by Jeff Noon
“Please tell me one,” asked Alice.
“Tell you one what?”
“A difference between a termite and an ant.”
“Well, now…let me think…I’m sure there was something…it’s in here somewhere…” The termite was tapping his head with one of his antennae as he pondered. “Of course! We termites are vegetarians, while the horrible ants are carnivores. In fact…” and here the termite looked around rather nervously as he whispered to Alice, “ants like to eat termites for breakfast. On toast! I suspect that the ants are jealous because they haven’t been found on the Moon. Quite a mound of difference, I think you’ll agree?”
Alice did agree, but she wasn’t sure why. “What is your name, Mister Termite?” she asked.
But this latest (very polite) question only made the termite even angrier: his antennae fairly bristled with indignation. “And that,” he trumpeted, “brings me to your second mistake, for, if you had been paying attention to my previous statement, you would have recognized that I am completely wingless and therefore, logically, I am a female termite.”
“Very well,” said Alice, getting just a little exasperated herself now, “what is your name, Mrs Termite?”
“Mrs? Mrs? Do I look like a Mrs? Only the Queen is a Mrs! I told you already that the Queen has wings. What is the matter with you?”
“Oh!” cried Alice, “Miss Termite, you’re just too…too…too logical for me!”
“Logical? Of course I’m logical. I’m a computermite.”
“Whatever’s a computermite?”
“Exactly what it sounds like, silly. I’m a termite that computes. I work out the answers to questions. Now, what is your question?”
“Very well,” began Alice, trying her best to keep her anger in check, “what is your name, Miss Computermite?”
“Name?” squeaked the termite. “Names, names, names! What would I know about names? I’m a termite, for digging’s sake! Termites don’t have names! Whatever next? You’ll be asking if we’ve got bicycles in a minute!”
Just then, Alice heard a trundling noise coming from behind her, and when she turned to look, what should appear around the corner but a male termite, on a bicycle! It was quite an ordinary bicycle except that it had two sets of pedals (rather like a tandem) which the male termite pedalled at furiously with his middle and his hind legs, whilst clinging to the handlebars with his forelegs. (This is one of the few cases when two plus two plus fore equals six.) Alice knew it was a male termite because of the wings on his back, and she felt rather proud to have worked out this piece of logic, although why he wasn’t flying through the tunnel rather than bicycling through it was quite another question. However, the male termite never gave her a chance to ask this question because he was obviously in a terrible hurry; he simply pedalled past Alice and the female termite at a terrific speed, shouting at them as he did so, “Come on, you two, hop to it! The Queen of the Mound has received a question from Captain Ramshackle and we must answer it immediately. Chop chop!” And with that he disappeared around the curve in the tunnel.
Alice was quite taken aback by this whirlwind appearance. “Who on earth is Captain Ramshackle?” she asked of Miss Computermite, but the female termite was already hurrying along the tunnel after the bicycle. “Come on then,” the termite shouted back at her, “there’s no time for questions, we’ve got a question to answer!” Alice thought that sentence completely illogical. “Oh dear, Celia,” she said to her doll, “we shall never be home in time for our writing lesson now.” And it wasn’t until after she’d finished the sentence that Alice realised she no longer had Celia in her hands. “Oh bother!” she said to herself. “Not only have I lost Whippoorwill, I’ve also lost Celia. And not only that, I’ve also lost myself! Great Aunt Ermintrude is going to be very, very angry.”
And with that Alice started to run along the corridor after Miss Computermite.
THE WRIGGLING
OF A WORM
HUNDREDS, indeed thousands of other termites joined with Alice in her race to find Whippoorwill. Of course these termites weren’t really after the parrot at all: they were after the answer to the question that Captain Ramshackle had posed to the Queen of the Mound. Eventually Alice managed to catch up with Miss Computermite, and immediately she asked of her this question: “What is the question that you’re trying to answer?”
“Oh, it’s a tricky one, indeed,” Miss Computermite answered whilst still running along the corridor at an alarming pace. “Captain Ramshackle wants to know which number, when multiplied by itself, will give the answer minus one. And that question doesn’t have an answer!”
“But that doesn’t seem such a difficult question,” said Alice.
“Well, as you must surely know,” the termite replied, “one times one is one, and minus one times minus one is also one, because two negatives always make a plus.”
“Do they?”
“They do indeed.”
“But I was taught that two wrongs do not make a right.”
“That’s true in real life. In computermatics, however, it’s quite the opposite.” And with that Miss Computermite put on an extra dash of speed.
Alice felt quite breathless from trying to keep up because she had only two legs whilst the termite had six: the only possible way she could keep up (because six divided by two equals three) was by running three times as fast as she was used to. But keep up she did. “So then,” said Alice, running, “if I had two milk bottles on a table, and I took one of them away, and then I took the other away, I would then be left with one milk bottle. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m not saying that at all,” replied the termite, running. “I’m saying that if you took one milk bottle away from a table, and then another milk bottle away from a table, and then if you multiplied all the milk bottles that were left on the table together, you would get another milk bottle.”
“That doesn’t make sense, but it sounds like an excellent way to get free milk.”
“Exactly! Captain Ramshackle is hoping to get a free bottle of milk, and more power to his elbow.”
“He’s going to drink the milk with his elbow?”
“Of course not,” laughed Miss Computermite. “You’re really rather stupid for a girl.”
“And you’re really rather large for a termite,” said Alice.
“Au contraire,” replied the termite (in French), “you’re rather small for a girl.” And as she listened to this answer, millions, indeed trillions of other termites thundered past Alice (some of them on bicycles) until Alice thought that she was caught up in a gigantic wave of termite frenzy.
“How on earth do you answer the questions?” Alice asked, still running.
“Well,” Miss Computermite began, also still running, “it’s all based on the beanery system.”
“Whatever’s that?”
“Well, a bean is either here, or it’s not here. Don’t you agree?”
“I agree entirely,” replied the running Alice.
“So then, logically, if a bean is here it counts as one bean, and if it isn’t here, it counts as a not bean. And from this knowledge, when the beans are arranged in patterns, it is possible to spell out many the question and many the answer. Why, with only a mere octet of beans (or not beans) one can spell out all of the numbers and all of the letters of the alphabet. And quite a few punctuation marks as well! So then, imagine a trillion beans! What problems you could work out with a trillion beans! And the same principle applies to termites of course: a termite is either here, or it isn’t here. And we termites are even better than beans at being here or not being here because we’ve got legs, and therefore we can move much faster than beans.”
“What about jumping beans?” asked Alice.
“Don’t talk to me about jumping beans,” replied the termite, angrily.
“So, this Captain Ramshackle asks the Queen a question, and all you termites answer it.”
“That’s correct.”
�
��Where does Captain Ramshackle live?” shouted Alice, loudly. (She had to shout this question out loudly, because the noise of six times a trillion termite legs, all of them running, can make a fearsome thundering.)
“Captain Ramshackle”, began the termite, mysteriously, “lives outside the mound.” She said these last three words very mysteriously indeed. In fact, she said them mysteriously mysteriously.
Alice was rather excited by this news. “Does that mean,” she shouted, “that I can get outside of the mound?” Alice was excited because she was almost certain that Whippoorwill had found his way out of the termite mound by now.
“Why, that’s exactly where you’re going,” answered Miss Computermite, “because this is how we tell Captain Ramshackle the answers to his questions: we march out from the mound so that the Captain can study our formation and, by studying our formation, by noting which termites are here and which are not here, the Captain can find out the solution to his latest question.”
“But I thought you said that this latest question didn’t have an answer?”
“It doesn’t, and that’s why I’m scurrying around even more than is usual. I’ll tell you one thing though…”
“And what’s that?” shouted Alice, grateful to know that Miss Computermite was only going to tell her one thing: Alice had learned more than enough things already that afternoon.
“Why, only that you’re a part of the answer, Alice; otherwise, why are you running so very quickly?”
“And what happens after you’ve answered the Captain’s question?”
“We all march back into the mound again, of course, carrying the next question.”
But Alice had no intention of marching back into the mound; once she was out, she was staying out. “Maybe I shall be home in time for my writing lesson,” she said to herself: Which gave her an idea. “Miss Computermite,” she said out loud, “you’re awfully good at answering questions, aren’t you?”
“I most certainly am. Fire away, young girl.”
“Answer me this then: What is the correct usage of an ellipsis?”
“No, no…don’t tell me…let me think…” the computermite pondered, “I know it…I’m sure that I do…now let me just…there…I have it!”
“Yes?” urged Alice excitedly.
“The correct usage of an ellipsis…” the computermite announced grandly, “is for the removal of greenfly from a rose bush.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“An ellipsis…it’s a kind of gardening implement…isn’t it?”
“Oh, this is no good at all!” spluttered Alice. “My Great Aunt will be furious!”
This statement stopped Miss Computermite completely in her tracks. “You’ve got a great ant?” she asked, astonished.
“I most certainly have. Her name is Ermintrude.”
“The great ant has got a name?!”
“Yes she has, and very, very strict she is too.”
“Upon my mound!” squeaked the termite in a frightened voice.
“What’s wrong, Miss Computermite?” asked Alice. “You look quite scared.”
“Just keep your great ant Ermintrude away from me!” the termite pronounced, and then off she set at an even faster pace than before.
“I wonder what’s bothering Miss Computermite?” pondered Alice. “Did I say something wrong?” And then she set off after the termite, doing her utmost to catch up.
Presently Alice did catch up, and just as she did so, she saw a faint light glowing from a distant hole in the mound. The trillions, even zillions, of termites were all scurrying forwards into the light and Alice was quite caught up in their rush: she was a part of the answer.
And then, quite suddenly, Alice was wriggling like a worm in a pair of giant tweezers as she was carried upwards into the sky. Up, up, up. How dizzy Alice felt! “My, my!” cried a faraway voice, “What have we here? I do believe I’ve got a wurm in my computermite mound!” The voice said the word worm with a U inside it, and Alice could hear the U inside the word wurm as it was said. “How splendid!” the voice cried. Alice couldn’t see where the voice was coming from, and she didn’t really care to, because right about then Alice was dropped from the tweezers so that she landed on a sheet of glass. The sheet of glass was quickly slid under another piece of glass which looked very much like a glass eye. Alice was squashed flat! “Now then,” said the voice, “let us see what we have captured. Magnification: five and ten and fiftyfold!”
Alice realised 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!
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 ou
tburst.
“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 clothes and his hair was night-black with a streak of silver riding down his brow.
