Vurt 3 - Automated Alice (4 page)

“You feel so ostrich-sized?” asked Alice.

“Not at all!” cried Ramshackle. “It's the Serpents who have buried their heads in the sand, not me. Surely you must see, Alice, that I couldn't possibly kill a spider?”

Alice accepted that fact quite easily, having witnessed the Badgerman's bristling indignation at such close quarters, not to mention the fresh cloud of talcum that billowed loose from his hair. (Oh dear, I just said I wasn't going to mention the cloud of talcum powder, only to find that I already have mentioned it. I must be getting rather tired in my old age, Alice. In fact, I do believe that I will take to my bed now, because it is getting rather late, and this is quite enough writing for one day. I will see you in the morning, dear sweet girl . . .)

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

(There, that's better. Now then, where was I?) Oh yes; Alice tried her best to calm Captain Ramshackle down by asking for an explanation of what, exactly, a wurm (with a U in it) was.

“The science of Randomology”, the Captain began, clearly relieved to have the subject changed, “states that a wurm is a parasite who likes to make a stolen home in a computermite mound. Once settled there the wurm does its very best to make the termites give the wrong answers. The Civil Serpents, of course, think that wurms are a pest to the orderly system; they try to kill the wurms. But I, Captain Ramshackle, inventor of Randomology, would like to invite the wurms into my mound. And you know something, Alice. . .?” And here the Captain looked around from side to side nervously and then bowed his head close to Alice's ear in order to whisper, “Some people actually eat the wurms.”

“Eat worms!” Alice exclaimed, quite forgetting the incorrect spelling.

“Wurms, Alice. W. . .u. . . r. . . m. . . s! Some people eat them.”

“But that's. . . that's. . . that's disgusting! Whatever for?!”

“It makes you go crazy, of course.”

“But why would you want to go crazy? Why that's. . . that's crazy!”

“Exactly so, Alice! Knowledge through nonsense. That's my motto. I welcome the wrong answers! Would you like to hear a song I've written about it? It's called 'Trouser Cup'.”

“Don't you mean trouser cuff?”

“What in the randomness is a trouser cuff?”

“Isn't it a kind of trouser turn-up --”

“A trouser turnip!” bellowed the Captain. “There's no such vegetable!”

“But there's also no such thing as a trouser cup,” protested Alice.

“Exactly!” cried the Captain, upon which he commenced to make a funny little dance and to sing in a very untidy voice:

"Oh spoons may dangle from a cow

  With laughter ten feet tall;

But all I want to know is how

  It makes no sense at all.

Oh shirts may sing to books who pout

  In rather rigid lines;

But all I want to turn about

  Is how the world unwinds."

Captain Ramshackle then knocked over a pile of his miscellaneous objects (one of which was a croquet mallet, which fell onto the shell of the Indian lobster, cracking it open). “That looks like a very crushed Asian lobster,” Alice stated.

“That lobster is indeed a crustacean!” the Badgerman replied, before continuing with his song:

"It makes no sense at all you see,

  This world it makes no sense.

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?”

But the parrot only flapped his green-and-yellow wings at Alice and then flew off from the top of the hedge. He vanished into the knotted maze of the garden. Alice tried her very best to run after the beating of his wings, but all around her the stark branches tried to clutch at her pinafore and the autumn leaves under her feet seemed to crackle like dry voices. Here and there amidst the leaves Alice noticed various work tools -- hammers, screwdrivers, chisels, even a pair of compasses -- that were littering each pathway. “Somebody's being very untidy in their work,” Alice said to herself whilst running. “My Great Aunt would certainly punish me severely for leaving my pencils and books in such disarray in her radish garden. But never mind such thoughts, I must try to capture Whippoorwill.” So Alice kept on twisting and turning along the alleyways of the garden's maze until she found herself even more lost than she had been before.

“Oh dear,” sighed Alice to herself, flopping down against the nearest hedge (and nearly cutting her knees on a discarded hacksaw lying in the grass), “I'm ever so tired. Maybe if I took just a little nap, I would then be more refreshed for this adventure.”

But just as Alice was dozing off, she heard somebody in a rather croaky voice calling out her name. “Alice?” the croaky voice called. “Is that you hiding there behind the hedgerow?”

This is indeed Alice,“ replied Alice, sleepily, ”but I'm not hiding; I'm only trying to find my parrot."

“You're looking in quite the wrong place,” croaked the voice.

“And who are you?” Alice asked, rather impatiently.

“Why, I'm you of course,” the voice answered.

“But that's impossible,” replied Alice, full of indignation, “because I'm me.”

“That leaves only one possibility,” said the voice: “I must be you as well.”

The funny thing was, the voice from the garden certainly did sound like Alice's voice, if rather croaky, and very confused Alice was upon hearing it: “How can I be in two places at one time?” she pondered. “But then again and after all,” she added to herself, “I am in two times at one place, 1860 and 1998, so maybe this isn't all that very strange.” Alice then pulled herself together (as best you can in a knot garden) and asked the voice this question: “Where in the knottings are you, croaky voice?”

“I'm right behind you, Alice,” the voice replied, croakingly, “at the very centre of the maze, which lies just behind the hedgerow you are resting against. I have your parrot here with me.”

“Oh thank you for catching him! But how can I find you?” Alice asked.

“Why, I'm only some few feet away from you, behind this very hedgerow.”

“But you know very well, Miss Mysterious Voice, that this is a knot garden; I could be miles and miles away from you along all the twistings and the turnings.”

“You could always cut your way through, Alice.”

This made Alice pay proper attention; she would never have thought of such an idea on her own. She turned around to peer through the branches but they were too thickly interwoven: Alice could see only sparkles of colour through the gaps. “Haven't you a penknife?” the voice asked.