THE MAGIC LABYRINTH by Philip Jose Farmer

“No.”

“You must have been sleeping like the dead. I awoke shaking and perspiring, but I couldn’t remember what it was that’d horrified me so.”

“It isn’t difficult to imagine what it was.”

Alice had gotten up to get a drink of water. On returning to the bed, she again had trouble getting to sleep. Among other things, she thought of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and the pleasures from knowing him and from his two books inspired by her. Because she’d reread them many times, she had no trouble visualizing the text and Tenniel’s illustrations.

“The first scene that came to me was the Mad Tea-Party.”

Seated at the table were the Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse. Uninvited, Alice sat down with them, and, after some insane conversation, the March Hare asked her to have some wine.

Alice looked all around the table, but there was nothing on it but tea.

“Actually,” Alice said to Burton, “that wasn’t true. There was also milk and bread and butter.”

The book-Alice said, “I don’t see any wine.”

“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.

Later there was a silence while Alice was trying to solve the riddle of why a raven was like a writing desk. The silence was broken when the Hatter turned to Alice and asked her what day of the month it was. He’d taken his watch out of his pocket and had been looking uneasily at it, shaking it and holding it to his ear.

Alice considered a little and then said, “The fourth.”

The real Alice said to Burton, “Mr. Dodgson wrote that date because it was May in the book and the fourth of May was my birthday.”

The Hatter sighed and said, “Two days wrong! I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works!”

“It was the best butter,” the March Hare meekly responded.

Burton got out of bed and began pacing back and forth.

“Must you go into such detail, Alice?”

“Yes. It’s important.”

The next scene she visualized, or empathized, since she became the seven-year-old Alice of the book, was from the Wool and Water chapter of Through the Looking-Glass. She was talking to the White Queen and the Red Queen.

“Can you keep from crying by considering things?” she (Alice) asked.

“That’s the way it’s done,” the White Queen said with great decision. “Nobody can do two things at once, you know.”

“Alice!” Burton said. “What’s all this nonsense leading to?”

“It’s not nonsense. Listen.”

In her reverie, Alice leaped from the White Queen to Humpty Dumpty.

“Perhaps because Loga is so fat that he reminds me of Humpty Dumpty.”

She, the book-Alice, was talking to the huge anthropomorphized egg sitting on a wall. They were discussing the meaning of words.

“When 7 use a word,” Humpty-Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Then the real Alice—But is she any more real than that other Alice? Burton wondered—flashed to the scene where the Red Queen asked her if she could do Subtraction.

“Take nine from eight,” the Red Queen said.

“Nine from eight. I can’t, you know,” Alice replied very readily. “But—“

“She can’t do Subtraction,” said the White Queen to the Red Queen. She spoke to Alice. “Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife—what’s the answer to that?”

“Were there any more?” Burton said.

“No. I didn’t think they meant much. They were just memories of some of my favorite sections.”

She’d slept again. And then she awoke suddenly, her eyes wide. She’d thought she’d heard someone far off calling her. “Just over the horizon of my mind.”

It sounded like Mr. Dodgson, but she wasn’t sure.

She was wide awake, her heart pounding fast. She got out of bed and walked to the control room.

“Why?”

“It occurred to me that there were three key phrases in the scene. The best butter. Which is to be master? Can you do Division?”

Burton sighed. “Very well, Alice. Tell it as you must.”