Inferno (5 page)

In fact, the hurricane in my head (Where does the Minos-thing keep its tail? What is Benito, that he gives orders to an inhuman that judges all others who come before it? Is this Hell for a science-fiction writer, where physical laws are whimsical and puzzles have no answers?) was nothing compared to the hurricane we were backing into. We moved flat against the slope, clutching at the rock and digging into the dirt for footholds.

Benito yelled, “Minos called you Carpenter. Not Carpentier.”

I’d been wondering how the monster knew. “I was born Carpenter,” I shouted down at Benito. “I added the ‘i’ to make the name more interesting, easier to remember. I wrote under Carpentier.” And when I talked to myself (I didn’t add) it was Carpentier I talked to. I’d started that in an effort to memorize the new pronunciation.

We’d backed onto a broad ledge. I stayed flat as I looked around.

Someone was dancing to the music of the howling wind.

He was bones and paunch and long flying hair just graying unevenly at the temples. He jumped and danced and flapped his arms like a bird, grim determination on his homely face.

I hollered into the wind. “Hey, friend—”

He didn’t wait for the question. “If I could just get off the ground!” he wailed. “The guy in the helmet’s got a
dozen
!”

Hey, yeah, I’d been right the first time! It was a futuristic loony bin geared for psychodrama on the grand scale! Let them work out their delusions here, and maybe they’d be fit for whatever unimaginable society they’d flunked out of . . . And I had answers to all the questions, in that wonderful moment before I followed his eyes upward.

The air was full of flying people.

They weren’t exactly guiding their flight. The winds had them. Here they churned them in a momentary funnel, then flung them outward. There they came in a straight blast; it hit a shoulder of the mountain and churned the trapped beings into eddy currents. The people flew like Kleenex in a hurricane, but they looked like people, and they howled like Kansans caught outside in a flash tornado.

Most of them were flying in man-and-woman pairs. But, yeah, there was one guy surrounded by a good dozen girls, all in a whirling clump at the top of a rising air column.

The bony guy on the ledge ran off flapping his arms. There were others along the base, men and women, all trying to fly. I had different ideas. I gripped the rock hard and stayed flat.

“The Carnal,” Benito screamed into the wind. “Those who warped all that mattered in their lives for lust. I imagine those at the base of the cliff were unsuccessful lovers. We will be in less danger on the next ledge.” He started crawling.

“Benito! That’s it!” I cried. “We’ll fly out of here!”

He turned in astonishment. It was a mistake. The wind slipped under his raised shoulders and lifted him and flung him at me.

I got him by the ankle. He nearly tore me loose, but I had a handhold in a split rock and I hung on. He doubled on his own length and pulled himself down my forearm until he was flat to the ground again.

“Thank you,” he bellowed.

“S’okay. I wish you could have seen your expression.” I was rather pleased with myself, as if I’d managed to catch a glass somebody’s elbow had knocked off a table.
Good reflexes, Carpentier!

“We’ll fly out of here,” I screamed happily into his ear. “We’ll fly over the wall. We’ll build a glider!”

“I was stubborn too, once. Perhaps I still am. Is this really your wish, Allen?”

“Damn right. We’ll build a glider. Listen, if we’re light enough to be blown away by the first wind, we probably won’t need much more than a big kite! Hey, let’s get out of this wind and talk it over.”

We crawled.

T

he
weather changed as we lost altitude. It didn’t get any better. The wind died down; we didn’t need to clutch at the rocks, and we could hear ourselves speak. But a freezing drizzle started.

Now that I was thinking
glider
, the loss in altitude bothered me. “We need a place to build it,” I said. “Out of the wind. We need fabric, a lot of fabric, and we need wood. We probably need tools.”

Benito nodded. “There is a place, a great swamp, the Styx. Trees grow there. As for the fabric and the tools, we can cross the Styx and get them from the wall.”

“How many walls have you
got
here?”

Benito smiled grimly. “None like this one ahead. Red-hot iron.”

I believed him. Nothing subtle about Infernoland. “How far down is it? We’re losing altitude with every step.”

“A good distance yet.” Benito laughed. “A glider. You may be the first ever to think of that. If we can launch from the hill above Styx, we can use the thermal updraft above the red-hot walls. Ecch,” he said, about the time I stepped backward into freezing slush.

We’d reached another level region. I stood up and looked around. Freezing, stinking muck in all directions. Human beings lay full length in it, like half-immersed logs. The rain was turning to sleet. Cold garbage washed against my ankles.

“Behold the low-rent district,” I said.

I got a chuckle from Benito. “Not yet,” he said, and if I hadn’t had the shivers before, I got them then. He swept his arm about him and said, “The Gluttonous.”

“I don’t want to know. Come on, let’s get through this.”

We waded out into it.

In the darkness, and half-blinded by sleet, I managed not to step on any half-buried victims. Some raised their heads to watch us pass, showing us uniform looks of weary despair, then sank back after we were gone.

“Come with us! Leave this place. I bring you hope,” Benito shouted. No one paid him any attention at all, and after a while Benito gave up. We sloshed along in silence through the sufferers.

Men and women in about equal numbers, they ranged from pleasantly plump to chubby to gross. Three or four were as bad as the woman in the Vestibule. I wondered if they’d be pleased to know about her.

And once I wiped frozen slush from my eyes, cursing imaginatively under my breath, and when I dropped my hand he was staring at me: a long-haired blond man built like an Olympic athlete.

“Allen Carpentier,” he said sadly. “So they got you too.”

I looked close and recognized him. “Petri? Jan Petri! What are you doing here? You’re no glutton!”

“I’m the least gluttonous man who ever lived,” he said bitterly. “While all of these creeps were swilling down anything that came near their mouths, from pig meat to garden snails—and you too, for that matter, Allen—I was taking care of myself. Natural foods. Organic vegetables. No meat. No chemicals. I didn’t drink. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t—” He caught himself up. “I didn’t hire you as my lawyer. Why am I bending your ear? You’re here too. You were one of the PIGS, weren’t you?”

“Yeah.” He meant the Prestigious International Gourmand Society, whose purpose in life was to go out and eat together. I’d joined because I liked the company. “But I’m not staying. This isn’t my slot.”

He wiped slush from his face to see me better. “So where are you going?”

“Out of this place. Come along?” He’d be unpleasant company till we got him a bath, but I knew he wouldn’t slow us down. There never was a health nut to match Petri. He used to run four miles a day. I figured he’d be a lot of help building the glider.

“How do you get out of Hell?”

So they’d convinced him too. “We go downhill for a while. Then we’ll—”

He was shaking his head. “Don’t go down. I’ve heard about some of the places downhill. Red-hot coffins and devils and you name it.”

“We’re not going very far. We’re going to build a glider and go over the walls.”

“Yeah? And then where?” He seemed to think it was funny. “You’ll just get yourself in more trouble, and for what? You’re better off if you just take what they give you, no matter how unfair it is.”

“Unfair?” Benito asked.

Petri’s head snapped around. “Hell yes, unfair! I’m no glutton!”

Benito shook his head, very sadly. “Gluttony is too much attention to things of the earth, especially in the matter of diet. It is the obsession that matters, not the quantity.”

Petri stared a moment. Wearily he said, “Bug off,” and sank back into the freezing muck. As we left him I could hear him muttering to himself. “At least I’m not
fat
like those animals. I take
care
of myself.”

I was annoyed with Benito. “You didn’t have to insult him. We could use his muscles.
Hey
—”

Benito heard the panic in my voice. “Yes?”

“I was at Petri’s funeral! All that attention to his health and then he got caught in the Watts riots. But they damn sure didn’t freeze him! They cremated him!”

“Freeze him?!”

I didn’t bother to explain. They’d cremated Petri, burned him to ash and gasses. How could he have been revived? How could the Builders of this Infernoland even have found specs for a robot analogue? Or a cell for cloning? Or . . . anything? Cremated is as dead as you can get!

Do the Builders have a time camera? Physical principles unknown, but to re-create Petri they have to be able to photograph the past. So we give them that, and the space-warping fields, and the genetic engineering that created Minos and freed Carpentier from the need to eat or drink or sleep, and the weather control, and the reducing mass of people in the winds, and the engineering technology that built Infernoland itself.

Carpentier, if they’re that powerful, do you really want to fight them?

Of course not. I only want out!

“You’re very thoughtful,” said Benito. “Watch your step.”

I stopped at the brink of a precipice. Then I followed Benito down a wandering, dangerous trail. It switched along the face of the cliff, and in many places it would have been easy to go over the edge. That scared me a lot. After all, I’d done it before . . .

At least we were going down on our feet, and the sleet had stopped.

Things were definitely looking up. Still, there were funny noises from the gloomy area below, sounds my mind registered as construction work.
Crash
. A long pause, in which voices screamed orders too distant to make out.

Crash
.

7

T

he
trail led out into a flat plain of hard baked clay. As we reached the bottom Benito stopped me silently, with an arm held straight out across my chest. I was willing. I had heard the rumble and the shouting coming toward us.

It rolled past us at a good clip: a boulder four or five yards across, nearly spherical, bounding across the cracked adobe, surrounded by a shouting mob. They were urging it along, running alongside and butting the mass with their heads and shoulders, a mob of men and women dressed in the finest rags I’d ever seen. There were the remains of evening gowns and slashed velvet Restoration clothing, academic robes and Gernreich original creations, all torn and filthy.

The leader wore striped trousers and swallowtail coat and a ring that would have choked a hippopotamus. “This time!” he screamed at the top of his voice. “This time we’ll . . . get them!”

“We can pass now,” Benito said calmly.

“What was
that
all about?”

CRACK!

I looked to my left. Two nearly identical masses of pale-blue translucent stone rocked back and forth. Eighty or ninety humans in decaying opulence lay about the rocks as if they’d been flung in handfuls.

A few started to get up. The leader shook his fist and screamed, “Hoarders! Misers! Next time—Come on, men, we need a bigger lead time!” More got up, shaking their heads dazedly, and two groups attacked the two huge stones and began painfully rolling them in opposite directions. The other outfit, the one farthest away, was dressed differently: also in rags, but these had never been much to start with.

“Hoarders and Wasters,” said Benito. “Natural enemies. They will try to crush each other with those rocks for all eternity.”

“Benito, I’d swear those rocks . . .”

“Yes?”

“Skip it. I’m getting so I’ll believe anything.” We started across the plain. A couple of hundred yards ahead of us was a hedgerow of some kind, and sounds filtered through it. The misers were rolling their rock back that way, getting good distance for another run. We followed until they reached the hedges and stopped. Then they turned to, pushing it the other way. A prim-looking bearded man in the remains of a dark suit from the 1890s shouted toward the other mob. “You threw away the good in your lives! Now pay!”

I couldn’t stand it any longer. I grabbed a wild-eyed matron by the shoulder. She struggled to get away. “Let me go! We have to crush those wasteful—”

“Ever manage to do it?”

“No.”

“Think you will this time?”

“We might!”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “What would happen if you stopped rolling the rock and took a break?”

She studied my face for signs of idiocy. “They’d cream us.”

“Suppose you both stopped?”

She pulled away from me and ran to put her shoulder to the boulder. The mob heaved it over a bump. She shouted back to me. “We couldn’t trust
them
. Even if we could . . . we can’t stop. Minos might . . .”

“Might take it away,” I guessed. “I
thought
I knew that color.”

Several of them glanced at me suspiciously. A couple of the men left the rock to advance on me.

“Hey! Hold on! I couldn’t steal it by myself. I don’t
want
to.”

They relaxed. One, a man wearing the remains of a peasant smock, said, “Many of us hae been here for unco time. Yon Queen Artemisia says when first she came, there were still facets upon’t. It must hae been a bonny sight.” He sighed wistfully.

It might hae been, yeah.
Hey, Carpentier, how long would it take to wear all the corners off a twelve-foot diamond?
I turned back toward Benito. He was talking to someone on the ground.

It was a man with both legs crushed. The rock must have rolled over him. He was still in shock, because he wasn’t screaming in pain, but he would be. Blood seeped from the jellied mess that had been his legs.