Page 29 of Katabasis
“Okay.” Alice took a deep breath and recited it all back. “A, we can only leave Pride once we pass. B, we have not passed. C, we must follow the rules of Hell. D, if we accept A and B and C, then we must accept Z, that we cannot pass.”
“Precisely!” Moore cried. “You’ve said it perfectly!”
“Still I refuse to accept that,” said Alice. “I simply don’t get it.”
“Are you dim, girl?”
“I am not dim. I am simply uncompelled by this syllogism.”
“But it’s so simple!” Moore bent over his deck, dipped a pen in ink, and began scrawling furiously. “I shall spell it out for you. A, you can only leave Pride once you pass. B, you have not passed. C, you must follow the rules of Hell. And then you simply addanotherpremise, D—” He stopped himself, and muttered something that sounded like, “No, then we must add an E... but to get those fools to accept the conclusion of E, very simple, we must add an F...”
Alice tugged at Peter’s arm. “Let’s go.”
Moore hardly glanced up as they tiptoed their way past his desk. By the time they were at the door, he was on premise J: “Andthiswill do it,thislittle extra premise is all you need...”
“Nicely done,” said Peter as they hurried down the hall.
“Oh, it’s nonsense,” said Alice. “I’m shocked he hasn’t read Carroll.”
“It’s a big problem for logic, actually!” Peter flapped his hands in the air. “Whyshouldany two premises compel the conclusion, valid though they might be? No one has a good solution. You actually can’t provemodus ponens. But if we don’t havemodus ponens, then we might as well be in the Stone Age, becausemodus ponensis the foundation for everything else...”
“Not you, too.” She smacked him in the arm. “Come on.”
They hurried down the stairs and back out into the lobby, past the squeaking and squelching bookshelves, the flickering study lamps, the squabbling study groups, and Shades sobbing within the stacks, until they saw a set of double doors. These were not the doors they came in, but at this point it did not matter. Above, a howling came from Moore’s office. Below in the lobby, all the Shades suddenly pointed their way, whispering excitedly.Passed, they whispered,someone thinks they’ve passed. The curious crowd surged forth. There was no time. Alice gambled and pushed. The doors swung open, and they stumbled out of that frightful, chilly space into blissful quiet, the dead outside.
This time, they faced the river.
Chapter Seven
The Lethe. A great expanse, fathomless and immeasurably wide. From the shore all one could see was endless darkness stretching toward the dim horizon. Whatever waited across—King Yama’s throne, the gates back to the living—lay out of sight. The Lethe was a visual paradox, two things at once. At first glance, eyes unfocused, the waters were still and silent, a glassy obsidian surface reflecting glimmers of the ever-dying sun. But then one looked closer, and the Lethe became an agitated churn, all whorls and eddies in currents without direction, and the longer one gazed the louder those waters sounded in one’s ears, bone-deep rumbles from waves roiling beneath the surface.
Alice stepped closer, entranced. As a child she had learned that white was all the colors wrapped in one, and she found this profoundly unfair; that one could have seen rainbows everywhere but instead, with weak mortal eyes, saw only plain light. The Lethe seemed an inverse of this principle. It was all darkness. But the moment you fixed your eyes on any one point it began to disambiguate, until you saw that what seemed like sheets of obsidian were in fact waves of color, and those waves of color formed memories. You could just catch fragments if you squinted. Here a faded teddy bear; there a pouring stream of red wine; and there a ringed, wrinkled, reaching hand... all fragments teasing richer memories, specific details, all the detritus of human experience swirling, condensed into one unending wash.
Oh, great Lethe. Hell wasalwaysbound by a river. All the sources confirmed this, regardless of period, geography, or religion. You didn’t have to call it the Lethe. You could call it the Apanohuaya, or the Vaitanya. You could call it the river of Meng Po. The domain of Neti. But you could not deny there was the river, delineating boundaries between worlds, severing the cord between this life and whatever came after. On this side, the courts of punishment. On the other, Lord Yama’s domain—and the promised golden circle where souls returned to the world of the living. There were many rivers of power in this world—there were rivers of death, and rivers of love; rivers that could grant immortality, and rivers that could take it away. Some washed away sin; some merely washed away the guilt. But only the Lethe washed memory.
Western Tartarologists preferred the nameLethefor its etymology.Lethecomes from the Greeklethe(λ?θη), meaning “forgetfulness,” “oblivion.”Lethealso has connections to the Greekaletheia(?λ?θεια), meaning “truth.” Though what connection truth had to forgetfulness, Alice was not sure. By some accounts, stripping all memories was a way to reveal the most fundamental truth—some ineffable element of the soul that was eternal. By other accounts, the causation was flipped. Truth was the necessary condition to deserving forgetfulness, and therefore reincarnation. Only when one acknowledged the truth about themselves could they wash away the burden of past lives to begin anew.
Dominant theories linked the memory powers of the Lethe to Heraclitus’s theory of flux. In most respects Heraclitus was a complete ass, and he was famous for bizarre proclamations like “Everything is its own opposite” and “All things in the universe are manifestations of an ever-living fire.” Despite this, Heraclitus had made the profound observation that one could never step in the same river twice, because it wouldn’t be the same river, and one wouldn’t be the same person. The Lethe, then, equated forgetting with rebirth. The continuity of one’s soul was tied inextricably to the persistence of one’s memories. When memories were gone, a new soul was born. The Lethe was forgetting was death was change.
“Suppose this is another way to go.” Peter was rifling through his notebook, thinking out loud. “Around the courts, I mean. Jesse Hagen had these theories—well, I don’t know if you read Hagen, I did take out the only copy. But we might move a lot faster if we traveled over water. The Lethe must pass by every court, so theoretically... hm.” Peter tapped his fingers against his chin. “But we’ve nothing to build a raft with.”
Alice had considered the same problem. Get on a boat. Sail across; either to successive courts or even to King Yama’s Land across the way. Yes, Alice had found a footnote citing Hagen’s theory. But where would they get a boat? It was hard enough to take one’s mortal soul to Hell. Pentagrams only stretched so large. No one had ever managed more than a bit of luggage, much less a vehicle. And the boat would have to be airtight, waterproof; they could not risk even one drop spilling onto their skin. On this subject, the literature was very clear. The waters of the Lethe ate memory. Even trailing your fingers across the surface could strip you of truths you’d known your whole life.
Alice had concocted some half-baked ideas about forming a raft with the supplies in her sack. She might inflate the blanket, perhaps, and try enchanting it so it held the weight of two, and formed a protective barrier besides. But those waters looked impossible to fool with magick. Those eddies lookedhungry. They exuded a vicious gravity. They were negative space, irresistible magnets, black holes of thought. Try me, the river seemed to say. I’ll eat your chalk.
Her arm twitched suddenly. She tugged her sleeve down. An old injury.
Peter was saying something else, but her mind drifted, lost in the river. She simply could not stop staring at that shifting, swirling surface. She had the absurd urge to take a swim, and it was the same kind of thought that invaded her mind when she stood any place high up. What if she climbed out that window? Tumbled off the edge? The waters seemed so cool, so soothing, and she imagined herself dropping down through that glassy surface without so much as a ripple.
A blur marked her vision. Alice blinked, and when she opened her eyes she saw a woman standing by the shore, old and hunched, terra-cotta jugs arranged neatly on a table beside her. “Murdoch!”
“What?”
“Don’t you see her?”
“Who?”
“The woman.” Alice pointed. “The woman by the shore.”
