Automated Alice

by Jeff Noon

  “I’m afraid I don’t. What does she study?”

  “The Mysteries of Time.”

  “That does sound useful. We must do our very best to find this Professor.”

  “What about an ellipsis? Do you know what one of those is?”

  “An ellipsis? Isn’t that the sister of an ellipse?”

  “Celia, I think your computermites must be on holiday. Oh, if only I’d asked Captain Ramshackle where Professor Chrowdingler lived! But I was in such a hurry to find Whippoorwill. At least I’ve managed one good job this day!” With these words Alice reached out to lift Whippoorwill off Celia’s shoulder. But the parrot was too quick for her: with a flickering fluttering of feathers he managed to fly off Celia’s shoulder just before Alice’s fingers reached him. He flew above the hedgerows over towards where the lights were flashing.

  “Oh goodness!” exclaimed Alice. “Whippoorwill has once again escaped! However shall we find him this time? This garden is so tightly knotted.”

  “I think I may know a way,” Celia answered, taking hold of Alice’s hand. “Follow me.”

  ADVENTURES

  IN A

  GARDEN SHED

  THE Automated Alice led the Real-life Alice over to where a small garden shed was sitting in one curvy corner of the maze’s centre circle. (I say “sitting” because the garden shed really did appear to be sitting on the grass, and rather awkwardly at that!) Above the closed door, a painted sign read: OGDEN’S REVERSE BUTCHERY. The garden shed was tilted precariously to one side, with many planks missing, and even more of them just about to fall off. From within came a terrible racket: a terrible banging! and a clattering! and then a terrible walloping! and then a terrible cursing cry! and then yet more banging! and clattering! and, indeed, walloping! To Alice’s eyes, it looked very much like the garden shed had been dropped from a great height: indeed, she was certain that the shed hadn’t even been there when she had first entered the centre of the maze, but how could a common-or-garden garden shed simply appear out of nowhere?

  Celia was pounding on the shed’s door: “Pablo, Pablo!” the doll croaked. “Let me in, please. Stop making that terrible racket!”

  And the racket was stopped for a second, as a gruff and angry voice answered from the interior, “But I like making a terrible racket! It’s my job! It’s my Art!” The shed’s door was then flung open with such violence that it almost flew off its hinges, and standing in the doorway was an extremely overgrown man. He was the first completely normal man that Alice had seen that morning, even if he was very, very large, and dressed in a blood-smeared butcher’s apron. He was holding a terrible racket in his hands.

  (I must add at this point that the terrible racket he was holding was a tennis racket, and it was terrible because the man had obviously been making it that very morning out of bits and various pieces: bits of old sideboards and pencil-cases and various pieces of string and wire and shoelaces. It really did look most unsuitable for the civilized game of tennis.)

  “Celia! My little terbot!” the big man cried. “What in the blazing mazes are you doing off your snake-guarded podium?”

  “Pablo, may I introduce Alice,” Celia calmly responded. “She has rescued me from the snake’s hold.”

  “But that’s impossible!” said Pablo.

  “Good morning, Mister Ogden,” said Alice, on her best behaviour.

  “A girl! At last!” sobbed Pablo Ogden. “Another human being! It’s been so long…so very, very long…you’d better come in. Quickly, quickly!…before the snakes come crawling!”

  Once Alice and her automated sister were inside the garden shed, Pablo pulled the door shut with a vicious bang that caused the whole structure to shake. Alice really did think that the shed was going to collapse around them into splinters and dust, but somehow it kept itself together. It was very cramped inside, especially with the hulking Pablo bent in half over his cumbersome workbench, and with all the tools that were stored there, and because of the large ship’s wheel and compass that were fixed to the floor. And then there was Pablo’s latest terbot creation, which quite by itself took up more than two thirds of the room. “Magnificent! Isn’t he?” Pablo asked upon seeing Alice’s wild-eyed stare. “My greatest work. His name is James Marshall Hentrails, Jimi for short. Well then, young girl…what do you think of him?”

  The lumbering sculpture looked like a pile of rubbish assembled into the vaguest resemblance of a man. His legs were made from spindly gutter-pipes; his body from a washboard and a mangle (all covered up with a well-read jacket woven out of discarded book covers); his arms were borrowed from the legs of a long-gone-to-salt-and-pepper chicken, all jointed up with brass wire and ending in a fine pair of puppet’s hands; his head was (disquietingly) almost human, a doll’s face of blackened skin on the top of which languished a long and shaggy knotted haircut made out of the ripped-up legs of a pair of ebony corduroy trousers. In other words: a perfect pile of rubbish.

  “Why is his name Mister Hentrails?” Alice asked, delaying her opinion.

  “You know what entrails are, don’t you, Alice?” Pablo responded, whilst unfastening a small door in the sculpture’s stomach.

  “Of course I do,” Alice replied, quite embarrassed. “Entrails are the…they are the…well, entrails are the insides of a…the insides of a…a…”

  Alice could not make herself say the words, and very relieved she was to let Pablo answer his own question: “Exactly, Alice! Entrails are the insides of a cow! And therefore…” and here Pablo swung open the sculpture’s stomach with a flourish, “hentrails are the insides of a chicken!”

  “Urghhh!” Alice squealed, “how horrid!” For within the sculpture’s stomach lay a knotted mass of blood and flesh.

  “This is how a terbot feeds,” Pablo elucidated. “Now come on, girl, what do you think of my latest masterpiece? Your honest opinion, now.”

  “A child of six-and-five-quarters could have made this sculpture!”

  “Oh thank you, little Alice!” Pablo cried. “A child could have made this! Why, that’s exactly the effect I was hoping for. Only at the age of six-and-five-quarters are we truly at home with our fantasies! The artist, you see, must travel backwards in time. To become, once again, a child of dreams.”

  “But Mister Ogden,” said Alice, “that’s exactly what I want to do. To travel backwards in time. Please find a way out of this garden for Celia and me.”

  “A way out for Celia, you ask?” Pablo muttered. “But that’s amazingly impossible! A terbot leaving the knot garden? Why, the snakes would strangle you both! It’s the written rulings. No, no and no! Terbots are bound to the garden. Even my latest and greatest creation, James Marshall Hentrails himself, why even he is doomed to stillness once the snakes get hold of him. There’s no way out of the garden for a terbot. That’s the unliving truth.”

  “Pablo, why are you making such a terrible tennis racket?” asked Celia.

  “It might look like a terrible racket,” replied Pablo, “but really it’s a guitar. Although, it does make a terrible racket.”

  “How so?” Celia enquired.

  “Watch closely,” Pablo answered, slotting the tennis racket into the outstretched hands of James Marshall Hentrails, and then flipping open the top of the sculpture’s skull. “Now, all that Jimi needs is a little brain power.” Pablo opened up a drawer in his workbench, and reached in with a garden trowel, to dig out a large scoopful of thick, black soil. “Aha! My lovely beauties!” Pablo announced, shovelling the soil into the hollow of the terbot’s head.

  “Are there computermites in that soil?” Alice asked.

  “Pablillions of them! The tiniest computermites in the whole world! My own invention. Watch closely…” Pablo closed up the skull with a loud and violent squelch, and then turned a switch on the terbot’s neck.

  Nothing happened.

  James Marshall Hentrails made not a move.

  “It takes the mites a while to warm up,” Pablo apologized, with a sigh. “May
be there’s a wurm in his workings. Oh dear.”

  “Pablo, we really do need to get out of the garden,” Celia said during another awkward pause; “Alice is so very desperate to get back home.” Pablo was nudging at the elbows of James Marshall Hentrails, paying no attention to Celia’s urgings.

  “Alice and I have come from the past, and, if we don’t get home soon, it may be too late…”

  “Too late?” Pablo murmured, “too late for the past?” He turned away from his beloved sculpture for a second. “How can one be too late for the past?”

  “Alice is a girl,” Celia responded. “When was the last time you saw a girl?”

  Pablo looked long and deep into Alice’s eyes and then answered, “Years and years ago. Years and years! Not since the years before the Newmonia.”

  “But why should pneumonia cause such a lack of girls?” asked Alice.

  “Newmonia!” Pablo screamed at Alice, “not pneumonia! You silly creature! There’s no P in Newmonia.”

  “But the P is silent in pneumonia,” Alice explained (holding her patience).

  “Why can’t you listen properly, Alice? The Newmonia is a terrible disease that allows animals and humans to get mixed into new combinations.”

  “Like Captain Ramshackle?” suggested Alice.

  “Exactly like the badgerman. You’re one of the last of your kind, girl! So pure, so very pure. Keep a tight hold of that. If you are a real girl, that is?”

  “How dare you?” Alice protested. “I’m real, I tell you. Why, I might well ask if you are a real butcher, as your sign outside proclaims? Because I suspect that you’re not really a butcher at all.”

  “I used to be a real butcher,” Pablo responded, “in my youth, but I became tired of simply cutting up creatures, so I became a reverse butcher instead.”

  “And what is one of those?” Alice asked.

  “Can’t you work it out, girl?” Pablo asked, whilst beginning to close up the stomach-door of James Marshall Hentrails. “A reverse butcher is an artisan of the flesh who reconstructs creatures out of their butchered parts.”

  “Wait a minute, Mister Ogden!” cried Alice (having noticed a certain tiny something within the sculpture’s giblets), “please don’t shut up Jimi’s stomach just yet! I do believe that this is mine!” She reached into the soft, damp, warm interior of the giblets (shivering from the squelchiness!) to pluck free a small piece of jagged wood that rested just to the North of the liver and the kidneys. “This is a piece of my jigsaw zoo,” Alice said, bringing the bit of wood into the light. It very much corresponded to the eyes and the beak of a chicken (although why the London Zoo should want to display a common domestic fowl was quite beyond Alice’s understanding). She added the fourth and feathery item to the other three jigsaw pieces in her pinafore pocket.

  “Maybe that’s why Jimi Hentrails was so slow to come to life,” Pablo pontificated. “He had a splinter in his stomach. That would surely slow him down.” And indeed, at that very moment the sculpture did make a small attempt at life: his spindly limbs jerked into a spasm of stunted dance. “Alice, my dear girl!” Pablo cried. “You have cured my creation! How can I possibly thank you?”

  “Take me home,” Alice replied immediately, “take me back to the past.”

  “To the past we are heading!” announced Pablo Ogden, working at some complicated levers that sprouted from the shed’s floor. With the manipulation of these levers, a frightening number of iron cables started to move along a series of pulleys that were fixed to the shed’s ceiling: from the pulleys the cables fed into an array of holes cut into the shed’s floor. “Hold on tight, my friends!” Pablo shouted above the resulting clanking din.

  And then the garden shed started to move!

  The garden shed started to quiver quite haphazardly and Alice was flung to the floor as the wooden world of her present life lifted up into the air. Celia and James Marshall Hentrails were both thrown to one side as the shed elevated itself above the garden! “Whatever’s happening?” screamed Alice, clinging desperately to the workbench.

  “The garden shed is taking a little stroll, of course,” replied Pablo Ogden, as he struggled with the ship’s wheel, in order to swing the shed around. “The shed has grown her legs!” There was a trapdoor in the shed’s floor with some small holes in it, through which a few drifts of smoke were rising. “That’s the steam given off by the shed’s legs,” stated Pablo, “take a little peek, Alice.” Pablo swung open the trapdoor and Alice peered through the gaping hole, only to see that far below her the garden was passing by at an ever-quickening pace!

  “Oh my goodness!” cried Alice. (And well she might, for just at that very moment the garden shed lurched achingly to one side and Alice felt herself slipping through the trapdoor.) “Oh my double goodness!” Alice cried once again. (As well she doubly might, because now she was falling out of the shed!)

  (And the garden was a long, long way down and down…)

  Luckily, just as her body started this gardenwards journey into breath-gulping air, Alice felt a strong hand gripping itself around her ankle. She was now suspended upside-down! from the lip of the shed’s trapdoor and from this advantageous position she could see in full detail the legs of the garden shed: they were the legs of a chicken, albeit mechanised and grown to a monstrous size; the legs were steaming and stepping over the hedgerows. The garden shed really was walking! “So this is how Mister Ogden manages to get around the knot garden,” Alice said to herself. “He doesn’t get around it, he gets above it.” Alice also saw various tools falling upwards past her from the trapdoor, including a hammer and a hacksaw. “And this is why I came across so many tools in the knot garden,” she added to her upside-down self, “and this is how I found the hacksaw that enabled me to find Celia Doll.” Alice also saw, in the upside-down far distance, Whippoorwill the very naughty parrot flying over towards an iron gate that marked the exit from the maze.

  “Whippoorwill!” she called out, “you come back here, this minute!”

  The parrot of course paid Alice no mind. How could he? The parrot was a thousand wing-beats away and Alice was by then being dragged back into the uncertain safety of the lumbering garden shed. It was Celia who had clutched at her ankle at the last second of falling. “Follow that parrot!” cried Alice, pointing through the doorway.

  And follow that distant parrot Pablo did, working the shed’s controls so that the walking, wobbling construction on a chicken’s overgrown legs made a run for the iron-gated exit. James Marshall Hentrails was meanwhile strumming his puppet’s fingers across the strings of his guitar, making a horrible blast of notes arise from the instrument. (SPERANNGGGUH! FIZZLE! WHEEEE! SNAZZBLAT! QWEET!) Alice covered her ears. “Oh my!” she said, “what a terrible racket!”

  “I told you so, didn’t I?” Pablo bellowed, over the noise. “He calls this tune ‘Little Miss Bonkers’.”

  “Excuse me,” screamed Alice, from behind her hands, “what is that word?”

  “Which word?”

  “That Bonkers word.”

  “Bonkers? You’ve never heard of bonkers?”

  “No, never.”

  “Oh, it’s used all the time in Manchester. It means Bananas.”

  “Bananas!”

  “Yes. As in, Completely Bananas.”

  “Oh, I see,” shouted Alice, not seeing at all, because Jimi Hentrails had now started to sing, drawling his lyrics between each outburst of guitar-strangling:

  Little Miss Bonkers! (BLISSSTUMB! TANG! SHEMUFFLE!)

  Lost

  In a (MANGLE!) of time and a knotted bind.

  (TWANGLE!) Freed a friend and awoke to find

  The love that conquers, (JUZZ! JUZZ! KERJANGLE!)

  (FUNKY WOOFGOSH!)

  Sidestepping the snakes to be tossed

  As Pablo concurs

  Completely (KLONK!) bonkers!

  Jimi Hentrails then went into a long and loud guitar solo that made the garden shed shudder even more. Alice clung on tightly to th
e quivering workbench, as she shouted to Pablo, “What kind of art is it that you craft, Mister Ogden? Because your latest creation is not making any kind of sense!”

  “I call my art Skewedism,” Pablo stated, working his controls, “which allows me to make creatures out of rudity. Indeed, I used to call my art Rudism, and then Crudism, but those labels seemed too crudely, rudely obvious. Before that I was making Gluedism, where all the parts are glued together, and some time before that, Cluedism, where I had only the faintest clue as to what I was doing. But then I realised that I didn’t have a clue at all, and I started to brood upon my doings; so then I called my art Broodism. But that didn’t seem to fit at all. So I called it Shoedism, because all my sculptures seemed to be wearing shoes. And then Shrewdism, because wasn’t I being very shrewd in the making of them? And then Cubism, because I was assembling the cubes of moments lost. But that label seemed to me so limiting, because by then I was making creatures out of creatures! So I called my art Zoodism. And then Fludism, because I couldn’t stop sneezing. And then Chewedism, because I couldn’t stop chewing. And then Bluedism, because I couldn’t stop painting everything blue. Ewedism: sculptures of female sheep. Foodism: sculptures of dinnertime. I’ve also been through Moodism, Brewedism, all the young Dudeisms, Judeism, Lewdism, Nudism and Pseudism. I then made a stab at Whodism, because who in the mazes was I anyway, to be making such illegal creatures? And then finally, after many a strange Queuedism, whilst waiting for a proper label, I finally settled upon Skewedism, because my mind is skew-whiff with so much diverseness. This is why the Civil Serpents hate my work so: they can’t stand anything that is even a little bit skewed.”

  James Marshall Hentrails finished his crazy solo and began the second verse of his song, accessorized by creeping guitar: