by Jeff Noon
More books pulled off: Vest Sores, Rescuing Books from Libraries (Volume Seven), Venus Guitars, Ars Gratia Artis, Tissue Ellipsis, Sisterly Forever…
“Celia, I do believe we’re getting closer!” cried Alice, crushing books underfoot to reach Vertical Piano Playing, and then Ingots of Gold, and then Olden Times, Messages from Jupiter, Terminal Guano. “Yes! Here it is!” screamed Alice, pulling out the next book along: An Octopus’s Area. But when Alice pulled the next book down from the shelf, imagine her disappointment to find that it was called Ceylon’s Favourite Stethoscope! “But this is all wrong!” stamped Alice. “This book should be called Reality and Realicey!”
“It should be,” Celia murmured, “but it isn’t. Look, Alice, there’s a gap where your book should have been.”
“But what does that mean, Celia?”
“It means, Alice, that somebody has borrowed your history.”
“How dare they!” cried Alice. “I shall never be able to look up myself now!”
Alice was crying so much that Celia had to clamp her porcelain fingers over her twin twister’s mouth. “Alice, will you keep quiet!” she whispered. “We are in a library, remember. Shush! You’ll disturb the other readers…”
(The reader will have only just noticed the other readers, for the simple fact that I forgot to mention them previously. Oh dear, I am getting forgetful in my old age. Never mind, let me show you the several mixed-up this-and-that creatures that were studying their chosen books at various tables. They were all looking up at Alice with glaring eyes: why, some of them were even pointedly pointing towards the SILENCE PLEASE! sign.)
“I don’t care about the other readers!” Alice sobbed. “Oh Celia! Just when we were so close to finding it, as well!”
“I know! It is a bother, isn’t it?” Celia croaked, kindly. “But look, there’s a funny little fishman over at that table—a plaiceman, I believe—and he’s fast asleep! Now you wouldn’t want to waken him, would you? That would be rude.”
Alice mopped up some of her tears with her pinafore, and then sauntered over to the fishman. Celia followed, wondering what Alice was hoping to achieve by gently tapping like that on the fishman’s shoulder? (Now then, the question of the exact position of a fish’s shoulders; this is the riddle that has puzzled ichthyologists—the Examiners of Fish—down the ages, and I shan’t go into it here.) Suffice it to say that Alice did tap on the fishman’s shoulders, achieving no response at all. “Celia…” Alice breathed, “I do believe this plaiceman is dead.”
“What makes you say that, Alice,” asked Celia.
“Firstly, I can’t waken him; secondly, his left fin is sprouting from his forehead; thirdly, his gills are where his eyes should be; and fourthly, his tail is flopping out of his mouth!”
“Alice, you have become automated to the subject of death!” said Celia.
“It’s time for us both to grow up,” Alice responded. “This poor plaiceman has been Jigsaw Murdered, and that is a crime. And look! He’s got a jigsaw piece clutched in his right fin. It’s one of my missing ones: a fish’s fin belonging in the aquarium of my London Zoo puzzle. And look! He’s slumped over a book called Reality and Realicey! Oh Celia, maybe I’ve finally found my place in history?”
THE HUNTING
OF THE QUARK
THE other readers were making a racketing protest by now (despite the SILENCE PLEASE! signs) at Alice’s shouts of jubilation. Alice paid them no mind at all; instead she quickly added the fishy jigsaw piece to the other seven in her pinafore pocket, and gently slid the history book from under the fishman’s glistening (and rather smelly) body. The book called Reality and Realicey was so large and thick and fish-stained that Alice had a rare time trying to get it open at the first page; but eventually she managed to reach the first sentence of the book, and this is what she read:
The Reality set is a subset of the Existence set, which also contains the Unreality set and the Nureality set. The three subsets of Existence correspond exactly to the three subsets of Alistence, namely: the Real Alice, the Imagined Alice and the Automated Alice.
“Celia?” Alice called out, upon reaching the end of the passage, “could you please explain these words to me?” But Celia was suddenly nowhere to be seen! “Celia, where have you vanished to this time? Oh, but I haven’t got time to be chasing that doll just now—and there simply isn’t enough time in the whole of history to read this entire book—so I think I’ll skip through all the pages until I reach the last one; surely there I’ll find my answer?” Of course Alice didn’t quite skip through the pages, because they were so heavy; it was more like a trudge through sludge, but eventually she managed to reach the last lines of the book, and this is what she read there:
…by which time the Real and the Imagined Alices were indistinguishable in Lewis Carroll’s mind. This confusion caused him to project the combined Alices into the future. Only by sending Alice on one final epic journey in search of her past, back into childhood’s dream, so to speak, could he hope to cleanse his own imagination in the dying moments of a mental ellipsis…
“Oh, poppycock!” exclaimed Alice. “This is no help at all! Why, the author has ended this giant of a book with an ellipsis! Surely there cannot be more to be said on the subject! Who wrote this rubbish?” (Alice was becoming really rather modern by this time.) She heaved the book shut in order to look at the front cover more closely.
Reality and Realicey, it said, by Professor Gladys Chrowdingler.
“Professor Chrowdingler wrote this!” Alice shrieked. “Why, she’s one of the things I’m searching for!” Alice once again wrestled with the book, until she forced it to turn to the inside back cover. There she found a photograph of an aged pipe-sucking crow-woman in a bowler hat, and below the picture, a brief biography of the author:
Gladys Chrowdingler was born in 1910. Her previous best-selling tomes include Oz and Ozzification, Pooh and Poohtrefaction and Peter Pandemonia. She is currently Professor of Chrownotransductionology at the Uniworseity of Manchester. She lives with a cat called Quark, who sometimes helps with experiments.
“Now then,” Alice thought, “I’m sure that I passed the University of Manchester on my police-auto journey into the city: perhaps the Uniworseity of Manchester could be somewhere near to that? Surely I must go there to find this Professor called Chrowdingler? But however shall I manage it in time?”
Just then Celia came thumping down a book-lined corridor. “Alice, quickly!” the Automated Alice croaked out, “we must make our escape: the police are here!” At which all the other readers vanished like bookworms into the deeply tangled word-tunnels.
“Where are they?” gasped Alice, looking around in a panic.
“Suddenly everywhere!” answered Celia.
Indeed the police were suddenly everywhere! They were creeping out of every alleyway, every tunnel, every single maze-path of the librarinth. In no time at all, Alice and Celia were completely surrounded by a champing circle of dog officers. Mrs Minus and Inspector Jack Russell emerged from the ragged circumference. Mrs Minus was snakely fingering the corpse of the aquatic reader. “Girl Alice,” the subtracter snake hissed, “you are under arrest for Hindering the Police in Their Enquiries. You are further under arrest for the Jigsaw Murder of this poor innocent fishman.”
“Oh, what shall we do now, Celia?” pleaded Alice.
“Open up the cupboard in my right-hand thigh,” whispered Celia.
“I didn’t know you had a cupboard in your right-hand thigh!”
“Pablo Ogden made many rearrangements to my body. Take a little look.”
So Alice did take a little look. Upon Celia’s right-hand thigh was a small cupboard door, labelled TO BE OPENED IN AN EMERGENCY ONLY.
“I don’t know what’s in there,” Celia croaked, “but won’t you please open it up, Alice? The police are closing in!”
The police were closing in!
So Alice opened up the cupboard in Celia’s thigh. There she found a shiny brass l
ever, and above it the message PULL ME AND HANG ON TIGHTLY! Alice pulled the lever…
Four-and-a-fearsome minutes later, Alice and Celia were speeding down the Oxford Road in search of the Uniworseity of Manchester. And there was Whippoorwill the parrot, fluttering along just ahead of them, always just so tantalizingly out of reach. Police sirens were singing a plaintive song through the rain, but Celia was running at such a terbo-charged speed that the twinly-twisted pair very soon escaped from their pursuers.
Six-and-a-slickety minutes later, Alice and Celia arrived at the imposing stone-built bulk of the University of Manchester. Once inside the campus, they managed (of course!) to lose Whippoorwill, but also managed to find a series of hand-painted signs that led them towards a small hole in the ground, marked with a downwards pointing arrow: THE UNIWORSEITY THIS WAY.
Down the hole Alice and her twin twister went.
(Dearest readers, in my old age I seem to have mislaid the passage that tells of what happened when Alice pulled the lever in Celia’s right-hand thigh. I must now deliver that story to you; or else the reader will surely bang shut this final Book of Alice in frustration.)
Pablo Ogden had kitted-out the Automated Alice with two thigh-cupboards, the left and the right. The left-leg cupboard was marked with the words TO BE OPENED IN AN EXTREME EMERGENCY ONLY. The right-leg cupboard was to be opened in a lesser-than-extreme emergency, and this was the door that Alice had opened, revealing the shiny brass lever which Alice pulled…
Celia’s legs then started to grow up like two tree trunks, towards the ceiling of the librarinth! Alice clung onto these telescoping legs, as Celia towered towards the skylight, through which Whippoorwill the parrot had previously flown. Ever so high! Alice looked down (always a mistake) and felt quite giddy from the upwards-rushing journey.
The policedogmen were left far down below, where they could only pant and growl in frustration. Alice waved goodbye to them, with a smile. Once on the roof of the library, Celia collapsed her extended legs back into a neat porcelain pair, and then reextended them over the side of the building so that Alice and herself could descend to the road below. Once safely on the ground, Celia folded up her legs to their usual size, and from there the two adventuring girls raced along the Oxford Road towards the University and its underfolded passages…
(I do hope I’ve remembered that little escapade correctly.)
The Uniworseity; a darkling underworld of glimmers and shimmers, a myriad shadows pointing Alice and Celia towards a laboratory called THE DEPARTMENT OF CHROWNOTRANSDUCTIONOLOGY. Alice knocked on the door and received no answer except for a far-off cawing; she pushed open the door and walked, quite brazenly, into the laboratory.
These are some of the things that Alice and Celia found in there: a whole concoction of scientific apparatus wriggling and steaming and fuming in every single corner of the laboratory; a giant heap of computermites noisily chomping their way through a series of terrifically difficult questions; waves of liquid mystery bubbling along a knotwork of glass pipes, until they all inserted themselves into a large wooden box that rested on the floor; some black lettering on the box’s side that said DANGEROUS EXPERIMENT!; a dirty black dishcloth of an old crow that was perching on the box’s lid (and wearing a bowler hat, mind!), cawing away to itself, whilst at the same time smoking a Meerschaum pipe. “Quark, quark!” rasped the crow, through clouding wreathes of tobacco mist.
But the very worst thing that Alice found in the laboratory was the smell! Oh dear, the smell! It was the stench that can sometimes be emitted from the wrong end of a ghastly meat pie, in the high season.
The crow was tap-tap-tapping on the wooden box’s lid with the pipe in her nicotined beak. “It’s very smelly in here!” Alice commented to the crow, not expecting any answer, and receiving none, except for a further tippety-tapping. “And I was so hoping to find Professor Gladys Chrowdingler!” Alice added.
At which point the crow flopped off the box with a piercing cry, “Quark!” And by the time the bird had landed at Alice’s feet, it had turned into a fully grown crow-woman: an ancient, creased-up crone of a human woman, complete with a crow’s beak-and-wing accessories (and a bowler-hatted accompaniment).
“I am Professor Gladys Chrowdingler!” the crow-woman quarked mightily, taking the steaming pipe out of her mouth for a moment (and tipping her bowler hat to the two Alices). “The horrible smell comes from my chemical and physical experiments, I’m afraid. Oh, but I’m so glad that you two girls have safely arrived in my lab; I’ve been waiting ages for you! Ages! Now then, which of you is the Reality Alice?”
The crow-woman flapped at Alice and Celia with her wings of soot.
Alice had noticed that something was trapped inside the wooden box. It was banging against the insides, demanding, in a muffled voice, to be let out. Alice decided to ignore the thing in the box for the moment: “Why, I’m the real Alice, of course,” she told the Professor.
“Are you sure?” asked the crow-woman, speaking around the fuming pipe she had replaced in her beak. “You both look almost identical.”
“She is the real Alice,” Celia stated plainly, and pointed. “I’m only the Automated version; my name is Celia.”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Alice, equally plainly (although, to be honest, the real-life Alice was becoming a little confused), “and we have come here from the past to ask you the way back home.”
“Quark, quark!” quarked the crow-woman, impatiently. “Alice, have you read my book in the library, pray?”
“Yes, I have, and that’s exactly how I managed to find you.”
“Excellent! The plan is unfolding!”
“That is…to be honest…” Alice hesitated, “I’ve only read the beginning and the end of your book.”
“That will suffice for now. Your final story will continue; the timely plan is being mapped-out.”
“What do you mean”, queried Alice, “by my final story? And what is this plan that you keep mentioning?”
“You know that Lewis Carroll invented you, Alice, in his books called Wonderland and Looking-Glass?” asked Chrowdingler.
“Well, yes…I mean, only partly so.”
“Splendid answer! You are more than halfway there!”
“Halfway where?” asked Alice.
“Halfway to not being merely an Alias Alice, of course. Don’t you see it?”
“I’m trying to see it. But really, Professor Chrowdingler, all I want to do is to get back to the past.”
“Of course you do! That is your nature, Alice: that is what Lewis Carroll instilled in your soul.”
“But I’m not just Lewis Carroll’s invention; I’m real as well!”
“Alice, you are both real and imagined, and also automated. Your real persona is called Alice Liddell; your unreal persona is called Alice in Wonderland; your nureal persona is called Celia Hobart.”
“I didn’t know Celia had a second name,” said Alice.
“Neither did I!” croaked Celia (rather proudly) before asking, “What does nureal mean, Professor?”
“Nureality is a recent discovery of mine,” answered the Professor. “A place where things can live halfway between reality and unreality. I invented the place because of the increasing population of the terbots, you see? Creatures like yourself, Automated Alice, are you real or unreal? Is there such a thing as an artificial intelligence? Basically, the question…can a mechanical being be deemed to live?”
“Well…I feel that I’m alive,” responded Celia.
“Exactly so! You feel your aliveness, Automated Alice, therefore you are alive! You are at home with yourself! This is why I discovered the new state of nureality. Reality Alice, on the other wing…” (and here the old Professor waved a blackly dismissive unfolding of feathers at Alice) “is neither here nor there. This little girl isn’t sure if she’s real, or else just a finishing story and plan inside Mister Lewis Carroll’s head. He wrote one final book, you see, in his old age: a book called Automa
ted Alice. In this lingering tome he brought Reality Alice to the future of now; he brought her into 1998! And in this final book, the author deemed it necessary that Alice should meet up with a Professor called Chrowdingler! Quark! Oh, I’m so excited!”
Alice decided things were getting out of hand. “Professor Chrowdingler,” she interrupted, “would you please tell me how to get home to the past, in time to complete my two o’clock writing lesson?”
“Quark! Am I right to assume, Alice, that you ate some radishes this morning?”
“I did actually,” replied Alice, “but it was only a jammy spoonful.”
“No matter at all, Alice! That is how you have come to visit the future: you have partaken of the Radishes of Time! They had chrownons within them.”
“Whatever do you mean? What are chrownons?”
“Quark, quark!” answered Professor Chrowdingler.
Alice suddenly remembered something she had read on the inside back cover of Reality and Realicey. “Professor Chrowdingler,” she asked, “are you hunting for your cat, by any chance?”
“You bet I am! Now where is that pesky feline? Quark!” Chrowdingler began hunting all around as she said this; all around the twisting pipes of her scientifical equipment; all around the stenching fog of gases emitted from spitting pipes; even all around the backside of the wooden box. “Here, kitty kitty!” cawed the Professor, holding aloft a piece of raw pork. “It’s dinner time, my little Quark!”
Alice thought it very unusual that a crow should have a cat as a pet, but she didn’t mention it. Instead, she asked, “Why is your cat called Quark?”
“Well…” began the professor, “a quark is a set of hypothetical elementary particles, postulated to be the fundamental and invisible units of all carryons and chrownons. Do you understand, Alice? It’s quite simple: every single thing that exists is made out of tiny particles; and a quark is the invisible unit inside every carryon particle, and also inside every chrownon. The strangest thing about quarks is that we scientists know that they do exist, but we don’t know where they exist!”
