Page 14 of Katabasis

A lice felt a little thrill passing under that gate.

She had always delighted in starting a new term at a new institution—elementary, middle, high school, college, and at last Cambridge.

She liked learning her way around the buildings, getting library access, nestling into tucked-away study nooks, finding her favorite shortcuts between her department and the dormitories.

She liked becoming a person that befit the institution.

With each new matriculation you had the chance to reinvent yourself, to deserve your place there.

And now Alice felt, though she knew this was dangerous, an instinctive want to fit into this place.

If Hell was just another institution, then it couldn’t be so bad.

It wasn’t even a city university, which would have involved horrifying things like shopping malls and subway stations.

No brutalist eyesores here. Hell was ancient in the comforting way, an Old World campus, neoclassical pales over American reds.

There were no trees or grassy lawns, for nothing grew down here, but that was all right; the silt was arranged in its own elegant manner.

All told, this current Hell was rather pleasant.

And she would have thought she was right back above, save for the quiet.

It was the absence of undergraduates, she decided.

It was undergraduates who made a university come alive, with their clumsy hustle, their self-importance and newfound freedom.

Undergraduates were fresh blood. They asked questions.

They brought ideas, and when they couldn’t come up with ideas they at least brought problems. Without their chatter, campus was frightfully still.

But even this failed to frighten Alice as it should have.

It had been so loud in her mind for so long. She liked the quiet.

“You might be right,” said Peter.

“What?”

“It might be progressive,” he conceded. “It might be there’s only one way forward.”

Alice saw what he was seeing. Unlike other campuses, there was no crisscrossing of roads and shortcuts.

There was only the one path, and when Alice tried to trace where it led, she found that most of the campus blurred in her vision, undeniably present, but pushed to the background.

All she could see in detail was a round building directly before them, several stories tall, its sides ringed with columns, and its top curving into a dome.

There were no windows, only plinths, and atop each stood robed statues of scholarly affect.

You cannot go back and forth, Hell informed them. You cannot jump this queue. You can only proceed in order. The First Court, and then the others.

“The map’s decided, then,” said Alice. “We’ll go one by one.”

So they strode up to the building and pulled open the heavy doors of the First Court, Superbia, the Court of Pride.

Pride was a library.

In fact, Pride had everything Alice liked in a library.

Pride had pale marble tiles and polished wooden shelves; high ceilings and sloping walls; lovely stained-glass patterns of vaguely religious imagery; leather reading chairs with generous backs.

Pride had leather spines arranged not on flimsy plastic shelves nor Erector set metal, but heavy wooden cases.

The best libraries were like the best churches: old and musty, preindustrial.

Everyone knew that the nicer a library was, the better the work you did within it.

Nice libraries meant donors, meant support, meant the time and resources to accumulate the best collections.

More important, nice libraries put you in a certain frame of mind.

You could unpack the precise same set of archives in the Rad Cam or a nondescript warehouse, and still you’d do better work in the Rad Cam.

The atmosphere mattered. You became the thinker the library expected you to be.

Nice libraries whispered: Everyone who has passed through here is very important, and so are you.

How bad could Hell be, if it housed a place like this?

Alice wondered. The doors opened to stacks upon stacks, shelves stretching in every direction, and researchers bustling about with arms piled over with manuscripts.

There was no screaming, no hissing or flaying of skin.

The books looked normal, smelled normal; even had normal titles, written in English, on subjects that had nothing obviously to do with death.

The air was just a bit too chilly, like in all university libraries, but otherwise it was quite comfortable.

There were even green, softly lit banker’s lamps of the sort that always induced contentment in Alice’s brain.

For a moment she had a terrible fear that Hell had been a hallucination, that she’d fallen asleep in the stacks and was now right back where she’d started.

But then she saw the Shades passing straight through shelves, their bodies solidifying only when they reached to take down a book and flip through its pages.

“It’s nicer than expected.” Peter peered around. “I fear death a bit less now.”

“Ouch!”

Something hard dug into Alice’s hip. She flinched back. The Shade who had bumped her stormed past, a great stack of books teetering in his arms.

Alice rubbed her hip. “Excuse you.”

The Shade tossed her an impatient grunt and marched off.

Now Alice noticed the Shades here were not quite so content as she had thought.

They were, in fact, rather hostile. As they wandered deeper in, she began picking up a tense, busy energy about the place, akin to the college libraries during exam time.

The simmering frustration of exhausted, exasperated souls.

This sort of mood was contagious. Alice’s skin prickled with unease.

Around the stacks she heard a symphony of angry mutters and books slamming onto tables.

Someone sneezed, and half a dozen voices went, “ Shush! ”

Several rows over a Shade stood hunched over a big, yellowing manuscript with a magnifying glass. He looked harmless enough, which was to say, he looked like an archivist. Alice got up the courage to ask him, “What’s going on?”

He blinked up at her. “What do you mean?”

“What’s everyone researching?”

“Oh.” Annoyance crossed his face. “Freshly dead, then?”

“Actually, we’re—” Alice began, but Peter cut her off.

“Yes,” he said. “Just got here, and very confused. What’re you reading for?”

The Shade pointed to a brass plaque on a wall behind him. It read, in big serif font, DEFINE THE GOOD .

“I don’t understand,” said Peter.

“Just what it says.” The Shade waved his hand impatiently. “Figure it out, give an oral defense, and they pass you through.”

“Figure what out, though?”

“Law, look.” Peter picked a printed sheet off the table. Alice glanced over his shoulder. It was titled “Recommended Reading,” followed by a list of authors. Immanuel Kant. Jeremy Bentham. Herbert Spencer. “Oh, look. Nietzsche.”

Alice ignored him. “What do you mean, pass through?” she asked the Shade. “Who passes you? How long does that take?”

“Christ,” said the Shade. “Do I look like your tutor?”

“But can’t you just tell me—”

The Shade turned his back to her, pressing his face determinedly against his magnifying glass.

“Let’s walk a bit,” Peter suggested, gently tugging Alice away. “See if there’s a floor plan, or a librarian deity, maybe.”

They wove round and round the maze of shelves, dodging irritable Shades, until they came upon an area that seemed like a main lobby.

The stacks stretched radially from a circular study zone, and the ceiling opened to reveal a great central staircase.

They looked up. The staircase went on and on, adorned at every floor by great bronze statues in various postures of deep thinking.

The library had seemed finite from the outside—Alice was sure she’d seen the roof of the tower—but from within it stretched onward as far as the eye could see, floors spiraling toward an ever-tinier center, and Shades moving busily all throughout.

Like all good scholars Alice sometimes had fantasies of an infinite library, a Borgian Library of Babel in which one could be forever lost. But this sight now gave her stabs of panic.

It was so vast. And they had no time . Professor Grimes was moving with purpose, the Shade at the wall had said.

He was bent on getting through, and when Grimes was bent on something it was like walls did not exist. They had to reach him before he reincarnated; they could not dally.

“Gosh.” Peter looked similarly helpless. “Should we just split up and search one by one?”

“That could take forever.”

“But maybe there’s some order,” said Peter. “Could be it’s chronological, could be more recent arrivals are near the bottom.”

“Hold on.” Alice rubbed her temples. “Let’s just—give me a second to think.”