Inferno

by Larry Niven

  Why would aliens care about that? Well, Carpentier?

  “Benito, I don’t like it here,” Billy said.

  I patted his shoulder. “Me neither. Let’s get out.” I felt the urge to run. At least I was safe from this pit. We all were. We’d never had heavenly gifts to sell.

  The bridge over the fourth gully was just ahead, and I glanced into it from the top, intending to run on past. The strange sight held me. The damned flowed beneath us, and their heads had been turned back to front. Most of them were women.

  “Fortune-tellers,” Benito said before I could ask. “They tried to see the future by magic.”

  And now they were not even allowed to watch where they were going. I shivered, thinking that a science-fiction writer might well end up here. But no, I’d never used magic. Only logic, and it hadn’t kept me out of Hell. “Why aren’t all the scientists and economic prognosticators here?” I asked. “They try to foresee the future.”

  “Most of these appealed to Satan for aid. He gave it to them . . . or not. It is the appeal that weighs against them.” He turned to move on.

  Then I recognized one of the damned.

  A little elderly lady, very prim and proper. She’d been a teacher in my nephew’s school. Now she walked with her head turned backward, and tears ran down her spine and between her buttocks. I screamed. The damned looked up at me.

  “Mrs. Herrnstein! Why?” I shouted.

  She looked away. Then she stopped and looked up. Face and back turned toward us. She’d always been thin, and I’d never thought of her as particularly feminine. Certainly she wasn’t feminine now. “I belong here, Mr. Carpentier,” she called. “Please leave. I don’t want to be watched.”

  “You belong here?” I could not see Mrs. Herrnstein with a crystal ball.

  “Yes. Whenever I had a pupil who had difficulty learning to read, I used—I was a bad teacher, Mr. Carpentier.”

  “You were a good teacher! You taught Hal more in a year than he learned in five!”

  “I was a good teacher with good pupils. But I could not be bothered with the ones who weren’t so bright. If they had trouble learning to read, I said they had dyslexia.”

  “Are you here because of bad diagnoses?” This was monstrous!

  “Dyslexia is not a diagnosis, Mr. Carpentier. It is a prediction. It is a prediction that says that this child could never learn to read. And with that prediction on his record—why, strangely enough, none of them ever do. Unless they happen on a teacher who doesn’t believe in educationese witchcraft.”

  “But—”

  “It was witchcraft, Mr. Carpentier. Please go now.” She walked on, crying uncontrollably, her face toward us as she walked away. I watched until she was out of sight.

  “She does not belong here,” I insisted.

  “Then perhaps she will not be here long,” Benito answered dispassionately. “Yet—you will note that she did not agree with your judgment.”

  “Then she’s wrong too!”

  “Why do you feel so competent to judge everyone, Allen?”

  “Get it through your thick head that it’s Big Juju I’m judging—”

  “It is God you are judging,” he thundered.

  “All right, it’s God I’m judging. If He can judge me, I claim the right to judge Him!”

  Billy seemed horrified by what I was saying. I was sorry for that. But Benito laughed and said, “How will you implement your judgment on God Himself?”

  The only possible answer to that was a feeble one, maybe, but I used it. “By withholding my worship. Benito, do you realize that the God you worship keeps a private torture chamber?”

  “Hardly private.”

  “Private or public, the God Allen Carpentier worships will have to meet higher standards than that!”

  Benito didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “We must hope our shouting was not heard. Look ahead.”

  F

  rom our position at the top of the arch we had a good view of the rims of the next gully. On both sides of the gap, horned black demons moved. They were larger than men, a little smaller than the demons in the first ditch, but like them they had horns and tails, and their skin was black ebony, very different from a black man’s skin. They carried—

  “Pitchforks?”

  “Certainly,” said Benito.

  I couldn’t help grinning a little. Pitchforks! I’d forgotten that detail. Had Walt Disney’s cartoonists ever realized why their devils carried pitchforks?

  “They must not see us,” Benito said. “None of us are safe from them. They guard the Pit of the Grafters, of those who stole from positions of trust.”

  Billy shuddered. “Reckon they’d like me,” he said. “Guess I took a few things from my bosses in my day. Not much, but some.”

  “Not me. Freelance writers don’t have bosses,” I said. Then I remembered the advance from Omniverse Publishing, nine years before I died. Somehow the novel never jelled, the money never got returned, and Let’s play it safe here, Carpentier. Demons wouldn’t understand the publishing business.

  There was cover at the bottom of the bridge. It was all a jumble of boulders. We waited our chance, then sprinted down the bridge while none of the demons were nearby. We were hidden before another group came past. We huddled together between the rocks.

  “Too bad the bridges are staggered,” I whispered. “We could have gone right across.” The next bridge was thirty or forty yards to the left, with a troop of twenty-odd demons between.

  “For us this is the second most dangerous place in Hell,” whispered Benito. “We must reach the next bridge without being seen. Cross at a dead run, and do not stop at the next pit. Run straight into it. There are no bridges in any case, and we could not reach one if any existed. The demons are on both sides of the pit.”

  Billy shifted restlessly. “Don’t like running from nothing.”

  “We must,” Benito said simply. He pointed. A demon strode past.

  A roughly human form nine feet tall, equipped with horns and hooves and a twitching tail. A capriform humanoid.

  How glib, Carpentier. Capriform humanoid? Demon! Why play games with yourself?

  The demon was carrying a human being, carrying him like a bowling ball, his claws inserted deep into the man’s back. The man writhed and struggled. The demon didn’t seem to notice. He called to three of the others. “How many New Yorkers this week?”

  They joined him in front of our rock. One twitched his tail up to his mouth. Teeth like butcher knives gnawed at the end. “Twelve.”

  “Make it thirteen. And it’s still Thursday on Earth. If Hideous wins the pool again I’ll rip his face off.”

  “You could forget to report this one.”

  “Why not?” The first demon lifted his human burden to study it. “He hardly counts anyway. He stole a few hundred bucks from a friend who needed an eye operation.” He addressed the man: “You won’t tell on us, will you?”

  “No. I swear,” said the man. His voice was choked with agony.

  “And you won’t show your head above the pitch? Because if we see any sign of you—” The demon hefted his pitchfork suggestively. “We’ll pull you out and tear you into little pieces and scatter you widely. It hurts a lot.”

  “I won’t tell,” said the man.

  “Good,” said the demon holding him, and he flung him. The man dropped below the rim with a mournful howl that ended in a sound half splash, half thud.

  “What’s down there?” Billy asked.

  I answered, “Boiling pitch.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “Graft.”

  “I kept wanting to try to save him.”

  Benito said, “I would not save him if I could.”

  The demons passed on. Like the warriors around the lake of blood, they looked always into the pit, always away from us. If we were careful we could move, one at a time, flitting from rock to rock to—

  “Gotcha!” a demon shouted, and I had a heart attack,
right out there between two inadequate boulders. All they had to do was come and collect me, but they weren’t looking. They were crumpled at the rim, jabbing down.

  A human form came up dripping gobbets of black pitch and trying to wriggle free of the tines of two pitchforks. I heard, “Boss Tweed, ain’t it? We been checking with some of those dead men that’re supposed to have voted your ticket—Hold him, Crazy-red!” The man lurched free of one pitchfork, but the other held him fast. They beached him. They began to play with him.

  I touched Billy’s shoulder. “Don’t look. We can get a good way while they’re busy.”

  We crawled like snakes. By the time the shade of Tweed had stopped screaming, we were opposite the bridge. I looked back once and had to close my eyes. The demons had opened him up and spread him out like a frog in biology class; but unlike the frog, he was still trying to get away.

  Benito crouched like a sprinter. “Ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Right.”

  We ran.

  I heard a great bass roar of rage. I didn’t look back. But as I went over the arch, last in line, I saw that the demons on the far side of the gully were running to meet us.

  One was going to make it.

  I stopped. Only for an instant; then I plunged down the arch behind Benito.

  But Billy had doubled his speed.

  The demon reached the end of the bridge off balance and skidding. “Come to Poppa!” he roared, and swung his pitchfork around.

  He was a nanosecond late. Billy shot past the tines and ran up the demon and swarmed over the huge head.

  The demon bellowed and tried to reverse eighteen feet of iron pitchfork. Benito slammed shoulder-first into his knee. The demon half-turned, and I hit the other knee sideways. Both huge legs went out from under the demon, left him blind and falling.

  Half a ton of demon slammed into the rock.

  Billy rolled away. The demon moaned and tried to gather his knees to his chest.

  “Now run!” cried Benito. “Billy!”

  A troop of demons was almost on us. I raced for the next pit, stopped at the edge. Where was Billy?

  Billy had retrieved the demon’s pitchfork and was raising it for the kill.

  I yelled, “Never mind that!” and then it was just too late. Billy yelled triumph and brought the pitchfork down hard. He raised it for another thrust, and they had him. I jumped into space alongside Benito. Three-inch fingernails clicked shut behind my neck.

  21

  T

  he side of the gully was rough rock falling almost sheer. I glimpsed it in free-fall, and when I saw that there were no handholds I simply gave up. A couple of seconds later I lay broken at the bottom, staring up at the non-sky.

  In the sea of pain I couldn’t tell what was broken and what was only bruised. But I remembered that you’re not supposed to move an accident victim. I didn’t try to move.

  Rustling near me.

  “Benito?”

  “Over here.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me too.”

  “We are out of their path, I think. We need only wait to heal.”

  Whose path? I was afraid to turn my head, but I turned my eyes. I found myself looking up along the fluted robe of a life-sized golden statue. No information there.

  I said, “What about Billy?”

  “Poor Billy. His urge to violence betrayed him.”

  “Don’t be so damned philosophical. We’ve got to get him out of their hands!”

  “How?”

  “Well . . . first we wait to heal, I guess. Where would they put him? In the pitch with the Tammany types?”

  “Look up along the edge of the gully.”

  Something like an endless length of rope was falling in loops across the sky. It dropped very slowly, as if almost weightless. As it came near I saw that it was thicker than rope, and there was a tuft on the end . . . Where had I seen something like that recently?

  Above our heads it hesitated, then descended like a blind worm. For seconds it was hidden behind the rock slope. Then it began to rise . . . and the end was coiled around something that moved. Billy.

  “Minos,” I said. “It’s his tail.”

  “Yes.”

  Before we could move, Billy would be back on the island in the river of blood—or in the river itself; he’d left the island of his own free will. He was beyond our reach. I sighed and turned my eyes from the tiny struggling figure and the infinite sprawl of Minos’s tail.

  And the statue had moved.

  It had gone past me about one yard. I turned my head, regardless of consequences. My neck wasn’t broken. And there were two bare human feet beneath the hem of the golden robe. One moved a good six inches as I watched.

  “Benito. There are men in those things.”

  “And women too,” said Benito. “Religious hypocrites.”

  He stood up carefully, testing to see if anything had healed. Apparently it had. He tried to help me up, but pain yelped in my ribs. I sat down against the slope to wait some more.

  Golden robes moved past like snails. There were men and women in those golden idols, but I saw only bare feet and shadowed faces within enormous hoods. One stopped, and turned with the same excruciating slowness that characterized his walk, and said, “Are you lost?”

  Benito said we weren’t. I asked, “Are you?”

  “Why, no. I think this is my proper place.” His accent was thick and hard to identify. “I have been here long enough to be convinced that God thinks so too.”

  “How long is that?”

  “Over a thousand years have passed on Earth, I’m told.”

  “That’s a little hard to swallow,” I said. “The English language isn’t that old.”

  “I know,” said the priest. “We teach each other. I learned this language from one who came here recently. There is little else to do as we wander this endless channel, and you may imagine that it is easier to teach each other than to search for some companion who speaks our own language.”

  “Why,” I asked, “don’t you stop and sit down?”

  The tired gray eyes studied me from within the golden cowl. “I could fall on you. But it may be that you do not know what you say. If I stop this robe grows hot. It is too hot now. It grows hot slowly, and it grows cool slowly. Now, good-bye.” He began to turn away.

  Benito said, “We could walk along with you.”

  “That would please me.” He finished his turn and took one lurching footstep.

  I got up. The ruined ribs only twinged. “How heavy is that robe?” I asked.

  “I never weighed it. They tell me it is gilded lead. Perhaps a ton?”

  “What did you do?”

  “Does it matter? I was young, I had not been a priest for many years. But the end of the thousand years since Christ was born were drawing to a close. People began to fear the end of the world. I urged them to give away their property. To the Church. We became very wealthy.”

  “You could have given it back, afterwards.”

  “We did not.”

  “Did all of you end up here? The whole order?”

  “No. Some truly thought the world would end. Some believed a wealthy Church could serve souls better. But I never believed the Second Coming could be predicted, and I enjoyed the wealth. I—do you need to know more? It was a good thing to be in the Church in those days.”

  Benito tapped my shoulder and pointed. “There is our way out. The rubble from the bridge.”

  It had been a bridge, high and arching like those we’d crossed before. Now it was a sloping pile of shattered rock. I looked at it curiously, but it didn’t seem different from any other rock I’d seen, and I could see that normal laws of material strength didn’t hold down here. It wasn’t a surprise.

  “What happened to it?” I wondered. “Earthquake?”

  “I am told that all Hell shook at the moment of Christ’s death,” said the ex-priest.

 
“So says Dante,” Benito added. “Afterwards, He came to Hell and threw down the great gate in the wall of Dis.”

  “He must have been mad about something. I suppose being crucified could do that to you.”

  “I would be less flippant, Allen. Look around you.” Before I could answer, Benito had started climbing the ruined bridge.

  It was still a ridiculous picture. Christ was supposed to be gentle. Using a whip on the temple money-changers was one thing; behaving like a comic-book hero was something else. I tried to imagine the bleeding, wounded, near-naked figure ripping those tremendous iron gates from their hinges, while the halo flamed angrily about His head—

  Then gave it up and climbed up after Benito. I tested each foothold, but some of the slabs slid down anyway. Near the top the rockslide ended, and we climbed by fingerholds and toeholds. There it was that I had to repress a sudden, violent urge to giggle.

  Benito wouldn’t have appreciated it. But—no wonder Christ was so upset. Some clerk must have tried to hand Him Form D-345t-839y-4583.

  T

  he seventh pit was enormous. I stood at the end of the bridge and marveled at the thin fairy-span arching across. Carbon steel wouldn’t have taken the stress; yet it was made of stone without mortar, like the fallen bridge behind us. Another miracle, and so what?

  We started across.

  It was dark down there. What I could see had a vaguely reptilian flavor to it: constant slow slitherings, and sudden flurries of violent motion.

  Benito pulled at my arm. “Why do you dawdle, Allen?”

  “What’s down there?”

  “Thieves. Theft is the most profitable of sins, and very popular. Tell me, Allen, do you expect to see anything that pleases you?”

  He had me there. I didn’t. But—“I’m a writer. I’ve got ten men’s curiosity. What’s the hurry? Are we in danger here?”

  “I remind you that we are fugitives.”

  I stared in astonishment. “Geryon could have stopped us. Minos could have stopped us. They didn’t.”

  “The demons behind us would have. Oh, very well, Allen. The real danger is at the next pit. We must cross that quickly.”