Page 31 of Katabasis
“Hey.” Peter paused. “Haven’t we been walking awhile?”
Alice had not been paying attention to the time. “Have we?”
“They didn’t look so far apart,” said Peter. “The library and the next building. But look—does that building look any closer to you?”
Alice summoned the picture from her memory. He was right. Before the gates, the campus had seemed as closely clustered as any typical campus, all its buildings no more than a five-minute walk apart. But the Second Court, Desire, remained just as far away as it had when they had started walking. Alice thought she could make it out in better detail now—it was a two-story building with ornate tiling all around the front and sides, and two bronze lions sitting guard at the front. But it had not grown any larger.
“I knew it,” said Peter. “We’re in hyperbolic space.”
“But that’s backward.” Alice did not remember much from geometry, but she did remember this. “With negative curvature, objects should be closer than they appear. Like with a convex mirror. Light spreads outward. So we shouldbethere—”
“No, no. What we saw from the wall was a clustering at infinity. Haven’t you ever seen the Poincaré disk model? It’s like we’re walking on coral. Down here on this plane, things could be miles apart, and they would still look like a regular campus from a different plane.”
Alice did not know what the Poincaré disk model was, and did not wish to know. “So what’s the implication?”
“The implication is that we ought to go to the peak,” said Peter.
“Not your mythical peak again.”
“Now we have some idea of where it is, because we’ve seen the outer bounds.” Peter pointed to the Lethe. “So we know to trackawayfrom the river, and that will take us toward it—”
“If even that point exists! If it doesn’t, we just wander into infinity.”
“But just suppose it does. It would save us so much time!”
“The point isn’t to save time, Murdoch. The point is tofindhim. We can’t just randomly assume about his sins—”
“Why not?” Peter threw up his hands. “You think he’s too good for petty sins. You also won’t believe he’s done something really bad. So what, then, Law? What’s the Goldilocks mean of acceptable badness for dear Grimes? Where do you think he’s landed?”
Alice felt she was under attack, and for no good reason. “I don’t know,” she said, and hated how small her voice was. The question frightened her. She did not want to open those floodgates. Behind lay a confused and guilty tangle she knew she could not sort out. Memories strained, always threatening to burst—but she had done so well at keeping those gates closed, at redirecting her thoughts, finding her planks. Better to keep it all locked away. Better to treat the whole matter purely as an experiment, and proceed methodically. All outcomes were possible. No biases. “There’s no way we can know. And that’s why we have to search in order.”
Peter must have noticed her shrinking, for his expression softened. “I understand that, I’m just—I’m just afraid we’ll be walking forever.”
“The Shades must get around,” Alice reasoned.
“Yes, but they have an eternity to get around, so that doesn’t matter.”
“But we haven’t seen any on the path.”
“So?”
“If it’s a long distance to the next court, we should see them,” Alice reasoned. “If it’s a shorter distance, then they’re already inside. We haven’t seen anyone, so it’s more likely that they are already inside.”
Peter considered this. “That is valid.”
“Thank you.”
“Then we just keep walking?”
“I don’t see a better option,” said Alice. “Do you?”
So they fell back into line, trudging toward a building that was probably—but not certainly—getting larger.
Somehow it was not unpleasant, this endless stroll. Alice was rather grateful for the reprieve. They could have been a Victorian couple, sojourning to the seaside for fresh air. The wash and lull of the Lethe was far preferable to the whining buzz of Pride, and if she closed her eyes Alice could imagine that wash sweeping over memories, sweeping them away, leaving a pure, clean slate behind. She knew that wasn’t how it worked. Still she felt much calmer than she had over a long time; her head emptied of thought; her mind blissfully quiet. She felt that she could breathe.
Sometime around half past noon she heard the clicking.
Later she would come to dread the noise. This warning that began always as a faint whisper, so faint you thought or hoped you’d imagined it, but intensified until it could not be ignored. Later she would learn the whisper always turned into a clicking, until the sounds were disparate enough that the ear discerned it was not a single sound but a dozen constant clicks at once, echoing so you could not tell from which direction they came, and that by the time you could make out each one—vertebrae clacking, tibias and fibulas rubbing against their joints—it was too late.
