Page 71 of Katabasis
“Well, not to be rude, but you’re all fucked up, aren’t you?”
Alice hated this misplaced sympathy. She hated whenever anyone looked at her with this much pity, as if she were a trapped rat, drowning in a bucket. She was not a victim, she had made all her choices herself, and she knew perfectly well how to claw to safety.
But Elspeth so clearly wanted to help her. And the worst part of Alice, the self-serving and nasty part, figured,Why not?Let Elspeth believe what she wanted. Let her believe that they were the same; victims in the same story. People liked you better when they thought you needed them. The girls she met at conferences were like this too. You made some noises about harassment and condescension and the Plight of Being a Woman, and they’d flutter all around you, instantly on your side. Wounded attachments. The delirium of shared suffering.
“Cheer up,” said Elspeth. “You’ll be all right. You want to know how I know?”
“How?”
Elspeth shot her a kind smile. “Because you’re looking for a way back up.”
Lord, thought Alice.Kill me.She couldn’t meet Elspeth’s eyes, so she focused on sucking the last dregs of smoke from her cigarette. She didn’t recognize this brand; she had no idea where Elspeth had gotten it, but it was the best thing she’d tasted in Hell. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”
“Anytime, love. Get some sleep.”
Elspeth vanished into the stacks. Alice curled in on her side and rested her cheek against the shelves, listening to Elspeth’s rattling footsteps disappearing up the stairs. She was cold; the air below deck felt stale and drafty at once. She tugged Elspeth’s blanket up further over her chin. It smelled of mothballs.
Her own entrance riddle had been the Ever Better Wine Paradox. Suppose you are gifted a bottle of wine that only gets better with time—there is no upper limit on how delicious it can become. Suppose also you are an immortal. When is it rational for you to drink the wine? If you popped the cork, you would be choosing an inferior wine compared to a future possible wine. But if, applying that logic, you never popped the cork at all, then you were worse off compared to every alternative.
Alice had answered with the argument that only adopting an attitude of accepting a satisfactory, not optimal, outcome could avoid the worst possible outcome. The principle of choosing the best possible option was, in practice, self-defeating. You were better off arbitrarily deciding to wait five years, then opening the wine and enjoying whatever you got.
But the lesson there, the nugget of truth within the paradox, was that happiness was comparative, not absolute. And this meant that if you could just outlast the other guy—if you could hold off even ten minutes before opening the cork—then at least you wouldn’t be the fool who drank the shitty wine.
Chapter Seventeen
She must have dozed off without realizing it, for when she awoke Peter was curled in the corner beside her. She checked her watch. Only three in the morning. She propped herself up on an elbow, wriggled over to him, and placed her lips beside his ear. “Murdoch.”
He didn’t stir, so she dug her finger into his side and whispered again. “Murdoch.”
He jerked away. “What?”
“Shh.” Alice squinted into the stacks but saw nothing but waterlogged books. She supposed Elspeth was still upstairs. “The Dialetheia. Let’s find it.”
Peter was fully awake now. “What are you talking about?”
She kept her voice as low as she could. “Elspeth knows where it is. She thinks she’s close. We need to get it for ourselves.”
She didn’t know where she stood now with Peter. He had ignored her pointedly throughout dinner, had spoken directly to Elspeth as if Alice weren’t present.
But Alice had practice talking to angry men. She had honed this art after years of managing Professor Grimes, of learning to tiptoe on eggshells when he was in a foul mood. So many graduates had ended up on his permanent shit list for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. But Alice was like a finely tuned receiver, with an instinctive sense of when to talk him down, when to grovel, and when to stay out of his way.
With angry sulking men, the secret was holding your ground. You didn’t get rebellious, no—that was asking for a slap to the face. But you didn’t self-flagellate, either. When you acted like you ought to be whipped, that only confirmed to them that you should. One should never cower. The secret rather was to keep talking as if you deserved no punishment at all, and then to distract them with something they wanted more than they wanted to hurt you. With Professor Grimes, it had always been upcoming conferences, exciting new papers. With Peter it would have to be their ticket out of Hell. She was fixing this. This was her apology.
“She’s just saved our lives,” whispered Peter.
“Which is proof she can take care of herself, isn’t it? Look. She’s nice and all, I feel rotten about it too. But she doesn’t know what it’s like to be alive anymore. She’s dressing in bones and skinningrats, for heaven’s sake. She’s hardly a person anymore. What’s she going to do back in Cambridge?”
Peter was quiet for a moment. Alice waited, letting him think. He’d come around. She knew he would, otherwise he wouldn’t have been talking to her.
“It’s been ten years,” he admitted finally.
“You see? There’s nothing for her up there, and the sooner she figures that out, the better. She really ought to just pass on. But,Murdoch!” Alice felt a thrum of excitement, the pleasure of resolve. Yes, she could be bold. Decisive. She was not falling apart; she could wrangle her mind into action. She had to take the lead now. This was how she made amends. “If we can get it first, then that’s all our problems, fixed—then we’ve only got to get to Lord Yama’s court and wait. We can bargain for Professor Grimes’s life, and our own exits besides.” She paused. “And then you wouldn’t have to exchange me, you know.”
Peter did not react to this. For a long while all Alice could hear was his deep, even breathing. Then he murmured, “How?”
“We’ll use magick.” Alice had thought this through. “Now we know all it takes is blood. We’ll use something to get her talking. I’ll distract her, and you encircle her in a pentagram, somehow. We’ll use the Liar Paradox.”
Yes, it could be that simple.
