Inferno

by Larry Niven

  “I think I’m going to like it here,” I said.

  Benito looked at me curiously, but he only said, “Pleasant, isn’t it? Here there is no punishment.”

  The word grated. Punishment implies authority, someone with more power and a moral position superior to yours. I couldn’t accept that. We were in the hands of the Builders of Infernoland, and I’d learned all about their moral position on the other side of the black river.

  But I didn’t flare up at Benito. Lightly I asked, “These, then, are the privileged customers of Hell?”

  “Yes.” Benito did not smile. “They never sinned. They would have reached Heaven if they had known the Church.”

  “And the children?”

  “Unbaptized.”

  I’d heard that about Catholic beliefs. Even in Infernoland it seemed a little rough on the kids. “I thought they got Limbo.”

  “Call it Limbo if you wish. This is the First Circle of Hell.” He paused, uncertain. “There are legends that say the children will be born again.”

  There were as many children here as there were adults! As if the Builders had gotten a discount for quantity. Hmmm. Could these creatures be androids?

  It could have come down to a matter of economics. Android infants would be cheaper than android adults: smaller, fewer reflexes. Would it be cheaper to build androids than to find and capture human beings? I couldn’t know, not without knowing the source: who the Builders were or why I was here—placed here without my consent or knowledge, by an unknown hand. If me, then why not a thousand others? A billion?

  Benito wouldn’t be much help. He didn’t seem to question anything he saw.

  Robot or human, child or adult, they didn’t seem unhappy. Except those near us . . . “Benito, what’s the matter with them?”

  “They sense that we do not belong here. I come from deeper in Hell, and the smell of the depths is on my soul.”

  “But I don’t.”

  His smile was grim. “They will not accept you either.”

  I wasn’t so sure of that. If I found a way to clean up, and different clothing . . . hmm. Knock someone on the head, steal his toga; why not? Well, partly because there was no privacy here. The villas, maybe. Or—

  “What is that?” I pointed at a building downslope in the distance. It might have been a mosque. It certainly looked like a mosque, minaret and all, but it didn’t have a crescent moon on the top. A man in striped robes and turban sat alone at the doorstep.

  Benito shrugged. “Probably a Moslem. Dante placed virtuous Moslems in this circle,” Benito said. “I have met few of them and none who would come with me.”

  I wondered how many had gone with Benito, and what happened to them, but this wasn’t the time to ask. I turned and pointed upslope toward what might have been a domed planetarium, the nearest building in sight of us. “What’s that?”

  He looked. “I have never seen it before.”

  “Come on.”

  He came, but reluctantly. “We might not be permitted entry. This is a public building, but we are not of the appropriate public.”

  “We—” I stopped because a white-bearded patriarch swathed in purple-bordered white bedsheets had grasped me roughly by the arm. He asked me a rude question in gibberish.

  “Go peddle your papers,” I informed him.

  He frowned. “Recent English? I asked of you why you invade a place not meant for you.”

  “I’m taking a survey. Are you happy here? Do the arrangements satisfy you?”

  He snorted. “No.”

  “Then,” asked Benito, “why not leave? There is a way out.”

  The bearded man looked him over, while several passersby stopped to listen. He said, “In what direction does it lie?”

  “Downslope. One must travel all the way to the center. To know and hate evil is one path to knowing good.”

  It was lousy dialogue. The bearded man thought so too. “I don’t question your knowledge of the depths of Hell,” he said pointedly. “I think you lie.”

  “Why would I? We plan to leave Hell—” Benito was interrupted by raucous laughter. A crowd was gathering, and it wasn’t friendly.

  “You can all leave.” Benito seemed deadly serious. “Come with me, deeper and deeper into Hell. Learn to hate evil—”

  “Hatred for salvation?” one of the oldsters asked. “A curious route to salvation.”

  Benito seemed to know him. “Yet, Epictetus, that is what you must learn. Not to hate men, but to hate their sins. And that you cannot do moderately. You know the truth, now. You know that reason alone is not enough. You must ask for grace . . .”

  I slipped out during the sermon. They were standing there politely waiting for him to finish. What might have been a mob scene had become a formal debate.

  How long would that last? Benito was pushing them in a direction they wouldn’t even consider, and they didn’t like him at all. They’d looked at me the same way; candid contempt, and the high bitter flavor of mockery. They wanted out, and they didn’t believe there was any way out, and they were damned well not going to listen long to a man they thought didn’t belong with them.

  Benito was preaching hatred, and they hated him. He should have had more sense.

  The dome: it couldn’t be a planetarium. There was no sky here. Conceivably it was a bathhouse where I could wash off the stench and possibly find an unguarded toga. I climbed toward it.

  There were no guards. I walked between Doric pillars, up black marble steps to an expanse of black marble floor. Half a dozen people were talking in a circle. They seemed lost in distance, but as far away as I was, when they caught sight of me they turned their backs firmly and continued talking.

  The language wasn’t familiar at all.

  The place was as empty as anything I’d seen since I left the area of the bottles. Six rude sons of bitches, and a thing in the center of the black marble floor. It might have been a sculpture, it might have been a machine. A thick silver ring twelve feet tall, standing on edge, and a control board at its base.

  The console looked operational. There were labels, in English. A switch (marked ON, OFF), a joystick, and a notch with a knob in it. The notch ran the whole length of the console.

  I tried the joystick. It went in all six directions: left, right, forward, back, push down, pull up. When I used the switch the space within the ring clouded, then became starry space.

  It was a planetarium.

  When I pushed on the joystick nothing happened.

  I took a closer look at the markings along the notch. They were logarithmic, labeled in parsecs/second. The knob was all the way to the left.

  I moved it hard right and tried the joystick again.

  The universe came up and hit me in the face. Whoosh! Stars shot past and around me; a sun came at me and exploded into a fraction of a second of intolerable brightness and was gone. And I was flat on my back a couple of yards from the console.

  That was some planetarium!

  The half-a-dozen natives were watching me with some amusement. Screw ’em. I went back to the console, moved the knob down to one parsec/second, then to a tenth of that. Tried the joystick.

  This time the motion was just obvious. I steered toward a blue-white star; moved the knob to slow as I approached it. Moved onto it.

  The brightness should have burned my eyes out. It wasn’t even painful. Odd . . .

  I went through the center of the star (X-ray blue) and came out the other side (tremendous prominences leaping out ahead of me) and into space. What now? Find a planet? A different star? Stars were easier to find in this sparkling emptiness, but I’d love to dive into an Earthlike world. To search out the layers of it, to see the glowing nickel-iron heart. Let’s see, that not-too-brilliant white fleck could be a yellow dwarf. I moved the knob—

  A large hand fell heavily on my shoulder.

  I twitched like a man electrocuted. I turned, and there was the mob scene I thought I’d left behind me: fifty-odd large, heavy men
surrounding me and Benito and the Anywhere Machine.

  The white-bearded man who spoke English said, “You are leaving.”

  I said, “Dammit! Why? Nobody else is using the damn machine. I’ve waited all my life for something like this!”

  “We do not want you here,” he said. “We waited because we hoped a messenger of the gods would come to remove you. We might have asked him questions . . . but we have tolerated you too long. As for the machine—” One side of his mouth twitched upward. “If you can carry it you may take it with you.”

  I cursed him. I stopped when his wide-shouldered friends converged. Several of them wore armor! They moved away in a tight circle with Benito and me in the center.

  I whispered, “Benito, can’t you stop them?”

  He looked at me. “How?”

  Yeah.

  But if I’d known what waited below, I’d have fought them.

  5

  E

  ven while they marched us toward the wall, Benito never gave up.

  “You may leave this place!” he shouted. “Hector! Aeneas! You are not cowards, to stay where it is pleasant when there is everything to gain elsewhere! Come with us! Come and learn the Truth!”

  They ignored him.

  They were compact and tough inside their armor: too tough to fight, even if they were men, which I doubted. Hector, Aeneas: I knew the names. I remembered the Abe Lincoln robot at Disneyland. Could the armor be part of them? With inspection plates—

  “Where is Virgil?” Benito raved. “He is no longer here, is he? And the Emperor Trajan?”

  “We had our chance,” said the taller, broader one. “We didn’t take it. There will be no other.”

  “Have none come here since?” Benito demanded.

  The soldiers barked bitter laughter. “Many.”

  “Is it reasonable to suppose that they will never have the opportunity to leave?”

  We had come to the wall. “We’ll think about it,” one said. “Now out with you. Go where you belong.” The gate slammed shut behind us.

  I went for the wall on the other side. I examined it without joy. The footholds Benito had used would better have fitted a spider.

  Benito watched with a wry smile. “You never give up, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Perseverance is commendable. You will need it, but you must develop other virtues, such as prudence. What will happen if you enter the First Circle again?”

  “Maybe they won’t catch us this time. I won’t go near anyone until I’ve changed clothes and taken a bath.”

  “Do not tempt the angels,” Benito said. He was quite serious. Yeah, and why not? I was expecting devils in Infernoland. Why not angels?

  “That messenger they hoped to see. They wanted him to come.”

  “They did, yes. But you are a fugitive, Allen.”

  “We. You’re a fugitive, too.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Allen, you have much to learn.” He leaned against the wall, obviously waiting until I gave up.

  There were no handholds. This time Benito wouldn’t help. I was still trying to climb the wall when a flash flood of people spilled into the far end of the alley. As they foamed toward us in a dreadful silence I made one last attempt to go up the wall. Then they swept us up and floated us away.

  W

  e were in a marble palace. It was enormous, without furniture. The walls were covered with frescoes of bulls and dolphins and pretty girls wearing flounced skirts and little jackets that opened in front to show bare breasts. There were columns everywhere, oddly shaped columns thicker at the top than the bottom. The place reminded me of somewhere, not anywhere I had ever been, but hauntingly familiar. The palace was lit with torches in bronze holders along the walls, and there wasn’t any sign of modern technology at all.

  Except for the palace itself. It wound on and on, chamber after chamber, huge staircases with those great pillars inscribed in languages I couldn’t read. It was too big; it must have been prestressed concrete or something better. I would have liked to stay and look around, but we were embedded in the flow of the crowd. Nobody spoke or paid us any attention. I was glad for Benito’s company. Crowds of strangers bug me, and this one was worse than New York commuters, everyone wrapped up in himself.

  We spilled into an enormous room open at the far end. I had a good view through the pillars. The ground sloped sharply away into the bleakest landscape I’d ever seen. The castle was perched on the side of an enormous bowl, a world-sized bowl. Far down into it were the glimmers of fires and the shadow of smoke. I couldn’t see far into the smog that hung over everything.

  There was an alabaster throne at the far end of the audience chamber. An alien occupied it. He was vaguely bovine, but I’d have taken him for an oversized man if it hadn’t been for his tail.

  Tail!

  “What is that?” I demanded.

  “Minos. Judge of the Dead,” said Benito.

  The Builders had mixed some Egyptian or Cretan mythology with their Christianity. That, or they’d had to warp their landscape to fit a genuine alien. I could believe a cropping beast becoming an intelligent biped, given time and impetus and perhaps an assist from biological engineers. I’d written stories about that kind of thing.

  Could Minos be one of the Builders?

  People went up to present themselves to the monster. I couldn’t hear what the girl in the yellow dress was telling it, but it grinned and nodded. Abruptly its tail looped out and wrapped around and around the girl. It lifted her.

  The tail stretched like the limbs of Plastic Man in the old comic books. The girl shot between two pillars and dwindled, dwindled, dwindled to a speck. Minos’s tail must have been tens of miles long at that point. It came snaking back through the air, while the speck that was the girl sank like a single snowflake.

  My willing suspension of disbelief went all to hell. I started to giggle hysterically.

  Nobody noticed. Nobody but Benito, who watched curiously as I gathered the shreds of my self-control, took him by the arm, pointed at “Minos,” and said, “He can’t do that!”

  He was doing it again! The tail stretched out between the pillars like an infinite length of snake, dropped a man in a postman’s uniform into the murky air, and came coiling back.

  But there wasn’t room! Even ignoring the moment arm—that much weight at the end of that much length should have toppled him, and how could such length of tail, flexible tail, be strong enough to stay almost straight? But ignore that, and tell me where there was room for tens of miles of tail to be coiled inside his body?

  His feet weren’t anchored; I watched until I saw them both move. The tail wasn’t stored in the floor, then.

  “Are you all right?” Benito asked.

  My vision was graying out; my whole body had a buzzing foot’s-asleep feeling. I said, “I’m going to faint.”

  “You can’t faint here. Hold fast.” His hand gripped my shoulder.

  A dark-haired woman, quite pretty, was encoiled in the tail until she nearly vanished, lifted, and sent spinning off down the bowl. A man in a cabbie’s uniform was next. Three loops of tail and out he went into space. And another, and another—

  There were thousands here. We’d starve before we reached our turn.

  But I didn’t feel hungry, and hadn’t felt hungry since I left the bottle, and that was hours ago. Also, something was wrong with time. “Minos” was in no hurry. Quite the opposite. He took plenty of time to deal with each case, and there were plenty of cases; yet the crowd thinned out much faster than it should have.

  Where were they going? I never saw anyone leave the room, but there had to be other audience chambers, people slipping off into side passages. There must have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of copies of “Minos.”

  Ridiculous mummery. But the tail, Carpentier! Hidden in hyperspace, or snaking out of an alternate time track? If the Builders have that kind of technology, how long
were you dead? Ten thousand years? A million?

  It was our turn. We approached together. Not many had come up in pairs.

  “Sodomites, huh?” Minos said. “Seventh Circle, Third Level. Or have you got something worse to confess?”

  I said, “I refuse to answer on grounds that my—”

  He looked a lot like an angry bull when he frowned, and nothing at all like a machine. He turned to Benito. “You’ve been here before. Why have you left your proper place?”

  “Is that your affair? You see I roam freely through Hell.”

  “Yes. How?”

  “It has been willed that I may do so. You have no right to interfere.”

  Minos waved at me. “And this one?”

  “He has come from the Vestibule,” Benito said. “You will note that he comes of his own accord. You may not judge him.”

  “Lawyers.” Minos laughed. “I have problems with lawyers. There are so many places appropriate to that breed. Where are you two going, then?”

  “Down.”

  “Back to the First Circle.”

  We’d spoken simultaneously. Minos laughed. “Back you will not go. Are you sure you don’t want me to judge you, Allen Carpenter? My judgment is just and fair. You could choose worse for yourself than justice.”

  “Cease!” Benito commanded. I jumped. He was a changed man. Power seemed to gather around him as he struck a pose, massive chin jutting out in defiance, his face both calm and stern. Once upon a time he had been used to obedience.

  “I am permitted to judge . . .” Suddenly Minos sounded petulant.

  “You have already judged me. What other power have you? And this man is not under your jurisdiction. Leave us alone to go in peace.”

  “Not back up.”

  “No. Down.”

  Minos laughed. He waved toward the steps leading down into the bowl from his throne. “Depart. Thou art sent!” He was still laughing as we started down those steps, the mocking laughter in our ears until we lost sight of the palace.

  6

  W

  e were all right as long as the steps continued. Unfortunately they soon trailed away into a broken slope that still dropped at forty-five degrees or so. At the same time a wind began to rise. Benito and I turned to face the slope and backed down on toes and knees and hands.