by Larry Niven
“Yes.”
“See! Power doesn’t have to be like that!” She waved at the desolation below.
I’d forgotten. People thought that way deep into the 1960s. Science was still a wonderful mystery, power was good, and the world was going to be a great place. All it would take was money, and we had that, and we could build a great society, a beautiful place where everyone was happy.
They taught that sort of thing in colleges in Sylvia’s time. I’d forgotten.
I started down. “Stay out of the lowlands,” I said. “Heavier stuff accumulates there. Like nerve gas.”
The path led straight to the bridge. It was a beautiful bridge that spanned a great part of the valley, a suspension bridge nearly as large as the Golden Gate. That beauty was entirely out of place here.
There was no one else on the bridge when we started across.
Down below us was desecration. Bulldozers and oil wells. Pools of sludge with people sunk in up to their necks and struggling to get out. Tarred and oiled birds flopped helplessly around the shores of the pools.
A power plant was running almost below us, and a train track was feeding it coal. We ran through the cloud of goop pouring up from the great wasp–waist chimneys. We held our breath, but it still got us in the eyes.
There was a highway under us. Great trucks roared down it. Some fell into pits or ran out of control into the hideous river. After a while I stopped looking down, but I could hear the endless noises of the assaults on nature.
We reached the other end of the bridge. Several paths led upward to the ridge opposite the way we’d come. There wasn’t any obvious reason to choose one path over another. Which way?
“They all lead up,” Sylvia said. “Take the path less traveled by.”
I laughed. “And that will make all the difference?”
She snorted at me. She started up a path and I followed.
We rounded a bend to find more desolation. Muddy streams ran past us. Up ahead was a huge scaffolding with ropes and cables that held up a large hose. A stream of water gushed out of the hose at enormous speed. The water smashed into a hill and ate it, dissolved the hill into rushing mud.
“California gold country,” I said.
She nodded. “I read about it. Mark Twain. Bret Harte. They tore down whole mountains. Washed towns down with the mud. For gold. Why are we seeing this, Allen?”
“Why?”
“We chose this path. There must be a reason.”
“You’re the one who accuses me of looking for reasons when there aren’t any. Let’s keep moving. I don’t want to be taken for a claim jumper.”
A large crew was working on the scaffolding that held up the hydraulic mining system. They were all dressed in Levi’s and flannel shirts, and most wore hats and work gloves.
A foreman stood on top of the scaffold and barked orders. Two men tightened cables to move the stream impact from one part of the hill to another. Others seemed to be concerned with keeping the structure from shaking itself apart. None of it looked strong enough to hold.
The scaffold began shaking harder. I broke into a run. “Quick, before it collapses, we have to get uphill,” I said.
Sylvia ran ahead of me. The trail led through a tent camp, then up farther. We got clear of the camp and were fifty feet above it when there was a terrible roar. The scaffolding collapsed and the water jet played against the hillside just below us. We scrambled uphill to get away from it.
The hill began dissolving. In seconds a river of mud washed through the camp. A dozen men clung to the wreckage of the scaffold as it tumbled through, broke apart, and fell into the rushing water. They were washed down with the mud, down into the valley. In moments they were gone.
“That was awful.” Sylvia watched the flood until the last of it was past. “Allen, there’s a man down there.”
He was not too far from us, waist deep in mud. I grabbed a shovel from a pile of tools in the camp. We ran downhill and waded out through the mud toward him. Sylvia was up to her knees in mud before she could reach him. A safety rope was tied around his waist, but it stretched out downstream. When we got to him I pulled on the free end of the rope. It came dragging a plank.
Sylvia took his hands and tried to pull him out of the mud. “Allen, I can’t move him. Help me.”
Even using the shovel, then both of us pulling, it took a long time to get him free. We kept sinking into the mud and having to pull each other out before we could resume the rescue. Eventually we got him loose and dragged him out through the mud. When we reached the edge I picked him up and carried him to the remains of the camp. He seemed unconscious, but as we got him to dry ground he stirred.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
He untied the rope from his waist and dropped the end to the ground. “Fat lot of good that safety line did.”
“Allen, we might want that,” Sylvia said.
“Sure. Mind if we take the rope?” I asked.
“No skin off my butt,” he said. “Crew boss may not like it, but we lost the whole rig this time. How’s he to know? Sure, take it.”
“Thanks.” I began to coil the rope.
“Why are you here?” Sylvia asked.
“Same reason you are,” he said. “Not enough gold. You a whore from one of the other camps?”
“No, are you?”
He laughed, a short snorting laugh. “Not me. Got some men whores here, but I ain’t one of them. Charles MacGruder. They call me Black Charlie, I guess ‘cause I used to dig mines before I got into this work. You ain’t a whore, what are you doing here, ma’am?”
“It’s a long story,” Sylvia said.
“We know the way out of here,” I told Charlie. “We go up, over that ridge —”
“Out into the fire! I’ve been up there, I saw it. No, sir, not me. I know my place.” He eyed me suspiciously. “You after our claim?”
“Good God no! We’re getting out of here. All the way down,” I told him. “What good is gold here?”
“Plenty good,” he said. “Enough gold we can buy our way out of here. Nuggets, dust, it’s all good! All it takes is gold, you can have anything you want.” He paused. “ ‘Cepting maybe you, ma’am,” he added politely.
“What makes you think you can buy your way out of Hell?” I asked.
“Sure you can,” Charlie said. “Everybody knows that! Ain’t that what the preachers always want? Whatever they say, you got the gold, you get their attention. You got none, you can die on the streets for all they care. There’s a man at the assay office, he told us about it. A train comes through, maybe every couple of hundred years, and if you can buy a ticket you can get out of here.”
“Charlie, it’s not that way at all,” Sylvia said. “Really. You can’t buy your way out, but we can take you out of here.”
“Through the fire,” Charlie said. “Sure. We go through the firefall and get out of here. Ma’am, I don’t fancy calling ladies liars but I have trouble believing that. Reckon I’ll take my chances on getting enough gold.” He looked wistfully around the remains of the camp. “Looks like most of what we had washed out,” he said.
“Does this happen often?” Sylvia asked.
“Yes, ma’am, we get wiped out fairly regular.” He shrugged. “What else can we do? Better here than out there in the fire. Or there.” He pointed down into the valley and shuddered. “It’s awful down there.”
He began scraping mud off his clothes. “Soonest started, soonest done. Ma’am, friend, the crew will be back up here pretty soon. I’d be scarce before they get here. None of us take kindly to claim jumpers, and maybe I know better about you now, and maybe I don’t, but I’ll never convince them.”
“We’ll be on our way,” I said. “You can still come with us.”
“Nope.”
“All right.” I bent to pick up a shiny rock a bit smaller than a baseball. “This isn’t gold, is it?”
“Fool’s gold. You want it?”
&
nbsp; “Yes.” I rolled it in the sleeve of my robe.
Charlie laughed. “Fine. See you around.” He went back to cleaning himself up.
I looked at the pile of tools and thought of the ice, then I picked up a pickaxe. Charlie looked at me with a frown, but he didn’t say anything. I started up the hill.
“Charlie,” Sylvia said.
He looked up. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Oh, never mind. Goodbye, Charlie.” She turned to follow me.
Chapter 19
Seventh Circle, Third Round
The Violent Against God, Nature, And Art
Part Three
The River
* * *
Now bears us onward one of the hard margins,
And so the brooklet’s mist o’ershadows it,
From fire it saves the water and the dikes.
We stood at the top of the ridge. The trail led steeply down into the fiery desert.
“I can see why he didn’t want to go down there,” Sylvia said. “How far do we have to run through that?”
“Father Camillus said an hour’s run.”
“My hair will be burned away in an hour,” she said.
“It grows back.”
“I know. I watched yours. Promise you won’t watch while mine grows in.” She took a deep breath. “All right, let’s do it.” She dashed down the steep pathway and out into the fireflakes.
We ran across the fiery desert. The pickaxe was heavy, and I thought of dropping it, but I hung on. It would be important if we ever reached the ice. There were others out there, but none of them were in pairs using a third as a parasol. Apparently that notion had not made it to this side of the valley.
I tried calling to them. “There is a way out! Follow us, we can get out of here!” If any heard us, they showed no signs of it.
“That man is wearing a cassock,” Sylvia said. She pointed. “There’s another! There are a lot of them! Allen, that’s horrible, priests and altar boys?” She ran on a few paces. “I mean, it must have been happening, look how many there are, but I never heard of anything like that.”
“Neither did I,” I said. I remembered a year I’d spent in a Catholic high school. The Brothers lived in their own building, and the rules were strict. No student was ever allowed inside the door. Once I was sent to deliver a message for Brother Ignatius. It was raining, and when Brother Henry answered the door he said he would go get Brother Ignatius, leaving me standing outside in the rain. We all imagined terrible things the Brothers must have been doing in there, but they all involved women.
“Aren’t you going to tell them?” Sylvia asked.
“About the way out? No. Someone else can do that,” I told her. We ran on.
There was a dike ahead. It wasn’t quite as high as my head. Fire–flakes fell heavily as we got closer. “Aargh! My hair!” Sylvia shouted.
I boosted Sylvia up, then she leaned down to help me. The dike was a good forty feet wide at the top. Beyond the dike was a streambed, with trees. A ribbon of red blood ran through. Steam rose from the stream and formed an arch over our heads. No fireflakes came through. Sylvia brushed the last of the fire out of her hair, then came to help me pluck off a sticky flake from the back of my neck. We stood there as the pain slowly faded out and we healed.
“That was too easy,” I said. “So why isn’t everyone scrambling up here?”
She shook her head. “Dante never explained.” She looked thoughtful.
Hurrying close to the bank, a troop of shades
Met us, who eyed us much as passers–by
Eye one another when daylight fades
To dusk and a new moon is in the sky,
And knitting up their brows they squinted at us
Like an old tailor at the needle’s eye.
“And then one caught at Dante’s gown and he stooped down to look at him,” Sylvia said. “It was Dante’s old teacher. Dante liked him and was sorry to see him here. But none of the group tried to get out of the fire. Oh! Now I remember.”
O son, said he, should one of our lot rest
One second, a hundred years he must lie low,
Nor even beat the flames back from his breast.
“I remember now,” I said. “But Dante never told how that was enforced.”
“Or how they measure time,” Sylvia said.
We went on downstream in comparative comfort. It was hot and muggy and smelled like boiling blood, there were screams from the desert, but we were out of the fire and moving downhill.
“How far is it?” Sylvia asked.
“I don’t know. We were in a fast car most of the way,” I told her. “Maybe twenty miles?”
“Dante saw lots of people on the way,” Sylvia said. She gestured expansively. “There’s no one around us.”
“Want to go looking for people?”
“No!”
“You’re looking normal,” Sylvia said. “Scars healed.” She pushed back her brush–cut hair. “I’m sure I’m still a mess.”
“Not at all. You look good,” I told her.
“Thanks.”
In fact she looked quite attractive. I wondered what that meant. It wasn’t a sexual attraction. I hadn’t felt anything like that since I woke up in my bottle.
“Anything wrong?” she asked. “You’re quiet enough.”
“Just thinking. You bought that Catholic stuff.”
“What do you mean, ‘bought’?” she asked.
“I don’t know, I shouldn’t bring it up.”
“Why not?” Sylvia laughed. “Are you trying to save my faith or something?”
“No — well, yes, actually. If you’ve got something to believe in I sure don’t want to take it away from you.”
“What makes you think you can?”
“Erasmus.”
“Erasmus? Oh. You mean contradictions, like the Donation of Constantine being a fake.”
“Yeah. It was a fake, you know.”
“Well, sure it was,” Sylvia said. “Even Dante knew that! Allen, Erasmus picked holes in a lot of silly practices of the Roman Church, but he never left it, you know. Neither did his father.”
“His father? How in the world do you know about Erasmus’s father?”
“Allen, it was a novel everyone read. The Cloister and the Hearth. It’s all about Erasmus’s father. There’s one scene where an old monk denounces half the practices of the Roman Church as pagan in origin. He was right, too.”
“And still you believe in all this?”
“Well, I didn’t. I was Unitarian, you know. But —”
“But what?”
“Allen, look around you!”
“Yeah. I see it. But the churches want you to believe in stuff that just couldn’t have happened.”
“Such as?”
This wasn’t a conversation I liked, but Sylvia seemed interested. “Such as Herod killing all the children in Bethlehem,” I said. “That never happened. If it had, someone would have recorded it! People would have rebelled! It’s just silly.”
She stopped and laughed at me.
“What? Sylvia, you never struck me as any true believer.”
“I’m not, but you’re the one being silly, Allen. Bethlehem in that time would have been a village of under a thousand people, no more. How many would have been male children two years and younger? Three? Five? Ten? Twenty even? Allen, Herod was a horrible man. The Romans have lots of records of what he did. He killed off whole villages. Starved people. They didn’t revolt. Why would anyone notice a few kids in a little village a dozen miles from Jerusalem?”
“But …” I let it trail off. She’d beaten me on the math!
She was giggling. “And you’re the rationalist,” she said.
“Oh, shut up.”
Fireflakes drifted down on the desert. Sometimes winds drove a storm of fire to the area near the dike, but up on the dike we were safe under the blanket of steam from the river. The steam obscured the view, but we had glimpses of people out in the
desert. Most of them ran. None seemed interested in us.
“No Pi shapes,” I said.
Sylvia frowned.
“Two carrying a third as an umbrella. That meme doesn’t seem to have come to this side of the valley.”
“Hey! Mister!”
I looked down to see a teenaged boy. Dark hair, brown eyes. His skin was mottled with burns. He managed a smile.
“Give me a hand up!”
“Sure.” I put down the pickaxe and reached down to help him. He scrambled up onto the dike.
“Thanks. I’ve been trying to get up here for years. Seems like years, anyway. I’m Angelo Corvantis. From Los Angeles. I — uh, like I died just after the millennium. Big car wreck, shouldn’t have let Tony drive, he was loaded. Piled us all up. Don’t know what happened to the others. Just me and Lorna when I woke up. Don’t know what happened to her, either, that Minos thing dropped me here.”
“So now what, where we going?” he demanded.
“We’re going out. Down and down, all the way through Hell,” I told him. I shouldered my pick and started downhill.
“Cool! Can I come with you?”
“You may,” Sylvia said.
He looked puzzled.
“We don’t all make it,” I told him. “Sylvia means you can come along, but it might not work out.”
“Gotcha. Well, we can try, yeah? It’s sure better up here than down there.” His easy smile was infectious, and we wanted to like him.
“Did they tell you anything when they put you in there?” I asked. “About having to keep moving?”
“Not me. There’s some said a demon told them they had to keep moving.” He shrugged. “Nobody told me anything. I kept running to dodge the fireflakes. But I couldn’t climb up here without help. Helped one guy up, but he didn’t stay to help me once he got up here. Bastard. Hope the motherfucker fell back in.”
Sylvia looked shocked.
“Sorry, lady, that’s what he did,” Angelo said. “It’s why he was here.”
“And you?” I asked.
“You first. And what’s your name?”
“I’m Allen. This is Sylvia. I wrote science fiction. Sylvia was a poet. I woke up in the Vestibule. Sylvia was a suicide.”