Page 105 of Katabasis
Alice thought about searching for meaning here, but the marble block had taught her better. She kept walking.
Sometime around sunset tall, white structures appeared on the horizon. She gravitated toward them, for the most basic need of a destination more than anything else. As she approached the white things she began to hear low, guttural moans. They were so faint at first that she did not register them as human at all. They sounded rather like empty glass bottles blowing when wind hit their apertures. Then she came closer, and looked up. She saw skeletal cages above—reminiscent of dustland construction, abandoned building frames—only these were made of alabaster bone, and glimmered under the sun. Their construction was exquisite, a lattice network of bones fit together just so, so that groove rested perfectly against groove, so that those cages swayed back and forth but never fell.
She wondered if these were built by deities. But there was something gorgeous about their mathematical perfection. These were projects possible only if you had eons of time, and a singular devastating focus. The structures of Hell were dreamscapes that emerged effortless from the mist. These cages took effort. They were meticulously human.
Trapped inside were Shades; hands clenching the bars, moaning in disharmony. Alice’s mind flashed ridiculously to study rooms, to carrels at exam time; rooms filled by lowered heads and hunched shoulders in uniform solitude. Whenever the carrels were all booked up some students would build their own carrels from books, walling themselves in, hostile in their focus. This hopeless atmosphere—oh, she remembered it well; she had felt it acutely before. You could not walk through those carrels without choking in despair.
These Shades did not seem trapped against their will. Those bars were very wide. Alice saw no guards, no chains. And those were not cries of despair. Were not voluntary noises at all. The sound was not of them, but moved through them, an involuntary response against physical forces. The necessary reaction to let the universe know you were still there. Was this punishment, or a refuge? Perhaps both. It wasn’t clear. Alice could only assume, like everything else, this was some way to make Hell more bearable. She could imagine a kind of peace up there in the sky, trapped in her own cage. Barely visible around her, others in their own cages as well—and the comfort of knowing that others were just as alone as you were. Far away from the cruel desert where nothing could touch you, an oasis unto yourself.
She cupped her hands around her mouth.
“Hello up there,” she called. She felt a sudden urge to join them. Right then nothing seemed better than a spiraling cage of her own, just and eternal.I want to moan too, I want to vanish into despair.“Hello?
The Shades did not acknowledge her.
“Hello? Might I come up there?”
A short pause to the moaning. Then it continued, redoubled, as if determined to drown out the interruption.
Alice felt very silly then, so she trudged on.Let them have it their way, she thought. Those cages were ugly anyhow. She could build a prison all on her own.
By midafternoon, the sand had hardenedinto cracked, brown rock. No more were the alien rocks and taunting patterns. She had gone from desert to deadlands. There was a difference; one was muted life and one was the scorched earth after everything living was burned away. The air here felt thicker, dryer and hotter. It smelled of frustration; of thirst never slaked.
Alice figured she was approaching the boundary between Cruelty and Tyranny.
There was no line in the sand, nothing that declared a hard and fast distinction between the cruel man’s blows and the tyrant’s cunning manipulation. Still Alice could tell the difference. The air sat heavy on her tongue. There was a metallic, musty tang here. The wind rose, a blistering force that rubbed her cheeks raw. She clutched her hood around her face. Her knuckles cracked and bled.
The Shades, too, acted differently. All the Shades of the previous courts had been harmless, too caught up with their own suffering to pay Alice much notice. But the Shades of Tyranny, sparse as they were, seemed aware of her and of each other in a way that made her uneasy. Several times she saw movement out of the corner of her eye, or glimpsed faces watching her from the trees. Yet every time she turned, they had disappeared.
She knew not what they wanted from her, or indeed, what they could do to her. She only felt their malice all about, constant and sharp, prickling like ant bites.
But she couldn’t turn back. There was nowhere else to go. So she wrapped her jacket tighter around herself, kept her knife close at her belt, and trudged on.
The sun sank and vanished. Alicewalked until her limbs shook, and then she hunkered down in the shadow of a boulder to examine what supplies she still had with her. The Lembas Bread was waterlogged, but the bits in the middle were still good. All the tea was foul with bog water—she threw that away. Miraculously the copied flask still worked. She drank one cup of clear good water, then another, and then six.
Body sated, mind cleared, she unfortunately began to think.
In the process of keeping herself alive, she realized she had to come up with a justification for all this effort.
What she knew was that she didn’t fear death anymore. She had seen the other side in that Escher trap, and like a child receiving her first flu jab, or emerging intact from the dentist’s office, she understood there was nothing much to fear. Death was just nothing. A twinge of pain, and that was it. And she had it better than any Shades, for she didn’t even have the afterlife to contend with. Only the vanishing of the self, and the end of all obligations.
But the question now—now that she was no longer motivated by the instinctive fear of death, now that she had no urgent reason to keep running—was what came next. She had a bigger problem on her hands now, which was the point of living. Living meant a future meant some teleological end, but Alice could not figure out what on earth she was going on for.
Her original quest seemed so silly now. She didn’t care to find Professor Grimes. She might be content if she never saw Professor Grimes again. The scales had fallen from her eyes. But she could not imagine any other future for herself. Everything she’d ever wanted now felt so frivolous; their pursuit agonizing. She imagined standing before her dissertation committee; receiving her marks from Grimes; moving on to her own job posting where another crop of miserable graduate students would come up under her tutelage. She imagined becoming a part of the cycle. She would rather have a cell in Desire.
Meanwhile death was so present, and obvious, and enticing.
Alas, she had put her mind to it, and her mind had settled on two premises that formed the incontrovertible conclusion that she must live.
First, because Peter had asked her to, and she owed him that much.
And second, because of his ridiculous hope that, at the end of everything, one might make an exception of Hell.
Damn Peter and his exceptions. Whether she liked it or not, he’d buried within her a seed that she couldn’t grind away. Like Dante’s Adam and Noah, like Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, like the possibility of a True Contradiction, maybe going on meant believing in what she couldn’t possibly know. Maybe if she went on she could find some way to make this pain stop. Maybe.Maybe.
Follow the river. Rescue Professor Grimes. Get out. Alice felt no internal motivation toward these objectives, but they were the only scripts she had, and they were better than nothing. At least they gave her reason to put one foot in front of another, again and again, until the minutes turned to hours turned to miles over endless silt.
The next day, Alice came uponthe tower.
