Inferno Read Free Page B

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