Jeff Noon: Automated Alice

And all of those who disagree

Are really rather dense.

Oh dogs may crumble to the soap

That jitters in the dark;

But all I want to envelope

Is how it makes no mark.

Oh fish may spade and grow too late

The trousers in the cup;

But all I want to aggravate

Is how the world adds up.

It's got no sum at all you see,

This life has got no sum.

And all of those who disagree

Are really rather dumb."

The Captain broke off from singing and turned back to the computermite mound. "Ah ha!" he cried. "Here's your answer!" He had placed his eye against the microscope. "Oh dear..."

"What is it?" asked Alice.

"Young girl," he said, "you are one-hundred-and-thirty-eight years late for your two o'clock writing lesson. You need to talk to Professor Gladys Crowdingler."

"Who's she?"

"Chrowdingler is studying the Mysteries of Time. Chrownotransductionology, she calls it. Only Chrowdingler can help you now. Don't you realize, Alice? You've actually travelled through time!"

"I'm just trying to find my lost parrot," Alice replied.

"I saw a green-and-yellow parrot flying out of the microscope, some two-and-a-feather minutes before you did."

"That's him!" Alice cried. "That's Whippoorwill. Where did he go to?"

"He flew out of that window there." Ramshackle pointed to a window that opened onto a garden. "He flew into the knot garden

"I don't care if it is a garden, or not a garden," said Alice, quite missing the point. "I simply must find my Great Aunt's parrot!" And with that she climbed up onto the window-sill and then jumped down into the garden. The garden was very large and filled with lots of hedges and trees, all of which were sprinkled with moon dust. And there, sitting on the branch of a tree some way off, was Whippoorwill himself!

"Be careful out there, Alice," shouted Ramshackle through the window. "Times may have changed since your day."

But Alice paid that badger no mind, no mind at all, so quickly was she running off in pursuit of her lost parrot.

Alice was glad to be aboveground and out-of-doors at last, even if she was rushing madly around in rectangles through the garden's pathways. "This garden is so complicated!" she exclaimed to herself. Again and again she scampered down long, gloomy corridors lined with hedgerows and around tight corners only to bump -- at the end of each breathless journey -- against yet another solid wall of greenery. "This is a garden, this is not a garden," she repeated to herself endlessly as she ran along; Alice couldn't get Captain Ramshackle's description of the garden out of her head. "And if this really is a not garden," she told herself, "well then I really shouldn't be here at all! Because I most definitely am a young girl. I'm not not a young girl." All these tangled thoughts made Alice's head spin with confusion. It reminded her of Miss Computermite's description of the beanery system. "A garden, like a bean," Alice thought, "is either here, or it's not here. And this garden is most definitely here! Even if it is terribly gloomy and frightening." Putting her fear aside (in a little red pocket inside her head which she kept for just such a purpose), Alice sped on and on through the morning's darkness, around more and more corners.

Every so often she would come upon small clearings, in each of which a gruesome statue would be waiting, silent and still in the ghostly moonlight. These statues weren't anything at all like the statues that Alice had seen in the few art galleries that she had visited. For one thing they weren't carved from stone, rather they were made out of bits and pieces of this and that, all glued together higgledy-piggledy; shoes and suitcases and coins and spectacles and curtains and books and hooks and jamjars and tiny velvet gloves and horses' hooves and a thousand other discarded objects. And for another thing -- unlike the works in the art galleries -- these garden statues didn't seem to want to portray real people at all, rather they looked like monstrous, perverted images of the subject, especially in this spectral light and with the rustling of dying leaves all around. "What strange portraits you have in 1998," Alice announced to a statue that looked a little bit like her Great Aunt Ermintrude and even more like a sewing-machine having a fight with a thermometer and a stuffed walrus. And then she was off and running once again.

"I'm sure I'm only going around in squares and circles," cried Alice, presently. "The trouble is -- I think I'm totally lost now." Alice pondered for a moment on what being partially lost might be like, but could come up with no better answer than that it would be like being only partially found. "And I wouldn't like that at all," she whispered, shivering at the thought of it. "Now, where in the garden has Whippoorwill got to? Why, only a few minutes ago I could see him clearly sitting in his tree: now I can't see anything at all other than these tall hedges and all these corners and corridors in the darkness and all these funny statues. And I don't even know how to get back to Captain Ramshackle's house any more! I shall be forever lost at this rate, never mind totally! This garden is more like a maze than a garden." And then it came to her: "This garden is a maze!" she cried aloud. "It's a knot garden. Not a not garden. That's what Captain Ramshackle meant. Oh how silly of me! The word has a K in it, rather than an empty space. All I have to do now is work out which knot the garden is tied up in. Then I can untie it and find out where Whippoorwill is perched."

The trouble was, Alice knew of only two knots: the bow and the reef. Her Great Uncle Mortimer had demonstrated a double sheepshank knot to her only the previous evening, but she had found it much too difficult to follow each end of the rope in their up-and-under and in-and-out travels. "And anyway," Alice had thought at the time, "whatever is the use of a knot that tied two sheep together by the legs?" (Alice knew that the shank was somewhere on the leg, although she wasn't quite sure whereabouts exactly.) "I shall never find Whippoorwill," Alice thought now, whilst running along a particularly convoluted pathway of hedgerows, "if this knot garden turns out to be a double sheepshank garden!"

Just at that moment who should appear over the top of the nearest hedge but Whippoorwill himself! He gathered his wings about him, landed, and then squawked out the following riddle: "What kind of creature is it, Alice, that sounds just like you?"

"Oh, Whippoorwill!" cried Alice. "Wherever have you been? You know that I'm not very good at riddles. Is it me that sounds like me? Is that the answer?"

"Poor Alice! Wrong Alice!" squawked Whippoorwill. "Another clue for poor, wrong Alice: this creature has got your name, only wrongly spelt."

"Oh I understand now, Whippoorwill," said Alice, remembering a misunderstanding she had once had with a certain Miss Computermite. "At last I've worked out one of your riddles! The answer is a lice, which is a kind of insect, I think."

"Explain your answer, girl."

"Well, your question, Whippoorwill, was this: "What kind of creature is it that sounds just like you?" Now then, the two words a lice sound just like my name, Alice, only wrongly spelt, because they've got a space between the A and the lice." She said this quite triumphantly, and Whippoorwill glared angrily for a few moments (during which Alice did believe she had stumbled across the correct answer) before flapping his wings gleefully and pronouncing: "Wrong answer, Alice! Wrong answer!" Squawk, squawk, squawk! "Try again, silly girl."

This made Alice very angry indeed. "Why don't you just stop this nonsense right this minute, Whippoorwill," she said in a firm voice, "and fly back home with me to Great Aunt Ermintrude's?"