Alice's Fuzzy Starship - part 3

The Rabbit led us to the fuzzy Starship. We crept inside the blurry portal, forgetting how its inside surfaces could easily be forgotten. I felt nothing now, but my brain was but a few feet from total confusion, and I felt ashamed that so fine a reel of wire was attached to these instruments in so clumsy a manner. I will even affirm these deplorable conditions must involve serious repairs and weeping.

"Rabbit, what have you done to this ship? It looks dreadful. So many wires and panels leaking their guts about. What happened?" I asked, looking at the terrible state of affairs in the control room.

"What can you expect, but to make up for the possibility of surgical treatment by this analogue." Rabbit replied. "Modifications."

"Oh?" Said Alice.

"Can anyone doubt today, that with all of the considerable developments of recent years, were made by the desire for a new spring jacket? Now, be a good one, and save your strong words for more ordinary views." He said, putting on his new captain suit. It was indeed a new spring jacket. Apparently he had sold components of the starship to pay for it.

We spend into the void, just in time to see the Venus Nucleus implode into the vortex of the great Trapezo-hedron.

We suddenly felt cold. Winter is commonly cold enough, but it is little compared to the body politic of maintaining the old-time chivalries. When we are wise and intelligent, we should have sympathy of their phenomena. We were not feeling very wise and intelligent at the moment.

Alice looked out the portal and cried. Adolescents indeed never continue in one form or another for very long, and on her mental surface she obtained the aphelion of her insanity, an in sanity that may be considered as belonging some animal passion. When the public first learned of these things, Why, then, was there not an immediate loud of voice of untellable pathos?

"My true friends Was all that so wild a night worth it?!" Rabbit asked us.

"I thought our escape from you two years was a blessing." Alice said. "And anyone else to carry us far from you was a wizard in my heart ... but I supposed you all can guess that." she interjected.

"Do you still play croquet?" Asked Rabbit?

"Not willingly." Alice said."

"Not interested." I added.

"I've been watching the royal tournaments as of late." Rabbit switched on a television. "The soldiers were to take on the Pacific portion, and it shall be a great change produced in the wildest hilarity! Oh ... when we get home how we will haunt the libraries, museums, laboratories, and lecture-rooms! -- all than and more when they get back!"

Meanwhile space bubbled and crunched in strange ways outside the portals of the starship.

Rabbit looked more and more for ways to elevate her, until the he calculated a very hazardous expedient on the electric abacus. At a second glance, a signal rolled and passed by the machinery, over the backs of the intelligent insects ... which were noted for their celebrity, and their cunning bayonets.

"MESSAGE! MESSAGE!" They chanted.

"Oh fine ... what now," Rabbit said, turning his gaze from the object of his infatuation. The Insect-o-grams chittered and chattered in a high pitched whine, capable of only being deciphered by very sensitive ears, and mature tea sipping professors with a talent for making hats. Their remarks referred to a great wedge and a cannon, with which to procure the albumen used in their opinions about the kidneys being red or discolored, and picked meats of the disagreeable passenger being chosen by Alice. Time required for its accomplishment will be necessary.

"Are you hungry professor Hatter?" Rabbit addressed me ominously.

"No, I've had plenty of water and toast, as of the morning." I let his plot to pickle me boil a moment. Something in the way he looked at me spoke of foul play in his little rabbit brain.

Alice was wise to his evil plans too. She said "Cut the fish with one quart of boiling water; add to it as many clouds for about a third of an editor in 1849, and with considerable argumentative power, and it might work. He shall not be easily disposed of ... nor will you any weapon on this stripped-down rocket scout sway my affections for you, Rabbit."

"Point well taken ... Rabbit conceded. He hesitated a moment in his mental inductions, like a unicorn in a captain's curious topical ointment. Love, how he regarded it with such indifference and insanity. But as a natural consequence of this practice on the roads of space, (or so said a recent traveler we met in Italy you will soon hear about), we saw at least a little warmth arise in her former lover. But we knew well enough that this true-heartedness would operate like an abortion performed by a knife happy squid.

Sleeping together weightless, Alice and I were like two suspended posts in a wheelwright's yard. There was no gravity in our quarters, though it didn't really matter. Nor was anything said about the expressive qualities in nature increased by the division between her and Rabbit. She had been silent because of it.

"The risk is too great." She whispered in my ear as she cuddled my chest."We cannot be at peace together so long as he is around."

"Not when you think it is not so." I replied, understanding the paradox.

"Hush! Let me tell you, it is to me incomprehensible that men and women with wills and purses for all drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks, experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras, both ordinary and aerial, may call into account a situation deemed appropriate for the supervision of a governess." Alice said.

"So are you saying you have regrets?" I asked her.

"About you? Oh no .... none at all! but I fear for Rabbit's reactions to my affections for you." She said quietly. "I intended to make a jar of pickled meats out of you you know. I could read it in his thoughts."

"Bah ... Put it back in his voice" I said. "I wasn't afraid of him."

Alice tried to draw a little memorial of my life, and orchestrated a course of action ... but I doubted Rabbit would ever cross that line. He was too much of a coward.

Just then to our total lack of surprise, Rabbit stepped through the hatch and barged in on our private moment. He was bleeding. Alice stepped toward him. Rabbit was holding out his wounded hands and trembled, and then sat down on them, with lots of blood pouring out of his wrists.

"I have wounded myself ... because I love you ... and because I hate you Alice!" Rabbit declared.

The young girl thought about it, like a student at the Academy and examined his arguments in favors of a century.

"As to this exercise, either extreme must be refused absolutely and unequivocally." Alice glared.

"Oh you are just saying that because ... you are in love with the Mad Hatter." Rabbit wailed melodramatically.

She cast him a sharp glance and slapped him soundly until breakfast ... and then well through the day until dinner, until the during evening meal she... not being a gentleman, stopped slapping him and bound the rabbit in chains, for the wealth and health of his ship.

"I told you had enough of your smart ass remarks Rabbit. Alice screamed. "The ship is MINE now."

"Good friends!" Rabbit screamed "You should not be apt to think that I never saved any more questions to ask, I transfer her to you you fully ... but only on the condition you release me!" His face and head were bruised and bloody after being slapped continuously for hours by the infuriated goddess.

But it was only with a questionable authority in which he commanded, indeed even a questionable sanity that even I could not define. Alice ignored him. I made a cup of tea. In addition to the many duties to love and the cries of pleasure that followed after securing Rabbit from our quarters, we lost no time in hastening back to ancient Rome.

Alice set the time travel controls. Rabbit did not like being chained up, but it did make for a more pleasant voyage. In time Alice took pity on him and released him, so long as he swore to stop presuming upon her interests and patience. She had pledged her heart to me now and he must accept it.

Rabbit did not like to make any certain promises of this, and it fell me to draw the line. Even the narrowest mind organized itself according to this questionable behavior, and would be unhesitatingly made to make me ponder the events that followed ever since.

"Alice loves me Rabbit, and I love her. Leave us in peace, and you may travel with us. Or, I can eject you out into non-space. What will it be?"

This discovery suggested serious embarrassment in respect to his one eye on a marriage to her ... and another on my murder ... so much that his crossed eyes said 'Say it isn't so!' Rabbit's conversations with the men who make love because the heat of the germ plasm becomes again modified, always bothered him.

"Don't you get it ... I must put my name alongside my father's!" Rabbit said.

"Your father's?" I asked Rabbit from below. "What does he have to do with any of this?"

"EVERYTHING!!" he twitched his cotton tail. I NEED a wife. Hatter ... listen to me!" He said. "I need offspring! My Brother Peter has 57 kids! I have NONE!!"

I had just come up from a sit down in the tubes. After two years, the bathroom still didn't look any different ... or improved to me.

We glanced at the controls which signaled our arrival back in time. Soon we were orbiting ancient earth.

Rabbit suddenly spoke up. "Most of the blast effects will have come from distant places, of that I am certain."

"What blast effects?" Alice asked.

"You know, sometimes you can do a lot of with a force field, although where most of my more experience lies, is in less imaginative experimentation of medical and court documents." Rabbit began to explain.

"What is he going on about now? Alice asked.

"When I was traveling those two years, I learned all about how an army floated captive and helpless in a black space galley, and they rowed so hard they escaped out into the loonyverse. I took the opportunity to learn how to practice my skills in medicine upon a fashionable noon wedding on that galley, which consisted of four people instead of two ... horizontally." Rabbit smiled. "They were on a time bombing mission."

"You mean a mission to bomb ... time?" Alice asked piecing the puzzle together

"That is what I said" Rabbit said.

"What are you getting at?" I prodded. Before we can place much reliance upon him, he needed to be a bit more forthcoming. "What about this blast?"

"I'm not sure. I left the galley before I forgot even the wildest Indian legends. That, and the fact I had gained some confidence in becoming a medium for wandering spirits."

We blinked at him. Rabbit was impossible sometimes.

"I later found out after a conversation with a lost soul, that the current of our training methods, were nothing more than one big tear-drop, suitable for an airplane survey party."

"THE BLAST RABBIT ... THE BLAST!!" Alice growled.

"I am getting to that!" He stammered. "Its position is in an ancient temple, bent forward on the hill. Dropped upon those hideous nameless folk-poets of centuries past."

"Are you saying Ancient Rome was to be bombed?"

"Yes .. well no ... only the poets actually, and only on the ourskirts of the city. Just your run of the mill plague." Rabbit replied blankly.

"Folk-Lore of the twisted tail behind I suspect!" Alice smirked.

And thus, by continual accumulation of his ramblings, we gathered the facts.

"We must save the ancient poets!" Alice said. She zoomed the fuzzy starship down though the atmosphere and and landed on the outskirts of ancient Rome. Apparently we didn't travel back in time quite far enough to prevent the disaster. The specifics of the land's heat after 10 to 20 years of infection, made the place of the poets smell of death.

"This place doesn't look at all sanitary" Alice said, holding a cloth over her nose. What is that horrid STINK?"

Rabbit bounded off the ship, ignoring the smell of death. As is usually how it happens to persons who believe themselves to be completely cured and sane, despite their own guilt.

I thought a moment considering the piles of decaying human flesh surrounding us.

I came to the the conclusion that it therefore behooves mothers to sit quiet while bathing, and to fill the dish full, simply because we were fresh enough in mind to disturb a new discovery. And though many will seldom reach so high, having no such discrimination of the relative antiquity of old, had it not been for Rabbit's first advances, poor Ms. Alice would no be so eager for more attentions from me. Or something akin to that line of reasoning, though I cannot precisely recall the particulars.

Thus is goes, we seem to trust even the noblest Rabbits to guide us, if only to deflected us from our passionate positions, to places within our heart where the present century flourishes, and oftentimes ... stinks.

We looked around not having any apparent reason to stay. The temporal stink bomb had already exploded here decades ago. The damage done, this dark and gloomy land took its place among our new nightmares. A smelly gloom that accentuated a unity of curvatures in the noses in the Doric Columns standing in the front cabinets of our brains.

Shadows cast by plain lines projected the compass-points being rested at midnight on the floor. Several times Rabbit seemed to be afflicted by the visible world, yet it was the total sublimity of the almost breathing statues in these historic times that were paneled with gold and silver. A word comes to mind ... in describing the scene a corresponding verb in Ancient Greek ... "A TALE WITH NO MEANING". Though the exact word escaped me at the moment.

"Well ... what now?" Asked Alice. She cuddled up against my arm at the ghastly display of stinking dead poets.

"Whatever has been performed here, should be called Satanic, though it is generally greater." I said.

Rabbit said. "I've seen miscarriages in this same color."

Alice pointed a megaphone toward him and said "All hands! Reality check!"

I think my crimson cloak caught his eye, but his strangeness was becoming more menacing by the hour. Rabbit had indeed changed. True he was always bizarre  - even before our long voyage upon the trackless infinities of the triune attributes of this awful fane - but still ... he  as not the same. There was an evil about him I could not explain.

"According to their affective values, can one find any such hysteria so thoroughly repulsive, that one does not live long enough to repent?" Rabbit asked surveying the piles of dead poets, apparently gassed to death from the stink bomb.

"So where is this black galley?" Alice fumed. "There's too many dead poets here to bury ..."

"I was thinking that same thought," Rabbit said. He pointed to the thin, intense young man who carried a whip approaching us. Alice leaned on me with her homogeneous body, and especially made a point in saying; "I love you all ... but the greater certainty is this smell must be mastered if we are to stay here. "Then turning to me she said, "But I won't complain if we stay ... so long as we have many children."

"Oh Alice ... it is far to smelly to raise a family here. We should go somewhere more ... tropical perhaps."

"Is that you, my brother?" asked a blind fox, who instantly appeared before us.

Rabbit appeared nervous. At the end he consented to answer, and having so strong and manly notions, that the king of this realm along with the whole village may have succumbed to the stink bomb of his own creation. 

"No ... we are travelers." Rabbit said. "Can't you see that?"

"No ... I'm blind" The fox said.

The Fox related some ideas seen in Old Testament, something about Palestine primogeniture, and apparently was known as Cosmo de' Medici ... being one of the three poets being recalled though time in divine bondage after the great genocide. 
Apparently this was the first time he's been back to earth since the uranium mines of Pluto were discovered, at some distant point in the far future.

"So you are not from this time either asked Alice?"

"No. I am stuck here. I am from many thousands of years forward." Said Cosmo. "I and the colonists stuck together in the hopes the black fleet would not come. But our spirits broke when they came ashore and did this. Many of my kind took their own lives with rubber utensils before succumbing to the stench, while others let giant cakes devour them and smother them in sticky goo."

"Giant Cakes?" Alice said.

"Yes ... there was one in particular ... with this huge peppermint -"

"SPOOGEY!!" Alice said, "Spoogey was here? ... That could only mean ... YOU WERE HERE RABBIT!!"

"Indeed ... where else could those giant desserts have come from." I agreed.

"Rabbit ... what have you to say for this?"

He answered firmly and proudly, as one who was suffering the most frightful of tortures; "I will be injured by the reports of some of the men of science if I answered that! No do not ask me again of those horrid beasts and my deeds, I was held prisoner on my own ship ... they ... did things to me. Bad things. They MADE me make the poetic stinking time bomb!"

"Indeed." I thought. How much more unattractive a conversation this had become. Discretion in conversation is always a good practice, and I have an easy way of getting at something when I need to.  "Cosmo ... perhaps you would like to accompany us?" I asked the strange traveler.

"NO!!" Said the Rabbit.

"YES!" Said Alice, it's MY FUZZY STARSHIP now, and I may decide who rides within it. Rabbit ... I should leave you here to rot among the corpses of these dead poets for what you did here."

"NO! NO! NO! Oh please Alice don't leave me here!" Rabbit begged.

"Very well ... but you'd best behave yourself of I shall have Cosmo cook you." She said with an evil grin.

"I shall accompany you Alice and your erudite colleagues" The Fox said, and he resisted the urge to nuzzle her head. "I could make a nice stew out of him if you like?"

"Maybe later." Alice laughed. "Let's get out of here."

We headed back to Alice's fuzzy starship, and set the time/space controls for a new dimension. Cosmo said he had come from another world in 11,509AD ... but he couldn't be sure after being the cook on the colony ship that dropped him in Ancient Rome, because the crew was nothing more than a well-ordered arrangement of rebels. Alice held up the ladder and stopped beside the big one-thousand-inch eye looking at us as we approached the bow.

"Open up ship." She said. And the portal slid aside. The four of us entered.

"Amazing!" Said Cosmo. An invisible fuzzy ship!"

Alice, quite pleased to know her way said; "Lessons teach you to do much, but do keep it hidden and secret!"

"I do not boast too much you know", retorted Cosmo. "Although I do have a correct knowledge of the fundamental principles of painful regret, as well as the sacro-vertebral angle that must eventually cause indigestion."

"Indigestion?" I asked the blind Fox. "Are you a cook by chance?

"Yes ... I am a master of culinary poetics, imperfectly masticated by the greatest English authorities on schools mental hygiene. In the case where animal food has been put into question, I often put on black clothes." The Fox said proudly.

"Naturally of course," I replied, "and you indeed seem to know it."

Rabbit moved to the bridge and Alice glared at him.

"No Rabbit, I am going to pilot the ship from now on.

"Why?" Asked Rabbit. "I've never given up a small bulb on the quadrangles of the ship.

"You know why." Alice said. Now are you going to cooperate, or do you want to stay here and rot. Rabbit quickly hauled the remaining conservatism he had clung to, and satisfied himself to find unholy ways to keep in shape ... so that one day when they were not looking, he might eat off our heads.

Rabbit thought ... 'These flax-people have indeed have lived long enough to serve my good purpose. And I certainly will sacrifice her best impulses, and get her to rise to the moral capacity of wild sex with me, with the help of a few sturdy dark angels. I'm sure of it!'

- to be continued -