"Uh, sorry. Beg pardon, m'lord."
"And what's that mean?" Russell gave Markham the full force of his famous scowl, his nose like a beak beneath glaring eyes.
"Well, you were a lord, after all."
The philosopher was startled again. "I was?"
"Of course. Lord Russell. You inherited it from your father, I think."
Russell sat down slowly, his haughty air of indignant affront turning to puzzlement. "I... did?"
"Can't you remember?"
"Well... m." Russell looked embarrassed.
"You won the Nobel Prize, too. For literature, some essays or something."
"Really? Not for peace? I seem to recall working for peace."
"No, they usually give that to people who negotiate treaties."
"Lake Mr. Kissinger, you mean? I saw him a few disasters ago, being carried off by a talking black snake."
"Wish I'd seen that."
"I rather enjoyed it, yes. But I've been thinking about an .earlier remark of yours. It has been 28 years since I died, but I can remember very little of my life before that. It's been fading gradually. The longer I'm in Hell, the more foggy become my recollections."
"You can't expect to keep stuff from the nineteenth century fresh at hand."
"Usually it's the other way, isn't it? That you remember the name of your favorite teddy bear but cannot recall last week?"
"That's just aging. We're dead."
"Ummm. Good point."
"Still, you're just as feisty as your writing was. I wonder how your personality survives, if your memory doesn't?"
"Perhaps that's my soul." Russell rolled his eyes in donnish jest.
"Y'know," Markham said sarcastically, "ritual irony and Brit class postures won't get us anywhere."
"I assure you-"
"You can't 'assure' me of anything! You've been here 28 years and learned nothing!"
The two men glared at each other, Russell drawing himself up into his ostrich-like dignity. His suit was a wet, bedraggled thing. "You can scarcely expect anyone to make sense of this madness, this meaningless chaos."
"Not unless we can do something concrete," Markham said, "an experiment."
"Ah, the old scientific ethos," Busseu said sardonically.
Markham decided to take a different tack. He hunched forward, hands outspread.
"Look, if you're right, memory fades with time around here. That means our technical knowledge will slip away. Use it or lose it. I'll bet."
"I'm not dotty, if that's what you mean," Russell said primly.
A distant bellow rang through the foggy arroyo where they huddled. It sounded reptilian, trailing off ominously into bone-crunching bass notes. Markham waved ft away and kept on earnestly, "Look, you remember lots of theology and stuff, maybe you can piece it together and find some kind of due, something we could apply rational analysis to, get-"
I'm surprised you haven't considered the implications of that time trap, then," Russell said archly.
"How so?"
"The ability to suspend time surely implies some tinkering with causality, no? If time can stop or even run backward, then what's die sense of moral action? There is no guilt if effects do not even follow from causes."
Markham frowned. "I don't..."
"Then such a time snare must be the creation of something .that stands outside the realm of morality, theology, of everything."
"Look, we need something practical, not some abstract-"
Russell's eyes flashed. "If you want to do some-" a disdainful drawing-down of his mouth-"engineering, then look to whatever causes those traps."
Markham blinked. "Y' know, that might actually tell us something. Come on."
He surged to his feet and set off into the mist. Russell scrambled after him, calling, "I only framed it as a hypothesis."
"Hurry up. The time trap might go away."
They tried to find their away back through the shrouded hillsides, but bearings were hard to keep in the shifting gray banks of fog. They stumbled among stunted trees and tricky, sandy slopes. Just as Markham began to think any effort was futile, the cloying wet mist lifted. A faint nwmwimm grew as a warm white cloud enveloped them. "What's this st-"
An insect buzzed past his ear, another flew into his eyes. He batted them away. Three more landed on his arm.
"A swarm!" Russell called.
"Head downhill. Well-"
A wasp-thing hovered in front of his eyes, gossamer wings humming. A tiny voice cried, "Help us!"
He looked closer. The wasp body was a series of slender. Jointed tubular sections, connected with a bulbous abdomen by a slender waist, A sharp green stinger dripped clear fluid at the tail.
But this was far larger than any wasp he had ever seen, and covered in a crusted blue sheen.
Spindly forelegs were held out toward him, beseeching.
Atop the body was not the normal insect's bulging eyes, but instead...
"It's a woman's ... face," he said wonderingly.
The tiny features were pinched with anxiety, the eyes large and white. She cried forlornly, "Help!"
Horrified and intrigued, Markham suddenly realized that the low hum of the insect hoarde was not merely the beating of myriad wings, but also a thing chorus of pleading voices, each shouting different messages as they hovered around the two men. Some buzzed angrily at his ears. Others attempted to attract his attention by flying up his nose or into his loose-fitting clothes.
He felt a thousand minute pinpricks as small hands grasped his skin. He shivered with disgust.
Without thinking, he slapped at them. Tiny bodies tumbled from the air, screaming.
Small things struck the ground. Some survived, but scuttling brown insects dashed from under leaves and stones to attack the wounded survivors. Markham bent down, confused by the welter of tinny voices, and watched a black beetle dose sharp pincers around the neck of a swollen fly.
Blood spurted. Markham thought irrelevantly that insects did not have red blood. As the fluid oozed from the plump little body he studied the small contorted face and felt remorse.
Until one bit him.
It had settled on his neck and plunged a sharp pinprick snout into a vein. He slapped at it, which only drove thee point further in.
"Damn! He slapped at others, and saw Russell was dancing madly, beating his suit with flailing hands.
"That's right! That's right!" called the woman-face, still hovering before him.
"Call them off!"
"They are of the mad," she explained reasonably.
A blue mote nipped his nose painfully. He squashed it, wiped his hand on his pants.
"Good," the woman-wasp called. "Send them to the other shore, great general."
He looked around wildly for some escape. The swarm seemed larger, a dense white cloud orbited the two men. A spherical galaxy of insectoid things, he thought, each with an obscenely mismatched head. Markham saw match-head sized faces of all races, some churning in endless loops, others with eyes dosed as if in sleep or prayer, still more screaming incoherently in strident bursts.
Some made droning speeches or gave hoarse mad barks. Another flitted into Markham's face, as if demanding attention-but when he looked, the head lolled, yellow eyes frozen, skin a putrid decaying mass, worm-ridden. Yet the thing buzzed on, a doomed soul harnessed to a brute insect engine.
Markham slapped it from the sky in revulsion and pity. Most of the motes simply wheeled about the two men, their voices like tiny saws, neither threatening nor giving ground when Russell and Markham began walking rapidly downhill.
Again the tiny woman's voice called, "Lead us! Show us a way, giant prophet."
"I don't know any," Markham said.
"Give us sup with devil-juice."
"If I had a fly swatter-"
"Yes! Yes! Thousands of us crave it." Her ten wings beat in an almost sexual frenzy.
A tinny cry went up from the swarm; "Free us! Free us!"