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.