Vurt 3 - Automated Alice (3 page)

Alice realized then that she was being looked at, rather closely, and she tried to think about what had a glass eye that allowed somebody to look at you rather too closely. “I'm being looked at through a microscope!” was her answer. She had seen her Great Uncle Mortimer use a microscope in his study; he used it to examine his numbers and his radishes.

“My, my!” the faraway voice stated. “We seem to be looking at a tiny girl, a minuscule girl, an ever-so-small girl. What's she doing in my computermite mound? What a very splendidly random occurrence!”

Alice looked up the glass eye of the microscope and saw another eye -- a giant eye -- an almost human eye -- looking back down at her. “Oh, if only I could travel up this microscope,” thought Alice, “then I could become my real size again.” But after all, she had already that afternoon climbed up the pendulum of a clock and vanished and shrunk, so this shouldn't be too difficult a task for her. And so it proved. Alice felt herself passing through the glass eye of the microscope and then through another glass eye, and then through yet another glass eye, and yet another, and then finally a final glass eye, and by this time she felt quite faint! In fact, Alice fainted quite away!

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The third thing that Alice knew upon awakening was that she was lying on an extremely uncomfortable camp-bed with a horsehair blanket placed over her. The second thing Alice knew was that she was surrounded by a jumbling of tumbling objects and items. And the first thing she knew was that an old and rather untidy badger was leaning over her with a cup of tea in his hand, from which he was trying to make her drink. Alice did drink, because she felt quite weak from her travels, but the tea tasted dark and she told the old badger so. “I'm afraid the tea is dark,” the badger agreed, “but that's only because it's got no milk in it. You see, I'm desperately short of money at the present moment, and I was trying to invent a free bottle of milk, but my computermites couldn't work out the solution to that little problem, I'm afraid: it made them go into a dreadful tizzy. Still, perhaps if I lighten your tea with a little fish juice. . .” The badger proceeded then to squeeze a live goldfish over Alice's cup of tea.

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?”

“You say that you left Didsbury village in 1860? Why that's. . . that's. . . why I don't know how long ago that is. Do you?” Alice tried to work it out, but she couldn't. “No matter,” said Captain Ramshackle, “I'll ask the mound how long ago it is.” And with that he picked up his pair of tweezers and proceeded to pluck a number of termites from the earth; he rearranged them here and there and then set them on their way back into the mound. “The answer should be arriving in a few minutes,” he said. And then he started to consult something lying on his desk beside the computermite mound.

“Oh this is very confusing,” cried Alice, edging even closer to the desk in order to see what Captain Ramshackle was looking at.

“Confusing? Splendid!” the Captain cried, not even looking up from his task.

“It's not at all splendid. It's extremely confusing.”

“Confusing is splendid.”

“Is that a jigsaw you're doing?” asked Alice, having finally dared to look over his shoulder.

“No it is not,” fumed the Captain. “This is a jigglesaurus.”

“What's the difference?”

“A jigsaw is a modern creature that finally makes sense, whilst a jigglesaurus is a primitive creature that finally makes nonsense.”

“None of the pieces seem to fit at all,” said Alice. “There's no picture there.”

“Exactly so. Everything adds up to nothing. You see, I'm a Randomologist: I believe the world is constructed out of chaos. I study the strange connections that make the world work. Did you know that the fluttering of a wurm's wings in South America can bring about a horse-crash in England?”

“No, I didn't know that,” said Alice, “in fact I don't even know what a horse-crash is, but I do know that a worm doesn't have wings.”

“Doesn't it?” Ramshackle replied. “How on the earth then does it fly?”

“A worm doesn't fly. A worm wriggles.”

“Does it? Excellent! Even better. The wriggling of a wurm in South America causes a horse-crash in England. Oh chaos, chaos! Splendid chaos! Now what's this doing here?” Ramshackle had plucked a jigsaw piece up from his desk with the aid of his tweezers. “This little piece seems to fit perfectly in place!” he cried out loud. “We can't have that! Indeed, no.” He slipped the jigsaw piece under his microscope. “It's a section of a badger's head I believe.”

“That belongs in my jigsaw,” said Alice.

“Splendid! And here was I fearing that my jigglesaurus was starting to make sense, of all things.” Alice took the offending piece from Ramshackle and then placed it in her pinafore pocket. “You know, I thought you were a wurm, Alice,” the Captain continued, “when first I saw you marching out of the mound.”

“I'm not a worm,” answered Alice.

“I didn't say you were a worm, Alice. I said you were a wurm.”

“Why do you keep saying the word with a U in the middle of it?”

“Because it stands for Wisdom-Undoing-Randomized-Mechanism. Don't you see, Alice? The world is totally random and all the Civil Serpents who try to find out the rules of it are just squeezing at strawberry jelly.”

Finally, Alice got round to asking the Captain what a Civil Serpent was.

“Those tightly knotted buffoons!” grunted the Badger-man in reply. “The Civil Serpents are these hideous snakes that writhe around all day in the Town Hall, making up all these petty laws against nature. Nature, of course, follows her own laws, and these are the laws of Randomology, as worked out by yours truly. The Civil Serpents regard me as a trouble-maker, as though I make the trouble! No, no: the Universe makes the trouble; I'm just the watcher of the trouble. And this is why they're claiming the good Captain Ramshackle is guilty of the Jigsaw Murder.”

“Has somebody been murdering jigsaws?”

“Silly, silly, silly! It's a murder by jigsaw. Not by jigglesaurus, mind. I mean, what interest have I in jigsaws? Those perfectly logical, slotting-together pictures? No indeed, jigsaws bore me to tears. Oh, those slithering oafs! Civil! I'll give those serpents civil! And they're claiming that I killed the Spider boy. Spidercide? Me? How could I possibly. . . why I love spiders!” At this moment Captain Ramshackle looked over to a (quite fearsomely large!) stuffed and mounted example of the arachnid species that rested amongst his miscellaneous objects. “Well, never you mind the details, Alice. Suffice it to say that I, the Captain of Ramshackle, am totally incapable of such a crime. Oh, I feel so ostracized!”