Page 139 of Katabasis
Elspeth shook her head, smiling sadly.
“Magicians,” she sighed. “Fools, all of us.”
Alice slept. What delicious sleep itwas; quick and dreamless, sleep that came easy and made time slip away. Elspeth was staring at her when she awoke, her face tight and pensive. She kept tapping her fingers against her leg. Her mouth twitched, like it couldn’t decide between a smile and a frown.
Alice sat up. “What is it?”
“I am trying to decide whether to help you.”
“Oh. Well let me know if I can offer any input.”
Elspeth did not respond.
Alice set her hands on her lap and watched the water rippling. She felt like a naughty child in time-out. She felt she was being weighed, though she couldn’t say what for.
At last Elspeth sighed. “I haven’t been fully honest with you.”
“That’s more than fair.”
“No, look.” She drew a satchel out from beneath the paddles. She placed her hand inside, hesitated for a moment, then withdrew an item. She placed it in Alice’s hands. “Here.”
Alice understood immediately what she beheld.
A Dialetheia. She peeled the fabric back and found the most curious plant she had ever seen: a Janus-headed flower, one face with seven petals the red-orange hue of the rising sun, twinned at the back by a second face with seven petals of identical shape, these the bluish-white of a falling moon. Vibrant and deathly both at once; warm and cool. A pomegranate tree growing defiantly in the land of the dead. A True Contradiction, the thing that could not be.
“I found it just before we met,” said Elspeth. “The Kripkes weren’t after you. I should have told you. They were hot on my heels. They were after me.”
Alice turned the True Contradiction over in her hands, marveling at the brilliant hues along the stems and stamens, at the delicate, tiny buds emerging from the tips of the branches. What a relief, to see such colors after weeks in grays and black. The only splash that had broken up the monotony was the brilliant red of blood—but here, finally, was green.
“Where was it?”
“In a crack between two boulders at the bank of the Lethe. Can you imagine? No fanfare, no fairy rings. Just growing there, impossibly, with nothing to announce itself. I would have passed by it entirely if I weren’t looking for a place to moor.”
Alice heard Peter’s voice in her head. The world is not a complete system; there is always an exception. No explanation for its existence; no reason why one might expect it to have existed before or ever exist again. The world was simply unknowable; exceptions cropped up all the time, and all you had to do to beat the odds was just look.
“Hold it close,” said Elspeth. “Drop that and I’ll kill you.”
“My word.” Alice held it closer, marveling. The petals were so fine, thinner than paper, their translucence lined with patterns like lace. “A contradiction explosion...” Slowly the implications caught up to her. They wouldn’t just be able to leave Hell. They could change everything. With the True Contradiction on one side of a proof, they could write anything else into validity. They could end world hunger, end famine and wars, reshape reality’s boundaries however they liked. If they could just get the True Contradiction out of this place, they could doanything. “But then that makes you God, Elspeth. You could do anything you liked. Reality’s just putty in your hands...”
“You still need blood,” said Elspeth. “Where do you think I’d get all that blood?”
“But still...”
“And the archives are quite clear on the limits,” said Elspeth. “The Dialetheia won’t work above. It’s only a miracle in Hell. Above, it’s just a tree.”
Elspeth leaned back, arms folded. “It seems to me that the only useful way to employ a True Contradiction is to take it back to the Lord of Hell. That’s how Orpheus bargained for Eurydice. The Lady Persephone was so moved by his music that she gifted him the first Dialetheiaas a favor, and then Hades had to barter with him to retrieve it. The Dialetheia has too much power to let loose in the world, you see. It’s no use to us down here, but the Lord of Death needs it back. So you take it to the final court, to the throne on the island at the edge of the world, and you offer it up freely. You always get one boon, that’s what the stories say. And with that boon, you ask for your life.” Elspeth nodded to the Dialetheia. “So be careful what you say up there. You only get the one chance.”
It took Alice a long moment to realize she had just been given instructions.
She could not find the words. She had no frame of reference to make sense of this, this impossible generosity. It defied every rule she’d been taught about moving within the world, in which favors were like the conservation of matter. A give always entailed a take. “You’re just giving it to me?”
“Well, don’t look so put out about it.”
“But can you find another one?”
“It’s a Dialetheia, you fool. They don’t just grow on trees.”
Alice did not know what to do with this gift. She could think of no appropriate response. Just then the Dialetheia felt so heavy in her grasp; she was seized with the irrational fear she might fling it into the water.
