by Larry Niven
So Rosemary had found her place. I said, “Hellish.”
She said, “Get out.”
I tried to stand up. It didn’t quite work.
“I mean it, Allen,” she said. “Oh, you have a choice. We all have choices. You can stay and work with me if you choose to do so.”
“I already gave you my answer to that.”
“I know you did. So get out. You are no longer welcome in Hell. Go and be saved. You already have aspects of sainthood. Go earn the rest of them. Go find out what’s beyond. Leave us to clean up your awful, awesome mess.”
“And you?”
“I made my choice, Allen. I have work to do. Here. I choose to do it.”
I turned away. Geryon grinned at me. I said, “I need a ride.”
“With all my heart,” he said. “But I can’t get above the ice. The thermals, you know.”
“Oh, give me a break.”
“And I’m afraid to get that close to the Devil. Allen, you also should be careful. He’ll be upset.”
The ice was trying to freeze around my feet. I had to keep moving.
Oppenheimer’s explosion had left a depression in the ice. As I moved into the crater, partially freed souls were trying to wriggle loose. Many shied from me, covering their faces. As I descended the ice came to an end, leaving … I couldn’t quite look at what made up the crater floor. Reality? Tiny shapes were writhing near the bottom, and I edged close to see.
By their mustaches, those were Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, locked in a wrestling match while steaming water froze around them. I didn’t come close enough to be sure. I didn’t care enough. They’d had their chance.
I didn’t see Oppenheimer. I didn’t see Sylvia. Wherever they’d come back to existence, they knew the way out.
The stench grew as I crossed the ice. At first I couldn’t identify it, mixed as it was with sulfur and rot and sewage and sickness, all the stenches of Hell pouring into the partial vacuum from higher up. But as I got closer … burned hair. A world of burned hair.
The Devil was bare red scar tissue across half his face and body. He was wearing one face only, and the mouth was empty: souls must have been ripped from his lips by the blast. I became very aware that his left arm was free. Glaciers clung to the fingers. He watched me for a while, then said, “Leaving?” in a basso profundo whisper only I could hear.
“Yeah. Any messages?”
“Tell Him He could have planned a better universe by throwing dice.”
I walked wide around the Devil until I was behind his right shoulder, the arm that was still bound. Why take risks now? I jumped across a gap to reach coarse black hair, and started down.
Faint sounds drifted to me. It sounded like a choir. A choir of angels? The song was triumphant. Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus … Gloria in excelsis Deo … A dozen hymns, some recognizable, some I had never heard, blending together. During my first trip here I’d heard nothing but the wind. I listened as I descended to the grotto.
I had a long climb ahead of me, but at the end I would once again see the stars.
Notes
* * *
The verses in the chapter headings are generally from the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation. For sheer poetic imagery the Longfellow translation has no peers. The notes in the Barnes and Noble Classics edition of this translation are excellent.
For readability we recommend the Ciardi translation. There have been many editions of Ciardi’s translation, and we are told that our original Inferno caused the reissue of at least one of them, as well as a renewed interest in Dante among college students. This was a very good thing to have accomplished, and we preen.
A few of the quotes are from Dorothy L. Sayers’s translation. Sayers is better known for her Lord Peter Wimsey novels, but she was an accomplished medieval scholar. This translation is unique in that she has managed to preserve Dante’s rhyming scheme with little compromise of the meaning. In doing so she has often equaled Longfellow in poetic imagery, and sometimes excelled Ciardi in clarity. Her notes are of great help in understanding Dante’s intentions as well as the confusing political circumstances of his times. We had not discovered this translation when we wrote the first Inferno.
For those seriously interested in Dante but handicapped by not having a working knowledge of Italian, all three of these translations are important, and we can add a fourth: the Easton Press bilingual edition, which presents the original Italian of Dante Alighieri side by side with the Allen Mandelbaum blank verse translation into English. Sometimes it is quite helpful to read the original Italian even if one’s knowledge of that language is limited to high school Latin, and it is convenient to have a line–by–line translation when doing so.
Regarding J. Robert Oppenheimer: we consulted a number of biographies, of which American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin was by far the most useful. It became clear that while Oppenheimer was never subject to Communist Party discipline, he knew people who were, and he knew that party discipline demanded unquestioning obedience to orders. It is quite clear that he knew that Ted Hall, whom Oppenheimer brought to Los Alamos and who worked on all of the most important problems, was a member of CPUSA. Despite the stringent security at Los Alamos — outgoing mail was censored, and for a time the only telephone was on General Groves’s desk — with Oppenheimer’s approval Hall was given a fourteen–day leave without supervision in 1944. He immediately took a train to New York City and walked into the Soviet Trade Mission headquarters, where he told them everything he knew about the Manhattan Project. He knew a lot, including both the Uranium (Little Boy) and Plutonium (Fat Man) bomb designs, and a lot about the rather tricky implosion lens needed to detonate a Plutonium fission weapon. It is impossible to believe that Oppenheimer was not aware that Hall would do that. The Rosenbergs were executed for passing considerably less information than Hall conveyed.
When we wrote our original Inferno, the Vatican II reforms and Pope John Paul II’s implementations of them had not been fully realized, and we drew much of our theological inspiration from C.S. Lewis, particularly his The Great Divorce. Since that time the Roman Catholic Church has made formal changes in its doctrines concerning the necessity of salvation through the Catholic Church alone, as well as considerable expansion of the doctrine of cocreation. Both doctrines have a major effect on Allen Carpenter’s speculations. While our original Inferno might have been thought to be in conflict with the views of the church as then expressed, the new doctrines of the current Pope seem very much in line with what we wrote, and we do not believe we are in conflict with church doctrine.
This is, of course, a fantasy novel, not a treatise on theology and salvation.
Acknowledgments
* * *
First, our personal thanks to our editor, Robert Gleason, who found many things to improve in what we had thought was our finished work. We also thank Marilyn and Roberta for their specific suggestions, but also for putting up with us while we spent a year in Hell, then had to go back again for months because Bob Gleason told us to.
Others who have contributed by commenting on this work include, in no particular order, Roland Dobbins, Patty Healy, Robert Bruce Thompson, and Roberta Pournelle. We also want to thank the readers of the Chaos Manor View column who made suggestions for inhabitants of Inferno.
Obviously this work is derived from the first book, Inferno, of Dante Alighieri’s great poem The Divine Comedy. First written in the early fourteenth century, Dante’s poem remains one pillar of Italian education and is at least in theory read by every Italian schoolchild.
Both of us were introduced to Dante through the John Ciardi translation. Ciardi provides extensive notes and maps, and his translation retains Dante’s lineation but not the poet’s complex rhyming scheme; which is to say, Ciardi concentrates on making the meaning and images clear at the expense of the aural experience the original has when read aloud. It is an excellent way to get the sense
and some of the feel of Dante’s magnificent work.
We later found the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation with introduction and notes by Peter Bondanella. Like Ciardi, Longfellow decided to abandon Dante’s rhyming scheme and wrote in blank verse. Unlike Ciardi, Longfellow strives for poetic imagery, and given his abilities as a poet often succeeds better than Ciardi; but of course at the expense of meaning. This edition includes the Doré illustrations, which add greatly to the Dante experience.
We had finished the first work when we discovered the rhyming translation of Dorothy L. Sayers, better known as the author of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories. Sayers was a highly gifted scholar and has done what neither Ciardi nor Longfellow managed: she has preserved Dante’s rhyming scheme. Astonishingly she has sacrificed very little in meaning or imagery. Her notes and introductions are illuminating. We have drawn the epigraph from the Sayers translation.
It is useful to compare Sayers’s remarks on rhyme with Ciardi’s. As Ciardi (and Longfellow before him) remarks, rhymes and puns are much easier in Italian than in English. Dante made frequent use of both. Sayers has attempted to convey this in her translation, and to a great degree has succeeded, although sometimes through imaginative rather than literal translation. Anyone interested in the technical aspects of writing poetry will profit from reading her discourses on translating rhyme.
In the last analysis, of course, Dante only exists in Italian. Indeed, Dante could be said to have invented Italian, and it is Dante’s Italian that is universally understood in a land of a thousand dialects.
Neither of us reads Italian well enough to comprehend Dante in the original, although constant reference to the handsome Easton Press bilingual edition of the Inferno has given us some comprehension of the magnificence of Dante’s achievement. The accompanying translation by Allen Mandelbaum in the Easton edition is clear and in simple language, although his introduction is perhaps not as useful as the others mentioned above.