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 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 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.
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