Page 93 of Katabasis
And she could not deny the part of her that was relieved at the fact that finally it was all out of her hands; that there was no longer any point to the scheming and spell casting and struggling. At last there was a punctuation mark to it all, and she had no control over it. This was a comfort.
“Alice.” Peter nudged her shoulder. “Alice?”
She blinked awake. “Yes?”
“I’ve been lying to you.”
“No you haven’t,” she mumbled. “Don’t say that.”
“The equation you found.” He sat up straight. “You were right. It wasn’t just my playing around. It is, in fact, my dominant strategy to get Professor Grimes out of Hell.”
“Oh, we were having such a good moment.” Alice let her arm fall limp against his. This confession did not bother her as much anymore—now that they were going to die, knowing Peter would have killed her had he gotten his way was disappointing, but not a surprise. “Please don’t ruin it.”
“You don’t understand,” said Peter. “I wasn’t going to trade you. I never would have traded you. I was going to trade myself.”
“But you can’t,” said Alice. “Axiom of... you can’t. I tried.”
“Well, no,” said Peter, “I would have asked you to do it for me.”
It was so hot, Alice thought. So damn hot. She couldn’t tell if the buzzing came from without or within. But she could let her mind slide, and think only about the buzzing, and not about the implications. Oh, sweet blankness; the absence of thought. She should have been born a rock. She considered acting like one; playing deaf, just letting Peter’s words slide off her like water.
But he looked so very distressed. He was clearly not going to let this one go.
She pulled together the energy to ask, “Why?”
“Well, becauseIkilled him.” Peter’s face worked terribly. “I mean, his death is my fault. Not yours. So it stands to reason I should bring him back.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Peter Murdoch never meant to hurt anyone. He was not like Alice; he didn’t have vicious determination. Peter did not hold grudges or acknowledge rivals, in part because he was so used to winning by default. Peter Murdoch was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a stick of chalk in hand. For him academia was a playground, not a battlefield, and he was just so good at all the games.
Yet this made him dangerous in his own way. For Peter had gone through life blithely assuming things would just fall in place precisely how he needed them, since in most respects, they always had. This made him careless. He never thought much of the consequences, or about much in particular except his own research. And it was only when things went sideways, when things got carried away, when the domino effects of his whims cascaded far beyond anything he’d hoped or intended—only then did he discover how dangerous being careless could be.
Peter was five when his geniusbecame evident. He was stuck ill at home, and was not getting better as quickly as hoped, and his parents had deemed it necessary to engage a home maths tutor so that Peter would not fall behind. This tutor—one of his father’s advisees, who would have happily done anything else if not for need of pocket money—took the pedagogically irresponsible approach of feeding him one algebraic exercise at a time while distracted by his own pile of problem sets to grade.
Peter traipsed happily through the problems. And since he was not in a classroom full of children cooing over crayons, and since all his attention wasn’t spent on not drawing attention to himself, he let himself skate through the next lesson, and then the next. The way Peter saw it, he was only happily solving the next problem as it appeared. He didn’t notice his tutor’s jaw slackening over the hour.
“He’s astonishing,” the postgrad reported to his father. “He doesn’t belong in year one, you’ve got to get him out of there.”
Peter’s parents—his dad a mathematician, his mum a biologist—were overjoyed by this news; for all academic parents hope and expect to have smart children but don’t dare admit out loud that they want genius children. But it seemed Peter was in fact a genius, and so they made arrangements for him to be surrounded by tutors all the time, stimulating his brain with advanced studies.
This was a good thing, for otherwise Peter’s childhood would have passed in tedious solitude. For the other defining trait about Peter was that he was so often sick. At first it seemed he was a classically persnickety child, always caught up with a round of upset tummy or food poisoning or diarrhea or constipation. He’ll grow out of it, said his grandparents; some children just like to catch every germ in the air. By the time he was six, however, it became clear that whatever Peter had was severe and chronic. Medical research on inflammatory bowel diseases would come quite a long way over the course of Peter’s lifetime. But in his early childhood, the most that any doctor could tell his family was that his colon seemed to be getting inflamed for no apparent reason, and that he would do best to avoid wheat flour. This later expanded to include dairy, nuts, and raw vegetables—indeed, Peter spent a lot of time on elimination diets. They couldn’t tell if any of it helped, only that all-liquid diets—that is, bone broth and apple juice—seemed to improve things when he was at his worst, but only because it meant there was nothing in his bowels left to clear.
At last, after many specialist visits and misdiagnoses, he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic inflammatory bowel disease with no known cause and no cure. Peter and his parents began referring to his condition as the Beast. It helped to personify the disease, for otherwise it was just a mysterious thing that messed with his sense of self. His own immune system was attacking his own cells for no clear reason. Easier to think of it as some capricious, alien entity. Sometimes the Beast left him alone. Sometimes it gnawed relentlessly at his insides. Sometimes it withdrew for several weeks, just long enough for him to make plans to go to birthday parties and the beach and go hiking, which he’d still never done, before returning with a vengeance. The Beast was unknowable, unpredictable. The only constant they knew about the Beast was that it couldn’t ever be vanquished; only kept at bay, hidden from, for brief pockets of time.
Peter grew used to doctor’s visits. Crohn’s had a number of side effects as a consequence of malnutrition. His eyes were always red and scabby. His teeth were all wrong. Every now and then a big red rash appeared all over his back, which no number of oatmeal baths would alleviate. He was chronically underweight, and because the first course of treatment for a Crohn’s flare was immunosuppressants, he was also chronically suffering from whatever seasonal bug was floating around. There was never a time when Peter was not coughing or sniffling or vomiting; indeed, if ever the rare day came when he appeared in good health, his parents only braced themselves for a vicious flare to come.
Peter took this all in good cheer. He had no siblings nor friends in the neighborhood; he did not have a “normal childhood” as a comparison case. Poor health was just something he had to deal with. Otherwise, he had his tutors. He didn’t need sports when he could stretch his mind; he didn’t need the outdoors when he had entire abstract universes unfolding in his imagination, their secrets waiting to be explored.
He loved numbers because they behaved the way they weresupposedto, because the rules never changed. The square root of sixty-four never ceased to be eight.
Most of the time, he had such fun that he nearly forgot he was a sick child, shut up in his room, with no friends.
Still, Peter’s parents felt that he needed to spend some time with children his own age. Therefore on his eighth birthday, during a months-long stretch in which Peter was actually feeling quite well, his parents invited his third-grade class over for a birthday party. Peter had spent so little time in class that semester that he hardly knew anyone’s names, yet everyone invited turned up to his home, bringing presents and good cheer.
“Look who’s popular,” said his mother.
Peter, venturing out of his bedroom, felt quite overwhelmed by the crowd and the noise. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked.
