The Science of the Lambs, Australian English: freebies

This is also available in an American English version.

This is a literary and mathematical romp in the form of a fantasy quest, a torrent of paronomasia, feghoots, sly literary references and running gags, telling the story of our heroes’ struggle to solve a problem. Think Spider Robinson meets Jasper Fforde and Robert Asprin, with more mathematics, superb numerological cryptography, superior literary references and better pea soup.

The sheep are mysterious beings, who wear Viking hats and once claimed to be ‘mad sheep’ (no more, though: in the foreword, they note that the ravens {who once used to be dragons} told them this was not nice). Only intelligent humans and nomads can see them, and they think they are behind 73% of all cases of ‘invisible friends’. Eric Blair and Alice Liddell (note the names, which are the real names of George Orwell and Alice of Alice in Wonderland!) both have doctorates in odd aspects of number-crunching, and when they see the sheep, the sheep investigate them and decide these two have the computer and numerical skills they will need to help them (the sheep) in a quest to recover The Book of Bells. The sheep have been set this challenge by a group known as The Rats (who are behind another 11% of invisible friend cases).

Eric is assisted by a minotaur called Gordon in his first task, breaking into a geology museum to borrow a special crystal. Gordon, we learn later, took a contract with his friend Theseus to carry Hannibal’s elephants over the alps: not all of mythology is true.

Alice then joins the crew, and they break into the London house of a Russian oligarch to get a map that gets them into the Tower of London to ‘borrow’ the Cabbage Diamond, one of the lesser-known crown jewels. After that, three Tower ravens (they used to be dragons) join them, and they rob a German fraudster in the Tyrol, to get some rare zinc, only found in candlesticks in the German’s schloss. A fourth raven, kept by the German, joins them, and they launch an attack on Eric’s former employer, an evil empire called MegaGlobal Limited or MGL. MGL goons capture them, and are rescued by sheep who are red-eye masters (they say Spielberg based his Jedi masters on them), and they meet Loki, an accident-prone black sheep with an abnormality projector. Loki’s projector is a major plot element.

Now they are on the trail of the Book of Bells, and following clues left for them by the rats, they visit Pompeii, and accidentally trigger Mount Vesuvius, then they go to Monte Ceceri, where they meet Leonardo, and accidentally move the Leaning Tower of Florence to Pisa. Still on the hunt, they visit the Norman Invasion in Whitby and accidentally flip it to Hastings instead, and then they head for Norway where a troll called Pebble saves them from werewolves. Then they are given a cunning hint by the rats, using a talking horse called Bucephalus (“call me Buck”) as their messenger. Following his advice, they travel to the Amazon on a ship crewed by vampires and sent out by Sir Joseph Banks with orders to wipe out piracy.

With help from two of the vampires (Barbara Cartland and Enid Blyton), they obtain the document they need, and realise that the Book of Bells was hidden in plain sight (the last of many Poe jokes). They recover the book from the IT Department of Eric’s former employer, and the quest is over. Eric and Alice are free to go — or are they? There is a stub for the sequel...

***

I am now seriously pitching this book, and this is a taster. I am looking for beta-readers, if you would like to see the lot as a ~2 meg PDF. Email me at petermacinnis44@gmail.com and specify Australian English or American English.

An apologetic foreword from Hypatia Bluetooth, R. E. M.^*

Chief archivist of the beings formerly known as the Mad Sheep.

The ravens (who were dragons once) say 'mad sheep' is, to modern eyes, offensive, but we entered this Earth universe-cluster through Australia in the late 1980s (on their counting system). At first, no humans could see us, but we soon found that itinerants (variously called tramps, hobos or in Australia, swagmen) could see us. Sheep were the dominant animals and so we took their form, and the swagmen, always hungry, would try to kill and eat us. Taking advantage of the then fear of 'mad cow disease', we wore Viking hats and claimed to be not-good-to-eat mad sheep. This sheep form and name then followed us into other eras and cultures.

True, we might have said to the swagmen "we have a prionic disease called scrapie," but Ermyntrude, who was one of our best ethicists, and who argued for doing exactly that, disappeared without trace from where we last saw her near a billabong, in the company of a profoundly deaf swagman, and we dropped the idea. As a tribute to Ermyntrude, we later took the polite, but misleading course of altering the way we are identified in all the surviving public records.

So when you encounter the expression 'mad sheep' in this history, please think of us as "slightly eccentric sheep", though some of our human friends persist in calling us "totally weird sheep". We are completely comfortable with that, because we know the limitations that humans operate under. We are no longer mad sheep.

That said, this disclaimer does not apply to the entity we call King George III, and you will see why we draw a line there, soon enough. Even our titular leader clearly says (and said) that he is several shingles short of a picnic.

Anyhow, you may now see why we made our selected annalist drop his original title for this tale, Sheep May Safely Craze, even though we allowed him to reproduce all the dialogue, just as it happened. In exchange for his caving in on the title, we allowed him to be ruthlessly honest in all other matters.

This is a True Story.

Hypatia Bluetooth, R.E.M.*

* Red-Eye Master

Prologue

To begin at the ending (and this is quite helpful as a way of reassuring excessively nervous readers), the sheep had completed their quest and won, so they were now free, but the first dawn of their new freedom saw them stuck with a great deal of filing. Some of them even muttered darkly about Pyrrhic victories.

Of course, it might have been worse, because the winners in any quest must always face the stern and precise requirements of the five Protocols of Postadventurism. The rats had gone somewhere, Eric, Alice and the ravens were headed for Paris, and the sheep were left to tidy up. According to a paragraph (in somebody else's hand-writing, but found on an early page in Hypatia's notes), this requirement exists mainly to stop winners getting too full of themselves when they successfully complete their allotted tasks in a quest. Aided by Alice and Eric, the sheep had completed every task, and now was the time for comeuppance.

Even Erasmus, who had done this before, could not recall the full details of the Protocols, so Hypatia had made a quick dive into the Library of Lost Manuscripts, read up on the subject, and returned to tell the others they had got off lucky.

"As it has turned out, we did very well," she said. "By tradition and law, those left standing after any adventure must meet the exacting terms of a total of five Protocols, but, but as things have turned out, only the last Protocol really needs any attention. True, even that one's onerous, but at least it's far less messy."

She went on to explain that the first of the Protocols involves sorting out dead bodies, including body parts and portions too large to fit in a bucket, but there were none of those. The second relates to damaged people and property, along with smaller loose or separated body parts, and there were none of those either, while the third Protocol (stitching, gluing, soldering and minor surgical procedures) was clearly not applicable.

The fourth Protocol is mainly concerned with the mopping up of blood, but after a quick discussion, the sheep agreed that, even under a generous and loose reading of the text of the Protocols, bleeding noses caused by high-kicking IT people doing the can-can in their celebratory conga line shouldn't really count as Adventure-related, so the survivors could ignore the fourth Protocol as well.

That just left the fifth and final Protocol, which deals with Filing, and as finger-wagging lawyers will tell you, that one can neither be avoided nor evaded. In the aftermath, there is always a great deal of serious Filing to be done, and those who are still conscious and upright must set to work, each in his, or her, own way.

True, some of their efforts did not necessarily lie entirely within the strict meanings set out in section 84 (2) (b) (iii) of the Protocols Interpretation Act, but Hypatia decided to let that ride. Just being seen to be filing was what mattered most, so Myfanwy was filing a callus on her right front hoof, a lump caused by the waldos she wore for operating keyboards and calculators.

Beside her, and totally unaware that these items were all made from papier mâché, King George III was filing the padlock on the ball and chain that Health and Safety had attached to his ankle, just before midnight. His file was also made of papier mâché, but nobody said a word to George about how that choice of materials was related to his slow progress in the act of freeing himself. Nobody minded, because this kept him out of harm’s way.

As a group, the Second XI red sheep conga line, weren't very bright, either, and their Filing consisted of forming a line (as they explained to Erasmus, they were in single file) and zipping back and forth across the floor, trying out the advanced moves that the élite First XI had shown off, late on the previous night.

Wisely, they elected not to try imitating the moves of the IT people, even though the IT can-can conga had totally eclipsed the First XI's performance.

All the same, the actions of the Second XI were enough to cause Erasmus to wonder briefly if any of the first four Protocols might soon come back into play, but Erasmus often worried about the wrong things. In hindsight, he should really have been worrying about Loki, who had stripped down his abnormality projector, and was using a triangular file, to give it a hair trigger, but that's another story.

Only Erasmus and Hypatia were doing things that qualified as Filing within the strict and rigid meaning of the fifth Protocol. At the end, as Hypatia slammed the last box-file shut, a sheet of paper flew loose, and drifted, almost unseen, to the floor. Humming Candle in the Wind with a conga rhythm that wrong-footed the entire Second XI, King George III bent and picked up the paper before he passed it up to Hypatia.

She saw that the loose sheet was a photocopied page from the simplified popular version of Alice's thesis, and Hypatia glanced at it idly, then did a double-take before scrutinizing it closely, after which she went several interesting and non-standard colours.

Some of the Second XI were also oddly coloured now, but we can afford to ignore them for now, because they do not appear again as a group. "This is where it went pear-shaped," she shouted, banging her waldo down on the sheet and leaving a small tear in it. "Look! It all began after the rats read this!"

Erasmus skimmed the sheet, and grunted his agreement. King George III shuffled back to the other side of the room, crooning Both Ends of the Candle and dragging his ball and chain through the Second XI, who were still on the floor, and still wrong-footed. They shrieked in a dutifully loyal sort of way as the papier mâché ball ran over their legs, but he ignored them. "What rats?" he asked.

Hypatia had deduced that the problems began when They (meaning the rats, or as she sniffily called them, "The Wrong People") read Alice's book, A Brief History of Cryolinguistic Quantum Rabbit Hole Theory, the popular and dumbed-down spin-off from her PhD thesis.

We will come to who the rats were later. In good time, we will come also to why Hypatia called them The Wrong People; who Alice was; and even who Hypatia was. King George III, on the other hand, may need to remain inexplicable, due to stringent health and safety regulations. We'll look into the safe portion of his case at the appropriate time. Like the dark side of pea soup, the teeth of Professor Fred Hay and the strictly theoretical aspects of lower mathematics, some things are best left unmentioned and unexplored.

According to Hypatia, the text on that single page had inspired the rats to set off on one of their devious plots, and clearly, none of their drawn-out adventure would ever have happened without that sheet of paper, and somewhere, the soul of a tree exulted, now that it knew it had not died in vain.

So here is the short sample of Alice's work that King George III had picked up, because, in time, this will all make perfect sense.

***

Some universes are fragile and unstable. All the best theorists believe there are many bifurcating universes, which diverged wildly when small but lasting changes caused them to drift apart after somebody made an idiosyncratic choice. Most of these theorists are unsure what 'idiosyncratic' means, but they believe that using it adds bonus points to any scholarly paper.

The experts are wrong about the bonus points, but spot on with the cosmology. Many universes are indeed oddly shaped, and in quite a few of them, Columbus fell off the Earth's edge. In others, the bronze-skinned seafaring inhabitants of Massachusetts sailed east across the Atlantic in pedal-powered ocean liners. Soon after the Black Death faded away, they took over Europe and replaced its huddled farms with bison-covered plains.

In a few universes, the Invisigoths came out of hiding (they were very good at that) and seized the Roman Empire, before inventing the bicycle and conquering the rest of the world with their cunningly camouflaged bicycle cavalry. Those time lines (or at least the ones with bicycle pumps) never saw the Invisigoths coming. They felt them, though.

To this day, the swarm of universes that we call the 'Profundo set' remain permanently deliriously happy, because Adam and Eve thought the apple tree might have been sprayed, so the apples were sure to fail their organic certification. They had no proof of this of course: it was just something about the shifty look on the face of the angel who told them to leave the apples alone. That angel most definitely had something to hide, so instead of trying the apple, they sent out for pizza.

Many universes don't get far, though, because someone believes the red button really wants to be pressed, that vaccines are the work of the devil, or climate change was invented by scientists as a scam to get better research funding. Those universes are all doomed.

There remains a small handful of universes where kangaroos hop around on ingeniously designed Pogo sticks which work on water; unemployable marketing graduates are given gainful work translating Tortellini verse into English; people wear transparent socks; every household has, as a matter of course, a robotic pomposity defenestrator and nobody at all is ever troubled by the apparently lewd sound of the word 'futtocks'.

In those lucky universes, Aeolian pantechnicons patrol the streets, distributing buckets of potentiated rosewater to the deserving poor; gang green is the new black; and ice cream soup on a bun is all the rage.

Unless extreme intelligence is strategically applied, the basic universe form operates like a black hole, drawing wavering universes back into its grasp and smearing out their individuality.

In other words, anything is possible but most universes are blandly similar, and the ones diverting and developing in interesting ways usually slide back and merge once more to form the core of the mainstream universe cluster.

In these universes, spin doctors; media moguls; tax dodgers; medical quacks; heritage destroyers; anti-vaxxers; casino operators; gig-economy newspaper delivery contractors; conservative politicians who started out running furniture shops; mining magnates and other blatant scofflaws are looked up to, and given leadership roles. From these exalted positions, those leaders cheerfully designate their own universes as normal.

Then again, a simple act, like hearing "stand-up comedian" when the speaker actually said "stand-up chameleon", or playing 'The Camels Are Coming' when the song sheet specified 'The Candles Are Gumming' may be all that it takes to effect the entry into an innocent universe of undesirable things like zombie dodos, rabid budgerigars, hoop snakes, venomous fruit flies, or eccentric sheep for that matter.

But that's another story…

Alice Liddell, A Brief History of Cryolinguistic Quantum Rabbit Hole Theory, p. 1984. Richmond: Breeks Anathema Press, 2037 (limited vellum edition).

***

And that, Hypatia said as she slammed the last box-file into the cabinet and banged the drawer shut, was where it all went pair-shaped, and by pair, she meant Alice and Eric. We will come to Alice shortly: first, we need a closer look at Eric, and how he became involved, right back at the start.

 ***

Eric Blair would begin to panic, precisely five minutes from now. He didn't know, just yet, why he would panic, nor did he even know that he would panic, because he usually caused serious concern and fear, rather than experiencing it, largely on account of his most prominent feature, his nose. Sometimes, as he floated on his back while swimming, nearby people saw his nose, screamed and fled for the shallows and the shore.

Once on the beach, they would wave their arms and sound shark alarms, because these foolish people had failed to notice his slim, slightly-taller-than average runner's body, or his mop of fair hair. They also missed his unshark-like, piercing blue eyes. People never think deeply when they panic, not even Eric.

As foreshadowed above, very soon, the young man in question would panic quite a bit, just because he had been wished a good morning. Looking at the big picture, he was probably quite right to panic, but his initial reasons for deep concern weren't the ones that became apparent later.

First, he had to wake up from a dream about strippers. Now before anybody gets the wrong impression, it was more of a nightmare than a dream. The strippers Eric saw in his mind were asset strippers, not well-endowed and limber young people with carefully designed, calculated, prepared and functioning future wardrobe malfunctions.

Let it be understood, though, that the asset strippers in his dream weren't the grey-faced balding men he had worked with until a few weeks ago either, though they were probably based on those people. These strippers were large and toothy male things, part alligator, part weasel, but grossly overweight, a bit like sumo boa constrictors, wearing formal attire and identical chrome-yellow top hats that owed the shape of their brims to industrial hard hats.

Where the strippers' drool hit the ground, the local plants withered; concrete was pitted; and small animals fled in unspeakable and abject terror. Nearby paint blistered; birdsong died; banshees hid and howled in fear; and the thorns on brambles turned into vipering, putrescent goo.

In his dream, the strippers snickered and giggled as they pillaged Eric's computer for spare parts. Tears of mirth ran down their cheeks as they ripped and stripped, their repulsive fat bodies wobbling with laughter as they worked. The air was filled with the plinking sound of stripped parts dropping into glass vials and dishes. It was a sound that made small birds wince, and fly off to Polar regions, while Eric whimpered in his sleep, rolled over, and covered his ears.

So all in all, Eric's dream was no fun at all. Mind you, if Alice had been there, and she caught him dreaming about the other sort of stripper, that would have been no fun either. Still, he wasn't dreaming of that sort of stripper, Alice wasn't there, and she isn't part of the story just yet. Be patient.

Seeing his computer stripped, even in a dream, was a traumatic experience for any cosmologist, even a cosmologist who, like Eric, had gone over to the Dark Side, to work in what insiders called the Financial Derivatives gulag at Mega Global Limited, where his money market colleagues had referred to him as "our tame rocket scientist".

To be fair, Eric had quickly realised that in the world of Financial Derivatives, he was like a fish out of water, luck and breakfast, in that order. He was bright enough to see that he would soon be a fish out of work as well, so after causing a small fuss, Eric had jumped ship, something very few fish get to do, unless they happen to be flying fish who are frequent users of banned sporting supplements.

As he explained it to Alice, "At least while it lasted, I was a well-paid fish, and now I'm a very well-paid-off fish." Eric had squeezed a nice golden parachute from the company, in exchange for his signature on a deed of eternal silence on certain irregularities he had found, but that payment came only after he handed over to two sweaty men, with no necks and not many teeth, a large box of what his employers believed were the encrypted printouts of their files, even though the pages were merely covered with what looked like gibberish. Only Eric and Alice knew that the files really were gibberish.

Sometimes, in the small dark hours, just before dawn, Eric worried that his former masters might discover his trick and appear on his doorstep, wanting their money back, and in all probability, that fear was what caused his recurring nightmares about the asset strippers taking revenge. Apart from the bad dreams, he was "resting between jobs", and sharing a house with some lively friendly minds. Living there, being a bit frugal, Eric thought he had enough cash for several years of leisure. He loved Alice, she loved him, and all was well with the world, at least during daylight hours.

He devoted his time to trying to find a method to invert 7-dimensional matrices, and failing. Later, he felt better when Myfanwy told him that even the prionic cows, his world's greatest mathematical geniuses, had failed this particular challenge.

Still, as we have seen, Eric was haunted most nights by those troublesome dreams filled with the horrors of his former trade. Demons resembling the asset strippers; the merchant bankers; market traders and executives in the Product Creation Division of Mega Global Limited, gathered each night as slumber closed in on him, surrounding and subduing him with sinister rattles; foul giggles; hoarse whines and fearsome threats.

Many of the sane people at MGL (and as any sane person would predict, the rational and sane ones were all in IT, working among the broken hand-me-down furniture that was their lot, in their lair in a hidden basement) wondered if the Product Creation people were cloned somewhere deep within a fetid, pox-filled swamp. On the other hand, in Eric's dreams there were numberless hordes of them, extruded with a glooping sound from steaming vats filled with something that his dreams remained diplomatically unclear about.

Whatever was bubbling around in those vats, Eric was quite sure he never wanted to dream any sorts of smells, ever. That was an important clue, when he opened his eyes and saw what appeared to be a yellow sheep standing on his pillow. Its breath smelled like new-mown hay, and since he could smell it, he knew this was no dream, or at the very least, it was not a normal dream.

The panic was about to begin.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 … 

1. The sheep and the jeep

"Good morning, Eric!" the yellow sheep greeted him in a well-modulated contralto voice with a Welsh accent. Eric turned away, then back again, considering this sheep slowly, thinking at about the same speed that an ingrown toenail grows inwards, or tectonic plates drift along. Alice explained this analogy to him later, saying it was an appropriate pairing, because the in-growing toenail causes pain, and the drift causes earthquakes and tsunamis. Sadly, she wasn't there to share that insight right then, so he had no warning of what was coming.

The Science of the Lambs, American English: freebies

This is also available in an Australian English version.

This is a literary and mathematical romp in the form of a fantasy quest, a torrent of paronomasia, feghoots, sly literary references and running gags, telling the story of our heroes’ struggle to solve a problem. Think Spider Robinson meets Jasper Fforde and Robert Asprin, with more mathematics, superb numerological cryptography, superior literary references and better pea soup.

The sheep are mysterious beings, who wear Viking hats and claimed to be ‘mad sheep’ (no more, though: in the foreword, they note that the ravens {who once used to be dragons} told them this was not nice). Only intelligent humans and nomads can see them, and they think they are behind 73% of all cases of ‘invisible friends’. Eric Blair and Alice Liddell (note the names, which are the real names of George Orwell and Alice of Alice in Wonderland!) both have doctorates in odd aspects of number-crunching, and when they see the sheep, the sheep investigate them and decide these two have the computer and numerical skills they will need to help them (the sheep) in a quest to recover The Book of Bells. The sheep have been set this challenge by a group known as The Rats (who are behind another 11% of invisible friend cases).

Eric is assisted by a minotaur called Gordon in his first task, breaking into a geology museum to borrow a special crystal. Gordon, we learn later, took a contract with his friend Theseus to carry Hannibal’s elephants over the alps: not all of mythology is true.

Alice then joins the crew, and they break into the London house of a Russian oligarch to get a map that gets them into the Tower of London to ‘borrow’ the Cabbage Diamond, one of the lesser-known crown jewels. After that, three Tower ravens (they used to be dragons) join them, and they rob a German fraudster in the Tyrol, to get some rare zinc, only found in candlesticks in the German’s schloss. A fourth raven, kept by the German, joins them, and they launch an attack on Eric’s former employer, an evil empire called MegaGlobal Limited or MGL. MGL goons capture them, and are rescued by sheep who are red-eye masters (they say Spielberg based his Jedi masters on them), and they meet Loki, an accident-prone black sheep with an abnormality projector. Loki’s projector is a major plot element.

Now they are on the trail of the Book of Bells, and following clues left for them by the rats, they visit Pompeii, and accidentally trigger Mount Vesuvius, then they go to Monte Ceceri, where they meet Leonardo, and accidentally move the Leaning Tower of Florence to Pisa. Still on the hunt, they visit the Norman Invasion in Whitby and accidentally flip it to Hastings instead, and then they head for Norway where a troll called Pebble saves them from werewolves. Then they are given a cunning hint by the rats, using a talking horse called Bucephalus (“call me Buck”) as their messenger. Following his advice, they travel to the Amazon on a ship crewed by vampires and sent out by Sir Joseph Banks with orders to wipe out piracy.

With help from two of the vampires (Barbara Cartland and Enid Blyton), they obtain the document they need, and realise that the Book of Bells was hidden in plain sight (the last of many Poe jokes). They recover the book from the IT Department of Eric’s former employer, and the quest is over. Eric and Alice are free to go — or are they? There is a stub for the sequel...

***

I am now seriously pitching this book, and this is a taster. I am looking for beta-readers, if you would like to see the lot as a ~2 meg PDF. Email me at petermacinnis44@gmail.com and specify Australian English or American English.

An apologetic foreword from Hypatia Bluetooth, R. E. M.^*

Chief archivist of the beings formerly known as the Mad Sheep.

The ravens (who were dragons once) say 'mad sheep' is, to modern eyes, offensive, but we entered this Earth universe-cluster through Australia in the late 1980s (on their counting system). At first, no humans could see us, but we soon found that itinerants (variously called tramps, hobos or in Australia, swagmen) could see us. Sheep were the dominant animals and so we took their form, and the swagmen, always hungry, would try to kill and eat us. Taking advantage of the then fear of 'mad cow disease', we wore Viking hats and claimed to be not-good-to-eat mad sheep. This sheep form and name then followed us into other eras and cultures.

True, we might have said to the swagmen "we have a prionic disease called scrapie," but Ermyntrude, who was one of our best ethicists, and who argued for doing exactly that, disappeared without trace from where we last saw her near a billabong, in the company of a profoundly deaf swagman, and we dropped the idea. As a tribute to Ermyntrude, we later took the polite, but misleading course of altering the way we are identified in all the surviving public records.

So when you encounter the expression 'mad sheep' in this history, please think of us as "slightly eccentric sheep", though some of our human friends persist in calling us "totally weird sheep". We are completely comfortable with that, because we know the limitations that humans operate under. We are no longer mad sheep.

That said, this disclaimer does not apply to the entity we call King George III, and you will see why we draw a line there, soon enough. Even our titular leader clearly says (and said) that he is several shingles short of a picnic.

Anyhow, you may now see why we made our selected annalist drop his original title for this tale, Sheep May Safely Craze, even though we allowed him to reproduce all the dialogue, just as it happened. In exchange for his caving in on the title, we allowed him to be ruthlessly honest in all other matters.

This is a True Story.

Hypatia Bluetooth, R.E.M.*

* Red-Eye Master

Prologue

To begin at the ending (and this is quite helpful as a way of reassuring excessively nervous readers), the sheep had completed their quest and won, so they were now free, but the first dawn of their new freedom saw them stuck with a great deal of filing. Some of them even muttered darkly about Pyrrhic victories.

Of course, it might have been worse, because the winners in any quest must always face the stern and precise requirements of the five Protocols of Postadventurism. The rats had gone somewhere, Eric, Alice and the ravens were headed for Paris, and the sheep were left to tidy up. According to a paragraph (in somebody else's hand-writing, but found on an early page in Hypatia's notes), this requirement exists mainly to stop winners getting too full of themselves when they successfully complete their allotted tasks in a quest. Aided by Alice and Eric, the sheep had completed every task, and now was the time for comeuppance.

Even Erasmus, who had done this before, could not recall the full details of the Protocols, so Hypatia had made a quick dive into the Library of Lost Manuscripts, read up on the subject, and returned to tell the others they had got off lucky.

"As it has turned out, we did very well," she said. "By tradition and law, those left standing after any adventure must meet the exacting terms of a total of five Protocols, but, but as things have turned out, only the last Protocol really needs any attention. True, even that one's onerous, but at least it's far less messy."

She went on to explain that the first of the Protocols involves sorting out dead bodies, including body parts and portions too large to fit in a bucket, but there were none of those. The second relates to damaged people and property, along with smaller loose or separated body parts, and there were none of those either, while the third Protocol (stitching, gluing, soldering and minor surgical procedures) was clearly not applicable.

The fourth Protocol is mainly concerned with the mopping up of blood, but after a quick discussion, the sheep agreed that, even under a generous and loose reading of the text of the Protocols, bleeding noses caused by high-kicking IT people doing the can-can in their celebratory conga line shouldn't really count as Adventure-related, so the survivors could ignore the fourth Protocol as well.

That just left the fifth and final Protocol, which deals with Filing, and as finger-wagging lawyers will tell you, that one can neither be avoided nor evaded. In the aftermath, there is always a great deal of serious Filing to be done, and those who are still conscious and upright must set to work, each in his, or her, own way.

True, some of their efforts did not necessarily lie entirely within the strict meanings set out in section 84 (2) (b) (iii) of the Protocols Interpretation Act, but Hypatia decided to let that ride. Just being seen to be filing was what mattered most, so Myfanwy was filing a callus on her right front hoof, a lump caused by the waldos she wore for operating keyboards and calculators.

Beside her, and totally unaware that these items were all made from papier mâché, King George III was filing the padlock on the ball and chain that Health and Safety had attached to his ankle, just before midnight. His file was also made of papier mâché, but nobody said a word to George about how that choice of materials was related to his slow progress in the act of freeing himself. Nobody minded, because this kept him out of harm's way.

As a group, the reserve team red sheep conga line, weren't very bright, either, and their Filing consisted of forming a line (as they explained to Erasmus, they were in single file) and zipping back and forth across the floor, trying out the advanced moves that the élite top team had shown off, late on the previous night.

Wisely, they elected not to try imitating the moves of the IT people, even though the IT can-can conga had totally eclipsed the top team's performance.

All the same, the actions of the reserves were enough to cause Erasmus to wonder briefly if any of the first four Protocols might soon come back into play, but Erasmus often worried about the wrong things. In hindsight, he should really have been worrying about Loki, who had stripped down his abnormality projector, and was using a triangular file, to give it a hair trigger, but that's another story.

Only Erasmus and Hypatia were doing things that qualified as Filing within the strict and rigid meaning of the fifth Protocol. At the end, as Hypatia slammed the last box-file shut, a sheet of paper flew loose, and drifted, almost unseen, to the floor. Humming Candle in the Wind with a conga rhythm that wrong-footed the entire reserve team, King George III bent and picked up the paper before he passed it up to Hypatia.

She saw that the loose sheet was a photocopied page from the simplified popular version of Alice's thesis, and Hypatia glanced at it idly, then did a double-take before scrutinizing it closely, after which she went several interesting and non-standard colors.

Some of the reserve team were also oddly colored now, but we can afford to ignore them for now, because they do not appear again as a group. "This is where it went pear-shaped," she shouted, banging her waldo down on the sheet and leaving a small tear in it. "Look! It all began after the rats read this!"

Erasmus skimmed the sheet, and grunted his agreement. King George III shuffled back to the other side of the room, crooning Both Ends of the Candle and dragging his ball and chain through the reserve team, who were still on the floor, and still wrong-footed. They shrieked in a dutifully loyal sort of way as the papier mâché ball ran over their legs, but he ignored them. "What rats?" he asked.

Hypatia had deduced that the problems began when They (meaning the rats, or as she sniffily called them, "The Wrong People") read Alice's book, A Brief History of Cryolinguistic Quantum Rabbit Hole Theory, the popular and dumbed-down spin-off from her PhD thesis.

We will come to who the rats were later. In good time, we will come also to why Hypatia called them The Wrong People; who Alice was; and even who Hypatia was. King George III, on the other hand, may need to remain inexplicable, due to stringent health and safety regulations. We'll look into the safe portion of his case at the appropriate time. Like the dark side of pea soup, the teeth of Professor Fred Hay and the strictly theoretical aspects of lower mathematics, some things are best left unmentioned.

According to Hypatia, the text on that single page had inspired the rats to set off on one of their devious plots, and clearly, none of their drawn-out adventure would ever have happened without that sheet of paper, and somewhere, the soul of a tree exulted, now that it knew it had not died in vain.

So here is the short sample of Alice's work that King George III had picked up, because, in time, this will all make perfect sense.

***

Some universes are fragile and unstable. All the best theorists believe there are many bifurcating universes, which diverged wildly when small but lasting changes caused them to drift apart after somebody made an idiosyncratic choice. Most of these theorists are unsure what 'idiosyncratic' means, but they believe that using it adds bonus points to any scholarly paper.

The experts are wrong about the bonus points, but spot on with the cosmology. Many universes are indeed oddly shaped, and in quite a few of them, Columbus fell off the Earth's edge. In others, the bronze-skinned seafaring inhabitants of Massachusetts sailed east across the Atlantic in pedal-powered ocean liners. Soon after the Black Death faded away, they took over Europe and replaced its huddled farms with bison-covered plains.

In a few universes, the Invisigoths came out of hiding (they were very good at that) and seized the Roman Empire, before inventing the bicycle and conquering the rest of the world with their cunningly camouflaged bicycle cavalry. Those time lines (or at least the ones with bicycle pumps) never saw the Invisigoths coming. They felt them, though.

To this day, the swarm of universes that we call the 'Profundo set' remain permanently deliriously happy, because Adam and Eve thought the apple tree might have been sprayed, so the apples were sure to fail their organic certification. They had no proof of this of course: it was just something about the shifty look on the face of the angel who told them to leave the apples alone. That angel most definitely had something to hide, so instead of trying the apple, they sent out for pizza.

Many universes don't get far, though, because someone believes the red button really wants to be pressed, that vaccines are the work of the devil, or climate change was invented by scientists as a scam to get better research funding. Those universes are all doomed.

There remains a small handful of universes where kangaroos hop around on ingeniously designed Pogo sticks which work on water; unemployable marketing graduates are given gainful work translating Tortellini verse into English; people wear transparent socks; every household has, as a matter of course, a robotic pomposity defenestrator and nobody at all is ever troubled by the apparently lewd sound of the word 'futtocks'.

In those lucky universes, Eolian pantechnicons patrol the streets, distributing buckets of potentiated rosewater to the deserving poor; gang green is the new black; and ice cream soup on a bun is all the rage.

Unless extreme intelligence is strategically applied, the basic universe form operates like a black hole, drawing wavering universes back into its grasp and smearing out their individuality.

In other words, anything is possible but most universes are blandly similar, and the ones diverting and developing in interesting ways usually slide back and merge once more to form the core of the mainstream universe cluster.

In these universes, spin doctors; media moguls; tax dodgers; medical quacks; heritage destroyers; anti-vaxxers; casino operators; gig-economy newspaper delivery contractors; conservative politicians who started out running furniture shops; mining magnates and other blatant scofflaws are looked up to, and given leadership roles. From these exalted positions, those leaders cheerfully designate their own universes as normal.

Then again, a simple act, like hearing "stand-up comedian" when the speaker actually said "stand-up chameleon", or playing 'The Camels Are Coming' when the song sheet specified 'The Candles Are Gumming' may be all that it takes to effect the entry into an innocent universe of undesirable things like zombie dodos, rabid budgerigars, hoop snakes, venomous fruit flies, or eccentric sheep for that matter.

But that's another story…

Alice Liddell, A Brief History of Cryolinguistic Quantum Rabbit Hole Theory, p. 1984. Richmond: Breeks Anathema Press, 2037 (limited vellum edition).

***

And that, Hypatia said as she slammed the last box-file into the cabinet and banged the drawer shut, was where it all went pair-shaped, and by pair, she meant Alice and Eric. We will come to Alice shortly: first, we need a closer look at Eric, and how he became involved, right back at the start.

Eric Blair would begin to panic, precisely five minutes from now. He didn't know, just yet, why he would panic, nor did he even know that he would panic, because he usually caused serious concern and fear, rather than experiencing it, largely on account of his most prominent feature, his nose. Sometimes, as he floated on his back while swimming, nearby people saw his nose, screamed and fled for the shallows and the shore.

Once on the beach, they would wave their arms and sound shark alarms, because these foolish people had failed to notice his slim, slightly-taller-than average runner's body, or his mop of fair hair. They also missed his unshark-like, piercing blue eyes. People never think deeply when they panic, not even Eric.

As foreshadowed above, very soon, the young man in question would panic quite a bit, just because he had been wished a good morning. Looking at the big picture, he was probably quite right to panic, but his initial reasons for deep concern weren't the ones that became apparent later.

First, he had to wake up from a dream about strippers. Now before anybody gets the wrong impression, it was more of a nightmare than a dream. The strippers Eric saw in his mind were asset strippers, not well-endowed and limber young people with carefully designed, calculated, prepared and functioning future wardrobe malfunctions.

Let it be understood, though, that the asset strippers in his dream weren't the gray-faced balding men he had worked with until a few weeks ago either, though they were probably based on those people. These strippers were large and toothy male things, part alligator, part weasel, but grossly overweight, a bit like sumo boa constrictors, wearing formal attire and identical chrome-yellow top hats that owed the shape of their brims to industrial hard hats.

Where the strippers' drool hit the ground, the local plants withered; concrete was pitted; and small animals fled in unspeakable and abject terror. Nearby paint blistered; birdsong died; banshees hid and howled in fear; and the thorns on brambles turned into vipering, putrescent goo.

In his dream, the strippers snickered and giggled as they pillaged Eric's computer for spare parts. Tears of mirth ran down their cheeks as they ripped and stripped, their repulsive fat bodies wobbling with laughter as they worked. The air was filled with the plinking sound of stripped parts dropping into glass vials and dishes. It was a sound that made small birds wince, and fly off to Polar regions, while Eric whimpered in his sleep, rolled over, and covered his ears.

So all in all, Eric's dream was no fun at all. Mind you, if Alice had been there, and she caught him dreaming about the other sort of stripper, that would have been no fun either. Still, he wasn't dreaming of that sort of stripper, Alice wasn't there, and she isn't part of the story just yet. Be patient.

Seeing his computer stripped, even in a dream, was a traumatic experience for any cosmologist, even a cosmologist who, like Eric, had gone over to the Dark Side, to work in what insiders called the Financial Derivatives gulag at Mega Global Limited, where his money market colleagues had referred to him as "our tame rocket scientist".

To be fair, Eric had quickly realized that in the world of Financial Derivatives, he was like a fish out of water, luck and breakfast, in that order. He was bright enough to see that he would soon be a fish out of work as well, so after causing a small fuss, Eric had jumped ship, something very few fish get to do, unless they happen to be flying fish who are frequent users of banned sporting supplements.

As he explained it to Alice, "At least while it lasted, I was a well-paid fish, and now I'm a very well-paid-off fish." Eric had squeezed a nice golden parachute from the company, in exchange for his signature on a deed of eternal silence on certain irregularities he had found, but that payment came only after he handed over to two sweaty men, with no necks and not many teeth, a large box of what his employers believed were the encrypted printouts of their files, even though the pages were merely covered with what looked like gibberish. Only Eric and Alice knew that the files really were gibberish.

Sometimes, in the small dark hours, just before dawn, Eric worried that his former masters might discover his trick and appear on his doorstep, wanting their money back, and in all probability, that fear was what caused his recurring nightmares about the asset strippers taking revenge. Apart from the bad dreams, he was "resting between jobs", and sharing a house with some lively friendly minds. Living there, being a bit frugal, Eric thought he had enough cash for several years of leisure. He loved Alice, she loved him, and all was well with the world, at least during daylight hours.

He devoted his time to trying to find a method to invert 7-dimensional matrices, and failing. Later, he felt better when Myfanwy told him that even the prionic cows, his world's greatest mathematical geniuses, had failed this particular challenge.

Still, as we have seen, Eric was haunted most nights by those troublesome dreams filled with the horrors of his former trade. Demons resembling the asset strippers; the merchant bankers; market traders and executives in the Product Creation Division of Mega Global Limited, gathered each night as slumber closed in on him, surrounding and subduing him with sinister rattles; foul giggles; hoarse whines and fearsome threats.

Many of the sane people at MGL (and as any sane person would predict, the rational and sane ones were all in IT, working among the broken hand-me-down furniture that was their lot, in their lair in a hidden basement) wondered if the Product Creation people were cloned somewhere deep within a fetid, pox-filled swamp. On the other hand, in Eric's dreams there were numberless hordes of them, extruded with a glooping sound from steaming vats filled with something that his dreams remained diplomatically unclear about.

Whatever was bubbling around in those vats, Eric was quite sure he never wanted to dream any sorts of smells, ever. That was an important clue, when he opened his eyes and saw what appeared to be a yellow sheep standing on his pillow. Its breath smelled like new-mown hay, and since he could smell it, he knew this was no dream, or at the very least, it was not a normal dream.

The panic was about to begin.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 …

 

1. The sheep and the jeep

"Good morning, Eric!" the yellow sheep greeted him in a well-modulated contralto voice with a Welsh accent. Eric turned away, then back again, considering this sheep slowly, thinking at about the same speed that an ingrown toenail grows inwards, or tectonic plates drift along. Alice explained this analogy to him later, saying it was an appropriate pairing, because the in-growing toenail causes pain, and the drift causes earthquakes and tsunamis. Sadly, she wasn't there to share that insight right then, so he had no warning of what was coming.

Exploring by sea and land

Once the white people had invaded Australia, their exploration began with sea trips where people landed or used boats to penetrate the continent. In 1790, Arthur Phillip progressed up the Hawkesbury River in an attempt to reach what were then the Carmarthen Ranges, a name that was about to be replaced by the Blue Mountains. This work was carried out in boats that might be sailed, but for the most part, were rowed. Phillip mentions in a despatch "an eye-sketch made by Captain Hunter, as we rowed up it".

The problem in the early days was that while the Hawkesbury entered the Pacific to the north of Sydney, it swings south under the Blue Mountains, and in the end, has its source in the high ground to Sydney's south, not far form the coast. And because exploration was going on in bits and pieces, the river gained three names: the Wollondilly in its higher reaches, the Nepean to Sydney's west, and the Hawkesbury to Sydney's north. Until decent surveys were done, it was hard to link them up, even though people soon began to suspect that these three rivers were one.

At a time when beasts of burden were scarce in the colony, and needed more for ploughing and general cartage, explorers got into the habit of using watercraft to get themselves well on the way to their goal using boats or ships, and so a pattern was set, of boosting a party into unknown territory by boat or ship. This meant they could begin fresh, having passed any number of intervening obstacles, and with their stores complete.

The bush around Sydney was bad news for anybody going on a long journey. The 200-million-year-old Hawkesbury sandstone was laid down in a river delta somewhat like Bangladesh, where the sand was washed and rewashed, until it was more than 200 metres deep. Then this was covered by other sediments and squashed till it formed tough sandstone. later still, the cover was ripped off, and the sandstone ground down to a flat coastal plain.

Augustus Earle, The Blue Mountains.

Then came the explorer-killer: the sandstone was heaved up in the west to make the Blue Mountains, and heaved up to a lesser extent near the sea — either that or the sea level fell. Either way, water running off the sandstone began to cut into the stone, ever so slowly. Sandstone has a curious property: it show jointing patterns, sets of weak vertical planes that are created by stresses as the rock forms, and in the Hawkesbury sandstone, they ran and run basically north-south and east-west, and this is where the water ran, wearing away the stone and establishing a pattern of gullies and valleys and chasms, not unlike a fern leaf.

Then came the final blow: the sea level rose, filling in the river valleys and making the deep waters of Sydney Harbour and other harbours north and south. The tough rock made steep cliffs wherever the rock was worn away, and this offered conditions where ships could moor close to the shore, and not ground at low tide, but what was excellent for sailors was horrid for landsmen, who needed to get around the water, or use boats to cross it. Sydney is marked by that heritage to this day, a city of bridges and tunnels, curving roads, and in some places, streets drawn by distant draughtsmen, oblivious of the cliffs that break the neatly drawn streets into fragments.

But while today's Sydneysiders can get around the cliffs and water gaps, the explorers faced a much grimmer battle — not that any of that mattered to the armchair experts, as we can see from a safely anonymous grizzle in Saunders's News-Letter, dated January 30, 1797:

Letters from Port Jackson, dated the 21st of December, 1795, mention that the settlement was then in a very flourishing state, and that the harvest, which was then collecting, was so abundant as to be thought equal to two years' consumption. The only scarcity was that of animal food. The capital of the colony is Sydney town, [t]he other settlements are Hawkesbury and Parra Matee. The productions of the country are but few. at least, they have not been fortunate enough to make any recent discovery; the interior is, however, little known.

The following fact is a striking instance of the want of enterprise and activity. A few days after the first arrival of the colony (now eight years since) a bull and six cows strayed from their keeper into the woods. A fear of venturing far amongst the natives, then somewhat hostile, repressed all attempts to regain them; indolence succeeded these fears, and no search was ever instituted. Some time since, an officer's servant, shooting in the woods, between twenty and thirty miles from Sydney, discovered them, and conducted the Governor and his party to the spot, where they found a heard (sic) consisting of nearly sixty head of remarkably fine cattle. The bull attacked the party. who, with some difficulty, escaped unhurt. That a neighbourhood of thirty miles by land, presenting no unusual obstacles to an adventurer, should, in the almost starving state of the colony, have remained unexplored for so long a period, is not to be accounted for otherwise than by the apathy or despondency of the settlers.

In areas of interest, the land did indeed present unusual obstacles. That was something that could occasionally be remedied by the use of watercraft, and so people sought for the Australian great rivers that would take them unerringly into the heart of the continent, and in the interim, they poked their noses in, wherever they could, seeking new places where settlements might be established, anchorages where storm-ravaged shipping might put in and lie at rest, and other convenient discoveries. So it was that in 1801, a small group set out to investigate the Hunter's River, but we will let Governor King set the scene, in the words he used to the Duke of Portland to describe the expedition in which the lost Mount Harris was named.

The Coal River, 70 miles to the northward of this place, which was seen by a lieut't of the Reliance in 1798, and named by him "Hunter's River," not having since been examined or any survey taken of it, I was anxious to ascertain how far it might be accessible to vessels, and could be depended on for a supply of coals, and as the service allowed Lieut.-Colonel Paterson's absence, I accepted his offer of accompanying Lieut. Grant in the Lady Nelson on that service.

A number of explorers in the 1830s and 1840s had sea support, from the Waterwitch, used by Eyre to remain in contact with the South Australian government, to Beagle supporting Grey on the coast of Western Australia, Rattlesnake and other vessels supporting Kennedy in his ill-fated Cape York jaunt, while in 1855, Augustus Gregory had the use of a small schooner, Tom Tough, and the barque Monarch.

There were several adventures and misadventures along the way: Gregory was to explore along the line of the Victoria River, previously visited by Captain Stokes, some 14 years earlier. The naval captain had taken boats up the river as far as they could go, but without horses and suitable equipment, there was a limit to how far they could go.

No such impediment would be allowed to stand in the way of Gregory, and Tom Tough was crammed to the gunwales with horses to ride and carry things, sheep to eat, drays, blacksmith's tools, powder, shot, guns, saddles, saddlebags, waterbags, tents and much more, though some of this would be left at their shore base, where they would return from time to time. All the same, they took a fair amount with them, and on one trip in January 1856, Gregory lists the following supplies taken for a party of nine men:

Horses: 27 pack-horses with pack-saddles; 3 pack-horses with riding-saddles; 6 riding-horses. Provisions for five months: Flour, 1,470 pounds; pork, 1200 pounds; rice, 200 pounds; sago, 44 pounds; sugar, 280 pounds; tea, 36 pounds; coffee, 28 pounds; tobacco, 21 pounds; soap, 51 pounds. Total, 3,330 pounds. Equipment: Instruments, clothing, tents, ammunition, horseshoes, tools, etc., 800 pounds; saddle-bags and packages, 400 pounds; saddles, bridles, hobbles, etc., 900 pounds. Total, 5,430 pounds.

There were drawbacks to using ships close to the shore, and at one time, Monarch spent two weeks high and dry and canted over on a reef, to the immense discomfort of the horses she was carrying, and the sheep were not particularly improved by living in a sloping hold for two weeks. Later, Tom Tough would be seriously damaged after she ran onto rocks while working up a river, to the extent that the hold partly filled with water, spoiling some of the food.

One of the ship's boats was also leaky, and being left unbailed one night, she sank, drowning eleven sheep, which had presumably been left in there to save them from the "alligators", the crocodiles which had already seized and killed a kangaroo dog, and also tried to attack some of the horses. Still, in the end the schooner had enough tools to be able to cut logs and make timbers so that she could sail off to Timor for more stores, and one of the advantages was that she had carried a "portable boat", a primitive inflatable made of fabric coated with india rubber, which unfortunately perished, so that the boat proved less useful than they had hoped.

 

Taking the land's measure

I have no book to write at the moment, so I am messing with a few leftovers that never made it into books,

How do you work out how far you have travelled? Watkin Tench tells us that Lieutenant Dawes was skilled at counting paces, while later parties, when they had competent surveyors along, were able to pinpoint themselves on the map, and so measure how far they had travelled by triangulation. In other cases, they used a curious surveying instrument called a perambulator, which was not for the carriage of babies, but a sort of wheelbarrow with a counter attached, a later version of the odometer that was used by the Romans to measure the lengths of roads using cogged wheels.

To take a simple example, a standard adult bicycle has a 28-inch wheel (there is method in my using these old units, as you will see). That converts to a circumference of 88 inches, which means that three rotations cover 22 feet, and nine cover 22 yards, one chain. A device that counts the rotations of such a wheel will record a mile for every 720 revolutions. If our explorers keep the perambulator going, they can keep track of the distance and direction every thirty minutes or so, and record that on a traverse board that summarises the morning's journey.

The traverse board of the sailors was a board with holes and pegs on strings (to stop the pegs being lost). One part was a compass rose, and each half hour of a four-hour watch, a peg would be placed to summarise the direction during that time, while a second peg would record the speed in knots. It was possibly this nautical device that the marines took into the bush, along with the counting Lieutenant Dawes, and it is likely that others used the traverse board or a similar method of summarising their travels in a visual form.

There is, however, some doubt as to what Tench meant, because he actually refers to a 'traverse table'. While we have seen that boards and tables are inextricably linked in the English language, the traverse board with its pegs was different from the traverse table, which was a set of figures in a printed table that could be used to calculate the days' travel from the sort of data that could be recorded on the traverse board. Incidentally, on board ship, the rough log where details were chalked each watch was commonly a hinged pair of boards.

What we do know for certain is that the early travellers kept a track of the direction they travelled by counting paces, that they recorded this in some way, and combined the distances and directions to produce a rough map of where they had been. These days, of course, you just let the GPS system take regular note of your position at regular intervals, so it can draw you a downloadable sketch of your path. complete with latitude and longitude.

Major Mitchell had chainmen going continuously, measuring distances covered, all along his route, others, as we have seen, managed quite well with the occasional baseline and triangulation, interpolated with the occasional highly reliable measure of latitude and longitude.