Inferno

by Larry Niven

  Imagine one of the Great Lakes frozen over, seen on a moonless night. Maybe it looked like that. I’d never seen any of the Great Lakes. To me it was an ice-skating rink for a society of teleports: big enough to hold, say, 1 percent of a population of five billion. The wall behind me seemed arrow-straight; the dark ice, infinite.

  A breath of breeze whispered around us and leached all the warmth from our massless souls. I stiffened with the shock, then crouched down and tried to shelter in my own arms.

  Benito was standing. “That will not help. Nothing helps,” he said patiently. “You must bear the cold.”

  If he could do it . . . I stood up and closed my eyes tight against the soft, unreasonably cold breeze. Surely it was below freezing, way below freezing. How cold was it? If it could kill a man in minutes, or seconds, I’d never know it. I couldn’t die.

  “Benito? Burst into flame again for your good friend.”

  “I would if I could. My apologies, Allen.” Benito took my arm. We walked.

  It had certainly been worth asking.

  Was it water ice we walked on? For all of me, it could have been dry ice, or frozen nitrogen, or something even colder.

  I kicked something that cursed me without emotion. I tried to open my eyes. The wind’s tears had frozen them shut. I pulled them open, painfully, with my fingers.

  “Leave them open,” Benito said without pity, “and they will freeze open.”

  When the urge came to blink I fought it. Then there was no need, for my eyes would not close. I looked back at what I’d kicked. I said, “Sorry.”

  The face was handsome, photogenic, dignified in middle age, undignified in the way it grimaced and bent to the ice for shelter. Had I seen that face sometime, on television? Maybe. The man was buried to his chin in the ice. At the sound of my voice he cried, “Wait! Are you American?”

  “Aren’t we all? I can’t seem to find anything but.”

  The head called another head sitting like a cabbage on the ice. “George! Maybe we can settle this now.” It turned back to me. “Late American? Do you know anything about the ABM controversy?”

  “Sure. Antiballistic missiles to knock down incoming missiles. The controversy was over whether to build the ABM system.”

  “Wonderful! All right, sir. George was a Democrat, and I was a Republican. The Democrats were against building the system. The Republicans were in favor of it. But which of us was right?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said. “Do you really have nothing better to talk about than that?”

  “No!” the man I’d kicked said sharply. “We do not! One of us had to be right! So why are we both here?”

  The cold wasn’t just getting to me; it had gotten me. I wanted out, not conversation. I said, “Other crimes, maybe.”

  “One of us was wrong,” George said. “Senator Gates here thought the system was a waste of money, but he went along with his party. He—”

  “It was more than a waste of money! It used up efforts we could have spent on a laser system! Sir, I’ve seen how accurate a laser defense system could be against incoming missiles. But politics dictated that I must support the ABM system. I went along.”

  “I don’t know anything about the darned lasers,” George said, “except they were highly experimental. Experimental weapons did a lot for the Nazis, didn’t they?” He snorted contempt, then sneezed on the freezing air. “I was convinced that the ABM system was needed to defend the country against an atomic attack. But our party platform was in favor of military cutbacks. Officially, so was I.”

  “Now, sir,” Senator Gates said to me, “we can’t both have been wrong.”

  “I think I’m getting the picture. You both thought you were wrong.”

  “. . .yes.”

  “And a mistake could wipe out the United States of America.”

  Neither answered.

  “For what it’s worth,” I said, “we’re still getting Americans in Hell. Corbett died much later than you.”

  “Thank you,” said ex-Senator Gates, and they both turned their faces to the ice again.

  “But you were both traitors in your mind.”

  “Thank you for your help,” said ex-Senator George. It was a dismissal.

  W

  e walked with care, to avoid kicking heads. There were certainly enough of them. But now it was worse; here the dead had been buried supine, and we would have been stepping on faces.

  Once I missed my step and came down hard on a human face. The ice across its eyes crackled under my feet, and I leapt back fast. “Sorry!”

  “Thanks,” I heard.

  “Mistake.”

  “Thanks, oh, thanks.” it said, weeping. “I haven’t cried in years. The damned ice froze across my eyes and I couldn’t cry. Thanks.”

  I felt awful. This was an awful place. “That’s okay,” I said. I bent and picked the remaining shards of ice from her eyes. “What’d you do?”

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “Okay.”

  I tore the ice visors from a couple of dozen pairs of eyes. Always they froze over again almost immediately. No one ever said, “Thanks.” Finally I gave it up. There were just too many.

  And the next head I passed screamed, “The ice! Stupid! Tear off the ice! You did it for the others!”

  I stopped. “Who are you?”

  “None of your business!”

  I turned away.

  “The ice! Wait! Al Capone, I’m Al Capone! You want names? That’s Vito Genovese, trying to turn his face! Wait, I’ll show you Lepke! Wait!” He was shouting against a chorus of voices trying to drown him out. I kept walking.

  When the noise was behind us Benito said, “I knew Vito Genovese.”

  “Was he worth talking to?”

  “No. Were you thinking of going back? It’s cold, Allen.”

  Sound whispered all around us. Partly it was the breeze, which had stiffened. Partly it was the chattering of teeth. I’d depressed that reflex in myself; it wasn’t warming me at all.

  But in that expanse of ice, there was only one point of motion. I caught it in the corner of my eye, way off to one side. Doubted my senses. Kept looking. Saw it again.

  “Benito?” I pointed.

  He found it. “I had no idea. I thought I was the only one.”

  “You may be. It seems to be one man. And a dog.”

  They had noticed us, and they angled to meet us. As they came closer I saw my mistake. The dog was a lizard, its scarlet color leached from it by the cold. And the man was the black-bearded thief who had stolen my shape at the seventh pit.

  We studied each other. No greeting seemed appropriate. Finally I gestured and said, “Benito Mussolini. I’m Allen Carpenter.”

  “Jesse James. This lizard is Bob Ford.”

  “What was that all about, that business there at the bridge?”

  “A bunch of us got together,” said Jesse. “We thought maybe we could cooperate in getting one of us out. It turned out a man couldn’t throw a lizard far enough. But we could stand a human pyramid against one of the walls, and the top man could throw a lizard at the bridge. I was the lizard.”

  “Funny nobody thought of it before.”

  He sighed. “It’s getting those animals to work together, that’s the problem. All the time we were trying to make the pyramid, some of us in the lizard form kept biting the ones in human form. We didn’t get anything done till we had a dozen big lizards to guard us while we made the pyramid.”

  “Figures. Why’d you jump back?”

  “I had to tell them which way was out.”

  “You might not have got out again. They might not even have let you take human form again.”

  He nodded.

  I remembered something. A line from a song. “It was little Robert Ford, that dirty little coward, I wonder how does he feel, for he ate of Jesse’s bread, and he slept in Jesse’s bed, and he laid Jesse James in his grave . . .” “Bob Ford. Didn’t he kill you? Shot you while
you were taking a bath?”

  “Hanging a picture. Yeah, he shot me, all right. I was following your advice—for which I thank you, stranger.” He laughed. “And there was Bob Ford’s head sitting on the ice. I thought it over for a while. I wandered around and around him, wondering what I could do to him, and wondering if I still hated him.” The lizard was rubbing affectionately against his leg. “I finally bit him on the nose.”

  It hit me like a stiff shot of good whiskey. “You can get out of the ice!”

  “Sure, friend. I just reached into that man-shaped bubble and picked up a lizard. Well, which way now?”

  “Inward,” Benito said. “Let us go. It is cold here.”

  That had to be the most unnecessary statement of all time. We moved inward, and the wind came up. It was blowing right in our faces. Pretty soon it was a real howler, as bad as the Circle of the Winds. I wondered if Corbett had ever got back there . . .

  The wind whistled past us and lifted Jesse off the ice. The lizard squealed and leaped after him, and the wind caught it too. Man and lizard were bowled end over end across the ice, then lifted and flung high and outward. I watched them dwindle.

  “So close,” I said. “They were so close!”

  “They were not ready,” Benito said. “Perhaps they must see what is done to others. Theft and treachery may not have been all they did. It is even possible that they will be blown all the way back to the Vestibule and must make their way back. Come.”

  “But—”

  “They know the way, Allen. Come!”

  “All right.” We bowed our heads against the wind and staggered on. The wind had been entirely too selective for coincidence. It had thrown Jesse and Ford an unguessable distance without knocking me or Benito off our feet. I thought it was a good omen . . . for us.

  27

  S

  uddenly there were no more heads. There was only ice, and the wind that had blown the others away. We leaned into it and kept moving.

  I said, “Hell has run out of sins?”

  “Look down.”

  Hell had not run out of sinners. They were buried beneath the ice in weird positions. Once I looked down, and then no more.

  We walked crouched, wrapped in our own arms, to no purpose. The wind had nearly sucked every erg of heat out of us.

  I saw motion ahead, high up.

  As we drew near, a shadowy mass loomed around the suggestion of motion. Pterodactyls on a mountain? Restless, rhythmic motion, like the wings of enormous birds. And gradually it all came clear.

  There was a humanoid form, a hairy torso more than a mile tall. We stood at the bottom, at waist level, and looked up at three vast faces whose features were almost lost in distance. Bat wings flapped on either side of each face, and the wind was now beating down at our heads.

  This was a very different picture from the dapper gentleman who offers to buy your soul. Or from Milton’s epic hero, proud and unrepentant. One could not imagine playing riddles or chess games with this hideous, miserable, helpless mountain. I studied it almost without fear.

  All three pairs of jaws were moving in the same rhythm as the wings. Something fluttered around the lips . . .

  “Benito, what’s he chewing on?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Skip it. Which way is out? Hey—” I reached to stop him, not fast enough. Benito was striding straight toward Lucifer.

  He stopped at the edge of the ice.

  The ice ended short of Lucifer himself. There was three feet of empty space all around the enormous waist.

  And no navel. I couldn’t have missed it. It would have been big enough to hide a battleship.

  “You must climb down,” said Benito.

  I looked into the gap. “After you.”

  He shook his head. “I cannot leave. There are others to rescue.”

  “I don’t go without you.”

  “You have not shown such fear before.”

  “It’s not all fear. You’ve rescued seven of us, now rescue yourself. You’ve earned it. If this doesn’t lead to where you think it does, we can help each other get back.”

  “What if I turn back now, leaving you here?”

  I’d wondered about that myself. “I don’t know, and that’s the truth. But there’s a moral problem. You’re a better man than I am—”

  He smiled sardonically. “I? The murderous dictator you pushed into the eighth pit?”

  “You’ve changed since you reached Hell. You’ve given me no evil counsel. I guess that’s the point. If you haven’t changed in Hell, if you haven’t earned the right to leave, then I haven’t and won’t. If you can’t go, I can’t.”

  “I, I think I can go. I choose not to.”

  “If you can leave Hell, you’ll have to prove it.”

  He studied my face . . . and then he smiled a joyful, luminous smile. He turned and stepped across the gap and had two fistfuls of coarse hair. And a sound beat down at our heads, a wind with an almost subsonic voice in it.

  “Carpentier!”

  I looked straight up. Lucifer’s middle face was looking down the curve of Lucifer’s chest. Two fluttering human legs protruded like a ghastly cigarette from the corner of the mouth. It spoke, and the deep bass voice blew down to me.

  “What will you tell God when you see him?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Will you tell Him that He could learn morality from Vlad the Impaler?”

  Benito was far below, clinging like a tick in the billowing hair, waiting for me.

  I stepped across and worked my way down. As I did, my weight seemed to increase, against all laws of physics. It scared me. I was back in Infernoland, climbing down into the quantum black hole Big Juju had used for artificial gravity . . .

  Benito looked up at me curiously. “What did he say to you?”

  I shook my head.

  We descended, getting heavier. There was a point where I must have weighed tons, and all of it pushing inward toward my navel. No quantum black hole crushed and swallowed me. I hadn’t really expected one. Benito worked his way around until his feet pointed at me, and kept climbing. I followed his example.

  Now we climbed up. Once I found breath to laugh at the picture we would have made: two men climbing at least half a mile of hairy leg, like ticks in the Devil’s hair. I half-expected to pass a dong the size of the Empire State Building, testicles like twin Astrodomes. There was nothing but hair.

  The climb seemed endless, but it ended, not in ice but in an echoing grotto of gray rock, dimly lit. The Devil’s hooves still loomed over us, big enough to stamp a city flat.

  We lay on our backs on the smooth rock, panting. Somewhere a running stream made a bright, happy gurgling sound. The dim light came from a single bright pinpoint source overhead. The rock curved inward over our heads, but it never closed. It stretched away like the neck of an inverted funnel, straight up for an unguessable distance.

  Presently I got up and found the stream and drank from it. The water was clear and sweet. There is the peace of deep sleep, and once I had thought there would be peace in death. I drank again, then lay with my fingers trailing in the water. Peace in death: I’d found it.

  But Benito was on his feet. “Onward!” he cried, and began to climb. The handholds were not difficult, and he moved like a spider monkey, or like a fat man who no longer weighs anything at all.

  He looked down from the inward-tilting gray slope of grotto roof. “A four-thousand-mile climb, if Dante was half right!” he bellowed cheerfully. “Are you coming?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “What did you say?”

  “No!”

  I sighed in exasperation when I saw him climbing back down, but I’d half-expected it. He dropped the last few feet, and it did seem he fell like a settling balloon, too slowly. “What was it Satan said to you?”

  “He asked me what I would say to God.”

  “Well?”

  “I have to know something befor
e I can speak to God at all.”

  Benito waited.

  “I have to know the purpose of Hell.”

  “Come and ask Him.”

  “You don’t get it. Every torture in Hell was too much too late. Punishment? But it’s infinite punishment for things that are little in comparison. Dracula caused a lot of people a lot of pain and death, but it ended. George only lied to people to make them buy things! And what about the fat lady in the Vestibule?

  “What’s the point? To teach us a lesson? But we’re dead. Revenge, punishment? Completely out of proportion. Balance? Does the universe need as much pain in it as pleasure? I couldn’t take Heaven if that was the case.”

  “There is a reason, and the reason is good. I know.”

  “Yeah? I don’t. There’s only one possible excuse for Hell, and I almost missed it in the ravings of a crazy psychiatrist. It has to be the final training ground. If nothing can get a soul into Heaven in its life, there’s still Hell, God’s last attempt to get his attention. Like a catatonic in a hotbox, like me in that bottle, if Hell won’t make a man yell for help, then it was still worth a try.”

  Benito was nodding. “You may be right. You may have found the purpose of Hell.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, but do you see where it leaves me? Everyone in Hell has to be able to leave once he’s learned enough about himself. Everyone, even the trees in the Wood of Suicides, even the poor devils in the boiling pitch and the sullen types anchored under the lake. Even the ones who think they’re satisfied, the ones in the First Circle. And I can’t leave Hell until I’m sure they can do it.”

  Benito nodded. “We go back.”

  “No, no, you idiot!” I was furious. “How can I tell anyone he can leave unless I know you did it? You’re going up! And I’m going to watch you do it!”

  He thundered, “Carpenter, you must still learn humility!”

  “Granted. And you?”

  “But they need me. They . . . ah. They have you.”

  “They have me.” I put out my hand. “Good-bye, Benito. Good luck. I hope you find—”

  He stepped past my hand and wrapped his arms around me and squeezed all the air out of me. I said something like “Huff!” and hugged him back. We held the embrace for a long moment. Then Benito released me and turned away fast—I couldn’t see his face—and started climbing.