Page 45 of Katabasis
S he 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 skinning rats , 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.
Consider the following sentence: This statement is false.
It is devastatingly simple in its breaking of logic. You cannot believe it. You cannot disbelieve it. It has no truth value that you can settle on. You’re stuck in the middle, thrown on an endless loop from one end of the sentence to the next.
The Liar Paradox was one of the oldest paradoxes of all time, for it violated that central premise of classical logic: the law of the excluded middle.
Statements must either be true or false, and nothing in between.
Still no one knew how to resolve the paradox.
The Greeks and the Indians had been tooling around with the Liar Paradox for centuries; instead of resolving it, they merely came up with a whole family of related paradoxes, one of which involves Socrates, a crocodile, and a stolen child.
It posed serious problems for the foundations of logic—indeed, Philitas of Cos agonized so much over the solution that he wasted away and died.
Inscribed in a pentagram, the Liar Paradox could suspend truth and falsity entirely.
Magicians did not use it often, for most of the time they needed someone to believe something, not to exist in a state of uncertainty.
But Alice didn’t need Elspeth to believe anything in particular about them.
She only needed Elspeth off her guard; willing to talk.
And she already knew Elspeth liked to talk.
The poor girl was desperate for anyone who would listen.
“That’ll never work,” said Peter. “Everyone knows how to ward off the Liar Paradox.”
“Not if she’s not expecting it.”
“She might be. She already doesn’t trust us.”
“She does now.” Alice was absolutely sure of this. “She thinks we’re just like her. Depressed, hopeless souls. She thinks we hate Cambridge, too—she thinks we’re on her side.”
“Jesus, Law.” Peter shifted under his blanket. “What is wrong with you?”
“We have to make it count.” She felt a lump in her throat. “All this, I mean. It has to be worth something. We can’t have done this all for nothing.”
“Hm,” said Peter.
Alice waited, hoping that he might say anything more. Wickedness felt better when you had a coconspirator; otherwise it was just you and your conscience. But he remained silent. Eventually his breathing evened out, and she assumed he’d fallen asleep.
Something tickled her cheek. She opened her eyes to see two vast, blinking green pools, inches from her face. Tiny pupils, narrowed to slits. They seemed quite judgmental.
“Don’t you tell,” Alice whispered.
Archimedes spun round, flicked his tail against her face, and disappeared into the shadow.
Irked, embarrassed for reasons too petty to name, she turned onto her side and closed her eyes.
“ I have a theory about why you’re so stuck on academia,” an old boyfriend of Alice’s had once told her, shortly before he became an ex.
This was during their senior year of college, when she had been single-mindedly obsessed with graduate school applications to the point of neglect—and perhaps downright rudeness, as she had stood him up at least half a dozen times by now.
This, paired with this boyfriend’s recent enrollment in a psychoanalysis seminar, made him vindictive.
“You’re obsessed with gold stars. You never got over the high school thrill of an A+ at the top of your paper and academia will let you chase those little gold stars for the rest of your life.
” He flicked her forehead. “Little ivory tower princess, you. You’re a teacher’s pet, Alice. You have a fetish for validation.”
“Is that so?” Alice, whose mind was only on the prospect of fat envelopes from Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Yale arriving in her mailbox, barely registered what he was saying.
Indeed it took her months to realize this nasty monologue had been his attempt to get her into bed. “Yes. I suppose that’s right.”
They broke up shortly after. Alice reflected on his words in those following months, but only with a thrilling contempt. “You’re giving up too much,” he had told her. “This can’t be worth it.”
But of course it was worth it. It was the only thing that was worth it.
She had been fortunate to find a vocation that made irrelevant everything else, and anything that made you forget to eat, drink, sleep, or maintain basic relationships—anything that made you so inhumanly excited —had to be pursued with single-minded devotion.
Academia was decidedly not about the gold stars.
If Alice had ever fallen prey to this notion, she was quickly disabused of it during her first year of coursework, wherein she heard every day a million things wrong with the way she thought, and only the occasional, “Not bad.” If you went into the field for gold stars you were in for disappointment.
No, the point was the high of discovery.
No one else understood—certainly not the ex, who went on to do something involving mortgages and making poor people poorer.
How could she explain to him the way her mind felt as if it were chewing, digesting difficult concepts?
That the headache she got after marking up an impenetrable text was like the pain in her gums after masticating on a good steak?
The way her whole body thrummed in excitement when she came across the exact algorithm, translation, historical reproduction, she’d spent hours searching for in the library.
The way she always forgot she needed rest as she hunched over a pentagram for hours, sometimes days, scribbling frantically away as idea after idea surged through her mind.
How good it felt when she seemed to abandon her body altogether—when she became fully incorporeal, drifting happily in a universe of ideas.
She was very proud of the days that she forgot to eat.
Not because she had any revulsion for food, but because it was some proof that she had transcended some basic cycle of need.
That she was not just an animal after all, held captive by her desires to eat and fuck and shit.
That she was above all a mind, and the mind was capable of miraculous things.