Inferno (2 page)

He was beautiful. Everything was beautiful. But my navel?
Magnifique!

“You are well?” he asked.

He spoke with an accent: Mediterranean; Spanish, perhaps, or Italian. He was looking closely at me, and he asked again, “You are well?”

“Yes. I think so. Where am I?”

He shrugged. “Always they ask that question first. Where do you think you are?”

I shook my head and grinned for the pleasure of it. It was pleasure to move, to see myself move, to feel my buttocks press against the dirt and know something would oppose my movements. It was ecstasy to see myself in the bright light around me. I looked up at the sky.

There wasn’t any sky.

Okay, there has to be a sky. I know that. But I saw nothing. Thick clouds? But there was no detail to the clouds, just a uniform gray above me. Even in my sensation-starved condition it was ugly.

I was in the middle of a field of dirt that stretched a couple of miles to some low brown hills. There were people on the hills, a lot of them, running after something I couldn’t make out. I sat up to scan the horizon.

The hills ran up against a high wall that stretched in both directions as far as I could see. It seemed straight as a mathematician’s line, but I sensed the slightest of inward curves just before it vanished into deep gloom. There was something wrong with the perspective, but I can’t describe precisely what, just that it didn’t seem right.

The hills and the mud flats formed a wide strip between the wall and a fast-moving river of water black as ink. The river was a mile away and didn’t seem very wide at that distance. I could see it perfectly, another perceptual distortion because it was too far away for the details I could make out.

Beyond the river were green fields and white Mediterranean villas, walled complexes with the squat classical look to them, some quite large. They weren’t arranged in any order, and the effect was very pleasing. I turned back to the wall.

Not very high, I thought. High enough to be trouble climbing, perhaps two or three times my six-foot height. I was hampered by the perspective problem. The nearest point of the wall might have been a mile away or ten, though ten seemed ridiculous.

I took a deep breath and didn’t like the smells. Fetid, with an acrid tinge, decay and sickly sweet perfume to cover the smells of death, orange blossoms mingled with hospital smells, all subtle enough that I hadn’t noticed them before, but sickening all the same. I won’t mention the smells often, but they were always there. Most stinks you get used to and soon don’t notice, but this had too much in the blend and the blend changed too often. You’d just get used to one and there’d be another.

Beside me on the ground was a small bronze bottle with a classical beaker shape. I figured it would hold maybe a quart. Except for the man standing above me there wasn’t another blessed thing.

“Never mind where I am,” I said. “Where have I been? I don’t remember passing out. I was screaming, and here I am. Where was I?”

“First you ask where you are. Then where you were. Do you think of nothing else you should say?” He was frowning disapproval, as if he didn’t like me at all. So what the hell was he doing here?

Breaking me out of wherever I’d been, of course. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“You should thank the One who sent you to me.”

“Who was that?”

“You asked Him for help—”

“I don’t remember asking anyone for help.” But this time I’d heard him pronounce the capital letter. “Yeah. ‘For the love of God,’ I said. Well?”

The fat meaty lips twitched, and his eyes filled with concern. When he looked at me it wasn’t in distaste, but in sympathy. “Very well. You will have a great deal to learn. First, I answer your questions. Where are you? You are dead, and you lie on the ground of the Vestibule to Hell. Where were you?” He kicked the bronze bottle with a sandaled foot. “In there.”

Hot diggity damn, I’m in the nut hatch and the head loony’s come to talk to me.

Carpentier wakes up a thousand years after his last flight and sloppy landing, and already he’s in trouble. Spoons and forks and chopsticks, traffic lights, the way a man puts his pants on, all may have to be relearned. Law and customs change in a thousand years. Society may not even recognize Carpentier as sane.

But wake him in a thirtieth-century loony bin among thirtieth-century twitchies, and now what? How can he adjust to anything?

There were other bottles sitting unattended on the dirt, some larger than mine, some smaller. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed them before. I picked one up and dropped it quick. It burned my fingers, and there were faint sounds coming from inside it.

It sounded like human speech in a foreign language, a voice screaming curses. That tone couldn’t be anything else. Endless curses screamed—

Why would they put radios in old bronze bottles and scatter them through the loony bin? My hypothesis needed more work.

The people up on the hills were still running. They’d looped back to about where I’d first seen them, and whatever it was they chased, they hadn’t caught it yet. Do they let the nuts run in circles in futuristic loony bins?

Where had I been? Where? There wasn’t any hospital around here, no facilities for keeping all or part of a corpsicle, nothing but this crazy man and a lot of bronze bottles and people running in circles and—and insects of some kind. Something whined and did a kamikaze into my ear. Something else stung me on the back of the neck. I slapped frantically, but there wasn’t anything to see.

It felt good even to hurt myself slapping.

My “rescuer” was patiently waiting for me to make some response. It wouldn’t hurt to humor him until I had more information.

“Okay, I’m in the Vestibule to Hell and I was in a bottle. A djinn bottle. How long?” I told him the date on which I’d fallen from the window.

He shrugged. “You will find that time has not the same meaning here as you are accustomed to. We have all the time we will ever need. Eternity lies before us. I am unable to tell you how long you were in that beaker, but I can assure you it is not important.”

Not important? I almost went mad in there! The realization made me start to shiver, and he dropped to his knees beside me, all concern, to put a hand on my shoulder.

“It is over now. God will not allow you back into the bottle. I cannot assure you that there will be nothing worse before you leave Hell. There will be much worse. But with faith and hope you will endure it, and you will be able to leave.”

“That’s a lot of comfort.”

“It is infinite comfort. Did you not understand? I know a way out of here!”

“Yeah? So do I. Right over that wall.”

He laughed. I listened for a while, and it got irritating. Finally he choked it down to a chuckle. “I’m sorry, but they all say that, too. I suppose there is nothing for it but to let you try. After all—we have plenty of time.” He laughed again.

Now what? Would he turn me in if I tried to climb the wall? I got up, surprised at how good I felt except for the gnats and the smell. My imaginary exercises in the bottle—

Or wherever I’d really been—

I started briskly toward the wall.

Wherever the ground dipped low it became squishy mud, ankle-deep, with small live things in it. I tried to stick to the high ground. The fat man kept right alongside me. There was no chucking him. After a while I said, “If we’re going to walk together I might as well know your name.”

“Benito. Call me Benny if you like.”

“Okay. Benito.”
Benny
sounded much too friendly. “Look, Benito, don’t you want out of here?”

I hit a nerve. He stopped short, his wide face a gamut of emotions unlike anything I’d ever seen. After a long time he said, “Yes.”

“Then come over the wall with me.”

“I can’t. You can’t. You’ll see.” He wouldn’t say anything else, just kept pace with me as I walked on.

And on.

And on, and on, and on. The wall was a
long
way off. I was right about the perspective. We’d been walking for over an hour as far as I could tell, and the wall looked no closer.

We walked until we were exhausted, and it was still a long way off. I sat down in the mud to slap gnats. “Didn’t seem that far. How high is that thing, anyway? Must be colossal?”

“It is no more than three meters high.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Look behind you.”

That was the shock of my life. The river was now maybe three miles away instead of one. And we’d walked for
hours
. But—

Benito nodded. “We could walk for eternity and never reach the wall. And we
have
eternity. No, you don’t believe me. Very well, convince yourself. Continue toward the wall. Continue until even you are certain it can never be reached, and then I will tell you how you can escape.”

It took me several hours, but I finally believed him.

The wall was like light speed. We could get arbitrarily close, but we couldn’t ever reach it. Like light speed, or the bottom of a black hole, but like nothing else in the universe I knew.

We weren’t going out this way.

And—and just where were we?

3

I

sat in the dirt and slapped gnats while Benito explained it again.

“We are dead and in Hell. This is the Vestibule to Hell, where those who would make no choices in life are condemned. Neither warm nor cold, believers nor blasphemers—you see them in the hills. They chase a banner they will never catch.”

I remembered then. “Dante’s
Inferno
?”

Benito nodded, his big square jaw heaving like a broaching whale. “You have read the
Inferno
, then. Good. That was the first clue I had to the way out of here. We must go down—”

“Sure, all the way.” Something about a lake of ice, and a hole in the center of it. It had been a long time since I read Dante. I couldn’t see that remembering a thirteenth-century book would do me any good to begin with. This couldn’t possibly be the real thing.

So where was I? “How come you’re so sure this is the place Dante described?”

“Where else could it be? All of the features are here. All of the details.”

And I’d been dead a long time. Centuries? What kind of civilization would build an exact copy of Dante’s
Inferno
? An Infernoland. Was it part of a larger amusement park, like Frontierland in the Disneyland complex? What might Paradiseland be like? Or was Infernoland all there was to it?

Who was Benito? A stooge, or a revived corpsicle like me?

The wall. How had they managed that trick? The wall hadn’t moved, and I certainly had. Some kind of local field effect? A time slip? Bent space? Come on, Carpentier, you
wrote
the stuff. What’s the explanation? Not
the
way they did it, just a plausible way!

“First, we must cross the river,” Benito was saying. “Do you believe me now when I tell you that you must not attempt to swim it, or even get wet from it, or must you try that too?”

“What happens if I just dive in?”

“Then you will be as you were in the bottle. Aware and unable to move. But it will be very cold, and very uncomfortable, and you will be there for all eternity knowing you put yourself there.”

I shuddered and slapped a gnat. He might be lying. I wasn’t going to try it.

It looked very nice across the river, and that was where we had to get before we could find Dante Alighieri’s escape hole in the center! Let me get to those villas over there and I’d be happy enough. “Who’s on the other side of the river?”

“Virtuous pagans,” Benito answered. “Those who never knew the Word of God, but kept the Commandments. They are not persecuted. Their fate may be the most cruel of all those in this place.”

“Because they aren’t tortured?”

“Because they think they are happy. You’ll find out, let us go and see them.”

“How?”

“There is a ferryboat. Once it was a rowing boat, but—”

“Got overcrowded in Hell. Too many arrivals. Sure.” And in Disneyland I’d been on a Mississippi riverboat big enough for fifty or sixty people to walk around on. It chugged around on a little pond it shared with a miniature clipper ship. The Builders of Infernoland had a sense of humor, putting a ferryboat in place of Charon’s old rowboat.

Maybe we’d meet some of the paying customers on the ferry. I didn’t think Benito was one. He behaved more like a fanatical Catholic. In Disneyland the guides were part of the cast.

And what was I? Nobody had given me any role to play. Who inhabits Infernoland?

Damned souls. Could that be my job now—to play damned soul for the amusement of tourists? It wasn’t a role I liked very much.

It took as long to leave the wall as it had to go toward it. At least things were consistent. There were laws to this place, if only I could discover them.

When we passed the bottle that had been beside me when I woke up, we turned left and angled toward the river. An old drinking song from science-fiction conventions kept running through my head. “If hosen and shoon thou never gavest men,
every night and all
, the fire will burn thee to the bare bone,
and Christ receive thy soul
.” Was that really where I was, in a real Hell, where justice was meted out to the ungodly?

Scary. It would mean that there was a real God, and maybe Jonah was swallowed by a whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and Joshua ben Nun really did stop the Earth’s rotation for trivial purposes . . .

There was something leaning against a rock. At first I couldn’t make it out: a pink mound with hair trailing down one side. We got closer and the mound became five-hundred-odd pounds of woman sitting cross-legged in stinking mud. A swarm of gnats hummed around her. She didn’t bother to swat them.

She looked up at us with lifeless eyes. Benito took my arm to hurry me on past her, but I shook him off. She couldn’t be quite sane either, but she might be able to tell me something straight. It was more than he would do, and I needed help.

I squatted down to look into her face. She was pathetic, hardly in shape to help anyone, including herself. Far back within tunnels of fat were tiny sparks of life, dull gray against black. Hopeless eyes, almost lifeless.