Jeff Noon: Automated Alice

This made Alice spring to her feet. "Please don't harm that poor fish!" she called out.

"But he likes flavouring tea," the badger answered, waving the fish under Alice's nose. "This is a Japanese tea-flavouring fish."

Alice politely declined the taking of fish juice and then asked of the badger, "Are you Captain Ramshackle, by any chance?"

"I am indeed by chance the one and only Captain of Ramshackle," the badger agreed, bowing at the waist. As he bowed a cloud of talcum powder rose upwards from his thick, black-and-white-streaked hair. "And what is your name?"

"My name is Alice."

"You're a girl, aren't you, Alice?"

"Of course!"

"A human girl?"

"And what is wrong with that?" Alice asked, having noticed that the badger was actually a mixture of a man and a badger.

"Nothing... it's just that... well..." pontificated the Badgerman, "and after all... there aren't that many... that is to say... if I may be so impolite... there aren't many... well, it's just that there aren't many human girls around these days."

"Why ever not?" asked Alice, rather worried by this news.

"Oh murder!" screamed Captain Ramshackle, all of a sudden. "Whatever am I to do now? Murder, murder, murder! The Jigsaw Murder!"

"Whatever's the matter?" asked Alice, quite alarmed at the outburst.

"There's been a spidercide and the Civil Serpents are trying to put the blame for it on me." The Badgerman threw his paws into the air with this statement. "I didn't have an alibi, you see?" (Alice wasn't sure what a spider's side had to do with anything, and she imagined that Ali Bi must be some relative, a cousin say, of Ali Baba, the poor woodcutter in the Arabian fable who discovered the magic words "open sesame", which allowed him to enter the cave of treasures. But if this was true, she couldn't for the life of her work out why a badger should need the relative of an Arabian woodcutter in order to prove his innocence. And anyway, shouldn't he have said Ali Bibi?) "I fear that the Civil Serpents will soon arrest me," the badger was now saying. "Oh, troubleness! And all because of a certain piece missing from a silly jigsaw."

Alice was curious at hearing this news, mainly because she had tried and failed to complete a jigsaw that very same morning. (If it was still that very same morning, of course.) "What do you mean by a Jigsaw Murder?" she asked.

"May I welcome you, Alice, to my humble abode," the Badgerman replied, calming himself and totally ignoring Alice's question. Alice greeted the Badgerman in return, took a little sup from her unlightened cup, and then looked around the room she had found herself in: Captain Ramshackle's humble abode was suffering from extreme untidiness. It was crammed to the walls with what the Captain called his "miscellaneous objects": rocking-horses and blow-pipes, frogs' legs and battering rams, blotting paper and tiger feathers and garishly coloured maps of countries called Epiglottis and Urethra, a seven-and-a-half-stringed guitar and a deflated cricket ball (Alice couldn't work out how you could possibly deflate a cricket ball!), a tear-stained mirror and a nosebrush and a stuffed Indian Lobster and a tumult of other things that Alice could make neither head nor tail of. (Especially the deflated cricket ball, because, of course, a deflated cricket ball has neither a head nor a tail.) And Captain Ramshackle was no tidier than his room was; in fact he was worse. The old Badgerman was dressed in a patchwork suit of many different cloths and his hair was night-black with a streak of silver riding down his brow.

"I see that you're admiring my suit, Alice," the Badger Captain said, moving over to a mound of earth that rested on a leather-topped desk. "It's quite splendidly chaotic isn't it? Of course, it cost me not a penny, because I made this suit myself out of a book of tailor's samples. One must make one's ends meet, when one is a Randomologist."

"And what is a Randomologist?" asked Alice.

"What else could it be but somebody who studies Randomology?" replied Captain Ramshackle.

"And what is Randomology?"

"What else could it be than what a Randomologist studies?"

Alice felt that she was getting nowhere at all with her questions so she decided to ask no more. Instead she walked over to the desk where Captain Ramshackle was fiddling about with the mound of earth. Alice could see numerously numerous termites running hither and thither over the soil. "What I want to know," Ramshackle asked, "is what in the earth were you, a young girl, doing in my computermite mound?"

"I was trying to get out," replied Alice.

"And very glad I am that you managed it. Of course, every home's got one these days; computermite mounds are most useful for the solving of problems. I dug this one up myself, you know, only yesterday, in a radish patch."

"A radish patch?" said Alice.

"What's so strange about that? Termites are vegetarians, you know?"

"I know."

"My previous mound was getting rather antsy, you see. Anyway, I'd heard on the badgervine that a rather nice Queen had moved her troops into an old radish patch in Didsbury --"

"Didsbury!"

"Yes. Do you know it?"

"I was there only a few minutes ago."

"Well, you must have very fast feet then, because it's five miles from here."

"Oh dear," said a very confused Alice.

"However, this is only a portable mound." Alice tried her very best to imagine a badger carrying a mound of earth through the streets, but no matter how hard she tried she still couldn't imagine it. "They say that if you could get enough computermites into a big enough mound," the Badgerman continued, "you would have a termite brain equal in imagination to the human mind. But, according to my miscalculations, that would make the --"

"Don't you mean calculations," interrupted Alice.

"I thought I had already told you that I was a Randomologist?" replied the Badgerman, crossly. "Now what would a Randomologist be doing making calculations? No, no; a Randomologist makes miscalculations, and according to my miscalculations, a computermite mound with the imagination-power of a single human would be as large as the whole world itself! But what I want to know, Alice, is this: How in the earth did you manage to get inside the mound?"

"I just found myself there," Alice said, quite dizzy from the Captain's miscalculations. "Could you tell me the time, please?"

"I most certainly can," replied Ramshackle, rolling up his left shirt-sleeve to reveal a tiny clock fastened around his wrist. "It's seven minutes past five."

"Oh goodness. I have completely missed my afternoon writing lesson!"

"No you haven't; it's seven minutes past five in the morning."

"In the morning?!"

"That's right. I do all my best miscalculations during the early hours. Maybe it's a breakfast writing lesson that you've missed? I know that most young creatures these days learn how to read from studying the labels on jamjars."

"But what day is it today?" Alice asked.

Captain Ramshackle rolled up his right shirt-sleeve where a second wrist-clock was fastened. "It's a Thursday," he announced.

"A Thursday! It should be a Sunday."

"It should always be a Sunday but, unfortunately, it hardly ever is."

"What month is it?" asked Alice.

Ramshackle rolled up his right trouser leg. Another tiny clock was fastened to his ankle. "It's a bleak twenty-fourth of November in shivery Manchester."

"At least that's right!"

"Of course it's right; this is a right-leg watch, after all!"

"And what year is it, please?" Alice then asked, quite confused.

Ramshackle consulted yet another tiny clock, strapped to his left ankle this time. "It's 1998, of course."

"1998!" cried Alice. "Oh dear, I am ever so very late for my lesson. I set out in 1860, and I still haven't reached the writing table yet. Whatever shall I do?"