Inferno

by Niven, Larry; Pournelle, Jerry

  “Let me at the controls! I used to be a glider pilot!” The hitchhiker pulled himself off me and scrambled into the other seat.

  Benito didn’t resist. “Let him fly,” he said.

  The plane turned sickeningly. We had lost altitude, I could see over the stranger’s shoulder: cliffside, swampland, a glowing red line—

  A tailspin, and we were beyond the place of the winds, headed back into the inner circles of Infernoland.

  He pulled us out of the spin. Nothing subtle about it. He just stopped the spin with the ailerons, then pulled back on the tail flaps and hung on. Presently we were flying level again, headed toward the swamp. The stranger looked back at us, showing a lean, cheerful face beneath short, wind-tossed hair. “Where to?”

  “Up and out. Over the wall.”

  “Good thinking, but there’s a problem.” He waved toward the cliff. We were well below the level of the winds.

  I said, “There are red-hot walls down there. Good thermals. We’ll spiral around them until we’re high enough, then get back into the winds—”

  “Not me.”

  “We have to! There are updrafts in the winds. Before you interfered we were high enough to get out of this place.”

  “Down is correct,” Benito said.

  “Not the way you mean!”

  He shrugged. “It is the only way we can go now.”

  “No question about that.” We headed out over the swamp again, feeling the rising air that was just strong enough to keep us level. If we didn’t find an updraft we’d crash in the swamp.

  The trouble was, we were looking for something invisible. You can’t see a wind, you can only see what it does. I was looking for heat turbulence, or formations that might break a horizontal airstream and send it upwards; anything. There’d been no problem spotting updrafts when the wind was full of actors or draftees or whatever they were.

  Ahead through the murk we could see the cherry-red glow of the walls of Dis. It looked a bit like the Nevada desert, and for a moment I thought of food and coffee and one-armed bandits, and girls . . .

  We were over a hot spot in the swamp. A shape rose from the murk and shook a fist at us. He had a big bushy Afro hairdo. He lost interest when another man in a voluminous white gown and high pointed cap rose up to scream at him. They were locked in battle when we left them.

  “Take it easy,” I told our pilot. “I think I saw the left wing bend way up when you pulled us out of the spin.”

  “Yeah, I saw it too. What did you build this thing out of?”

  I told him. He looked uneasy. I asked, “What kind of gliders are you used to?”

  “Hypersonic.”

  “Eh?” said Benito.

  “Huh?” I said.

  The stranger chortled. “Jerome Leigh Corbett, at your service. I was a space-shuttle pilot. I had a dozen flights on my record, and then . . . You ever have one of those days?”

  “Damned right,” I said. Benito laughed and nodded.

  We seemed to have enough altitude to reach the hot walls. They were close enough that we could make out details through the murk and red glow. Corbett seemed to know what he was doing.

  There were ripples in the dark mud below. A hand thrust itself upward, middle finger extended. There was no movement in the cobwebs and slimy moss hanging from the bushes, no wind, nothing; only the ripples in the mud.

  “One of those days,” Corbett said. “First, a twenty-six-hour hold while we replaced one of the solid boosters. That was only irritating. We lost one of the three main motors going up. Then after we made orbit one of the fuel tank clamps jammed. Either of you know what a space shuttle looks like?”

  I said I did. Benito said he didn’t.

  “Well, the tank is big and bulky and cheap. We carry the main motors down aboard the dart, the winged section, but we leave the tank to burn up in the atmosphere. If we couldn’t get the tank loose there wouldn’t have been any point in going down.”

  “Did you?”

  “Sure. We fired the orbital motors in bursts until the clamp sprang open and let us loose. Then we had to use more fuel to get back to our orbit. We were supposed to dump cargo and change orbit, but there wasn’t enough fuel. We had to go down.”

  Benito was looking totally confused. It must have been gibberish to him. I asked, “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I spacewalked out and looked at the fuel tank clamp. I swear there was nothing wrong. But maybe the metal fatigued, or maybe the hatch over the clamp lock got twisted—anyway, we were halfway down and going like a meteor when we got a burn-through under the nose. I heard the maintenance techs—they were the cargo I couldn’t jettison—screaming in the instrument room. I woke up by that ferryboat. The crowd pushed me along to Minos, and he threw me into the whirlwind.”

  “And why were you there?” Benito asked.

  Corbett grinned. “Being a shuttle pilot carries a lot of prestige. The girls liked me.”

  We were over the walls of Dis now, and banked to catch the rising air. My seat surged comfortingly against me . . . and the left wing bent in the middle. The Fudgesickle turned on its side and dropped.

  Corbett dropped the nose. The wing, relieved of pressure, straightened out. But when he tried to pull up it bent again. We’d have been better off if the loose section had ripped away, but it hung on, dragging us back.

  Corbett did his best. He tried to fly with the broken wing, the flap raised high on the right wing to compensate. We got some lift that way, but there wasn’t any doubt: we were going to crash.

  Inside the walls of Dis there were tombs. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of tombs, some glowing red-hot, others dark. The whole landscape was littered with them.

  On the walls themselves were—beings. They didn’t look much like the cute little devils in Disney cartoons. They raged at us, and Corbett, seeing them, dove for speed to get out of their sight.

  The wing folded entirely. Corbett played the controls like a virtuoso at an organ, heading out over the tombs and toward a steamy clear area beyond and below them, but we were too low and falling lower, into the tombs.

  We dropped into their midst. The plane kissed the top of one tomb, bounced, and smashed nose-on against a wall of red-hot iron.

  13

  F

  lames roared up around me, as if a fuel tank had caught. I pulled myself loose and rolled out, clawing frantically with my hands as the flames washed over me. When I tried to get to my hands and knees my right leg wouldn’t work. I pulled myself along the ground, dragging the useless leg behind me, whimpering with fear while the fire raged and the air I breathed grew unbearably hot.

  I didn’t stop until I was forty feet away. My fingernails were torn, and my hands cut on the flinty ground. I rolled over onto my back to look behind me, afraid to look at my leg, knowing I’d have to. What had I done to myself?

  Someone was screaming.

  I ignored the deep throbbing pain in my leg to look back at the crashed glider. Benito had been thrown clear in the crash. Now he was running back toward the glider.

  Corbett was trapped in the wreckage, rammed up against the red-hot iron tomb, screaming like a damned soul. I didn’t even consider trying to get him out. He’d be dead in seconds. His skin would already have charred away, and he was breathing superheated air and smoke. How could he scream like that with seared lungs? He was a dead man.

  Benito hadn’t thought of that. He ran straight back into the flames. I watched in disbelief as he pulled at Corbett’s arm, getting nowhere, while fire roared about him. Benito took flaming wreckage in his hands and heaved it away, clawing to get Corbett out.

  Idiot! He’d leave me stranded here, my leg ruined, with no guide and no one to help me! I sat up and tried to go to his aid, but agony flashed in my leg. I had to look down.

  I stared at two splintered ends of red-and-white bone protruding through my thigh. Bright blood spurted through the torn skin. Arterial bright, impossibly red. I couldn’t take my eyes away.r />
  Once before I’d broken a bone. I’d caught a football wrong in high school, and a knuckle cracked. It made me sick, not just the pain, but the thought of that broken thing inside me. I could hardly walk to the clinic. Now I stared at two ends of a broken thighbone while my life’s blood jetted out with each pulse. I expected to faint. But nothing happened, and presently I thought of making a tourniquet before all my blood was gone.

  There was only my robe. I gripped the hem in my teeth and pulled with both hands. It wouldn’t tear, and wouldn’t tear, and bright blood jetted in the air.

  Benito! I was lying with a broken bone and a terrible wound, but I could be saved! Why was Benito wasting his time on a hopeless case, a man he’d barely met, a hitchhiker? It wasn’t fair.

  Corbett was still screaming as Benito tore at the wreckage. Where did the pilot find the strength? He should be finished, lungs burned out, heart stopped, but he went on screaming mechanically as if the sounds of pain were being ripped out of him.

  The pilot came loose suddenly, and they both went sprawling backward. Benito got up and dragged the pilot over to me. Benito was parboiled and hairless, his hands blistered and burned. Corbett was a charred corpse, black from end to end, with blood-rare steak showing through cracks in the char. There were no eyes left in the sockets. And still sounds came through the swollen blackened lips. I wanted to stop my ears.

  “Stupid!” I said. “Stupid, stupid, stupid! In a minute he’ll be dead anyway!”

  “He will heal,” said Benito. “He is already dead.”

  “Heal?”

  “Certainly.”

  Agony surged in my leg. I looked down . . . and couldn’t look away. I watched in helpless fascination.

  The blood had stopped pumping. The bone ends gradually vanished as skin crawled out to cover them. It crawled on, closing the wound, leaving my leg in an odd tented shape. Without my willing it the leg straightened slowly.

  An old scar I’d once got fishing slowly reappeared where before there had been bloody jagged bone end. The pain turned to a ferocious itch. That went away too.

  I was healed.

  Corbett had stopped screaming. Now he only moaned softly. I looked, afraid to look, afraid not to. The char was flaking off him in thick patches. The skin beneath was bright sunburn red, not at all like raw meat. His tattoo, like my scar, came up from underneath his skin like a self-developing photograph. He groaned again and opened his eyes.

  There were eyes in the sockets. Corbett looked at me and smiled weakly. “Can’t die again, I guess. Wished I could for a time there.”

  “It is a pointless and evil wish,” said Benito. “The dead cannot die.”

  “No.” Corbett began an inspection of his body.

  I stood up uncertainly. Benito watched, saying nothing. I was able to stand. I could walk. I did. I went off a way, toward the glowing tomb, until the heat was nearly unbearable, and I stared at it.

  We’ll have to change our theory, won’t we, Carpentier? Corbett’s no robot. The Builders would have had to put a new, sunburned skin under the skin to be charred. They would have to have planned all this ahead of time. They would have to be omniscient.

  And what about your leg, Carpentier? What about your leg?

  Biological engineering. Rapid regeneration. That, to add to their powers. They can warp space and possibly time. They can take the mass from a human body and leave the weight. They can put Minos’s tail into—where? Hyperspace? They’ve got fine-tuned weather control and infinitely adaptable robots.

  And they can engineer your body, Carpentier, your body, in such a way that it heals in minutes, and do it without your knowing they gave you that ability.

  Getting a little thin, isn’t it Carpentier? A neat set of rationalizations, but it won’t work. How are these Builders different from God Himself? What can God do that they can’t?

  And back at the edge of my mind I couldn’t help remembering the last thing I’d screamed in the bottle.

  Corbett had gotten up and was peeling saucer like flakes of charred skin from his chest and shoulders. “Hot here,” he said.

  I nodded and abandoned my reverie. It was hot. Even the tombs that weren’t glowing were just below red heat. Here and there flames shot up from open pits. It must have been painful for Corbett with his new skin.

  I remembered where we were. Inside the walls of Dis. How were we to get out again? We were surrounded by hot glowing tombs, flames, fire, heat everywhere, except in one direction where darkness showed through the red glow.

  “We have to get out of here,” I said to Benito. “We’ll roast to—We’ll roast.” To death? We couldn’t die. Can’t die twice, Carpentier.

  “Of course we must leave,” Benito said. “Recall your promise. I helped you with the glider, and it did not work. Now you have no choice. We go downward.”

  “Which way?” For that moment I didn’t care.

  “I am not sure. We may as well go where it is more comfortable.” He led us off toward the dark. It drew us onward, promising relief from the heat and the choking air. We threaded our way between heated tombs and great vatlike pits with fire dancing from them. Huge lids that would just cover them lay beside each one.

  The edge of the hot region was the beginning of a white marble maze. The heat stopped as if we’d gone through an insulated doorway, but there was no door. I wasn’t even surprised. It would take more than invisible heat barriers to surprise me now.

  Corbett staggered into a corridor and sank down with a happy sigh, his back against cool marble. He wriggled to get his head clear of the brass fixtures.

  We were in an endlessly sprawling building. The corridors were about fifteen feet wide and nearly that high. Every wall was covered with square-cut marble slabs and rows of brass plates and slender brass . . . what? Vases? I read some of the plates. Name, birth date, date of death. Sometimes an insipid poem. These were burial vaults, and those brass things were vases, and of course there were no flowers in them. The corridor stretched on endlessly, and there seemed to be branches at frequent intervals. Millions of tombs . . .

  “More unbelievers,” I said.

  “Yes,” Benito answered.

  “But I was an unbeliever. An agnostic.”

  “Of course.”

  “Why of course?”

  “I found you in the Vestibule,” said Benito. “But now you know the truth.”

  A two-syllable response stuck in my throat. The truth was an elusive thing, here in Infernoland. I could talk about advanced technologies until Hell froze over, and Benito would still call them miracles.

  I’d watched a miracle. A compound fracture had healed before my eyes. And I was no robot!

  But this place had to be artificial. It was a construct, a design. I knew that.

  All right, Carpentier. An artifact implies an artificer. There has to be a designer. Pick a Chief Engineer for the Builders, and call him . . . what? Good fannish names, like Ghod, Ghu, Roscoe, the Ceiling? No. Call him Big Juju.

  Questions, Carpentier. In what way do Big Juju’s abilities differ from God Almighty’s?

  Size? This place is the size of a small planet. Carpentier, you’ve no way of knowing Big Juju can’t build even bigger. Worlds, stars, whole universes.

  Natural laws? He suspends them at will. A world-sized funnel, as stable as a sphere would be in normal space. And—and he can raise the dead. Me! Corbett, who couldn’t possibly have been frozen. Jan Petri the health-food addict, cremated, Carpentier, burned to a pile of greasy ashes and a few chunks of bone, and now risen so that he can be tortured.

  Big Juju can create. He can destroy. He can raise the dead and heal the sick. Was more ever claimed for Christ?

  I looked back at the red-hot tombs. They still glowed with heat, but none of that reached us in these cool marble halls. “There are people in those tombs?”

  Benito nodded. “Heretics.”

  The word was frightening. Heretics. They believed in the wrong gods, or worshiped the rig
ht god in the wrong way. For that they were raised from the dead so they could be tortured in hotboxes.

  Iago says it. “Credo in un Dio crudel.” I believe in a cruel God. And that you must believe, Carpentier. The ability to make a universe does not presuppose moral superiority. We have seen no strong evidence that Big Juju’s moral judgments are better than our own. Would God torture people?

  I half-remembered Sunday school lessons. No. But also, yes. It was one reason I was an agnostic. How could I worship a God who kept a private dungeon called Hell? That might be all right for Dante Alighieri, a Renaissance Italian! But Carpentier had higher standards than that!

  A voice floated from within my mind, a tired voice whispering out of a mound of fat. We’re in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.

  We were in the private museum park of Big Juju. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Too right,” said Corbett. He paused. “Music?”

  I listened. There was music playing from somewhere within these marble corridors. Something chintzy-sweet, a minor work by a major composer, played for every melodramatic sweet note in it. Artificial good cheer in Hell. “It fits,” I said. “Granted we’re damned, how do we get out? Which way?”

  Benito looked around him. “I have never been in this part before.”

  “Not back there,” Corbett insisted. “Not unless we have to.”

  “Right. We’ve got time,” I said. And I started laughing.

  It was an awful sound. It bounced around in the maze and came back at me from all directions, transmuted to racking sobs. I tried to stop. Corbett and Benito were staring. I tried to tell them:

  “I was right. Just once, I was right. All that time in the bottle, all that guessing, and I was right just once. Immortality! When they woke me up they had immortality.” Dammit, I was crying.

  Corbett took my arm, “Come on, Allen.”

  We went inward.

  14

  T

  he corridors branched away, endless cross-corridors in an endless corridor, and every one of them the same, wall after wall of marble-sealed caskets, each with its empty bronze vases for flowers. Our footsteps echoed hollowly. Our sandals hadn’t been touched by the flames. The sprightly music continued, never getting louder, and the light never changed, neither gloomy nor bright. On and on, corridor after corridor. Finally we halted.