, who were continuously unknotting and reknotting themselves into new configurations. Alice hopped from one foot to the other, trying to keep her balance!

The cellar stretched out for miles and miles and miles, and the serpents filled every single inch of every single mile. Alice had heard of sea-serpents before, but never had she heard of a sea of Serpents: and now here she was actually afloat upon such a thing! Far above her Alice could see the tiny jigsaw-shaped hole in the ceiling through which she and Celia had fallen. Celia was nowhere at all to be seen, but Alice didn't even have time to call out her Automated Sister's name, because just then, the snaking floor beneath her started to move!

Suddenly Alice was riding along on top of the twisting mass of Civil Serpents! Alice was a serpent-surfer!

Eventually, she was carried towards the very centre of the cellar, where the gigantic head of a hideously malformed snake thrust its way upwards from the wriggling maelstrom. This monstrous reptile had glistening black slits for eyes; its long snout ended in a pair of jaw-like doors which slowly hinged open to let slip a dangling rope of thick saliva; two spears it had for fangs, sharp and to the point.

"Good afternoon. My name is Alice," said Alice, curtseying, and crossing her fingers. "Are you the Supreme Serpent?"

The snake flickered out an unrolling red carpet of a forked tongue. This bifurcated implement changed Alice into an Alish, in a splash of sibilant hissingnesses. "Alish, we meet at lasht!" the Serpent sprayed, and then spittled and spattled out this rain of rhymes:

"Alish, can you enwonda

About thish Anaconda?

Alish, can you ennoblra

Thish hoodifided Cobra?

And can thish girl enshcriptor

This corsheting Conshtrictor?

And can thish girl enladder

The shumming of thish Adder?"

"Well I'm trying to enladder your meaning, Mrs Big Snake," Alice answered, "but you seem to be rather unsure of which kind of snake you are!" To which the bloated Serpent replied with one final hissing verse: