Page 100 of Katabasis
Peter shrugged but said nothing. He only continued writing.
It exhausted her to watch him. How silly this was, she thought. How silly this all was—not just his scribbling, but the entirety of their efforts. Their situation in the Escher trap was just a microcosm of their entire lives at Cambridge: endless scribbling in an attempt to prove they could be the golden exception when in truth there was nothing exceptional about them at all; they were only following the scripts laid out for them from the beginning. And clearly the only thing to do was to get off the wheel, to quit, and refuse playing the game. Really the only victory here was death. How could she convince him?
She tugged on his sleeve. “Peter.”
He paused. “Yes?”
“We don’t have to be afraid,” she whispered. “It’s just as Elspeth said. We’re living souls in Hell. We won’t go anywhere. We won’t become anything. It’ll just be over—everything, all of it, done.”
“But I don’t want it to be done.”
“Oh, hush.” She patted his knee. “It will be fine, I promise.”
“Don’t say that.”
She only patted him more firmly, as if he were a crying babe, as if he only needed to stop making such a fuss. “It’ll all be silent. It will be all right.”
She was so tired. Her eyesight had gone blurry. She couldn’t see Peter’s face then. She saw his lips moving but heard nothing, and then all she saw was the outline of a shape, growing smaller and smaller in her view, until all receded to black.
Snap.
Her eyes blinked open. Peter’s fingers hovered just under her nose. He snapped again, and she startled awake, ears ringing.
“Wake up,” he said briskly. “I’ve figured it out.”
“Hm?” Alice raised her head. Her whole body felt fuzzy. She didn’t remember when she’d drifted off to sleep, nor could she tell how long she’d been out. The low red sky burned above, just the same as always.
Peter sat hunched over an array of papers, still scribbling. He’d filled out eight sheets at least since she’d drifted off—all covered in crossed-out, circled, and shaded-in algorithms.
“Our way out,” he said. “I’ve got it.”
Reluctantly she sat up. “What?”
“It should have been obvious.” He spoke at a quick, robotic clip, a voice Alice knew quite well. It was the voice he always took on in lab when he’d figured something out; when he needed to get it all out at once but couldn’t get his mouth to keep up with his thoughts. “Something I know from introductory logic. A silly game, really. It’s got to do with types of knowledge and probabilities. But perhaps I shouldn’t tell you, it’ll weaken the paradox—”
“Murdoch.”
“Okay. Listen.” He drew a neat circle between them, just large enough for two to stand side by side. “Would you say that when the Kripkes come, it will be a surprise?”
Alice couldn’t determine the significance of this statement, but neither could she find a problem with it. “Ah, sure.”
“And would you say that they must come sometime between now and when we starve to death five days from now, otherwise our blood will go bad?”
“I suppose that’s what I would do.”
“Excellent.” He pressed his palms together. “Then the conditions are set.”
Her head hurt. “I still don’t understand.”
“Just listen,” said Peter. “Now, suppose a prisoner is awaiting his moment at the gallows. The hangman tells him he’ll be hanged sometime in the week, but otherwise he is not to know the date of his execution. Which day of the week can we rule out, then?”
Alice pondered this, and then ventured, “Sunday?”
“Good. Why?”
“Because it’s the last day of the week. So if he hasn’t been hung on any of the previous days, then he’ll know it’s happening Sunday. Only then it won’t be a surprise.”
“Very good,” said Peter. “So Sunday’s out. What happens, then, if he still hasn’t been hung by Saturday?”
