"Maybe that s just the cleanup squad, come for the body."
"They do appear to have missed us."
Markham noted a strange silence in the woods ahead. No bird calls, not even the subtle brush of wind.
"Something funny over that way. C'mon."
They crept through tree-lined paths, angling away from the brooding zone of sepulchral silence.
Markham was reasonably sure this was not (he same hill where the battle had occurred, though it was hard to gauge distances when you were tumbling through the air on a belching, foul-breathed dragon.
They came to a gouged-out area that seemed the site of some past disaster.
Pillars and caved-in buildings poked like jagged teeth from the undergrowth. A snake slipped around a Doric column, eyed them, and left a trail of green slime as it moved off. The emerald line formed a written line, a message.
Markham gestured at the slimy numbers silently: 666.
"Ah, the number of the Beast."
"Does that mean he knows everything that's going on?"
"Perhaps. The Devil's supposed to be omnipotent.
"I thought that was God.'
A cackling laugh. "Is there a difference?"
"I hope so." Markham sat on a ruined wall of ancient red brick which reminded him of Greece.
He felt suddenly tired. Yet in Hell he could not sleep.
"You're a physicist?"
"Was. And you?"
"A philosopher."
"I think I remember your face. From the back of a book..."
"I died in 1970. Bertrand Russell."
Markham blinked. Why was Hell so densely populated with the famous? "Of course. I read a book of yours."
"History of Western Philosophy, I'll wager."
"Right. I'll bet you're surprised."
"Why?"
"You dismissed ideas of an afterlife as pure bullshit."
Russell again laughed like a cross between a barking dog and a clucking hen.
"True enough. I was a neutral monist, holding that personalities were collections of events. An aggregate, like a cricket club."
"But we're here. Some motivating personality makes the world run, and it cares about your particular cricket club. And. mine."
Russell's eyes sparkled, "Never feel absolutely sure of anything."
"Come on. You can't peddle that positivist doubt any more."
"Oh, can't I? Just because we have wakened to a comic book Hell."
"Dragons with Dante written on their hides? You think they arose from natural selection?"
"I do believe someone with a great deal of power has ordered this odd place we're in.
"Not the Devil, though?"
"Oh, I don't know his name, mind you. He can call himself whatever he likes."
"But you don't think this is a supernatural place?"
"I believe we are in the grip of a superior intelligence, that is all."
Markham preferred believing in the rule of physical law. If a capricious Devil ran everything here, there was no hope of doing anything independently. All human effort could be overruled by fiat. "You could explain our escape as just something the Devil let happen?"
"Of course.
"Even a Devil needs to make his Hell work with some order."
Russell leaned forward, rubbing his palms together as if relishing a good talk for the first time in quite a while. "You're a scientist. Let me put it to you: Isn't it perfectly possible that the old world we came from was the product of intelligent manipulation of a purely natural
"Until I woke up here, I'd have said yes. But now-"
"No no, let me be more precise. For example, our galaxy could have been made by a powerful mind who rearranged the primeval gases using carefully placed gravitating bodies, controlled explosions and all the other paraphernalia of an astro-engineer. But would such a super-intelligence be God?"
'Well, as far as we're concerned, yes."
"Not sol God was not supposed to be some mere galactic architect. Cleariy, no being who was obliged to operate within the universe, using only pre-existing laws, can be considered as a universal creator."
"I see." Markham didn't know whether he liked this line of argument. It had been strangely reassuring to die in Hell several times and be reborn, none the worse for wear. Even if you weren't hugely pleased with the place-to say the least-it did guarantee immortality. Death had been the deepest, most disturbing problem humanity faced in the old, "real" world. Its remorseless coming motivated the pyramids, vast rich art, all the grasping after tatters of immortality that lay behind great works. Awareness of it was lust about the only remaining feature which separated humankind from animals, far more important than language or tool-using or the opposable thumb. And each mortal faced it, finally, alone.
"If you as a scientist are to believe in God, you must hold that He created space-time. Eh?"
"Uh ... okay."
"But modem physics-or what I can glean of it from people passing through-holds that mere humans alone could accumulate enough matter in a small enough region to create a black hole."
"So?"
"Well, a black hole is a dosed-off space-time, is it not?"
Markham chewed at his lip. Russell's legendary quick wit was accompanied by a ready grin, a concentrated, almost wolfish gaze, a lust for the intellectual hunt. "No, a black hole destroys space-time at its center. That's what the singularity is. The whole idea of spacetime no longer works there. Anything that falls in enters that point, where our ideas of space and time and event itself no longer makes sense."
"To us." Russell said briskly.
"Yes, to us." Something was bothering Markham, plucking at his awareness. But he brushed it aside.
Russell nodded, still enjoying the pursuit "Of creating space-time, admittedly, we know nothing.
But in a sense the mathematical discovery of
black holes-and how to annihilate space-time at one vortex-like point- brings us halfway to Godhood ourselves."
"You mean if we were just smart 'enough, or had enough time to work on the problem-"
"Exactly. We would become gods."
"Rulers of space-time," Markham said sardonically. "Masters of the sevagram."
Russell sniffed with donnish primness. "Similarly, there is absolutely nothing which requires that we attribute this Hell to anything more than a natural God or Devil. He-or It-could quite simply have arranged v the galaxies to form, or life to begin, for example. No need for creation out of nothing, ex nihlio. Indeed-"
"You're just stuffing everything we don't know into a box and calling it God."
"Ah, quite right. At Cambridge we called that the God of the Gaps. Then, every time you physicists turned a new leaf, brought light on some subject. God retreated."
Markham nodded, still somewhat troubled by the silent forest they had found.
He studied the trees nearby, melancholy drooping willows. Was there a dead zone in the woods to his left, a curious noiseless region like the one he had noticed before? He felt jumpy.
Russell said with lordly reserve, "I do not wish to make this God the friend of ignorance. If we are to find God here, it must surely be through what we discover about things, rather than through remaining ignorant."
Markham said fervently, "Damn right. If we can just do a, few experiments, try to-"
"No, wait, you misunderstand. Let me frame my point more precisely. You surely accept the possibility that in the remote future, humanity might be able to place great regions of the universe under intelligent control."
"Well..." Markham had always been rather leery of wild-eyed speculation, of what-ifs piled atop one another to dizzying heights of absurdity.
"Then such a zone would be totally technologized. Why, then, is it so difficult to suppose such a superintelligence cannot have existed before us?"
"There's no evidence-" Markham stopped.
"Exactly. This may be such evidence.'
Some innate sense of what science was about forced its way forward. Markham said irritably,