Page 123 of Katabasis
“Yes you can,” said the knob. “Try, try...”
“I’ve tried.”
“Try harder. It will come. You will calm.”
“But how do you know?”
She was aware of how childish she sounded, but at that moment she did feel a childish need for the simplest answers. If only someone would tell her she would be all right. If only someone would show her the way.
“Because you’re not the first.”
The knob creaked back, and Alice followed its gaze down the groves clustered in all corners of the campo: all up the side streets and up the walls, trailing out of windows. Dense forestry crowded the inner streets of the Rebel Citadel for as far as Alice could see.
“They come in agony,” said the knob. “They come with their regrets and confessions. They come in shame, and with a great urge to make things right. They stand in the squares and fret like you are now, until they learn the calm of stony places, and they become part of the grove.”
“And now they’re asleep?” Alice asked.
“Close,” said the knob. “Sleep doesn’t come, not here. But close your eyes, still your mind, and you get something close...”
“But what if I can’t?”
“Then seek the monasteries.”
“The monasteries?”
“Across the way,” said the knob. “In the shade lie the trees. Along the cliffs, the abbeys...”
Alice had thought the citadel was emptied, still. But where the knob gestured, inside the walls along the cliffs, she saw Shades in congregation. No great movement, but a kind of stirring; rhythmic, circular. Souls pacing in place. Souls chanting in unison. That was the buzzing, she realized; not bees, but psalms.
“Psalms at Terce,” said the knob. “Prayers at Nones, prayers at Vespers. In all other hours, prayers and meditation...”
“Praying to what?”
“They pray to the act,” said the knob. “They pray to waiting, for the strength to be patient until the end. Until the world turns upside down. Until the Lethe runs dry, and the domain of Lord Yama turns in on itself. For nothing is eternal, not even the order of this universe, and one day the eight courts will fold in on themselves and the meaning of being itself will change. They believe that souls cannot be purified by retribution, or reformation, but only by the fires of time. That thekalavada, the school of time, holds all answers to the cryptic idiocies of Hell.”
This response was so disappointing, Alice nearly wept. “So they’re waiting for nothing.”
“Do they not have good reason to wait?” asked the knob. “Every religion supplies an origin of the universe. Every tale has a beginning. Every beginning implies an end. The one became a million which will diminish to one again. The fires of Ragnarok will split the earth and birth it anew. Even Father Time is not infinite; even he will be slain.”
“So what?” Alice cried. “They think they’ll survivethat? The apocalypse?”
“Nothing will survive the apocalypse,” said the knob. “But it takes away the necessity of choice. They do not move on. They do not die. They only wait. They await the turning of the sands. A new world, and a newer world after that. Worlds you could not imagine, with laws utterly unlike our own. Worlds where entropy runs in the other direction, and time proceeds toward order. Worlds where men fly, and birds are tied to the ground. Worlds where chance does not exist, and the future is a solid, steady block. Worlds without pain and suffering, worlds without subjectivity, worlds of beauty, worlds worth dreaming for...”
Perhaps, thought Alice; but this was a game not of millennia, but orders of magnitude even above that. And before that new world came, their world had to die, and everything in it. Nothing here would survive the turning of the sands. These souls would not perceive the future.
It pained her more and more to look at this forest, all this vegetation that had given up and was content now to barelybe. She thought to all the hours she had ever wasted in her life; all the minutes she had watched count down on the clock, waiting for them to go faster. Whole days she had spent confined to her room like a prisoner, sitting blankly on her chair, anticipating the ritual marks that proved time was going by: meals she didn’t eat; prayers she didn’t attend; the bells at all hours, reminding students it was time to get going. She’d been so relieved to sleep; so disappointed to wake. Back then every hour that slipped by her seemed like a tiny victory. But why had she been so eager for that time to disappear? What was that countdownto?
At least in the world above she had the slimmest hope that something in her condition might change, that one day she would wake up and feel right again, that a door would open up; a solution would present itself. Here that countdown led nowhere at all. Change was foreclosed. Here all events were just little piles in the hourglass; reaching, then collapsing, over and over again.
The garden seemed so dead and cold then. That wasn’t green. Just the memory thereof. Just a cruel imitation.
And Alice realized with terrible clarity that this was the worst punishment of the citadel, of Hell itself. This punishment they had wrought themselves. If Aristotle and Leibniz were right, and time was just change, then time was done for them. But not for everyone else. They still had to feel it, chronicity with no telos. And to be placed outside of time—denied everything that moved in cycles, birthing and growing and aging and dying; denied ancestors and descendants; denied any place in the tree—while at once forced to feel every inch of its slow, inexorable progress—God, but this was horrific! Stumps only, dead ends with diminishing echoes of their short mortal loops. Immortality here was no gift. Nothing was fleeting, precious, and so nothing was valuable. Not even thoughts, for none of their thoughts were original, but mere echoes of one another, everything they would ever be capable of thinking in a gilded box with the spotlight merely roving. Nothing added; no discovery, no delight. No growth here. Just withered stumps of time.
Suddenly the campo seemed to shrink around her. Alice had a vision of sinking into that grove; of receding further and further into the settled souls until black branches closed over her face. She felt a swell of panic, and this made her want to yank at the branches, smack at the leaves, set the whole thing on fire, just to make it stir. Oh, to make it scream!
“Well then,” she snapped, “if you’re notwaitingfor anything except the end of the world, then why don’t you just die?”
At this, a cluster of branches beside her made a low keening noise. Alice felt a stirring in the bush. Something solidified, pressing against her shoulder. She saw a silhouette that hadn’t been there before. The slope of a forehead; the mass of a chest.
