This idea was inspired by TheLightsAreOnButNobody'sHome who has done sterling work in matching song lyrics to Discworld characters, It's inspired me. This is my take on it. Thanks TLAOBNH.
The song I'm using is one I wish I'd written. Originally © Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, 1967. I really wish I'd written this.
A spin-off from The Graduation Class – a bit of spare text I couldn't find a way to make fit. A five-minute piece of near-nonsense possibly masking deeper meaning (and yes, I've done acid). Enjoy.
Time hung heavy in the Poisons and Exothermic Alchemy lab and demonstration room at the Assassins' Guild school. It was a late summer afternoon, a couple of months into the training course for the Mature Entrants' Class. Along with the twenty-nine other mature candidates for full Assassin status, Alice Band had been kept busy all day with physical activity such as basic edificeering and sword drill. She was starting to flag somewhat.
The dry and dour Mericet had divided them into teams of two. They had already worked out how to do this: in return for Alice coaxing and cajoling her through the Edificeering training, Joan Sanderson-Reeves, who before her arrest by the Guild had been a proficient amateur poisoner, would guide Alice through a subject she had no real feel for. Meanwhile, Emmanuelle and Johanna occupied the next pair's working area, and could also benefit from Joan's greater skill and feel for the subject.
"Incapacitants." Mericet droned on. "These are favoured where there is a need to humanely eliminate a threat from any bodyguards around the client, or where there are people to silence and remove from play before you reach the contracted client. Unless you are conducting an inhumation with extreme prejudice, it is considered impolite to randomly inhume and annul everyone who stands between you and completion of your contract. It is also thought of as being somewhat unstylish. Therefore you require an arsenal of weapons at your disposal which will incapacitate, and render harmless, without actually killing. Fortunately, there are several classes of drugs which will help you achieve this happy goal of rendering harmless without inhuming. I now propose to take you through the various classes of incapacitants, and through practical synthesis of several. I need hardly warn you that normal lab discipline applies, ie breathing masks and surgical gloves. Take a moment now to don these."
The class of diligent students got to work, Alice fighting off waves of tiredness and Joan tirelessly working, occasionally prompting her.
"Lithium hydroxide, m'dear. Good old LiOH. So easy to make, and such a gratifying quick result!" Joan said, with the easy assurance of one to whom the subject comes easily. "Also known as a liquid cosh, or a Mickey Finn, by the way. Two drops of this in somebody's bedtime cocoa, and it assures them of a night's unbroken sleep!"
Sleep. thought Alice. A lovely, lovely, word.
They moved on to Disorientating Drugs, which rendered the subject incapable of coherent reaction to an immediately pressing situation. From simple tactics such as flooding a guardroom with nitrous oxide – "erroneously known as laughing gas" – they moved on to hallucinogenics.
"You each have a sample of ergot fungus in front of you." Mericet's monotone voice rolled on. "This may be cultivated on damp grain produce or on brown bread, and its influence has been thought to be responsible for some of our more, ah, colourful, religious texts, such as the Paisely-Patterned Apocalypse of Om, or the Psychedelic Revelations Of St Ungulant, Dig The Freaky Purple Spiders, Man, laden as they are with vivid and memorable imagery. (1)"
Mericet paused.
"The cultivated fungus spores may be used direct, or used to lace foodstuffs, or, as I will now show you, may be refined via alkaline hydrogenation into a crystalline acid of even greater potency. Observe."
It was during the synthesis of lysergic acid diethylamide from ergot fungus that Alice realised she had a rip in her latex glove, down the inner seam of one finger. She changed gloves quickly, noting that the world around her seemed suddenly brighter and more colourful. She vaguely remembered Mericet warning that many of these chemicals could be absorbed directly through the skin, but it seemed far away and unimportant.
As Emmanuelle-Marie Lapoignard les Deux-Epees put it later, by the end of the lesson, Alice Band was tripping her tits off.
One pill makes you larger,
And one pill makes you small;
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all…
Go ask Alice!
When she's ten feet tall….
With deep absorption, Alice watched the familiar buildings of the Guild recede and wash forward like waves on a beach, grow and shrink like crazy plants. Or was it her, expanding and shrinking many many times a second? Oh, wow, ten feet tall one minute, six inches high the next, alternately looking down on Johanna and Joan, then looking up at them, while Emmanuelle laughs multicolour tinkling laughter that smells of oranges…
"This isn't funny, Emmanuelle! At least help us get her up to bed!"
"Do you think it's going to lest?" A red-haired face swum into Alice's distorted field of vision, radiating anxiety. For some unfocused reason this provoked a surge of fear and anxiety in Alice. She associated it with decapitation…a head hacked off…
The Red Queen! She gibbered. Off with her head!
Alice was aware of motion upwards, up a spiral staircase. She looked up.
Yes. There I am. On the next spiral up. And on the one above that. Why am I not surprised?
And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall….
She saw an infinity of Alice Bands on the spiral staircase leading upwards. She was too scared to look at the infinity of Alice Bands on the spiral staircase leading downwards. She panicked that she might fall and join them, a fallen angel, seeing her father's irate face, a fallen daughter bound for Hell…
Let's get her to bed. Find her a nightgown, Johanna. Emmanuelle, help me get her day clothes off. We can make her comfortable. But this is going to be an all-nighter, girls, I'm afraid. We can't just leave her!
Caring hands laid her out on an ocean of softness. She felt layers of skin being removed. She was lifted and a new skin was rolled onto her, so that made it alright…
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call…
She smelt smoke. Sitting at the bedside with her legs elegantly crossed and radiating concern and sisterly affection, Emmanuelle, one of her foul Quirmian cheroots on the go. Only she would smoke like a chimney in a sick-room. But why is she turning into a large slug-like creature.. no, a caterpillar, it has stubby little legs… smoking a Klatchian hookah… ah. Time to recede and shrink again…
Just ask Alice
When she was just small….
Alice, aged ten, sitting with her father the Bishop, who is teaching her to play chess. He is relaxed, and has even taken off the white clerical collar and the purple front. With a terrible aching shock, she realises how much she loved him and how much the Rift cost both of them. Later her brother James, the favoured older son who went to the Assassins' School, taught her how to play Assassins' Chess, with the extra file at each side of the board and the unique new piece, the Assassin, that moves in the Slurks according to rules all of its own. (2)
When men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go,
And you've just had some kind of mushroom,
And your mind is moving low,
Go ask Alice….
I think she'll know!
The White Assassin looked up from the board and winked at her.
"Happy families now, Alice, but in four years time you blow it all to pieces, and your father will barely be able to look at you. Won't you be glad? ! Ekyd Ekyd Eyyd naibsel Ekyd trevrep nekasrof-oI sselepoH l"
Alice saw the family chess-playing evening being interrupted by her mother's voice, telling them the starter would be on the table soon, and it was mushroom soup, everyone…
She could have screamed inside. Where had the years gone since that happy early childhood in the Bishop's palace in Quirm? Would she ever see her parents again in any sort of afterlife? And was this trip going to take her to other memories of her earlier life?
Alice briefly surfaced to find Joan feeding her orange juice.
"Lots of vitamin C. That's the ticket for this stuff. The vitamin breaks down the LSD molecule in the blood and we get the real Alice back in her own true mind. That's the ticket, my love. Drink it down, there's plenty!"
Then she dived again.
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead;
She swam through a world of four-sided triangles and pinwheeling brains. In the dark forest, a Skundian shaman asked her if she was Topaxe, Spirit of the Smoke. Alice said she thought that was a very personal question, thank you very much, and the shamefaced shaman said he needed to know, as if Alice were Uncherrel, Spirit of the Mushroom, he'd only merit Sorceror rank, you see.
And the White Knight is talking backwards,
And the Red Queen's "off with her head!"
"Well, I'm Alice, spirit of the mushroom soup" she said, before being dragged back to the bed where her body laid. And…oh no… the deadly Red Queen again, sitting at the bedside, her face radiating concern.. Alice saw, clearly, the Red Queen standing over a dying man with a machete. She takes him, a black native with a bomb-shattered body, by the hair and delivers the mercy blow…
"Off with his head!" Alice screamed. "The Red Queen! What she did to end up here! The Black King! She took his head off!"
Under her Titian mass of red hair, Johanna Smith-Rhodes paled. Back in Howondalaand, she had inhumed a Zulu warlord with a massive bomb. Then taken his head and impaled it on his own spear, leaving it in his kraal as silent warning to his people. It had been right at the time, necessary for the existence of the Staadt. But it had ultimately brought her here, and contrary to her hopes, an act of revenge had brought no relief for the deaths of the van Rental family. It still haunted her dreams sometimes, as she'd also inhumed his wives and children. Bombs do not discriminate. She is beginning to be aware that it might not have been a nice thing to do, and Alice's drug-trip accusation hasn't helped.
The mouse in the teapot stuck its sleepy head out to see what the noise was.
"You're not my Alice!" it said.
"Well, you're in the wrong story!" Alice accused it. "You must have crossed over from somewhere else!"
"No." said the White Rabbit. "You've crossed over from another story into this one. You're not the Alice who belongs in this fiction. You're a clergyman's daughter, yes, but you are surely not Alice Liddell. Would you mind kindly leaving?"
Can we have our Alice back, please? she heard the White Rabbit say as it merged into Joan Sanderson-Reeves' spare figure.
"Alright, m'dear?" Joan asked. "It's been twelve hours now. Mericet said an inadvertent dose normally lasts this long. Johanna and I have been sitting up with you. As for Missy, she took first watch and then cleared off to bed!."
"Did I say or do anything stupid?" Alice asked.
"No more than usual!" Joan assured her. "Although you spooked poor Johanna, when you told her about… something she did… back home in Howondalaand. "
"Something she did?"
"Well, I scored eighteen before the Guild caught me. You got thirteen. Emmnuelle only got to eight. Young Johanna was very indiscriminate with a barrel of Agatean fireclay. She scored the best part of thirty-two. She doesn't talk about it very much. She'd die rather than admit it, but I think our Red Queen has a bad conscience."
"Joan?"
"Yes, dear?"
"I'm hungry… any food going?"
Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head!
Feed your head!
Feed your head!"
Alice slept again.
In this dream she was on a stage. There were musicians behind her. In front were thousands of people, young men and women, dressed like tatterdemalion clowns in multicolour motley, with extravagantly painted faces. They were looking at her as if expecting her to do something. The musicians were looking at her as if expecting her to do something.
Alice paused. This body wasn't hers. Less toned. Wider-hipped, bigger breasted, a little bit fatter all round. Thicker, coarser, darker, hair.
She realised it was the last of the drug surging through her. A last station on the trip. Right, OK.
Something behind and to her right started a low, insistent, bass theme that sent shivers down her spine and made her body move. A guitar took it up. Then a drum, beating a slow almost military tattoo.
Alice, moving sensuously with the music, now knew exactly what to do. She took the... thing... in her hand. It looked like one of Tuttle Scropes' under the counter intimate devices, but a great big crackle arose when she tapped the end. But… here was the cue… I have to sing into it, apparently... stranger things have happened in dreams...
One pill makes you larger,
And one pill makes you small!
And the ones that mother gives you,
Don't do anything at all.
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall!
Alice privately thought her voice was too reedy and thin to be brought out in public. But here she was, riding in another body, sharing her voice, sharing the adulation of the fans... doing exactly the sort of thing the normally shy and retiring Alice Band did not do. And to sing in the voice of this woman…. she was called Grace? - which was strong and firm and carried and built, it was exhilarating. And the crowd were shouting and screaming and applauding for a favourite song…
Grace's voice, sung by Alice, built slowly and passionately to its crescendo in
Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head!
Feed your head!
Feed your head!" Then a climactic few notes and silence, as he last drawn-out sung note faded.
Then wild and screaming applause….
Alice woke, flushed, the screaming applause of thousands dying in her head. So that's what they meant by Music with Rocks In, she thought, as she cherished the memory of a very nice dream where she'd been free to be somebody else entirely… a memorable performer, this Grace. Very polished. Very ….slick.
(1) This has been advanced as a plausible reason for the coming into being of the last book of the Bible, the Apocalypse of St John of Patmos (Revelations). The theory is that living as a hermit on a remote Greek island, St john of the apocalypse was dependent on… yes, badly stored grain and wholemeal bread produce, which got damp and cultivated the hallucinogenic ergot fungus. As Revelations reads like a bad acid trip, this is very plausible.
(2) See the Assassins' Guild Yearbook or the New Discworld Companion for a description and rules of Assassins' Chess. Including use of the Assassin and where the Slurks are located.
YouTube link:- I don't know if this is permissible or not, it probably isn't according to the Guidelines, but if you're interested, load this into your address bar and see where it takes you:- it begins http:\\ www. youtube and if you reverse the forward slashes into backslashes and add
.com/watch?v=Quhj6PEboCU
you might get Grace Slick and the lads performing "White Rabbit" on American TV, late sixties.