Inferno

by Larry Niven

  “Or for not noticing you.”

  I meant it to hurt, but he nodded happily. “So we put him in a hotbox and started raising the temperature. We watched him through a window. First he just sweated. Then he started to move around. At a hundred and thirty he said his first words in sixteen years. ‘Get me the fuck out of here! ’”

  The mad eyes found me, and his face seemed to cave in. The cherubic smile vanished. Urgently he said, “Get me the fuck out of here!”

  “I can’t. I’ll be lucky to get out myself.” I tried moving again. There was pain, but not enough to keep me in that place. I stood gingerly and started up the slope.

  The girl cried, “You can’t do that! Come back here! Come back!”

  I kept going. There were rocks to pull myself up, cracks to use as footholds. I’d climbed just far enough when another hydrophobia case raged past, biting and chewing everyone he passed. A rock rolled from beneath my foot, and pain grated in my spine as I caught myself.

  The rabid man screamed at the psychiatrist, but the cherubic look had returned and he was smiling dreamily at the opposite wall. When I reached the top I remembered who had been in the last pit on the Eighth Circle. Frauds. Falsifiers. False Witnesses.

  23

  T

  hat was the last of the bolgias. Now the way led across an empty, rocky land. I turned and looked at the ten canyons rising upward behind me, light flickering from some, others marked by rising smoke or rolling heated air. It had not been a pleasant journey.

  Far ahead, through a twilight gloom that would just have had drivers turning on their headlights, I saw what seemed a cluster of great towers. There was nothing else to see, nothing at all.

  Benito’s evil counsel had brought me this far. Now it was too late. I could get back a little way, probably to the fifth pit, possibly as far as the cliff. But I’d never talk Geryon into taking me up that cliff . . . and there were just too many places where Allen Carpentier might belong.

  Could I talk the monster into summoning Minos? That could get me all the way back to the Vestibule. Yeah, and into the bottle again. If I was lucky. I hadn’t forgotten that burrowing this far into Hell might be a crime in itself. Minos had told me that I could choose far worse for myself than “justice.” Maybe I’d already made the choice.

  Or . . . I could just sit down. In this empty borderland I could spend a good piece of eternity before some angel noticed me.

  I sat down.

  It was very peaceful.

  It was, in fact, the only completely empty spot I’d seen in Hell. Why? Maybe it was reserved for some brand-new sin, something that hadn’t been invented yet . . . say, a development of brain research or genetics. At some time in the indefinite future I might have to vacate fast.

  Meanwhile, it was better than the bottle. I could see my navel.

  Time passed without leaving footprints. Days, I think. The stinks of Hell were still in my nostrils. The ever-present background noise might have been soothing if I hadn’t known what it was: millions of moans and cries blended by distance. But nobody was hurting me or hurting at me. I didn’t have to watch people getting sliced up by demon cars, or distorted into obscene shapes.

  I sat and dreamed of the past. I wondered idly about the looming towers I could see in the dark distance. I wondered at Benito’s ultimate purpose in luring me here. But none of it seemed to matter. I thought even curiosity had been burned out of me.

  That would have been nice. I would have liked to turn my mind off for a long time. But it wouldn’t turn off. Whatever quiet I’d found here, there was still Hell around me, and I hurt with the need to know why.

  God had created human souls; could He not uncreate the failures? God had created sleep; could He not put the failures to sleep, forever? There were no good excuses for Hell. I thought of some unsettling bad ones:

  The universe would fly off its axis if Hell’s agony did not balance Heaven’s bliss.

  Or: Part of Heaven’s bliss was the knowledge that lots of nasty people were suffering terribly.

  Or the old standby: We were in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.

  I got restless. The towers kept catching at my eye: blurred gray shadows on the horizon. Skyscrapers? A city in Hell? Quarters to house the maintenance crew for Infernoland? Or were they the true entrance, the tourist entrance?

  But I was only playing with plots. I didn’t believe in Infernoland anymore. This was Hell, and I knew it. I finally realized what was really bothering me.

  To all intents and purposes I was back in the bottle.

  I got up. I walked toward the towers. No harm in looking.

  They weren’t towers.

  They were giants, enormous humanoids, buried in the earth from the navel down. I stopped well out of their reach to study them. Their enormous eyes found me and pinned me to the landscape like a butterfly on a board, then shifted away. I was not worth their attention.

  I was glad. Unreasonably I felt that those tremendous deep eyes could see everything there was to know about me.

  One was mad. He looked down at me hopefully and said, “Ildurb fistenant imb?” His face fell when I did not respond. Alien language, alien being. What were these aliens doing in human Hell?

  Not serving Big Juju. Not hardly. Miles of chain bound their arms to their sides.

  There were giants in the Bible and Titans in mythology. But no archaeologist had ever found human bones this size. And how could they survive Earth’s gravity? The square-cube law should have flattened them into mountains of hamburger.

  Maybe they weren’t from this universe at all. An attacking army from another universe made by another creator? The science-fiction writer in me, the late Allen Carpentier, wanted very much to see their legs and feet. They must be disproportionately large and sturdy to support their weight . . . unless they had developed in a lighter gravity field . . .

  While Carpentier the trapped damned soul was examining the chains that wrapped another of the giants.

  For the giants were buried just outside a chin-high wall: their chins, not mine. The wall looked too smooth to climb. I walked up to the chained giant, ready to jump, but it wasn’t necessary. The chain looked like anchor cable. Whoever had wrapped it round him had a fine eye for detail. He’d have been lucky to shrug his eyebrows.

  Now, what would Benito have done here? Climbed the giant, of course.

  The thought of climbing such a monster gave me pause. Yet I was sure I could do it. Up the chain, stepping in the links, as far as his shoulder; beware of snapping teeth. Then onto the wall and down.

  If Benito had told the truth . . . if what I remembered of Dante was true . . . I would then be in the last Circle of Hell, the Circle of Traitors. Traitors to nation, to overlord, to benefactor, to parents and siblings. A great ice plain, and the Traitors embedded in it. There would be nothing but the cold to stop me from crossing it, and I knew I couldn’t freeze to death.

  It looked so easy. What had Benito left out?

  I remembered the great ice plain well enough. The college boy had been jolted at finding part of Hell already frozen over. Benito hadn’t said anything that jarred with my own memories of Dante.

  But there had to be a joker in the deck somewhere. Benito had been a power in Hell. He’d given orders to others of Hell’s minions. He’d demonstrated demonic strength against a tank of a man in the great swamp.

  Carpentier, why didn’t he do that to you?

  Maybe it was guilt that stopped him. He’d writhed and torn at the ground, but he hadn’t actually hit me, not once. He’d uprooted jagged rocks while trying to use them as anchors, but he hadn’t tried to hit me with them. And for all his presumed safe-conduct, he was back where Minos had sentenced him, with the Evil Counselors.

  Maybe Satan or God or Big Juju had rendered some kind of judgment against Benito. With me as the agent. But why hadn’t Benito fought?

  The giant tried to shake himself. The chains barely rustled.

  No
danger here.

  You writhe and you struggle, but there’s no way around it. Me too, giant. From every possible direction it looked the same. It was going to be unreasonably easy for Allen Carpentier to enter the Circle of Traitors . . . the place of punishment for those who had betrayed their benefactors.

  I thought it over for a long time. Then I turned and started back.

  24

  G

  oing back was harder. The dip at the lower end of the tenth bridge was steeper, and now I was climbing it. I crossed the pit without looking down and climbed backward down the high end of the bridge.

  I saw the next bridge close by, and made for it.

  A sword point flicked up before my eyes. I stopped. Surely he’d been under a different bridge? I’d skewed my path deliberately. But a half-human, half-bestial head beyond the sword’s point shook itself negatively.

  “You can’t go back, Carpentier.”

  “I have to.”

  The blade hung before me, rock-steady. I could have chinned myself on it. I half-stepped forward and the blade moved too fast to follow. Now it pricked the tip of my nose.

  I shrugged and turned back.

  I took no chances. I crossed the inner pit again and circled through the wasteland beyond. Two bridges away, I crossed again—on my belly. I slid down the high end of the bridge and kept crawling along the ridge above the ninth pit. He couldn’t be under all the bridges.

  Couldn’t he just. Like the damned clerk. He was waiting when I tried to stand up. At this, the low side of the pit, he had the angle on me. “You can’t go uphill,” he said. “I really don’t know how to make it plainer.”

  “I’m from the Vestibule,” I said. “I don’t belong here.”

  “You never created your own church, Carpentier?”

  Oh dammit! “Listen, those weren’t in competition with God or anybody! All I did was make up some religions for aliens! If that was enough you’d have every science-fiction writer who ever lived!”

  “We’ve got him,” said the demon, and he pointed with the sword.

  I forgot the sword entirely. I leaned far out over the edge of the pit to see. “What in Hell—to coin a phrase—is that?”

  It was, in a sense, the last word in centaurs. At one end was most of what I took for a trilobite. The head of the trilobite was a gristly primitive fish. Its head was the torso of a bony fish . . . and so on up the line, lungfish, proto-rat, bigger rat, a large smooth-skinned beast I didn’t recognize, a thing like a gorilla, a thing like a man, finally a true man. None of the beasts had full hindquarters except the trilobite; none had a head except the man. The whole thing crawled along on flopping fish-torsos and forelegs and hands, a tremendous unmatched centipede. The human face seemed quite mad.

  “He founded a religion that masks as a form of lay psychiatry. Members try to recall previous lives in their presumed animal ancestry. They also recall their own past lives . . . and that adds an interesting blackmail angle, because those who hear confession are often more dedicated than honorable. Excuse me.”

  For the line of victims had bunched up while we talked. The demon turned and sliced at them rapidly, to a tune of screams and curses. The centaur creature he sliced into its separate components, and it went past him in a parade, on arms and forelegs and wriggling fishy fins. The sword flicked up again just as I’d decided to make a break for it.

  A bead of blood formed at the tip of my nose. “I’m not like him,” I said quickly. “He played the game for real. With me it was just a game.” I backed away until the tenth bolgia was an emptiness beneath my heels. He couldn’t reach me now. “Take the Silpies. They were humanoid but telepaths. They believed they had one collective soul, and they could prove it! And the Sloots were slugs with tool-using tentacles developed from their tongues. To them, God was a Sloot with no tongue. He didn’t need a tongue; He didn’t eat, and He could create at will, by the power of His mind.” I saw him nodding and was encouraged. “None of this was more than playing with ideas.”

  The demon was still nodding. “Games played with the concept of religion. Enough such games and all religions might look equally silly.”

  “You can’t do this!” I shouted. “Listen, there’s a friend of mine in the eighth bolgia, and it’s my fault he’s there, and I’ve got to get him out!”

  “Did anyone promise you it would be easy? Or even possible?”

  “Whatever it takes,” I said, and thought I meant it.

  “Step closer.”

  I walked to the edge. Carpentier shows his good faith.

  The sword flashed twice. I heard and felt the tip grate along my ribs. It left two vertical slashes along my chest and belly. I reeled back with my arms wrapped around myself to hold my guts in.

  The demon was watching me steadily. What could he be waiting for?

  I knew. I stepped forward and dropped my arms. Carpentier shows his inability to learn.

  The sword flashed twice more, leaving two deep horizontal slashes, perhaps mortally deep. A living man would have fainted from shock. I couldn’t.

  “Games,” said the big evil humanoid. “Your move.”

  I studied the slashes and the flowing blood. Shock did seem to be slowing down my thought processes, but presently I saw what he meant. I said, “What do I use for a pencil?”

  “You’ll think of something.”

  I studied my fingernails. I thought of something.

  I gouged a ragged X in the top left square of the diagram. The sword flashed to place an O in an adjacent corner.

  I

  climbed the first slope of the bridge on fingers and toes. When I could walk I held my arms wrapped around myself, holding me in. The pride of my victory seemed excessive for a stupid game of tic-tac-toe.

  As I left the bridge I heard him call, “Carpentier?”

  I turned my head.

  “Best two out of three?”

  My imagination was dead of shock. The only dirty word I could think of was one I’d never use again, not after seeing the place of the flatterers. I just kept walking along the rim.

  The eighth pit was a canyon filled with firelight. “Benito!” My voice echoed hollowly between the canyon walls. “Benito!”

  Some of the flames wavered. Thrumming voices, retarded by the transfer from voice to flame tip, floated upward.

  “Leave the damned to suffer alone.”

  “Benito who?”

  “Bug off, you!”

  The canyon stretched endlessly away in both directions in a gentle curve. If it was a full circle, it could hold millions. How was I to find Benito?

  “Benito!” There was panic in my voice. The strain hurt my slashed chest. “Benito!”

  “Benito Mussolini? He just passed me going that way—”

  “No, it was the other direction.”

  “You’re both wrong. Mussolini’s in the boiling lake.”

  A fat lot of help I’d get here. And if I found him, what then? How was I going to get him out.

  How did he get out in the first place? Maybe he’d already left again. A frustrating thought, because I couldn’t do a thing about it, and it would mean I’d played my game with the demon for nothing. I hoped Benito was already out, but I had to assume he was still in there.

  The canyon wasn’t all that deep. What I needed was a climber’s rope. Yeah, an asbestos one, stupid! Benito was on fire! For that matter, I hadn’t seen any ropes anywhere.

  I thought for a second about the chain on the giant. It would mean passing the demon twice—

  No. Even if I got the chain loose, it was too heavy to move, and the freed giant would probably crush me for my trouble. I was glad I didn’t have to decide to face the demon’s sword again. I don’t know what I would have done.

  Well? Think, Carpentier! There are tools in Hell. Sure, boats carry rope. Now we’re getting somewhere. A heavy rope, kept wet while Benito climbs—Wait a minute. How do we climb the cliff when there’s no rope yet? There haven’t been any boats since
the gaudy alien Geryon took us down. Tackle Geryon again?

  And if it doesn’t work, back in the bottle while Benito burns?

  Benito was smarter than I was. Maybe he’d think of something. “Benito!”

  Mocking, thrumming voices answered.

  I thought of fourteen feet of sword blade attached to a twenty-foot demon. Disable the demon (with what?), cut the blade loose (how?), send it down to Benito. But could he climb something that sharp? Or would he lose his fingers immediately? Did fingernail burn?

  Waitaminute! There were smaller demons, higher up, carrying pitchforks!

  I made for the bridge. In a few steps I was running. If I slowed down I’d want to stop, because I was terrified of what I planned.

  I was in too much of a hurry. I was trotting toward the base of the tremendous bridge over the chasm of thieves when something flashed scarlet from behind a rock. I turned, frowning . . .

  . . . and there was agony, flashing out from my neck to engulf me and drown me. I felt my bones soften and bend.

  The pain drew back like a broken wave receding but it left a blackened mind. I was confused; I couldn’t think. A homely bearded man bent over me, saying urgent words that made no sense.

  “Which way out?” He was huge, I realized. A giant. I stepped toward him—and I was tiny and four-legged; my belly scraped the ground. A lizard. I was a lizard.

  The bearded man repeated himself, enunciating each word. “Which way out? How can I leave Hell?”

  Vengeance. I advanced on him. Bite the son of a bitch! He backed away, still talking, but I couldn’t understand him.

  He stopped and seemed to brace himself.

  I leapt. I sank my teeth into his belly. He howled, and I dropped to the ground, writhing in new agony.

  When my mind cleared I was a man. I rolled away fast from the red lizard and didn’t stop until there was a rock between us. The lizard stayed where he was, watching me.

  I was making for the next bridge when his words came back to me. My dumb reptile brain had registered them only as sounds.