Page 73 of Katabasis
“Oh, never. They always know when it’s not original work. They take plagiarism quite seriously here—somehow folks always forget. A while ago someone copied two sentences from the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and they wouldn’t let him touch paper again for fifty years.”
“Gosh,” Alice muttered. “Who wouldn’t do their own work in Hell ?”
“Everyone,” said Gradus. “Haven’t you ever had writer’s block?”
“Well of course, but—”
“Did someone mention writer’s block?”
Alice ran smack into what felt like a great, meaty wall.
She stumbled black. Before her stood a veritable centaur; a man’s head and muscly torso over the indigo-blue bottom of a horse.
She would have found him very handsome, in the rugged mountain-man fashion, were his mouth not split in a massive, toothy grin that indicated he wanted to eat her.
“I’m sorry—”
“No apologies necessary.” He dipped his head and forelegs in a low bow that should not have looked so elegant as it did.
His head ended up somewhere near Alice’s crotch, which was both startling and titillating.
“I am Nessus.” His voice was wonderfully smooth.
“Lower chthonic deity, itinerant writing tutor of Dis, at your service.”
“Bugger off,” said Gradus.
Nessus rose and grasped Alice’s hands. “Are you new to the city, love? First time in the bazaar?”
“Yes, I—”
“Never fear!” He squeezed her hands tight. His skin was very warm. “I am here to offer any paper-writing services you need. Proposals, outlines, bibliographies, even entire dissertation chapters if you so desire. Rates are negotiable—”
“Leave her alone,” said Gradus.
“Does that work?” asked Alice, intrigued.
“Of course it doesn’t,” said Gradus. “No one wants those phony essays.”
“Our essays are the best on the market.” Nessus continued to ignore Gradus.
Indeed, every time Gradus spoke, Nessus only opened his mouth further, continuing on with his pitch at a deafening shout.
“WE HAVE HELPED HUNDREDS OF SOULS PASS THEIR DISSERTATION DEFENSES AND FIND PASSAGE ACROSS THE LETHE ON LONG-AWAITED GOLDEN SHIPS—”
“It’s a complete scam,” said Gradus.
“OUR ESSAY WRITERS HAVE INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORKINGS OF THE UNDERWORLD. MANY HAVE WALKED THE SANDS OF DEATH SINCE THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD—”
“But you’re all deities!” Alice exclaimed. “What can you possibly want for trade from humans?”
Nessus ceased his shouting, looked her up and down, and murmured close into her ear. “A human soul can be useful in more ways than one.”
Alice did not quite understand what he meant, but she knew enough to jerk her hands away.
“Leave her alone.” Gradus grasped Alice’s arm and dragged her down the stalls. Nessus did not follow. When Alice glanced back over her shoulder he was in avid negotiations with another Shade, haggling over word counts and delivery times.
“Haven’t you ever been in a market before?” Gradus demanded. “You keep your gaze forward, you never respond —”
“Sorry,” Alice gasped. “It’s just—there’s so many—”
“The bazaar is built to distract,” said Gradus. “This is Lord Yama’s design. There’s a million things to keep a soul from writing, all in the service of making you better at it. Remember that, Alice Law. Hell is a writers’ market.”
The bazaar seemed endless. Lost in the thick of it, Alice could not see any way out.
Only Gradus seemed to know where they were going, ducking and weaving around hawkers with irritable indifference.
They passed stalls of writing accoutrements and productivity cures—old typewriters, reams of paper, sand hourglasses (“DON’T PROCRASTINATE FOR ETERNITY!
”), self-help books ( How to Write a Confession in Ten Days , Two Thousand Words a Day: The Augustinian Method ), and black quills advertised as bona fide vulture feathers (“SAY NO TO THE TYPEWRITER: WRITE IN ANALOG TO PROMPT YOUR CREATIVE MIND”).
Alice couldn’t quite understand what passed for currency in Dis—she saw Shades exchanging all sorts of trinkets, from buttons to bottle caps to what appeared to be human knucklebones—but the trade, evidently, was thriving.
The traffic thickened. They pushed their way forth and came upon a packed crowd gathered around a creature—a deity, Alice saw, a giant with an elephantine head, his skull studded with too many eyes.
Two great horns extended from his temples, but Alice’s eyes could not track where they ended.
She could only describe those horn tips as ending many places at once, a cloud of probability.
Indeed Alice found the deity himself hard to look at; his form kept shifting in space, so that the moment she thought she had fixed him in her vision, he was several inches to the left.
“Who—”
“Laplace’s Demon,” said Gradus.
“Laplace’s Demon is real?”
“Oh, yes. He likes to wander the bazaar and talk people into thinking nothing is their fault. Sets them back decades in their progress. Come round this way, you’ll get lost in the crush.”
Alice followed him to the edge of the crowd.
The demon’s followers listened in rapturous excitement as he pronounced facts about their lives, explanations of their pathology.
Someone’s pet cat had died when they were ten.
Someone had been spanked too hard by a babysitter.
Someone was genetically predisposed to anger.
“How does he do that?”
“Well, he’s a determinist,” said Gradus. “So he thinks just because he knows everything about you, that frees you of all personal responsibility from everything you’ve ever done.”
“How would that work?”
“Laplace’s Demon has been observing the universe since its very beginning,” said Gradus.
“Or so he says. The first collision of atoms, the big bang, all that. He watched the first cells on Earth become sentient life. He watched as the atoms they were composed of interacted in new and exciting combinations to create generations. He knows, because of set natural laws of the universe, precisely how those atoms will interact in the future to form new combinations, and so on. He knows, when you are deciding between an apple and orange, what you will choose. He knows if someday you will betray your husband, or drown your child. He knows all, for every ill deed you have ever done was determined the day you were born. Life is a set course that you were born onto, a course you can never escape. You don’t know that you are even following it. ”
“What if I choose different?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Gradus. “He will have anticipated this too. He knows one day you will think of determinism and feel compelled to resist. And he knows you will choose what seems unpredictable for the sake of it. Laplace’s Demon knows all.”
“And that means no one can ever be responsible for anything.” Alice had caught on now. “Which means there’s no concept of guilt, or culpability... I mean, could it work? If you could explain all your sins as the product of forces outside your control?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
She huffed. “Don’t you know anything ?”
“I know everything there is to know about this place,” said Gradus. “And I’m offering that knowledge freely, by the way, which is a better deal than you’d get elsewhere.”
“Then how come you can’t say how a dissertation passes?”
“ Because. ” Again Gradus’s essence took on that frightening, deadened calque.
Alice felt the weight of accumulation, of layers on layers of time.
“I don’t know how it’s done. Because nobody knows how it’s done.
Because I have never once seen a passing dissertation in the entire time I have been in Hell.
Because many of us think that the dissertation is a pointless exercise offered by sadistic deities to keep us distracted, because wouldn’t that be so funny, wouldn’t it be the best and cruelest joke to keep us running in circles around the bazaar forever.
Because none of us in this wretched place have ever been given reason to hope. ”
“Oh,” said Alice, in a very small voice. “I see.”
Dis did not feel so impressive now. The bazaar’s hustle was no longer amusing. Now the stalls and crowds struck her as a dreadful show; teeming and desperate, hamsters spinning circles in a pathetic ornate cage, all to avoid the only question that seemed to matter: why did you sin?
Could she write her own way out of Hell? Alice wondered. If she somehow died a natural death, if she ended up in Dis. Could she face down the blank white paper and tell the truth?
She knew what her great crime was. She had let Peter Murdoch die. She had killed Peter Murdoch.
Now, Alice knew from conversations in hall that the philosophers at Cambridge were greatly concerned with the difference between killing and letting die.
Some argued that there was no distinction: that if you knew the cause of death and failed to stop it even if you were able, then that was morally tantamount to murder.
Others disagreed. Letting die might be morally callous, they argued, but it entailed refusing to get involved in a situation, not bringing it about.
If letting die was so evil, were we responsible for not doing anything about world poverty?
About orphans starving continents away? So one might reasonably convince Alice that no, none of this was her fault.
She didn’t throw them off the Neurath , she didn’t lay the Escher trap, and she didn’t make Peter sacrifice himself.
She’d simply failed to stop it all, and she couldn’t be blamed for that.