About Sheep May Safely Craze

Sheep May Safely Craze: a gloomy prospectus

In this novel, you will learn of the πth dimension, a fish called Dada, how Hannibal really got the elephants over the Alps, sesquivalent zinc and hemisemidemiconductors, but there will be nothing about the obscene verses of Cosher Bailey.

The sample below does not mention the ravens who used to be dragons, the role the Lone Ranger played in  triggering their change, what caused the Vesuvius eruption that buried Pompeii, or the vampire wannabe novelists, Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland. Or how Dr Moreau operated on King George III, or who really warned Julius Caesar about the Ides of March. These were all in the NDA I signed, but the rats' lawyer was a crook, and for two doubloons and residual rights, she made sure that the NDA said nothing about any books, so you can find most of it in this ebook and dead tree book.

The NDA also said nothing about the dark side of pea soup, but I have been counselled against even mentioning that topic.

The Sample

Since the dawn of time, humans have always pondered: what is life? why are we here? is there life after death?  This book does not answer any of those questions, but it has nice colours.
—Loki Svartifossson, R. E. M.

Loki-verification: with the exception of this statement, absolutely nothing in this book is completely untrue.

Prologue

Reader, here, we reduce a tale of multidimensional beings to a linear narrative. Just hang onto your hat, seat and undergarments (also your teeth, if the Ninja Tooth Fairy warning light is flashing). We will be as gentle as we can.

<SPOILER ALERT> To begin at the ending (and this is quite helpful as a way of reassuring any excessively nervous readers), the sheep had completed their quest and had very clearly won. <END SPOILER ALERT> So now they were free from all compulsion, but the first dawn of their new freedom saw them stuck with a great deal of filing. Some of the more classically trained ones even muttered darkly about Pyrrhic victories.

Of course, it might have been worse, because the winners in any quest must always meet the stern and precise requirements of the five Protocols of Postadventurism. The rats had gone off somewhere, Eric, Alice and the ravens were headed for Paris, and as usual, the sheep were left with the task of tidying up and clearing away.

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 have successfully completed their allotted tasks in a quest. Aided by Alice and Eric, the sheep had completed every single task in their quest (OK. so there was only one…), and now was the time for somebody’s comeuppance. It was No Free Lunch time…

Even Erasmus, who had been through all of this before, could not recall the full details of the Protocols, so Hypatia went into the Library of Lost Manuscripts while the others stopped for coffee, read up on the subject, and returned to tell them they had got off lucky.

“It seems we did very well,” she said, in a fruity school-marmish contralto. “By tradition and law, those left standing at the declared end of any adventure must meet the specific terms of a total of five Protocols, but as things have turned out, only the last Protocol really needs any attention. That said, even that one can be 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 as they all agreed after looking around, those bits were all entirely absent. The second item relates to damaged people and property, along with smaller loose, lopped 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 all 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, and leave the robotic floor scrubbers to deal with it.

That meant that the fifth and final Protocol was all they had to work on. That one deals with Filing — and as finger-wagging lawyers will tell you, that requirement 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.

While it may be argued that some of their own-way efforts did not necessarily lie entirely within the strict meanings set out in section 84 (2) (b) (iii) of the Protocols Interpretation Act, Hypatia had decided to let that ride. Just being seen to be filing if the inspectors came in would meet the letter of the law, so Myfanwy was filing a callus on her right front hoof, a lump caused by the waldos she wore for operating keyboards, phones and calculators.

Beside her, and totally unaware that all the items in question were 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, as the conga line went can-can. His file was also made of papier mâché, but nobody said a word to George about how that choice of materials might be related to his slow progress in the act of freeing himself.

Nobody minded his failure to contribute, because this task kept him engaged, slightly amused, and out of harm’s way, and as Hypatia pointed out, if the inspectors did show up, they would go after him first, and arguing with King George III invariably made inspectors collapse into a confused slumber. George may have been short on IQ points, but his fracturing illogic was a weapon of mass distraction.

As a group, the reserve team red sheep conga line, weren’t very bright, either, and their Filing consisted of forming a line (after all, as they explained to Erasmus, they were in single file) and zipping back and forth across the floor, trying out the less outrageous of the advanced moves that the élite top team had shown off, late on the previous night. Wisely, these second-tier sheep elected not to try imitating the moves of the IT people, whose 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 elements 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 donned his blue waldos, and stripped down his abnormality projector, before using a triangular file to give it a hair trigger, but that’s another story.

Only Erasmus and Hypatia were doing things that truly 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 single sheet of paper flew loose, and drifted, almost unseen, to the floor. Humming Candle in the Wind with a twisted and inverted conga rhythm that totally wrong-footed the entire reserve team, King George III bent and picked up the paper before he passed it up to Hypatia.

* * *

See? More smart-arsery, and in most cases running several layers deep. F'rinstance, do the names Eric Blair and Alice Liddell ring a vague bell? Here's a hint: in another quarter, Eric Blair wrote Homage to Catatonia, and Alice Liddell worked with Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on looking-glasses, but my latest NDA allows me to go no further.

That one (the book or the NDA?) is scary!