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.
Her voice was a husky whisper. “Well?”
“I don’t know where I am. I just got here, and I have to know. Can you help me?”
“Help you! I died, and then this happened to me!”
“Died?”
“How else do you get to Hell?” Her voice rose to demand attention despite my shocked surprise. The full force of her breath washed over me in waves. “What did I do? I don’t deserve this! I don’t belong here at all,” she wailed. “I was beautiful. I could eat like a horse and burn it off in an hour. Then I woke up here, like this!” Her voice dropped to a low, confidential murmur. “We’re in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.”
I shied back. Another one.
“Is there nothing you can do?” Benito asked her.
“Sure. I can chase banners to keep slim. What’s the point of that? They won’t let you do anything meaningful.”
I shuddered. It could have been me. “Why would anyone do this to you?”
“I . . . think it must have been because ten million fat people were cursing me.” Her voice turned venomous. “Fat, fat, fat people with no willpower and no self-respect.”
“Why?”
“For doing my job! For trying to help people, trying to save them from themselves! For banning cyclamates, that’s why! It was for their own good,” she ranted. “You can’t trust people to be moderate about anything. Some people get sick on cyclamates. They have to be helped. And this is what I get for helping them!”
“We’re trying to escape. Want to come with us? Benito thinks we can get out by going down to the center of this crazy place.”
A little spark of interest flared in her eyes, and I held my breath. My open mouth had sent me floating down the side of a building; when would I learn to keep it closed? If she came with us we’d never get away. What good was she?
She struggled to get up, then collapsed against her rock. “No, thank you.”
“Right.” I started to say something else in parting, but what? If anything went all right, I’d never see her again. I just walked away, and she let her head slump back into the mounds of fat that bulged at her neck.
As we walked away, Benito asked, “What are cyclamates?”
I slapped at a gnat. The gnats were everywhere, stinging us both, but Benito didn’t bother to slap at them. “Sugar substitute. For people who want to lose weight.”
He frowned. “If there is too much to eat, surely it would be better to eat less and share with those who have none.”
I looked at his big paunch and said nothing.
“I too am in Hell,” he reminded me.
“Ah. And they can do what they did to her to you . . .” I shuddered. We were lucky.
“I take it you did not agree with her policy?”
“Idiots. If they’d fed as much sugar to the control rats as they gave cyclamates to the experimental group, they’d have killed the controls first. Instead, they doomed a lot of people to fat. There wasn’t a good substitute for cyclamates. I know one guy who bought up cases and cases of a cyclamate diet drink just before the ban hit. He used to give cases of ‘vintage Tab’ as Christmas presents. They were appreciated, too.”
Benito said nothing.
“I know a couple who used to drive up to Canada every so often just to buy cyclamates. It was a stupid policy.” I looked back over my shoulder at the shapeless pink mound. “Still, it seems a little extreme, what they did to her.”
“It is not just?”
“How can you call that just?” I didn’t say anything else, but I remembered what she’d said. “ ‘We’re in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.’ ”
“She is not here for the reason she gave,” Benito said. “Certainly not for that alone.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because, as you say, it would not be just for her to be here. Being cursed would not place her here. If she had been evil in life she would not be in the Vestibule.” Benito shrugged, spreading his hands in a wide gesture. “You did not agree with her decision.”
“I did not.”
“She decided a matter that affected you. You did not agree. Yet you did not know who she was.”
“Yeah. Now that I think of it, I’m not sure anyone took credit for that decision.”
“And so the deed is remembered but not those who did it.” He shrugged again. “Is it not just that she remains with the angels who would not choose sides in that first war in Heaven? With those who will not choose between good and evil? Do you not see justice here?”
I didn’t answer. Just who in Hell was Benito? A paying customer having sport? A damned soul like me? Or one of the paid crew—cast—of Infernoland? He talked like a religious fanatic; he seemed to take everything at face value.
Dare I follow him? But what else could I do? One thing was certain: if he could think that woman had been treated justly, he was not much better than a devil himself.
Hey, Carpentier. Would an artificial Hell have artificial devils? I looked at Benito more closely. He was partly bald. There were no horns on his forehead.
We seemed to be covering a lot of ground, as if the effect of too much distance to the wall had been played in reverse. Suddenly we were part of a crowd, all streaming toward the river. Nobody was pushing them along, but they didn’t seem friendly and they didn’t talk among themselves. Each one was huddled in toward himself, not looking where he was going. Or she, there were a lot of women.
The ferryboat captain had a long white beard and eyes like burning coals. He screamed in rage when anyone was slow getting aboard. We were pressed together on deck, a mass of us so tightly packed that we couldn’t move.
“You again!” He’d turned his burning eyes on Benito. “You’ve come here before! Well, you won’t escape again!” He swung a long billy club at Benito. It hit with a crack that I thought would break my guide’s skull, but it only staggered him.
More people packed the decks until I couldn’t even see. Finally I felt the boat begin to move. By then I’d have been glad to stay behind, but there was no way off the boat. The water was black and looked cold, and terrifying.
Two voices whispered intensely near my ear:
“Why didn’t you stop when I screamed?”
“Because you startled me into taking my foot off the brake. At least I’ll never have to listen to your backseat driving again—”
“But we’re in Hell, darling. They’ll probably put us in a car with no brakes. Maybe they’ll give you a horn. You’ll like that.”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
She did, and quiet descended. No crowd is that quiet. It was as if nobody had anything to say to anyone.
We bumped solid ground. “All off,” Charon shouted. “Damned souls! Damned forever! You cursed God, and now you’ll pay for it!”
“Damn God and everyone else!” “Piss on you!” “Up the people!” “You’re mucking bastards, all of you, get off my foot!” “But I don’t belong here.”
“What’d I do? Just tell me—” “Damn the lot of you, I died a man!”
We pushed and shoved and danced to keep our feet in the swarm. At least we were on the other side. The crowd was hurrying downhill, along a road that ran between thick, high walls. I hung back, hoping Benito would go with the rest. No such luck. The road turned and twisted so we couldn’t see what was ahead, but that was good because after a while we were alone.
I tried to climb the wall. It was a tough scramble, and I kept falling back. After the fourth time I sat there below the wall and whimpered.
“Would you like help?” Benito asked.
“Sure. I thought you said the only way out was downhill.”
“It is, but we have time to explore. Try again, I will lift you.”
He practically threw me over the wall. He didn’t look that strong. I sat on top for a second and looked down at him.
He seemed to be waiting for me to help him up.
And now what, Carpentier? Fair’s fair, he helped you. Yeah, but why? Leave him behind, he’s trouble.
But he knows things I don’t. And he got me out of the bottle.
Did he? He says he poured you out of a bottle the size of a fifth of rum! Leave him.
I didn’t get the chance to decide. While I was thinking it over, Benito began climbing like an alpinist, using tiny cracks and bumps I could hardly see. Pretty soon he got one hand on top of the wall and pulled himself up. He wasn’t breathing hard, and he didn’t say anything about my sitting there and watching him instead of helping.
I turned to look at the countryside. After all, this Infernoland seemed to be modeled on Dante’s. A quarter of a century ago the Inferno had been a required course in Comparative World Literature. I’d paid as little attention to the book as I could get away with. I remembered almost nothing, but certainly the place had not been pleasant. God’s own torture chamber, very medieval.
Vague images came back to me now: devils with pitchforks, trees that talked and bled, giants and centaurs, fire, snakes . . . but were those from the authentic Inferno, or were they hangovers from Oz books and Disney cartoons? Never mind, Carpentier. You’re not going any farther.
4
I
t was lovely on the other side of the wall. I jumped down onto firm ground, grassy and pleasant. The air was clean, as at the top of a mountain, with that fresh smell you get only after a hard backpack into remote country. The gnats were gone. There was a faint smell of orange blossoms, quite pleasant. We walked toward the villas, lovely things, square-built, the colors of stone by twilight.
There were crowds around us. Men and women and children—a lot of children, far too many, all watching us with big round eyes (or almond eyes, Hell was thoroughly integrated). Adults and children alike were curious, but none of them said anything.
They didn’t want to be near us, either. They shrank away as we approached.
It was embarrassing. I thought we must be carrying the smells of the Vestibule area, the fetid stench of roses and decay. We’d have to find a place to wash.