Inferno Read Free Page A

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