Russell slapped at several of them and barked, "From what?"
A welter of piping voices called out to Russell as they spun and fluttered about his head.
"Accursed form!"
"Hunger eats like worms in belly!"
"Want suck demon!"
"Crush me!"
"Inhale me!"
"Hot kiss of frog's tongue!"
Markham caught a foul scaly thing crawling into his ear, crushed it between his fingernails, flicked it away. "What do they mean?" he asked the wasp-woman.
"Some are beset by hungers. Others wish to leave this foul form."
Russell caught in midair a large one which was pleading for death. He popped it in two and a rank acid odor turned the air blue. The men trotted away from the spreading murk, but the swarm stayed with them, humming with feral desires
Markham could sense but could not name.
"Those who would die, please crush," the wasp-woman pleaded, flying nearly into Markham's eye.
"If you'll leave us, yes," Russell bargained.
"I would travel in your wake," she answered, darting around Russell's wrinkled neck.
"Why?" Markham asked, methodically smashing his cupped hand into the path of all who ventured near. When they understood that he would accommodate them, dozens of hornet-people dove directly into his swinging hands. They died with sharp, brittle cries of almost sensual agony.
The wasp-woman hung by his ear. "I would suck the green blood-pap of a demon."
"We don't want to tangle with them."
"But you are a world-strider, and so will cross them."
"Not if I can help it." Markham panted with exertion.
"They come to test you, yes, vast man." The waspwoman seemed sure other prediction.
"Try to follow us and la knock you from the air," Russell said imperiously, patience gone. "If I suck the green-gore pap, I can become a frog or rat,"
the wasp-woman explained as though this were a laudable and common enough ambition.
"Bravo," Markham said sarcastically.
"Get away!" Russell shouted.
"If will not lead to demon," the wasp-woman cried, "then crush me."
"Well, no, I ..." Despite his horror, to Markham this careening mote was a person, even if it was a dreadful perversion of nature.
"Is chance I return as worm to sup shit! Or be weevil," the wasp-woman pleaded.
"And you would rather be that?" Russell was puzzled.
"Would rest from endless gyre!"
The wasp-woman's passionate plea bothered Markham. He could not bring himself to swat her into oblivion.
Russell pointed at the air. "Look!"
The weaving flecks united for a long moment, hovering, forming letters that drifted lazily before the men:
Emit
No
evil;
live
on
time.
"Why are you doing that?" Markham asked the wasp-woman.
"Do what? We fly, we seek."
Russell said slowly, "They don't know what they're doing. Something else is using them."
"To write little epigrams?" Markham snorted.
"It's another palindrome."
Markham blinked. "Time. Time trap. We should keep going."
"Thirst for blood juice!" a small keening came in his ear.
"Dammit! We can't stand this!" He smashed a few more of the eager suiciders.
His hands were thickly spattered with gore now, and stung.
"Then I will banish them!"
She turned and wove a pattern over their heads, spewing a milky fluid behind her. It curied into orange smoke as it descended, scattering the swarm. They fled, sobbing and calling curses at her.
"I don't... are you their ruler, somehow?" Russell asked.
"I hold sway," she said, wings beating the air with a tired drone. "I have been among the cursed and the crawling for centuries now, and have learned their vexed arts well."
Russell observed, "But not well enough to escape the form."
Her slit of a mouth pouted forlornly. "I must suck the green-pap five times, so a frog told me."
"A frog?" Markham wondered if animals talked in Hell. So far he had seen only domesticated animals and birds.
"It promised me knowledge, if I would approach to be eaten.
Markham said, "So you..."
"Gladly made my way into its mouth cavern.
This shook even Russell's aristocratic demeanor. "All to discover that drinking demon blood five times will do ... something?"
"Will make me a person! Like you." She said this with awe and desire.
Markham asked, "You were once?"
"When I came, a shepherdess! was. Then I transgressed. Spread thighs and made sup with a snot-eater. It gave me ram and at its spurting moment pierced my brain with its prick-sucker."
Russell paled. "Well, at least the sins are more picturesque here. I'm sure..."
"Then was I cast among the crawlers and flyers. Please let me come with you. I see knowledge, a path from this vile station."
Markham wondered if this implied a sort of reversed transmigration of souls.
The Hindus-had imagined that they could work their way up the chain of being, eventually attaining nirvana. Here you could easily slip down evolution's slick steps, end up a bug. And the Hell of it was that you knew what you were.
Was this a parody of Earthly beliefs, a joke? Or the truth? Perhaps both...
Russell eyed her with hooded eyes, as though he were examining a student in oral exams at Cambridge. "Ummm. You were a Christian?"
"Oh yes, sir. A humble and devout servant."
Russell said wryly, "At last, a religious person. Very well."-He nodded peremptorily at Markham. "We are all seeking knowledge. Let us travel together."
Markham had explained his thinking to Russell, and the philosopher showed a quick ability to get through the thickets of jargon and find the kernel of physics. Markham had wondered how the time trap could work, and in pondering the riddle realized that perhaps the trap itself was a huge due. After all, if the God of the Gaps intended them to figure anything out. He-or She, or It, or whatever-would have to allow them some ability to experiment. They certainly couldn't deduce the essence of Hell by abstract thinking alone. "Like Descartes crawling inside the famous stove, to deduce the properties of the world by pure undisturbed thought alone, Russell had remarked when Markham brought up the point.
So, to Markham, this meant they must be able to experiment in some way, Russell's survival of the electrocution was perhaps a hint, a gesture, an encouragement. To learn more they had to try something different, not Just slog around in the mud, waiting for demons or Guevera to find them again.
So Markham had been thinking of the time trap, and how it might work. In Einstein's relativity, the basic unit was the space-time interval. He had scribbled this out for Russell-and, resting on a tuft of grass nearby, the wasp-woman-in a patch of sand: (ds)^2 = (dx)^2 - c^2 (dt)^2
"See, ds is the length of an interval in space-time," Markham said, expecting to have to step through the equation slowly. He started to describe in his familiar professorial cadence how the notation dt meant a small, differential change in time. But the philosopher waved away his explanations, remarking that he had himself written a book about relativity and its implications well before Markham was born. Daunted, Markham went on to point out that the only thing which had the differential ds = 0 was light itself. Ordinary matter couldn't move fast enough-at the speed of light, o-to do that.
Markham felt a forgotten pleasure, the muted joys of the orderly classroom. He went on with assurance, "Now, let's assume general relativity applies to this space-time, shall we? Then-"
"To suspend time means making dt = 0," Russell said crisply.
"Uh, yes. To do that, there has to be a region where the differential of physical lengths, dx, changes sign. Then-"
"What is a negative length?" Russell asked acidly.