"You ... were both mathematical reasoners," Markham muttered, staring into the two faces that beamed at him. "I suppose I am, too, though I'm really a fly on the wall compared to you..."He smiled wanly. "Have I come to some sort of refuge?"
Thales's mouth twisted in disapproval. "You dismiss me as mere numerologist?"
"Well, no -"
"I remind you that in the city of Miletus I once humiliated the so-called 'practical' men by cornering the market in olive presses. When the crop came good - as I had calculated, a half year before - I charged them, great and often. I laughed muchly while they scowled, and thus made my fortune. No mere abstract reasoner, I."
"I'm sorry, sir. I didn't mean ..." His voice trailed off. It had been millenia since Thales died.
"You can remember that far back?"
"Of course. Oh, I spy your intent. In the Rude Lands memory rubs away on the stones of agony."
Einstein said, "Here, not."
Markham said eagerly, "In all that time, have you found out what's going on here?"
Thales blinked. "Why, no. It is barely possible to learn this fool tongue."
"English?"
"Yea. It is ripe with tangle and contort."
"But you've had -"
"A year, no more."
Markham gaped. Einstein said, "Ja, and I haff been heir perhaps a few months."
"That's -"
"Vee know vye you are disturbed," Einstein said. "Vee are in a pocket, a leftover is maybe. A drain which collects junk, I denk." Einstein chuckled agreeably.
Somehow Markham had never thought of Einstein as a stooped little man with a broad, comic accent. Yet here he was, no icon, but a cheery figure brimming with life. Markham found he was blinking back tears. To come to this, a green and warm paradise, in the company of the greatest minds in history...
Thales said stubbornly, "I cannot ponder this point of singular points, Einstein, when you persist in saying that there are no such things as points."
Einstein shook his shaggy head. "Let us go back to time, eh? You here, me here, this new Junge Markham - proves that gedanken experiment is right. All time arrows here can go forward or back. Only solution to field equations, I say, is a singularity "n time. Not space!"
Thales slapped his palm to the stone. "A single time would mean frozen time, as up there!"
He jagged a finger at the filmy blue sky. A few yellow puffball clouds coasted by lazily. Looking up into it reminded Markham of the open simplicities of childhood.
"Nein! Field equations are clear."
"Not so. Your third derivative term -"
"One haff to interpret the intergral convergence -"
"You look for God in equations!"
"Vee haff proved that in Hell, time radiates from a non-temporal center, nicht wahr?" He scowled at Thales.
The Greek replied, "A possibility, yes. But the center may be God, or may be Devil - cannot tell from physics, not yet. We need more data."
Markham said wonderingly, "Then we can figure this out, if we just reason together..."
Both men looked at Markham with pity. "So that is vat you denk?" Einstein said. "Nein!"
Markham sputtered, "But, but - "
"Nein, you are coming for harder task," Einstein said gently. "Hier there are real problems.
Come, we must get down to the truly difficult werk."
Markham smiled. Russell and the wasp-woman had paid a price to put him here, and yet he had reached no plateau of the spirit. The whirl of Hell would go on, revealing new levels, and he would go with it.
But what could be the real problems? If Einstein hadn't solved them...
Somewhere, he drought he heard the keening, malicious laugh of the angel.
Altos. And a low bass one, as if from Satan himself.
What if, Markham thought, they were two faces of the same coin?
SPRINGS ETERNAL
David Drake
"Here we have hope," said Sulla to Sulla's Luck who lounged across the table from him. Either of the two could have been the other's mirror image, except that Sulla's Luck wore a peculiar smile. "As they do not anywhere in this - cosmos - except for this Pompeii we have founded."
"They have the hope we bring them, my Lucius," said Sulla's Luck in a tone too mild to be an objection. His thumb and forefinger pinched powder from the heap on the low table, raised it in the air, and brushed it off again.
Illumination from the roof opening of the adjacent reception court entered Sulla's Office through a latticework door. The light of Paradise was usually a murky red from piercing the clouds which covered even this place that could almost be home - but now, for an instant, a shaft of clear light pierced the sky to scatter from the decorative pond in the center of the court.
The powder drifted down, as white and pure as an infant's soul.
"Hope," repeated Sulla's Luck.
Sulla stood up, a motion that began abruptly but hitched as the ghost of a pain reminded him of the gout he once had. He thought that agony was over, now
- here, wherever here might be. Still, the memory hid somewhere in Sulla's mind or in the muscles themselves; and it seemed to recur whenever long absence had let him hope that it was gone forever.
Sulla walked to the window that opened onto the garden of his house and threw back the shutter. He favored his right foot, even though the twinge was gone and there had not been any real pain anyway. Behind him, he heard his Luck rise from the opposite couch, but the mirror figure did not join him at the window for the moment.
The plants in the walled garden grew well, though they tended to flower less fully than they should - than they would have in the sunlight and breezes of the real Pompeii. In the sky.
Paradise struggled with the lowering clouds and won through as nothing brighter than a baleful orange.
"Nearly perfect," said the man who was Dictator here, as he had been Dictator of Rome before he chose to abdicate and then a private citizen. "That I could found this town in this cosmos was your doing, my Luck."
"It's unusual in the Underworld," said Sulla's Luck, fingering the trophy that bung on the wall above boxes of scrolled accounts, "for the parameters of existence to seem as familiar to men as they do here on Adam's Isle. Elsewhere, they may be quite different."
The trophy was a bronze plate two inches thick. A bullet was imbedded in the bronze, a coppered-steel Jacket over a steel core. It had been shot from a weapon at velocities enormously greater than could have been achieved by a slinger in one of Sulla's armies in life, but the plate was thick enough to stop the missile and hold it in the center of an inch-wide crater in the softer metal.
Pompeian fishermen had cut the plate from the breast of a huge creature which actually flew, buoyed up by light gas in its belly, until it drifted across the shore of this place. Then, acted on by physics similar to those of the upper world, the huge mass of metal had crashed to utter ruin.
Sulla's Luck traced with an index finger the motto engraved on the plate: All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
Dante had reported accurately, though of course he did not understand. Even now.
"They're happy, don't you think?" said the Dictator in a tone of harsh demand, though he did not turn his eyes from the window. He had not painted his garden walls with hunting scenes or foliage to expand the apparent space for planting. Instead, Sulla's walls bore a frescoed bird's-eye panorama of the town he ruled. The orange-red roof tiles glowed with a semblance of reality, but the shifted spectrum of Paradise turned the painted gardens into splotches of purple.
"No, I don't think they're happy, my Lucius," replied Sulla's Luck in a voice more wistful than ironic. "But they have hope."
"Why shouldn't they be happy?" snapped Sulla, turning his head with the jerky suddenness of a fish engulfing prey. "What do they lack that matters?"