by Jeff Noon
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 worktools—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.
“I most certainly have not!” cried Alice in exasperation; and then (after a second’s further pondering) she added, “But I’ve got something even betterer, even sharperer!” (In her excitement Alice had forgotten all about her grammar.)
A longer than long time later (because the branches were very thick and the hacksaw was more blunt than sharp) Alice finally managed to cut her way through the hedgerow. It was almost daylight by the time that she had pushed aside the final branches: and there she found herself at last, in the very centre of the maze. The statue of a young girl was standing upon a podium inside a circle of trees and shadows. She looked a lot like Alice, that statue, especially with the early morning’s sunlight sheening her face; the statue even wore a (rather stiff-looking, granted) replica of Alice’s red pinafore. Alice was quite taken aback by the resemblance. Why, for a whole second, Alice didn’t know which girl she truly was! But on the statue’s left shoulder Whippoorwill the parrot was perched. And stretched between the statue’s outstretched hands was a long and writhing and very angry-looking, purple-and-turquoise-banded snake!
“Oh dear,” cried Alice (in a whisper), “I do hope that snake isn’t poisonous!”
“Not only is this snake poisonous,” replied the statue in the croaky voice that Alice had heard previously, “it is also extremely venomous.”
“Is there a difference,” Alice asked (not even pausing to think about how a statue could speak), “between poisonous and venomous?”
“Most certainly there is: anything can be poisonous but only a snake can be venomous. Venom is the name of the poisonous fluid secreted from a snake’s glands. The origins of the word can be traced back to the goddess Venus, thereby implying that snake venom can be used as a love potion. Perhaps it was this usage that directed Queen Cleopatra of Egypt to use this particular snake as her instrument of suicide. After all, this is an asp that I hold in my hands, also known as the Egyptian cobra.”
“Why ever don’t you throw the snake away?” asked Alice of the statue.
“How can I?” the statue replied. “I can’t even move. After all, I am a statue.”
“But you can talk, so you must be a very special statue,” said Alice.
“I am a very special statue. My name is Celia.”
“But that’s my doll’s name!” Alice cried (having quite forgotten, once again, until that very moment, that her doll was still missing).
“Yes, that’s me,” the statue croaked to Alice, “I’m your doll.”
“You’re Celia?”
“Yes, that’s my name.”
“But you’re much too large to be my
doll,” exclaimed Alice. Indeed, the statue was exactly the same size as Alice.
“I’m your twin twister,” the statue said.
“But I haven’t got a twin sister,” replied Alice, quite mishearing.
“I didn’t say twin sister, I said twin twister. You see, Alice, when you named me Celia, all you did was twist the letters of your own name around into a new spelling. I’m your anagrammed sister.”
“Oh goodness!” said Alice, “I didn’t realise I’d done that. How clever of me.” And then Alice finally worked out Whippoorwill’s last riddle; she realised that the statue-doll sounded just like her in the way she spoke, and their names were the same, only misspelt: Celia and Alice.
“The trouble with you, Alice,” croaked Celia, “is that you don’t realise you’ve done anything, until it’s much, much too late. Whereas I, your twin twister, I know exactly what I’ve done, even before I’ve done it.”
“Who turned you into this garden statue, Celia?”
“Pablo the sculptor.”
“And who is this Pablo?”
“Presently I shall tell you. For the moment, however, I’m quite helpless unless you remove this snake from my fingers.”
“Who put the snake in your fingers?” asked Alice.
“The Civil Serpents of course. Who else? They don’t want us statues moving around freely, that would break all the rules of reality.”
“But—”
“Alice, there’s no time for further questions. Kindly remove this asp from my grasp.”
“However shall I remove that snake,” Alice asked herself, “without getting myself poisoned? Or, indeed, venomed? Oh well, I suppose I can only try my very best if I’m ever going to get us all back home in time for my writing lesson. Now, what was it that Great Uncle Mortimer had said about dealing with dangerous creatures? Look them in the eye, that was it: look them in the eye and recite the Lord’s Prayer.”
So Alice did look the snake in the eye: only, just as she was about to start her rendition of the Lord’s Prayer the snake hissed! at her. Alice was sure she could hear certain words in between each hiss. They sounded something like this: “Do you mind, young lady? I’m an Under Assistant of the Civil Serpents!” And so very fearful a noise the snake made that Alice cleanly forgot every single word of the Lord’s Prayer.
“Now look here, Mister Snake,” she cried (having decided that the snake was male for some reason), “I do believe that you’re not very civil at all, keeping my doll under lock and fang.” But the snake just carried on hissing and wriggling and writhing and slithering and flickering out his forking tongue and showing off his fine set of fangs. It was then (whilst looking deep into the snake’s jaws) that Alice noticed a tiny piece of wood that was speared onto the left-side fang. “I wonder if that’s another of my missing jigsaw pieces?” Alice said to herself. “I simply must retrieve it, but how can I when the Lord’s Prayer has quite simply vanished from my mind?” She racked her brains to remember the words, but the only “prayer” she could now recite all the way through was the lullaby called “Go to Sleep, Little Bear.” The reason she could remember this poem so well had a lot to do with the fact that it had only four lines containing only twenty-two words, many of which were repeated:
“Go to sleep, little bear.
Do not peep, little bear.
And when you wake, little bear,
I will be there, little bear.”
So this was the “Lord’s Prayer” that Alice recited to the Under Assistant of the Civil Serpents whilst at the same time fixing her gaze, icily, upon his. Only, for this rendition, Alice (quite against her will) changed the words slightly:
“Go to sleep, little creep.
Do not peep, little creep.
And when you’re deep, little creep,
I will not weep, little creep.”
Alice felt despondent at losing the rhyme between there and bear in her new version of the lullaby, but ever so pleased at having replaced it with the new rhymes between sleep and peep and creep and deep and weep. She thought her creation a much better poem! Not that the Under Assistant paid much mind to the ins and outs of poetic rhyming schemes; he was altogether too very tired to care anymore. His head slumped into slumber. Snakes don’t have eyelids of course, but if that snake had had them, he would have closed them then. When Mister Snake was quite asleep, Alice removed (very carefully) the jigsaw piece from his left fang. It showed only a pattern of purple-and-turquoise scales but Alice knew that it would fit perfectly into the reptile house section of her jigsaw picture of London Zoo. She popped it into her pocket (alongside the badger piece and the termite piece) and then unwound (also very carefully) Mister Snake from Celia’s fingers. Alice then carried the snake over to the nearest hedgerow where she placed him gently down in a bundle of leaves. Mister Snake wrapped himself into a reef knot and then into a bow, and finally into a double snakeshank, in which convoluted shape he started to loudly snore.
“Alice, you have released me from servitude!” With that croakment the statue stepped down from her podium with a creaking gait, which sounded very much like a creaking gate. Celia came up very close to Alice and, once there, she shook Alice’s hand.
Alice felt very shivery to be shaking a porcelain hand, but shake it she did. “Celia,” she cried, “I’m very pleased to have found you and Whippoorwill once again, but how in the garden did you get to be so tall for a doll?”
“I’m not a doll anymore,” replied Celia, “I’m a terbot.”
“A turbot!” exclaimed Alice. “That’s a kind of fish, isn’t it?”
“Indeed it is: a European flatfish with a pale-brown speckled one-dimensional body. But that definition only counts when the word’s got a U in it.”
“Oh, I’m dreadfully sick of words with U’s in them rather than their proper letters!”
“A terbot, on the other hand, is an automated creature powered by termites.”
“Termites?”
“Exactly so, Alice. Termites. I have termites in my brain. Take a look.” Celia bent forwards at her squeaking waist and then turned a couple of screws on each side of her temple. She swivelled aside the top of her head. Alice leaned forward to peer into the gaping skull and found inside a loosely packed mound of soil through which a million termites were scuttling, and no doubt passing questions and answers and answers and questions to each other.
“So you’re using the beanery system?” asked Alice.
“I wouldn’t know anything about beans,” answered Celia. “I think I must be an automaton. You know what an automaton is, don’t you, Alice?”
“Is it a toy that can move without being pushed or dragged?”
“That is correct, and that is what I have become. I am the automated version of you, Alice. The word automation comes from the ancient Greek; it means that I’m self-moving; it means that I’m self-improving. In point of fact, I’ve improved myself so much…I’ve become rather more intelligent than a human being.”
“But surely,” Alice said, “in order to equal the thinking of a single human mind, a termite mound would have to be as large as the world itself.” (Alice was only borrowing this knowledge from Captain Ramshackle, not really stealing it, so we can forgive her for this slight copycattering, surely?)
“Indeed it would be,” replied Celia (referring to the mound-size), “but that argument fails to remember the ingenuity of Pablo the sculptor. Pablo has managed to breed the termites down to the size of pencils.”
“But pencils are so much longer than termites,” Alice argued.
“Not if they’re used up from the tip and nibbled down from the eraser. Eventually a pencil will meet itself in the middle and then it will vanish. Just like us, Alice! Perhaps we faded away from both ends until we met in our middles and then we vanished! I’m a work of art, did you know that?” Celia twirled around quite proudly as she said this. “I’m terbo-charged!”
“Celia, why are you dropping the letter T from the word?” Alice asked.
“Because that’s how the future people say it,” Celia replied. “You do know that we’re in the future now, Alice? I must have slipped from your fingers whilst falling through the tunnel of clock-numbers. I therefore entered the future at an earlier date than you did. I landed in 1998 a whole week before you. I had grown to my present size, but I was still only a doll. I could not move at all, or even think for myself. Pablo the sculptor claims that he found me lying in this very garden, in a briar of roses.”
“Did Mister Pablo plant this knot garden?” Alice asked.
“He most certainly did. Pablo’s hobby is to make terbots, you see? The Civil Serpents look down upon this hobby; they think it very unreal. Only by promising that his creations would be trapped forever in a garden of knots and guarded by snakes could Pablo convince the serpents that his work be allowed. It was Pablo that put the computermites in my skull. Alice, my dear, it was as if I had woken up from a long, long sleep of dollness. I came alive!”
“Celia, I’m very glad that you’re alive,” stated Alice, “but I simply must get you and Whippoorwill and myself back to Great Aunt Ermintrude’s house in time for my two o’clock writing lesson.” Just then an almighty commotion took place beyond the knot garden; red and white lights flashed in the sky above the hedgerows and a piercing cry howled through the morning, followed by what sounded very much like a policeman’s whistle being blown. “Whatever’s happening now?” cried Alice.
“Maybe it’s something to do with the Jigsaw Murder,” replied Celia.
“You know about the Jigsaw Murder?” a surprised Alice enquired.
“I don’t know much about the case,” Celia replied, “but I do know that Whippoorwill isn’t too happy with the sudden disturbance.” Indeed, the parrot was flapping his green-and-yellow wings in a chaotic pattern that Captain Ramshackle would have been very proud of. It was these movements that caused Alice to remember certain words that the badgerman had spoken. “Celia,” she asked, “would you happen to know the whereabouts of a certain Professor Gladys Chrowdingler by any chance?”
