A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck Page B

sleep can’t be
helped and all things are repaired and made right and new in
Hell.
    The days passed in a dream. I pictured our
reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over
until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it
seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion.
Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation
is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s
loss, however, is the greatest despair.
    I never found her. I don’t know what
happened. I searched everywhere she could have been. I called her
name relentlessly, but she was gone. I never found her. I continued
down after a score of millennia of wandering, opening an occasional
book, but mostly looking for her. Of Wand I found no trace. Now I
wonder if our meeting was real. Perhaps it was a dream? Maybe my
memory of her getting into the stacks was an illusion, and she
plunged light-years below me. She is gone. That at least is
clear.
    All hope is gone also. All hope for anything
has vanished – meeting a person, finding a book, discovering some
hidden way out. So much time has passed, what is left to say? All
variety is lost, and billions of years spent searching through
books has left me a poor conversationalist. I could tell you of my
fall to the bottom – the starving and dying over and over in
endless cycles of pain and forgetfulness. I could tell you of
starting my search in earnest from the bottom floor. Of moving
slowly up light years and light years of stairs. Of opening books
beyond count. I could tell you of occasionally, every eon, meeting
a person, with whom I might stay for a billion years. But what of
it? After a billion years there is nothing left to say, and you
wander apart, uncaring in the end. The hope of a human relationship
no longer carries any depth or weight for me, and all meaning has
faded long ago into an endless grey nothingness. Now the search is
all that matters. I know there will come a time when I find my
book, but it is far in the future. And I know without doubt that it
will not be today. Yet a strange hope remains. A hope that somehow,
something, God, the demon, Ahura Mazda, someone, will see I’m
trying. I’m really trying, and that will be enough.
     
     

 
    APPENDIX

    T HE LIBRARY OF BABEL
CONTAINS all the books of a certain size that can be written. I
assume all the characters on a standard keyboard and that each book
(as described in the original story by Jorge Luis Borges) is 410
pages long with 40 lines of 80 characters on each page. So the
total number of characters in the book is:
     
    410 * 40 * 30 = 1,312,000
     
    With about 95 possible characters on a
standard keyboard, that implies that the number of possible books
is 95 1,312,000 , a rather large number when one considers
that there are only (according to Arthur Eddington [1882–1944])
1.5 80 electrons in the universe. Now, assuming the books
are about 1.5 inches thick and take about 1.5 feet to shelve
vertically, figuring about 8 shelves 200 feet long and about 100
square feet of living space, the width and breath of the library
(given two shelves, one for each side of the library) is about
7.16 1,297,369 light-years wide and deep.
     
     

 
    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
     
    S TEVEN L. PECK IS AN
evolutionary ecologist and professor of the philosophy and history
of science. He is the author of a previous novel, The Scholar of
Moab (Torrey House Press, 2011), and a forthcoming young adult
novel, Spear from the Wealdend’s Tree (Cedar Fort Press).
His poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous literary
journals, including Dialogue, Bellowing Ark, Irreantum , and Red Rock Review . In 2011 he was nominated for the Science
Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award, and his writing has
been recognized through honors and prizes including the Mayhew
Short Fiction Contest and the Eugene England Memorial Essay
Contest. His scientific work has appeared in American
Naturalist,