Page 115 of Katabasis
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 neverrespond—”
“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 knowanything?”
“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?
Couldshewrite 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 theNeurath, 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.
But this reasoning didn’t stand up to intuition. Alice knew also that in criminal defense, there was a type of argument called “but for.” But for your actions, would this car have crashed? Would this child have drowned? But for Alice Law, would Peter Murdoch be dead? The answer was obviously no. Alice could draw a straight line from her own stupidity and selfishness to Peter’s sacrifice. And she knew, if she ever died properly in the world above, if she ever escaped back to the world above, she would end up right back here atoning for the murder of Peter Murdoch’s immortal soul. But if she was ready to admit this, if she laid it all down on paper, would that be sufficient? Was it enough to declare what she’d done and admit full responsibility for it? Certainly that was too easy, for if so there would not be so many frustrated souls in Dis. Certainly not all of these souls were deceiving themselves. Certainly, after decades in this pathetic din, one would prefer to tell the truth.
