Automated Alice

by Jeff Noon

  Little Miss Anagram! (ZING! ZANG! QWERTYUIOP!)

  Completely bananas!

  (ASDFGH! JKL!) Polygon pyjama jam!

  (ZX! CVB! NM!)

  Awake from your dramas (!@£$%^&*!)

  Forever mañanas!

  The word polygon only reminded Alice of how far away her parrot was. “The garden gate is looming close, Alice,” shouted Pablo, over the singing.

  Indeed, the shed had now folded up its chickeny legs, in order to squat itself down, some twenty yards from the knot garden’s exit. Alice had one last question, as she ran towards the door, and it was this: “Pablo, what was that last word that Jimi sang?”

  “What word?” answered Pablo.

  “That mañanas word.”

  “It’s Spanish for tomorrow, Alice. The singer is asking us to celebrate the Forever Tomorrows. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  “I wouldn’t like that, at all!” said Alice, as Celia and herself stepped out, onto the grass, “because yesterday is where I want to be.”

  (JOING! SHULEEOINNNGH! BLOZZ BLOZZ BLOZZ!)

  Jimi Hentrails was still playing up a storm, as Pablo called after the two girls, “Watch out for the snakes, Alice: they won’t like Celia leaving the garden…”

  Imagine, after taking only a few steps over the dewy grass, Alice heard a terrible swishing sound from behind her; and then imagine her surprise when seemingly a hundred slithering snakes came rushing out of the hedgerows, all of them extremely keen to take a fangly bite at her ankles!

  THE LONG

  PAW OF THE LAW

  SNAKES, snakes, snakes! Everywhere all around Alice a swissshing and a hisssing noise could be heard as a hundred-knot of sssnakes ssslithered and sssibilanted themselves through the undergrowth. It was now thirty minutes past seven o’clock in the morning and the Real-life Alice was being viciously dragged towards the knot garden’s exit gate by Celia, the Automated Alice. The sun was rising over and above the hedgerows, illuminating the rainbowed scales of the collected ranks of the Under Assistant Civil Serpents. Alice glanced behind at a sudden scrunching noise to see the walking shed of Pablo Ogden lumbering off, back towards the centre of the garden. And then she was running towards the iron gates and jumping over many a snake in her journey. “All I seem to be doing in 1998,” Alice said to herself whilst running (and jumping) alongside Celia, “is running! Running, running, running! It was never like this in 1860: why, in the afternoon of that year, I could not even be bothered to get out of my armchair. Not even for a writing lesson! Maybe everything is so much faster in the future? At this rate I shall never catch my breath, let alone my parrot!”

  “Quickly, Alice, quickly!” Celia cried, fearful of the snakes dragging her back into the garden. “The gates are just ahead of us.”

  They made it only just in time. Celia wrenched open the iron gates with her terbo-charged arms (even as the myriad snakes were biting at her porcelain ankles) and then pushed Alice through into the next episode. Celia clanged the gates shut behind her (squashing a snake’s head in the closing process). “Jolly bad luck, Mister Snakified Under Assistant!” Celia sang, quite gleefully.

  And that was how Alice and Celia made their entrance into the streets of Manchester.

  Alice had never heard such a hellish noise before, such a tumultitude, such a cacophonous display of wailings and screechings! And so very early in the morning! Why this was even worse than the terrible racket that James Marshall Hentrails had made upon his terrible racket. Alice and Celia were now standing at the side of an extremely busy thoroughfare; behind them the gates to the knot garden were being hissed at madly by the frustrated snakes. In front of them were hundreds of moaning metal horses, who breathed out a fulsome wind of smelly gases from their hind ends as they sped along the road (at more than twenty miles per hour!). Clinging tightly to the saddle of each metal horse was a person (not one of which looked entirely human).

  “My goodness!” cried Alice to Celia. “What a pong! I’ve never seen so many horses before.”

  “These are not horses,” said Celia, “these are carriages.”

  “Well they certainly look a little like horses.”

  “These vehicles are horseless carriages.”

  “How do you know that the carriages are horseless?” asked Alice.

  “Because they haven’t got any real horses drawing them.”

  “I didn’t know that real horses could draw. Can they also paint?”

  “Alice! You must know what I mean!” Celia cried. “A horseless carriage is what the people of the future call a carriage that isn’t being pulled by a horse.”

  “Is that similar to a pianoless lampshade?” asked Alice.

  “Whatever’s a pianoless lampshade?” asked Celia.

  “Why, it’s a lampshade that isn’t being played by a piano, of course.”

  “Alice! I’m getting rather tired of your loopiness!” Celia replied. “Only by working together can we escape from this future world and thereby make our way back to the past. We are the not-quite twins, the sisters of the corkscrew. Your feelings, my logic—Girl and Doll; only by this shared route may we travel back home. Don’t you see that yet?”

  Alice didn’t see it, mainly because she was too busy studying the lights and cries rising above the houses on the opposite side of the road. Alice just knew that Whippoorwill would be attracted to those colours and noises, and (having spotted a small gap in the rushing traffic) Alice stepped out into the road. Oh dear: one of the ever-so-horseless carriages nearly knocked her down. In fact, that passing vehicle clipped Alice on the elbow! “Yeeooohhh!” Alice yeeooohhhed, falling back onto the pavement, “that hurt!”

  “The proper name for a horseless carriage is an automated horse,” Celia coldly responded, whilst rubbing at Alice’s arm with her porcelain fingers. “But in these yet-to-come days, the people are far too busy to use the full name for things, so they call their transportations auto-horses. Which they sometimes even further shorten to simply autos.”

  “Well, that may be so,” Alice replied (wincingly, on account of her pain), “but in our day, we called a horse a horse and a carriage a carriage, and there was no such thing as a horseless carriage, because a carriage could not move unless it had a horse in front of it!”

  “Alice, won’t you please admit that we’re trapped in the future now. We must learn the latest lessons. Believe me, my dear, we are currently facing a drive of auto-horses.”

  “I hate lessons,” sulked Alice as she nursed her injured elbow, “but at least I know that the collective noun for horses is a herd.” (How proud Alice was, to have pointed this out to Celia.)

  “I think you’ll find, my somewhat pale human companion,” Celia gently suggested, “that you can have a herd of cattle, a herd of bison, or even a herd of elephants. But you cannot have a herd of horses. You may, however, have a drove of horses. But when the horses are automated, they become a drive. And we are still facing a galloping drive of autos.”

  “Oh, Celia! You think you know every single thing.”

  “Well, one doesn’t like to boast; but you must concede that the name auto-horses perfectly suits these carriages. Why, one need only examine their legs…” Alice did examine their legs (having completely missed Celia’s correct usage of the ellipsis) and she had to admit to herself (because she didn’t want Celia to think she was right all the time) that they certainly looked more than a little like an automated horse’s legs. “To my terbot-mind,” Celia added, proudly, “the people of the future have wedded the horse to the carriage; these are horsey carriages.”

  “Oh but look, Celia!” Alice interrupted, shrugging off Celia’s healing hands. “The autos have snakes wriggling above their eyes!”

  “Don’t you worry, Alice,” replied Celia, “those snakes are there in case it rains; they’re called windscreen vipers.”

  There was no possible way to cross the road. The auto-horses were riding along, nose to tail, tail to nose; a constant creaking and neighing of met
al and noise. “If they’re not careful,” Celia announced finally, “these riders are going to cause a horse-crash. We need to find a Zebra Crossing.”

  “Whatever’s a Zebra Crossing?” Alice asked.

  “A place in the road where even a zebra can cross. It’s one of the Civil Serpents’ better rulings—”

  “There’s one!” cried Alice. And indeed there was: there was a zebra crossing the road a long, long way away from Alice and Celia. “Follow that zebra!” Alice called out. “He’s a piebald, actually!” Celia added. Alice didn’t bother to ask what a bald pie was doing in the conversation, she was far too busy running along towards where the zebra was crossing the road. “Look at that, Celia!” she called out as the pair of them reached the spot, “Whippoorwill is perched on the zebra’s shoulder!”

  The parrot was perched on the zebra’s shoulder. And, by that stripy transport, he was working his way towards the other side of the road. (Alice never thought to ask herself why the parrot simply didn’t fly across the road, she was far too used to his wayward nature by now.) And indeed, just then Whippoorwill fluttered his green-and-yellow wings in quite a shameless display and twisted his head around through one-hundred-and-eighty degrees in order to squawk at Alice, “Why did the Catgirl cross the road?”

  Alice felt sure that the parrot was laughing at her, so she didn’t even attempt an answer to this latest riddle. The zebra was looking rather scared during his passage between the parted ranks of the auto-horses (and wouldn’t you, if you were a horse’s relative in a horseless society?). It wasn’t a real zebra of course: Alice had learnt enough about this future Manchester to know that nothing was really real any more. Oh no, following the effects of the Newmonia (if Pablo Ogden was to be believed), Whippoorwill was riding upon the shoulder of a zebraman: a black-and-white-striped combination of the human and the zebra. This zebraman had by now almost succeeded in crossing, so Alice nervously stepped into the road after him. The riders of the auto-horses shouted all manner of curses at Alice, the worst of which came from a sweating fat pigboy: “What in the mud-bath is that?!” he snorted, “some kind of a girl crossing the road!”

  “Where are we?” Alice asked of Celia, whilst only a little less than half-way across (and doing her very best to ignore the insults).

  “We are currently crossing a thoroughfare called Wilmslow Road,” Celia replied, “in a place called Rusholme, a small village some few miles away from the centre of Manchester.” Ahead of them now could be seen a large building with the words PALACE OF CHIMERA written large and golden across its frontage, and underneath these, FLUTTERING TODAY: FLIPPETY FLOPPETY COMES UNSTUCK!

  “Why do they call this village Rush Home?” asked Alice, a little further along in the crossing. “It seems to me that the people of Manchester are rushing away from their homes.”

  “Exactly so, Alice. And in eight hours’ time they will commence to rush home, after finishing their day’s work. They call these twin times the rush hours.”

  The zebraman had by now managed to completely cross the road. The auto-horses started up a snarling and braying, as though they wanted to eat Alice and Celia alive, and then sprang forwards in a rapid burst of metallic clankings! Celia Doll firmly grabbed hold of Alice’s hand and started to walk faster than anybody had ever walked before! Alice felt she was flying, so quickly did Celia move. “Celia!” Alice cried, “where in the future did you learn to walk so quickly?” But her words were lost to the frightening wind that Celia created in her rush to get away from the accelerating auto-horses. “Oh well,” said Alice to herself, “I suppose if I were an Automated Alice, I also would be able to run as quickly.” Just then the screaming drive of horsey carriages fairly pounced upon the pair of them, aiming to squash!

  Alice and Celia did manage to cross the road of course, if only by the hairs on their smallest toenails. (And a good job too, otherwise this fable would be a very sorry story indeed. Why, I’m not even half-way through Alice’s adventures in the future yet. No, no; it would not do to have my principal actors quite so easily squashed by metal hooves!)

  Upon gaining the safety of the opposite pavement, Alice lunged forwards to grab at Whippoorwill, but all she managed to grab hold of was a single green-and-yellow tail feather, which she plucked clean from the bird! Whippoorwill himself, despite lacking a tail feather, flew off quite easily from the zebraman’s shoulder, disappearing over the roof of the Palace of Chimera and into a hive of houses. The zebraman trotted off in the same direction, leaving Alice to clutch desperately at the parrot’s lonely feather. “Do you think, Celia,” Alice then asked, “that Great Aunt Ermintrude will be satisfied with a single feather from her lost parrot?”

  “I think not, Alice,” Celia replied. “But look at this!” Celia had bent down to pick up a little piece of something from the ground. “The zebraman must have dropped this in his hurry to get away.” It was a wooden piece from a jigsaw, portraying a rippling pattern of black-and-white stripes. Celia handed it to Alice.

  “This is yet another missing piece from my jigsaw of London Zoo,” Alice proclaimed. “This belongs in the zebra house.” Alice took the piece and placed it in the pocket of her pinafore, with the other four she had already gathered. “Are we anywhere near Didsbury, Celia?” she then asked.

  “We are,” the doll replied, “but we are going in the opposite direction. Why do you ask?”

  “Because that is where my Great Aunt lives, or should I say once lived, and we have to find our way back there.”

  “But not just now, dear Alice.”

  “For once, dear Celia, I entirely agree with you.”

  The pair of them set off in pursuit of Whippoorwill, entering the hive of houses. They very quickly found themselves lost again, of course. The trouble was this: every house was identical, and every street was identical. And every street was tightly knotted around every other street. The whole world it seemed was identically identical and twisted around itself. It was yet another knotty problem for Alice to unravel. But the lights were flashing into the glistening morning sky and the siren-calls and the whistlings came trumpeting from the hidden streets. In the end, it was only by relying on Celia’s superior judgement that Alice managed to find the place where the noises and the lights were coming from.

  Imagine this scene, if you will, dear reader…

  A drive of police-autos (horseless carriages belonging to the police) were parked inside the centre of these all-too-identical houses. A crowd of animal-people was clogging up the street: goatboys and sheepgirls, elephantmen and batwomen. Alice nudged her way through the strange zoo of spectators. “Can you please tell me what is happening here?” she asked of the nearest policeman.

  “A second Jigsaw Murder has taken place,” the policeman gravely replied, his furry body full of trembles. “A catgirl this time.”

  It was only when Alice noticed the policeman’s fur trembling that she realised that this policeman was really a policedog; or rather a policedogman. Yet another victim of the Newmonia, of course. Alice tried to push her way past the policedogman to where a lumpy something on the ground was lying quite still and morbid, under a white bedsheet. Only a single gingery furred cat’s paw and claw protruded free, to rest, lifelessly, on the pavement.

  “How sad,” whispered Alice, in horror. (For Alice had a pet kitten of her own, far away in the distant past. Sweet, sweet Dinah of forgotten years!)

  Just then another policedogman came loping towards Alice. This dogman was growling at the other dogmen, telling them all to get a move on, and at the double-quick! He was obviously in charge. Alice could tell this, not only from his barked-out orders, but also from the fact that he wore a suit, a tailored suit at that, whilst all the other policedogmen wore blue police uniforms over their canine bodies. “And who are you?” this boss-of-all-dogs asked of Alice. He had a face of finely furred colours: a broad and brown stripe running all the way along a creamy, whiskered snout.

  “I’m Alice,” replied Alice.

&nb
sp; “And I am Inspector Jack Russell of the Greater Manchester Police. What are you doing here, Alice?”

  “Well, Inspector Russell…I do believe that’s my parrot on your shoulder.”

  Inspector Jack Russell did indeed have Whippoorwill perched on his shoulder. “This parrot is guilty of hindering the police in their inquiries,” Jack Russell barked, “and I want him off my shoulder right this minute!”

  “Whippoorwill, come fly to me,” Alice sang, only to see the parrot unlodge himself from Jack Russell’s shoulder and then fly away, not towards her but to the ever-brightening morning sky that flittered above the houses: the parrot was heading for the centre of Manchester.

  “Pardon me, my stripy horseman!” Jack Russell growled at the zebraman who had suddenly appeared on the scene, nudging his wet nose at the dead catgirl’s bedsheet. “Don’t you realise that you’re hindering my investigation of a caticide?”

  “Whatever’s a catty side?” asked Alice.

  “The murder of a catgirl, of course,” answered the Inspector. (Which gave Alice the answer to Whippoorwill’s last riddle: why did the catgirl cross the road? To get to the catty side, of course!)

  To get to her death.

  “The victim’s name,” Jack Russell continued, “was Whiskers Macduff. This is the second of the Jigsaw Murders. The first victim was a young spiderboy, name of Quentin Tarantula. He was a Chimera artiste, famous for his violent, celebratory portrayal of the criminal life. I must admit that I won’t be shedding any tears at his demise. That kind of Chimera show shouldn’t be allowed.”

  “What is a Chimera show, exactly?” Alice asked.

  “What’s Chimera?!” howled Jack Russell. “Where have you been for the last five years?”

  “I haven’t been anywhere for the last five years,” Alice replied. “In fact, I haven’t been anywhere for the last one hundred and thirty-eight years!”