Page 125 of Katabasis
She could not find the Lethe. She had lost sight of it as she ran, and now no matter which direction she turned, she could not find it. She could not see its faint black outline on the horizon, nor hear its waves crashing against the rocks. Until now Hell had been always bounded at least on one side, and now it was not. No matter which map was right—Peter’s spiral/pizza/anus, her linear progressive map—the Lethe was the only limit on infinity. And in both Euclidean and hyperbolic space, a line that once intersected another would never intersect it again.
When she considered the implication of this, the bottom fell out of her stomach. If she never found the Lethe again, she might just trek deeper into infinity forever.
Oh, dear.
She had no landmarks. She could not find the citadel. She could not find Dis. The terrain was confounding, and seemed deliberately so. The land taunted her. The grounds shifted far more rapidly than the earlier courts, and every time she glanced up she was somewhere new. A ring of cacti became a ring of rocks; a hill in the distance became, at second glance, a valley. At the very least she thought she was not walking in circles, for she came across no familiar landmarks—but the desert-scape re-formed itself so often that even if she was spinning in place, she might not even know.
But what was there to do but trek?
She would not die. She would not fade away, passive, listless, into the black. She knew this much. But that was all she knew. She needed that fact to matter, but she didn’t have the reasons why at hand. Only the inkling of an idea. An impulse really. An open question, a fumbling in the dark. That was enough to keep going. It had to be.
We are searching, she told herself.And we will know what we are searching for, when we find it.
Time slipped by. She stopped counting the days. She lost track of the sun, the moon. She suspected the moon had disappeared; whenever she searched the sky, she couldn’t find it. She found she didn’t get hungry or thirsty anymore. When she did eat she felt nourished, but otherwise, her body felt theoretical. Her metabolism must have slowed; she hardly registered her need. Perhaps her body was stilling to match the rhythm of Hell, where change was counted in not hours but ages. In her mind’s eye she saw herself whittled down until she was hard and gleaming like the incomprehensible skeletons that littered the plane.
Here was a riddle: If nothing lived in Hell, then how was it that bones were stripped bare? For it was hawks and buzzards, nibbling crawling bugs, that made skeletons gleam so on earth. Death was scrubbed clean because life went on; rot and decomposition were growth; the cycles begot one another, so how did death polish itself in these wastelands, where time stood still?Boundaries are porous, she thought.That must be it; the only explanation.Life seeped in, even here at its antithesis; life made death beautiful, and kept the circle going.
But the implications of this were profound! This meant there were no absolutes, if even death itself was not an absolute.Peter and Gödel were right, she thought.The universe is incomplete, and I am one of their moving exceptions. But what does the fact of me prove, except that I am here?
As she wandered deeper into the desert she began uncovering the strangest things. Bookcases half buried in the sand. Books in languages she had never encountered. Metal bars—silver, bronze, gold tools—curved into shapes she had never seen and could not imagine a use for. Dentistry implements? Torture devices? Or evidence of another civilization; something ancient even to the Sumerians, the Mesopotamians? It was quite incredible. These artifacts matched absolutely nothing in her memory bank, set off no associations. This was new. This sparked a dull curiosity in her; the embers of the fire of discovery that had once guided her every decision. She might have stopped to study them. She might have been the first chthonic anthropologist. But she wouldn’t have known where to start—these were texts that she couldn’t decipher; markings she couldn’t even identify.
She recalled another theory she had read of Hell; this one from a Mahayana Buddhist text, which held that the world itself moved through cycles of life, death, and rebirth just as humans did. The world hurtled through the stages of civilization until humans burned themselves out, and everything fell in cataclysm—through climate change, or world war, or any variety of planetary destruction that turned all that vibrant life into gray silt. And that became the resting place for all souls, from the beginning of time until now, until a spark of life formed on the other side—and the seeds of life began to sprout. So the world kept shifting and tilting like a great coin, souls spilling over from one side to another. Perhaps Gertrude and her ilk did have some reason to hope, then. Perhaps Hell was indeed not eternal; perhaps the sands would shift and the souls in Dis would emerge masters of some world.
But before that moment came—a millennium had passed, and how many more millennia to go?
Jesus fasted forty days in the desert, and emerged only when he’d resisted Satan’s temptations. Here Alice found nothing quite so clarifying. She passed no test. She was bored and desperate and ready to give it all up, and she was sure that the moment some demon offered any way out she would accept.Let me return to the citadel, she thought;give me a cell in Desire, a carrell in Pride.
The desert did not purify or improve her. It taught her nothing—except that the loneliness, the sheer expanse, made her rebuild and reinforce herself, like an insistent castle on shifting sands. One sought structure in the flow. One needed repetition, a pounding sound. I am still here. I think, therefore I am.I am Alice Law, I am a postgraduate at Cambridge, I study analytic magick...she really did need to reinforce these things, because the sheer, flat wash threatened to erode her sense of self until she was just swimming in a bath of unstructured memories. Faces here; feelings there; but what did it all build up to? Who did those recollections make?
The strangest effect of all this was that her memories stopped bothering her so much. Her skull no longer felt so painfully tight. Instead her thoughts were given space and time to spill outward; a flow from which she could step outside, pick and choose. The awful stuff was still there, but it was easier somehow to let it just—slide through her fingers. She had now some way to sort those memories; some coherent narrative built on the most basic premises, which she repeated over and over in her head, so as to remember she was human at all.
My name is Alice Law.
Sometimes I am very clever but most of the time I am not.
I have been a good person sometimes, and a bad person at others.
Sooner or later I will die.
But before I do, I will try—I will try very hard—to make itcount.
Once she heard skittering behind herand her heart nearly dropped out from fear. But she turned and saw it was only a poor lurching animal. A leopard or wolf or coyote, she could not tell in the dim light—some thing composed of hide and bones that seemed on the point of death but not quite there yet. All sorts of things make their way down to Hell, Elspeth had told them. People and animals and forgotten things.
She decided it was some sort of large cat. She could only guess, for its fur was so dirty and matted, its head and ears mangled with sores. But its eyes gleamed a bright green, pupils narrowed to thin black slits. She thought she remembered from freshman biology that only cats could manage such an eerie glare.
They regarded one another in silence, breathing. Alice watched the cat’s flanks laboring to expand, contract, expand. It was so very thin.
“Poor thing,” she murmured. “How did you get down here?”
The cat padded forward. She realized, belatedly, she ought be afraid; that under that matted fur and those jutting ribs still was a deadly predator that had clearly gone far too long without eating. Its jaws glistened; saliva dripped from yellow fangs. Borges had written once of a distant wildfire, colored the pink of a leopard’s gums. The cat was close enough now that Alice could see its raw wound of a mouth. She wondered if this was Borges’s leopard. Fire in a maw, ravenous flame.
Her fear was a dull, abstract thing. She simply could not summon any true panic at the thought of having her jugular ripped out, her blood spilling and sinking into the soft gray. It seemed an abstract proposal to her, and an aesthetically interesting one at that.Maulwas such a meaty word, so visually suggestive. She had a guilty want to hurl herself into its fangs, and witness the subsequent slash and tear. She could not help it, the attraction was always there; she understood now the Shades that had run at Cerberus. Still, she reasoned, Peter had not saved her for her to be eaten by a desiccated leopard.
She considered reaching for her rucksack but feared the sight of a knife might inspire the cat to attack. In any case, she didn’t care to take her chances against those fangs. She had Lethe water in her flask, but that would not help her here. The poor beast would not know to fear those waters. Perhaps it had even drunk already, mistaking it for a clear stream—perhaps had lost all sense of self, its history, its pack and cubs; perhaps now knew only that it was very hungry, and could not get out of this place.
She stepped back. The cat stepped forward, keeping even the distance between them.
How soft those paws are, thought Alice;how delicately they press, leaving not even footprints on the silt. What I would give, to step with such grace.
