Alice Unbound

by Colleen Anderson

  I saw the path back now, the rabbit hole. I ambled toward it, no longer able to tell the difference between moving and singing. Either would achieve my objective because they wished it to. Their raw desire here dwarfed my willpower. They were in charge.

  I crawled up the rabbit hole by thinking about skating on mint candies strapped to my feet and how yellow is a perfectly good colour to build a house out of, strong and resistant to the smell of darkness. Time and chaos stretched out for what could have been a second or a lifetime. Then finally roots, grass and dirt appeared. These things were real.

  The unthinkable form of the jabberwock faded as reality composed itself. Skills, memory and senses began to work. I crawled, too dizzy to get up. Grass gave way to dirt, then a creek and finally a field of wheat. Just these simple, normal things were like a tall glass of water to a thirsty man in the desert. I regained more composure but sickness churned my stomach and did not diminish. I had escaped the web by being fly and spider and web at the same time.

  None of the creatures followed me. They did not want to. I had seen the rabbit, but just as a rabbit here. They wanted to be here as they were there through that rabbit hole. Inside me was their madness now, their way into this realm. If I let it out, they could consume this world.

  The next time I became something else, the next time I dug down into my well of magic, their madness would claw its way to the surface, and let them in. That’s what the madness wanted.

  I knew a place to take it, a horrible place that would be improved by their chaos. I started through the wheat to see what was on the other side, a traveller with a burden now.

  SOUP OF THE EVENING

  Robert Dawson

  The Mock Turtle paddled in lazy circles beneath the cloudless sky. Since its carbon-fibre-composite front left flipper had failed, eighty-three years ago, circling was easier than swimming straight. On each circuit, it scanned the horizon, the wooded headland, the beach, and then the horizon once more, looking for poachers.

  It had not seen a poacher, or any other human, in more than fifty years, but thousands of generations of evolution had given its turtle brain near-infinite patience; and the implanted computer had no concept of haste whatsoever. The Turtle’s job was to guard the sea creatures in the park, as the Gryphon guarded the land.

  Once upon a time, on evenings such as this, the Gryphon would come down to the beach, the Mock Turtle would crawl out of the water, and they would talk together of many things while the sun set and the full moon climbed the sky. But it had been a long time, years, since their last meeting. Perhaps the Gryphon, too, was gone.

  Ahead drifted a jellyfish, a mop of angry tentacles under a glassy clear dome. An invasive species, one that the Turtle was allowed to eat without limit. Its stainless-steel beak bit hungrily: two more gulps finished the jellyfish off. There was not much nutrition in jellyfish, but with few other creatures to eat them, they were plentiful.

  Half an hour later, the Turtle became aware of a faint discomfort in its stomach and a buzzing in its head. Had that jellyfish been contaminated in a red tide? So many of the Turtle’s organs had been replaced by pumps and filters that the dinoflagellate toxins could not harm it for long; but they would disturb its organic brain until the nanofilters cleared them away.

  Strange thoughts and memories from long ago invaded the Turtle’s mind. It swam in ovals, in trefoils, in spirals. On a sudden whim, it began to sing to the pale moon: Will you walk a little faster, said a Whiting to a Snail? Through the fizzing tingle of the dinoflagellate toxin, the words almost made sense. The beach was coming into view once more. Two figures walked along the sand. One was – could it be? Yes! The Gryphon! A step behind followed a strange small human. The Turtle surged toward them, stopping occasionally to correct its veering course. No, Constable, I haven’t dropped a touch. Must have been something in the jelly. Sober as a, as a, one of those sober things.

  The Gryphon paused now and then, looking out to sea. The Turtle tried vainly to call over the crash of the surf. Onward it swam, taking bearings from a boulder on the beach. The water grew shallower now: the waves began to shoal, the lazy irregular rocking of the open sea turning more urgent. The crests mounted steeper and steeper, flecked at the top with impatient patches of foam. At last, one ridge toppled, and a mighty surge drove the Turtle dizzily through tumbling foam onto sand. The water slid back, leaving the Turtle beached, stuck onto the wet sand by its own weight.

  Slowly, awkwardly, on its three good flippers, it crawled up above the licking waves. The Gryphon shouted and waved; the Turtle called weakly back, and the Gryphon lolloped across the beach on all fours, its claws throwing up little puffs of sand. The small human followed, holding up its skirt to run faster.

  “So good to see you again!” cried the Gryphon, and threw itself on top of the Turtle in a clumsy embrace, sandwiching the Turtle’s head between shaggy fur and sand. Finally it moved away, and the Turtle could speak again. It smiled weakly.

  “Good see you too.”

  The Gryphon looked solicitously at the Turtle. “Pardon me? Are you feeling poorly?”

  “Sorry. Jellyfish. Disagreed with me.”

  “What?”

  “Disagreed with me. I settled the argument. Ate it.”

  “That will teach it,” the Gryphon said cheerfully. “I’ve brought somebody for you to meet. Don’t get into an argument with her. Didn’t bring her for you to eat, you know.”

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s a little girl. The Queen said to bring her here.”

  The Turtle blinked. “What for?”

  “Ask her if you want.”

  The little girl stopped a metre away. “Are you the Mock Turtle?” She scuffed her patent-leather shoes in the sand.

  “Once,” said the Mock Turtle gravely, “I was a real Turtle.”

  “You look real.” She reached out as if to touch the Turtle’s shell, but drew her hand back at the last moment.

  “Oh, I’m solid,” the Mock Turtle said. “But they put a computer into me. And cyborg parts.”

  “A computer! Do you have internet? For games?” she asked.

  “That wouldn’t be a good idea,” said the Gryphon.

  “Why not?”

  “Nets are bad for turtles.”

  She put her hand to her mouth. “Oh! I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” said the Turtle. “And, yes, we used to have games. Back when there were porpoises around, they played all sorts of games. Chasing games, mainly: Tag-And-Release, Red Roughy, and British Bullhead. But they’ve all gone now.”

  “And you can’t play without them?”

  “It would be porpoiseless,” the Turtle said sadly.

  “Why did the people do all those things to you?”

  “So that I could guard the coral and fish and oysters better. And talk to the scientists. And file the weekly and monthly and quarterly and annual reports. And do the Population Apology—” That didn’t sound right. “I mean the Botheration Ecology. Counting the oysters.”

  “Are oysters very difficult to count?”

  “Well, they don’t move much. No feet, you know. But I had to take lessons to do it properly.”

  The little girl frowned. “They make me take lessons too. What lessons did you have?”

  “Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.” Blasted jellyfish! The words would not come out straight. “Deferential and Interminable Calculus. And Sadistics.”

  “That doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

  “It wasn’t. All the Sandwich Deviations, and Incompetence Intervals, and Linear Digression, and Hippopotamus Testing. And Bays’ Rule.” The Turtle thought for a moment. “Because the beach is in a bay, you know.” It made as much sense as anything.

  “And why do you have to count the oysters?”

  “So they’d know how many there were. So nobody would harvest too many.”

  “Do the oysters mind being harvested?”

  “I never asked them.
It wouldn’t have done any good, you see. Oysters can’t talk.”

  The little girl nodded. “How many are there?” She looked around, as if she expected to see oysters walking along the beach.

  “There aren’t any. Not anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “The water got acidic. And then the little oysters couldn’t grow shells, and the fish ate them.”

  “So now you just guard the fish? And the coral?

  “No, the fish swam away when the oysters were gone. And all the coral turned white and died, because the water was too warm.” It had all been so beautiful once… The Turtle began to weep. It brushed at its eyes with a flipper, awkwardly, trying not to rub sand into them.

  Its melancholy thoughts were interrupted by a faint and distant whine, imitating a lone mosquito. Far up the beach, something silver and black glided above the sand, twisting and dipping in the air like a glittering ribbon. As the Turtle watched, it swooped toward the beach, picked up a scrap of something, and resumed its flight.

  “What’s that?” asked the little girl, her eyes big with wonder. “It’s so pretty – is it a dragon kite!”

  “It’s a Snark. They keep the beach clean.”

  The little girl clapped her hands. “Will it come closer?”

  “I’m afraid not. They’re programmed to stay away from people.” Snarks had been picking up litter and flotsam from the beach, and taking it who-knew-where, for almost a century.

  “Oh! It is coming closer!” And so it was, hurtling toward them faster than the Turtle had ever seen a Snark fly. The whine grew, and frigid tentacles clutched at whatever was still organic in the Turtle’s belly.

  A century was a long time; software could be corrupted by circuit failure or cosmic rays. A rogue Snark might attack humans and cyborgs, trying to get directly at the metal and organic materials that it was programmed to crave. The Turtle would be safe in the sea; the Gryphon could fight back or run away. But what of the little girl?

  The flapping peril loomed nearer: the sound grew to a whistle, to the shriek of a hurricane. The Turtle turned to the Gryphon. “Cover her up! Keep her safe! It’s a boo—”

  The Gryphon knocked the Turtle aside and threw itself on top of the little girl, who gave a little “oof!” as she vanished under the shaggy beast’s bulk.

  And then the boojum was upon them, like a whirlwind in a machine shop, clawing and biting at the Gryphon, as if trying to chop its way through its body to the small human beneath. There was a smell of blood and hydraulic fluid. The Turtle raised itself as high as it could, and clamped its steel mandibles onto the nearest limb of the boojum, which immediately turned its fury on the Turtle.

  Without releasing the boojum, the Turtle pulled as much of its head as it could back into the darkness of its shell, protecting its skull and eyes from the hacking, slashing cutters and pincers. There was an upward pull and a flapping sound as the boojum tried to fly away. The Turtle’s shell rocked back and forth, but the boojum was not strong enough to lift it.

  Slowly, blindly, the Turtle crawled back toward the sea, dragging the thrashing monster with it. Every time a flipper was exposed, the boojum attacked, but the Turtle persisted. After an age of struggle, it felt the welcome splash of a little wave, then a bigger one. Soon it was swimming, scraping along the sand, pushed out into deeper water by the undertow. The limb that it held in its beak no longer thrashed and struggled, but pulled first one way, then another, like a kelp stalk in the waves.

  The Turtle swam on, dragging the boojum completely under. Once it was sure that the enemy was submerged, it rested on the sandy bottom, waiting for the salt water to take its toll on the boojum’s air-fuel cells and electronics. When enough time had passed, it opened its jaws, leaving the inert body of the boojum to drift, and swam back through the breakers to the beach.

  The sand was empty, and unmarked except for the Turtle’s own tracks emerging from the sea and the traces of its solitary struggle with the boojum. Silently, it turned and limped back into the sustaining embrace of the sea. It would have been pleasant to talk with the Gryphon some more, or at least say a proper farewell.

  It swam out beyond the breakers, beyond the drifting wreckage, into the deeper water where the oyster beds had once been. Empty shells still covered the sand, grown brittle and white as the water gradually leached the strength out of them. Little creeping things, sandworms and shrimp, moved among the shells. Disturbed by the Turtle’s passage, they scuttled for cover.

  Don’t be afraid, little ones, the Mock Turtle thought. I’m here to keep you safe.

  CYPHOID MARY

  Pat Flewwelling

  Mary entered the rope corridor, one of a half-dozen weary travellers bound for red-eye flights. This was her sixth international and second domestic business trip in three months.

  Security had kept the queue switchbacks in place, forcing the few tourists to walk needlessly back and forth six times as they approached the baggage scanners.

  The security guard’s voice was too big for the late shift. “Boarding passes ready, please.”

  Mary hadn’t slept in nearly seventy-two hours. It was as if she’d simply forgotten how to fall asleep the moment she’d landed in Vancouver. Everything felt darkly comical.

  The teenager ahead of Mary skipped once. Her older companion – father, maybe – gazed in wonder. The girl shrugged and asked, “What?”

  Mary couldn’t account for a block of time on her last flight. It might have been sleep. She’d opened a book, and the next she knew, four hours had passed and they were landing.

  “Move forward,” the guard said. He had a face like an Easter Island statue. He dropped his cleaver-shaped hand to cut the traffic between the teen and her dad. The girl advanced to the conveyor and hopped three times on the spot, as if her leg had the hiccups.

  “Can’t you just let me go through with my daughter?” the man asked. “Please. We’re late. We’ve got an appointment in the morning and I—”

  “Stop there,” the Moai statue bellowed, as if yelling at a crowd only he could see. He narrowed stony eyes at the belligerent and crossed his arms. “Have your passports and boarding passes ready,” he said. “Peanuts!” Curious people turned in his direction. As if nothing had happened, he gazed over Mary’s head.

  Mary felt like she was in a dream that was taking a turn for the dark. She needed to wake up, or security might assume she was stoned.

  Time trickled on as the teen deposited her carry-on luggage, jacket, computer, and phone into the grey bins. All the while, she hopped periodically on her left foot. God, I hope she’s not on my flight. Is she high? “Stop that,” the baggage inspector said. Defiantly, the girl stopped, tucked up her left leg and hopped on her right. The inspector nodded and let her pass.

  Only three people remained in line now, Mary included. No one new had joined. It gave her the willies.

  “Go forward,” the security guard said to the worried dad and to Mary, then slammed his hand behind her.

  Just get on the plane, Mary thought. You’re tired. You’re hallucinating. Go to sleep, get home, take a couple of days off. Mechanically, she placed her possessions in the bins.

  “POPcorn.”

  Everyone jumped. The long-faced, blushing gatekeeper cleared his throat, guarding the last person in queue, as if denying the exclamation had ever come from such a paragon as himself.

  Mary handed over her boarding pass to the inspector. “Take off your head, please,” the inspector said.

  “I’m sorry?” Mary asked.

  “Take off your hat, please,” the woman said, in the same cadence and tone.

  “Oh,” Mary said. “Right.” She took off her ball cap and dumped her personal effects into it before proceeding to the metal detector. The agent on the other side blinked at her. Thinking she’d maybe missed the hand sign, Mary moved toward the metal detector, but the agent shouted, “Stop!” With a gentler gesture, the agent waved her back, and then loosely stood at ease, watching the
metal detector’s lights as if waiting for a sign from God.

  Maybe I’m asleep in the taxi. Maybe I’ve been drugged.

  A second agent summoned Mary through the detector. Mary didn’t know if she should obey the come-ahead wave or the stay-there shout. At the second agent’s insistence, Mary passed through the arch, without setting it off.

  Mary shuddered. Well, that was weird. The guard behind the X-ray monitor saw her shiver and said, “Take this, sweetie,” in a grandmotherly voice. He started taking off his own uniform. Suddenly, the cheery light went out of his eyes. He looked confused and retrieved Mary’s jacket for her instead.

  The next passenger came through the metal detector, making it beep. He said, “Oh, excuse me, I forgot my watch.” He retreated, took off his flannel shirt and dumped it on the floor. He was wearing an undershirt. He passed through the detector again. “Oh, excuse me, I forgot my watch.” He took off his shoes. A third time, he set off the detector’s alarm. The two agents stood by with the metal detection wand. “Oh, excuse me, I forgot my watch.”

  It was like watching a time-loop, and no one else seemed to think it was odd that he was taking off his pants, undershirt, and underwear. Mary’s eyes bugged out. He wasn’t even wearing a watch.

  “PROGRAMS!” shouted a furious voice. “GET YOUR PROGRAMS!”

  Mary shivered. She’d stopped breathing. What. The. Actual. Hell. “Excuse me,” she said to the security supervisor. “I’m uh… I don’t feel so good.” She pointed to her head. “Is there a doctor or something—”

  “You must be cold, dearie,” said the agent behind the X-ray machine. He climbed awkwardly over the Plexiglas and roller track, taking off his uniform jacket as he came.

  “Oh, excuse me,” the nude man said, “I forgot my watch.” He had no more clothes to take off. The passenger made like he was pulling off a jersey from the bottom hem up over his head, but instead of material his nails caught skin. Three great, bloody wounds unzipped under his fingers as he tried to flay himself. Mary gasped to scream, but her voice caught. Someone else had to see what was going on.