Crusaders in Hell

THE NATURE OF HELL Janet and Chris Morris

Sinday, Moanday, Duesday, Weptsday, Tearsday, Frightday, Sadderday ... the weeks rolled on, tune without end, and the Devil rolled with the punches.

Usually.

Time in Hell is an endless series of infinitely divided instants, as Zeno of Elea would have put it. Did put it, as a possible solution to the paradox of Achilles and the .tortoise. Infinitely divisible or singularly indivisible; either any moment, no matter how small, could be divided into an infinite number of smaller moments, and so on ad infinitum, or not: these were the.

Original Choices in the quandary of time.

Now that Zeno had all the time in Hell to work out the solution to his problem, it seemed not to matter. At least, not until the Devil came to call.

"Hello, Zeno," said the Devil who looked, that Sadderday, rather like an Oxford don. Zeno hadn't been familiar with Oxford dons or atomic clocks before he came to Hell. Now, he worked at the Infernal Observatory, in the department of Apparent Time. Here he was in charge of the Diabolical Dialing Department, which dispensed, by phone, the exact Satanic Mean Time to all callers.

When the phones were working, anyway. If the tape-machines were running properly. And assuming that the Demonic Day and Dating Service wasn't screwing around with the intervals between Paradise-rise and Paradise-set.

Which they were today. Or someone was, today. If the term 'day' had any meaning-beyond that of a mathematical standard 24 + hours-when your hours were on the fritz.

Zeno had known that something was amiss with the hourly rate of time's passage in Hell for some ... time ... now. He hadn't known, however, that the Fault finding Forum would decide that he was to blame which it must have. Otherwise, why would His Infernal Majesty be visiting up here, on Mount Sinat-coming to Zeno's monastic little cell in the observatory?

"Ah, s-s-sir," stammered the philosopher to the donnish Devil, a man in black robes and a powdered wig. "D-d-do sit d-d-d-down." Zeno gestured to the sole wooden chair that, with the single writing desk and feather pallet on the floor, made up his cell's furnishings.

When the Devil crossed the cell to take his seat, a black, scaled and furred creature with wings folded against its back scampered in after him. The door, closing on its own, nearly caught the thing's tail. It hissed, its back arched like a cat's, its tail fluffed to twice-normal size, and it looked Zeno straight in the eye.

Then it opened its jaws (the size of a big cat's) and hissed again, showing ivory fangs. Next, it pronked in mock-threat and bounded into the Devil's lap with a rip of his robe.

The Devil winced and, from beneath his seated person, smoke began to rise from the wooden chair in which he sat. Grabbing the familiar by its ruff, he settled it roughly into his lap and said,

"Greetings, Zeo of Elea. It seems we have some sort of problem,"

"Yes sir. Your Satanic Majesty, we have."

"'Nick' will do, Zeno, at least until this crisis is over."

Zeno of Elea, whose sins had been the inventions of dialectic and the technique of finding paired, contradictory conclusions in other men's premises, had never imagined himself on first-name terms with the Devil.

He could only mutter, "Yessir, Nick, sir."

At the mention of the Devil's name, the furred and winged beast in his lap fixed Zeno with a baleful stare, then growled on an ascending note.

"Michael," chided the Devil, offering a finger to the beast who immediately took the appendage in his jaws and began contentedly to munch on it.

"Michael's my eternal companion. Pet. Friend. You get the picture. Have you some milk around?" As he spoke, the Devil grimaced intermittently as the beast gnawed.

Zeno could hear the sound of fang scraping bone.

"Yes, sir-Nick. Around here someplace." And went to fetch the pot of newts milk cooling outside his single window in the snow of Sinai's peak.

When he returned with it and a bowl to pour it in, the beast deserted the Devil's lap with a bound. And its master said, "Now, then, Zeno, I'm here because you're the man who argued that every magnitude is divisible into an infinite number of magnitudes, and yet self-same and indivisible. Do I have it right: 'both like and unlike, at rest and in motion, ease and many'?"

"Ah, well, that's a good paraphrase. Sir Nick."

"Just a paraphrase, then? You don't consider yourself responsible for the human concepts of infinity, continuity, and unity?" said the Devil with deceptive casualness.

But Zeno was not fooled. This might be the beginning of infinite punishment; so far, he'd avoided the worst that Hell had to offer. He said carefully, drawing on all his philosophical skill, "Surely no human is responsible for the concepts of infinity, continuity, or unity. Unity is a precondition for all existence ... something must be, indivisibly and wholly, to differentiate itself from nothingness. Once 'being' is established, one has two states, being and non-being. As-"

"I'm not saying you created the concepts - just that you re guilty of first explicating them," Nick interrupted impatiently. Now cut to the chase, you long-winded pedant"

"Yes, s-s-sir" Zeno quavered, trying to stifle a pained look. The 'chase' had been his life's work; was his eternal vocation; he could not 'cut' to it, he was eternally and entirely engaged in it. And continued: "As soon as there are two states, there is also duration, from which follow all relations of space and time: forward and back, up and down, to and fro, before and after.

Thus the assumption of being and non-being' create a primary divisibility which, in and of itself; generates the concepts of infinity, continuity, and unity, since none of the aforementioned can exist without its opposite.

Therefore, differentiation is the Initial State, First Moment, the Root Casuality ... and the culprit you seek." Zeno smiled, having gotten himself irrefutably off the hook.

The Devil did not smile. The Devil stared at Zeno unblinkingly and then leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his white, curly wig swaying gently against powerful shoulders. Regardless of your pettifogging, you, you alone, first rubbed Mankind's nose in this particular brand of philosophical bullshit...

What would you say if I told you that something is disturbing the very fabric of your assumptions, here in Hell? That forward and back, to and fro, before and after are threatened at their very center? That the forward-moving arrow of time and the backward-moving arrow have collided in mid-air?"

I would say, Zeno replied very softly, "That you are better at creating paradoxes than even I am. But since my clocks are not reading the time in concert - not simultaneously, if I may add a loaded term to this discussion - I will admit that there does - seem to be some disturbance in the procession of time. In the length of what had previously and conveniently been uniform instants. In the ... fabric of time itself."

The Devil nodded morosely. He looked at his hands between his knees and then at his familiar, Michael, lapping from a bowl of milk which was still as full as when the two men had started their conversation, or the creature had first begun to lap. "I'm told that Hell is in danger of becoming temporally unstable - of having no duration and all duration simultaneously, I ask you, Zeno of Elea, is this a syllogism, or a real threat?"

Zeno had a sneaking suspicion that the Devil was trying to trap him into speaking some blasphemy so terrible that it demanded infinite punishment of indeterminate duration. He said slowly, "Sir Nick, if that were so then it would always have been so - at least once it starts or started, or will start

So we wouldn't know the difference, since there would only be a single moment in which to realize, cogitate, remember and predict Therefore, also, because danger, is a transient condition which leads to a result, there could be no peril in the true sense, because there would be insufficient duration to lead to any denouement. , . no result no crisis or shift or event to which what the New Dead call catastrophe math could apply. There could be no catastrophe whatsoever, since there could not be, in an indivisible instant, any shift of states - no events, if you like. There would be simply stasis, in which everything poised to occur simultaneously, but nothing whatsoever did occur.

And stasis, of all states, demands the single condition consciousness cannot meet peace. Thus, my answer is no, such a threat is not real, because such a threat, if it became reality, would be imperceptible and so unreal. Unreal for as long as there exists consciousness. And if consciousness does not exist, then nothing--"

"Stop!" howled the Devil, his fists balled over his ears, his wig's flaps pressed against them like earmuffs. "You know, you smartass word-monger, you really do belong here! Some of them don't, Ill admit ... bureaucratic muck-ups and the nature of big systems to malfunction. But you're as bad as Aristotle, who told me that his precious geometry proved the threat false in as masturbatory language as you're using."

"Sorry, Sir Nick, but you asked..."

"Asked!" This time, the yowl was so loud that Michael flattened himself before the bowl of milk and began to choke. As Zeno watched, the cat/bat/familiar seemed to bloat to twice its size as every hair stood on end. Its whole body convulsed from back to front. Then, its neck stretched to double its former length and its tongue sticking an inch out of its mouth, it vomited all the milk it had drunk back into the bowl.

And this was a very interesting phenomenon, because the bowl was still full before Michael began to vomit. And yet, as he vomited and after he vomited the milk he'd drunk back into the bowl did not overflow. When the animal lay exhausted and panting beside the bowl with its eyes glazed, having vomited into the bowl the entire contents of its prodigious stomach, the bowl was exactly, as full as it had been before the beast had begun vomiting. As, fall as it had while Michael had been drinking. As full as it had been when Zeno first brought the bowl, sloshing milk against its rim, to place it on the floor before Michael in the first place.

Zeno had stopped listening to the Devil, who was yelling. He said quietly, "Sir Nick, do you realize what this means? The bowl... the quantity of milk in the bowl was unchanging throughout the entire interval of not-drinking, drinking, and regurgitating. And after."

When Zeno again looked up at the Devil, the face he saw was as red as the sky above New Hell when Paradise was trying to set.

"No. Tell me. What does it mean?" said the Devil, spittle riding his words as he expelled them from purpling lips.

"It means that your informant was correct ... at least partially correct; In some places - for example, where Michael and the bowl are, but not here, only a few feet away on either Side, where you and I are - space-time is becoming anomalously subject to different laws."

"No shit," said the Devil as he rose from his chair in disgust "Michael!" The call shook the very rafters of Zeno's cell.

And the familiar rallied to it - or tried to. It twitched its ears, it got up on its hind legs, it sought to back away from the bowl. But for every moment away from its bowl, it exhibited an equal and opposite movement toward the bowl. To Zeno, the cat seemed trapped in a tape loop. First it went forward, then it went back, but it never managed to execute more than a circumscribed set of motions.

And the Devil, watching the familiar, began to rage. "Michael! Michael!" he screamed as if the beast were his only child. And strode forward, toward the bowl.

"No! Don't! Sir! Nick" Zeno called, and lunged for the Prince of Darkness, hoping to stop the Devil from becoming stuck like a fly on flypaper, as the familiar was now, in some temporal glitch.

The familiar was yowling, intermittently, whenever it reached a forward instant in its forward/backward/forward/backward minuet...

Now the Devil was cursing so horribly that demons started appearing-coming out of the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the very air. These were horrid creatures and Zeno (seeing acid spittle drip on floorboards and begin to smoke, spittle that dripped from gaping jaws which could chomp him in two), covered his head with his hands and sank down to curl himself into as small a ball as possible.

He heard noises his ears couldn't sort into sensible sounds. He heard the ripping of the firmament and the fundament.

And then he peeked, spreading his fingers. Through them he saw Satan, not a don now in human robes, but a gigantic fiery-eyed thing with horn and tail, beset by a great serpent and by winged clocks with spear-like arms.

He saw chariots with wheels of flame and mushroom clouds on which they rode.

He saw creation and dissolution. He saw the sun swallow up the sky. He saw the earth charred to a cinder, deep within the corona of that sun. And he saw a cloud of gas in which angels darted -

hundreds, thousands, wing brushing wing as they worked. He saw a huge ball forming in the midst of pregnant gasses.

And around all of this wound the serpent, and in the serpent's coil the Devil toiled.

And in the Devils arms Michael was cradled, fangs bared at a hungry sky as the serpent's wide-spread jaws came closer - jaws that contained an entire universe within the maw they circumscribed.

Zeno's fingers closed of their own accord, shutting out the awful sight. His head bowed down until it touched his knees. He curled up, hiding from the chaos he had seen. And though he could no longer see a struggle that his mind could not comprehend, he could still hear it.

He heard the Devil snarling that Michael was his and no Power had the right to take Michael from him. He heard a chorus of demons singing songs to sear the inner ear.

Then he heard nothing. Silence. Utter peace.

Unutterable peace. He couldn't even hear himself breathing. He couldn't hear the pulse in his ears. He couldn't hear the wind whipping Sinai.

Then he did hear something. He heard the squishy sound of a terrified man losing control of his bowels. Himself And he smelled his fear in its most base form.

And he heard a clearing of someone's throat. Then: "Zeno?"

He raised his head and the Devil was there. Alone but his familiar, riding now upon his shoulder, wings unfurled the Devil had wings now, also, great leathery wings and deep-burning yellow, slitted eyes.

This horror made Zeno raise his hands before his face.

But out of the gaping, sharp-toothed jaws of the Devil's new aspect came the same cultured voice of an Oxford don: "Now that we've determined that there is a threat, I'd like you to work on some solution. Now that the physics are clear to you." And the Devil began to laugh.

Squinting, Zeno saw why he laughed: the familiar had sunk its teeth into his neck and was gnashing them there. Blood began to drip from the wound, down over Satan's shoulder.

"A solution?" Zeno gasped. "Me?"

"You. A way to keep the clocks right. I'll deal with what's throwing the larger temporality out of balance ... it's, ah, certain mischievous souls among the dissidents and elsewhere who're to blame." From a pouch at his stomach, of the sort nature gives a marsupial, the Devil brought forth an object and held it out to Zeno.

Zeno scrambled to his feet to take the artifact. "But ... it's just an hourglass. A mere hourglass, big, but not the sort of thing I need to keep-"

"Just an hourglass?" boomed the Devil, his wings moving restlessly. "This is the hourglass. The primal standard. If you lose it, you'll find yourself with first-hand experience of a multi-temporal hard time. For now, your job is to keep the observatory running like..." White teeth gleamed.

"...Clockwork."

"But...."

"But what, mortal?" thundered the Father of Lies. "Its the nature of Hell to give every man a problem he can't solve. I'll leave a few demons here to make sure you've got the proper motivation."

And in a puff of black smoke that smelled hideously charnal, the Devil was gone.

But the demons weren't. They were outside Zeno's cell in the hall. They were outside his window, making obscene snowmen from the white caps of Sinai. And they were waiting, Zeno knew, for the hourly chimes to toll.

He didn't need to hear that first ragged, imprecise and tardy announcement of the approaching hour to know what the demons were going to do to him, every hour on the hour, for howsoever long he failed to make the clocks toll simultaneously.

The snowman outside his window looked just like him, and what was happening to it was so awful, and so graphic, and the demons were having so much fun doing it, that Zeno's hands were trembling like leaves before he'd even gotten down to work.

It wasn't so much the fear of intermittent punishment that made him shake, but the fear of getting caught in one of those space-time glitches while he had a demon up his ass.