Excerpt

In Wonderland, one only works in one's sleep.

All proper Wonderlandians spend all night, every night, hard at work winding the great clock of Wonderland, the Master Chronometer, of which all other Wonderlandians are but synchronized slave clocks.

At night, one understands that one is made of clockwork, although of course one pretends otherwise when one is awake. To do otherwise would make the current madness of the daylit Wonderlandians look like stark sanity.

Besides, it's only polite.

· · ·

The White Rabbit's main duty was to carry reports between the two main courts of Wonderland, the Red Queen's Court and the Golden Court. (The White Court had long since wandered into philosophical territories along the meandering coastline, no one knew quite where.) In order to accomplish this purpose, he had been given a new pocket-watch to replace his old one, and that served as a safe-conduct and prevented him from having to obey certain laws that affected the other Wonderlandians. Alas, no-one paid the slightest amount of attention to him, which meant that he was both the perfect messenger for traveling through dangerous territory, yet completely useless once he had arrived.

Being an earnest Rabbit, he attempted to warn both courts of the dangerous gossip he heard while traveling—that the populace of both the daylit and moonlit Wonderlands were very near to uprising, following a mysterious leader who spread rumors of something known as The Great Unwinding.

They ignored him.

He ran faster and tried harder to gain the attention of the two courts, and for a time it seemed almost as though they were listening to him—which may have been a mistake.

But then two clerks of the Golden Court caught up to him as he was carrying messages to and fro (you can tell that he was severely overworked because he was required to do both), and arrested for lack of sleep. This was a serious offense in Wonderland, and exactly the thing that the White Rabbit, as a lifelong bureaucrat, had come to expect: the tyranny of paradox.

The White Rabbit, in order to attract the attention of both courts, must work both day and night; and yet if he did not spend the proper amount of time each night winding the Master Chronometer, all the clockwork in Wonderland would slowly lose time (at least in theory), and no one could tolerate that.

And so, the harder the White Rabbit worked to save Wonderland, the more in debt of sleep he became.

The punishment for sleeplessness was death.

Pending trial, the White Rabbit was imprisoned at the top the needle-like tower that lay in the center of the Central Palace, which rested upon the Mainspring of the Great Chronometer.

No-one particularly liked the White Rabbit; no one particularly noticed that he was no longer gadding about except the Red Queen, who had one fewer Wonderlandian to shout at on a regular basis. When the other members of the courts heard what had happened, they scoffed.

"What good are reports?" said the Wonderlandians. "Just gossip. The Master Chronometer never falters; it's just the White Rabbit trying to make himself look important again."

· · ·

Alice was sitting above the riverbank with her sister, Ina; she was supposed to be reading Sermons, which unfortunately upset her stomach, so she was eating cherries and drawing figures in the dirt instead, with a forked stick.

"Alice!" cried her sister. "Your hands are covered in blood!"

Alice looked down at her hands, but it was only cherry juice they were covered in. She protested as much to her sister.

Her sister did not find this the least bit comforting. "Wash your hands off this instant or you'll stain your book!"

Alice did not see how she would be able to wash her hands off, at least not without making the mess worse than it already was, but she scooted down to the riverbank and dipped her hands into the water anyway, her sister being less than rational where books were involved.

Unfortunately the cherry juice had stained her hands, and there was no removing it.

She began to scrub her hands with sand from the riverbank, hoping at least to lighten the stains enough that they could be concealed by a pair of gloves—the juice had gone almost up to her elbows—but when she had finished her scrubbing, her hands were red still.

"I shall have to tell Ina that they are red for ever," Alice said to herself. "I wonder if she will tell Mother that I'm a murderer, for it's only murderers who have hands stained the color of blood in stories."

Alice leaned back on her heels and started to stand in order to climb up the riverbank, but was interrupted by a splash in the river.

Swimming weakly in the water in front of her was a rabbit. Not, as she had suddenly hoped, the White Rabbit who had once led her to Wonderland, but a brown one, with a brown coat, blue tie, and eyes bulging with fright.

He was a poor swimmer; in fact, it seemed as if he were about to drown.

"The March Hare!" Alice cried, then clapped both hands over her mouth, lest Ina take note. However, Ina only glanced up for a moment, then turned a page and went back to her book.

As soon as it was safe, Alice reached down and pulled the March Hare out of the river, and dragged him onto the bank.

He lay gasping on the sand, face down, his arms and legs spread wide as if he were clinging to the ground itself. "I'm late…I'm late…" he said.

Alice rolled him onto his back, then helped him to sit up. "Marchy! Whatever brings you out of Wonderland?"

"It was…terrible…mistake," he gasped. "Thought…White Rabbit…mocked…abused…so wrong…"

She gave him a cherry, which he ate greedily, smearing red juice all over his mouth and paws. He reached out for another, still gasping for air. Soon, however, he was able to speak.

"The White Rabbit has been arrested," he whispered, peering over Alice's shoulder at her sister, who was still reading her book.

"By the Red Queen? Is he all right? Has his head been cut off already? If so, I don't think I can do anything for him," said Alice.

"Not the Red Queen at all, but by the clerks of the Golden Court," the March Hare explained. "He worked so hard to try to convince the Red Queen and the Crown—that's the Crown that Watches over the Golden Court—that there was something to all the rumors of the Great Unwinding—and we did not believe him—and now he has been condemned to death for letting his accounts with the Master Chronometer fall into such arrears."

Alice hadn't the slightest idea what he was talking about, but the situation was soon explained, at least in part. When she had heard that the Wonderlandians were in actuality made of clockwork, she touched the March Hare on the ear, which felt exactly as warm and soft as that of any normal rabbit.

He flicked his ear and gave her a cross look. "Stop that!"

"Sorry." A question occurred to her. "But why is it so important that the White Rabbit be rescued from the Golden Court? He is only the old White Rabbit after all."

"That's what we all thought," said the March Hare. "And the truth is that the explanation was so confusing that I haven't the slightest idea at all what it means. But in short the Red Queen called for you to come, Alice, and it was either fetch your head to attend her or leave mine behind entirely."

Alice nodded; she could quite understand his point of view on the matter. "I shall come with you and find out what it is that has happened, if I must," she said, not mentioning the red stain on her hands, the sermon, or her sister. "But do you know how to get back to Wonderland from here? "

"Of course," the March Hare said, looking insulted. "You have only to—"

She put a finger against his cherry-stained mouth. "Shush," she said. "I don't wish to be any more confused than I am already. Don't explain, just lead on. When people begin to explain things, it only makes my head ache."