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 petermacinnis@ozemail.com.au 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.
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