Somehow the memory was very dim now, of a time on Earth when a London girl had propositioned me, taken my money, and vanished from a bathroom with an unsuspected second door, leaving me in rage and frustrated l.u.s.t. If I"d caught her I"d have killed her.

But that was long ago, and nothing looked bad next to where I was now.

So I lied. "They"d be downslope from here. I haven"t been there yet."

Satisfied, she sank back and forgot me in the examination of her ruined body.

The mad psychiatrist noticed me again. "We were just playing," he said dreamily. "Tinkering with something we didn"t understand. I knew. Oh, I knew. Let me tell you--"

"Don"t tell me." They kept hurting at me, all of them!

"He was a catatonic. He was like a rubber doll. You could put him in any position, and he"d stay there for hours. We tried all sorts of things in those days. Shock therapy, insulin shock, lobotomy. Punish the patient for not noticing the outside world."

"Or for not noticing you."

I meant it to hurt, but he nodded happily. "So we put him in a hotbox and started raising the temperature. We watched him through a window. First he just sweated. Then he started to move around. At a hundred and thirty he said his first words in sixteen years. "Get me the f.u.c.k out of here!""

The mad eyes found me, and his face seemed to cave in. The cherubic smile vanished. Urgently he said, "Get me the f.u.c.k out of here!"

"I can"t. I"ll be lucky to get out myself." I tried moving again. There was pain, but not enough to keep me in that place. I stood gingerly and started up the slope.

The girl cried, "You can"t do that! Come back here! Come back!"

I kept going. There were rocks to pull myself up, cracks to use as footholds. I"d climbed just far enough when another hydrophobia case raged past, biting and chewing on everyone he pa.s.sed! A rock rolled from beneath my foot, and pain grated in my spine as I caught myself.

The rabid man screamed at the psychiatrist, but the cherubic look had returned and he was smiling dreamily at the opposite wall. When I reached the top I remembered who had been in the last pit of the Eighth Circle. Frauds. Falsifiers. False witnesses.

CHAPTER 23

That was the last of the bolgias. Now the way led across an empty, rocky land. I turned and looked at the ten canyons rising upward behind me, light flickering from some, others marked by rising smoke or roiling heated air. It had not been a pleasant journey.

Far ahead, through a twilit gloom that would just have had drivers turning on their headlights, I saw what seemed a cl.u.s.ter of great towers. There was nothmg else to see, nothing at all.

Benito"s evil counsel had brought me this far. Now it was too late. I could get back a little way, probably to the fifth pit, possibly as far as the cliff. But I"d never talk Geryon into taking me up that cliff... and there were just too many places where Allen Carpentier might belong.

Could I talk the monster into summoning Minos? That could get me all the way back to the Vestibule. Yeah, and into the bottle again. If I were lucky. I hadn"t forgotten that burrowing this far into h.e.l.l might be a crime in itself. Minos had told me that I could choose far worse for myself than "justice." Maybe I"d already made the choice.

Or... I could just sit down. In this empty borderland I could spend a good piece of eternity before some angel noticed me.

I sat down.

It was very peaceful.

It was, in fact, the only completely empty spot I"d seen in h.e.l.l. Why? Maybe it was reserved for some brand new sin, something that hadn"t been invented yet... say, a development of brain research or genetics. At some time in the indefinite future I might have to vacate fast.

Meanwhile, it was better than the bottle. I could see my navel.

Time pa.s.sed without leaving footprints. Days, I think. The stinks of h.e.l.l were still in my nostrils. The ever-present background noise might have been soothing if I hadn"t known what it was: millions of moans and cries blended by distance. But n.o.body was hurting me or hurting at me.I didn"t have to watch people getting sliced up, or burned, or riddled by diseases, or smashed by demon cars, or distorted into obscene shapes.

I sat and dreamed of the past. I wondered idly about the looming towers I could see in the dark distance. I wondered at Benito"s ultimate purpose in luring me here. But none of it seemed to matter. I thought that even curiosity had been burned out of me.

That would have been nice. I would have liked to turn my mind off for a long time. But it wouldn"t turn off. Whatever quiet I"d found here, there was still h.e.l.l around me, and I hurt with the need to know why.

G.o.d had created human souls; could He not uncreate the failures? G.o.d had created sleep; could He not put the failures to sleep, forever? There were no good excuses for h.e.l.l. I thought of some unsettling bad ones: The universe would fly off its axis if h.e.l.l"s agony did not balance Heaven"s bliss.

Or: Part of Heaven"s bliss was the knowledge that lots of nasty people were suffering terribly.

Or the old standby: We were in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.

I got restless. The towers kept catching at my eye: blurred gray shadows on the horizon. Skysc.r.a.pers? A city in h.e.l.l? Quarters to house the maintenance crew for Infernoland? Or were they the true entrance, the tourist entrance?

But I was only playing with plots. I didn"t believe in Infernoland anymore. This was h.e.l.l, and I knew it. I finally realized what was really bothering me.

To all intents and purposes I was back in the bottle.

I got up. I walked toward the towers. No harm in looking.

They weren"t towers.

They were giants, enormous humanoids, buried in the earth from the navel down. I stopped well out of their reach to study them. Their enormous eyes found me and pinned me to the landscape like a b.u.t.terfly on a board, then shifted away. I was not worth their attention.

I was glad. Unreasonably I felt that those tremendous deep eyes could see everything there was to know about me.

One was mad. He looked down at me hopefully and said, "Ilfurb fistenant imb?" His face fell when I did not respond. Alien language, alien being. What were these aliens doing in human h.e.l.l?

Not serving Big Juju. Not hardly. Miles of chain bound their arms to their sides.

There were giants in the Bible and t.i.tans in mythology. But no archaeologist had ever found human bones this size. And how could they survive Earth"s gravity? The square-cube law should have flattened them into mountains of hamburger.

Maybe they weren"t from this universe at all. An attacking army from another universe made by another creator? The science-fiction writer in me, the late Allen Carpentier, wanted very much to see their legs and feet. They must be disproportionately large and st.u.r.dy to support their weight... unless they had developed in a lighter gravity field...

While Carpentier the trapped d.a.m.ned soul was examining the chains that wrapped another of the giants.

For the giants were buried just outside a chin-high wall: their chins, not mine. The wall looked too smooth to climb. I walked up to the chained giant, ready to jump, but it wasn"t necessary. The chain looked like anchor cable. Whoever had wrapped it round him had a fine eye for detail. He"d have been lucky to shrug his eyebrows.

Now, what would Benito have done here? Climbed the giant, of course.

The thought of climbing such a monster gave me pause. Yet I was sure I could do it. Up the chain, stepping in the links, as far as his shoulder; beware of snapping teeth. Then onto the wall and down.

If Benito had told the truth... if what I remembered of Dante was true... I would then be in the last Circle of h.e.l.l, the Circle of Traitors. Traitors to nation, to overlord, to benefactor, to parents and siblings. A great ice plain, and the traitors embedded in it. There would be nothing but the cold to stop me from crossing it, and I knew I couldn"t freeze to death.

It looked so easy. What had Benito left out?

I remembered the great ice plain well enough. The college boy had been jolted at finding part of h.e.l.l already frozen over. Benito hadn"t said anything that jarred with my own memories of Dante.

But there had to be a joker in the deck somewhere. Benito had been a power in h.e.l.l. He"d given orders to others of h.e.l.l"s minions. He"d demonstrated demonic strength against a tank of a man in the great swamp.

Carpender, why didn"t he do that to you?

Maybe it was guilt that stopped him. He"d writhed and torn at the ground, but he hadn"t actually hit me, not once. He"d uprooted jagged rocks while trying to use them as anchors, but he hadn"t tried to hit me with them. And for all his presumed safe-conduct, he was back where Minos had sentenced him, with the Evil Counselors.

Maybe Satan or G.o.d or Big Juju had rendered some kind of judgment against Benito. With me as the agent.

But why hadn"t Benito fought?

The giant tried to shake himself. The chains barely rustled.

No danger there.

You writhe and you struggle, but there"s no way around it. Me too, giant. From every possible direction it looked the same. It was going to be unreasonably easy for Allen Carpentier to enter the Circle of Traitors... the place of punishment for those who had betrayed their benefactors.

I thought it over for a long time. Then I turned and started back.

CHAPTER 24

Going back was harder. The dip at the lower end of the tenth bridge was steeper, and now I was climbing it. I crossed the pit without looking down and climbed backward down the high end of the bridge.

I saw the next bridge close by, and made for it.

A sword"s point flicked up before my eyes. I stopped. Surely he"d been under a different bridge? I"d skewed my path deliberately. But a half-human, half-b.e.s.t.i.a.l head beyond the sword"s point shook itself negatively.

"You can"t go back, Carpenter."

"I have to."

The blade hung before me, rock-steady. I could have chinned myself on it. I half-stepped forward and the blade moved too fast to follow. Now it p.r.i.c.ked the tip of my nose.

I shrugged and turned back.

I took no chances. I crossed the inner pit again and circled through the wasteland beyond. Two bridges away, I crossed again-- on my belly. I slid down the high end of the bridge and kept crawling along the ridge above the ninth pit. He couldn"t be under all the bridges.

Couldn"t he just. Like the d.a.m.ned clerk. He was waiting when I tried to stand up. At this, the low side of the pit, he had the angle on me. "You can"t go uphill," he said. "I really don"t know how to make it plainer."

"I"m from the Vestibule," I said. "I don"t belong here."

"You never created your own church, Carpenter?"

Oh, dammit! "Listen, those weren"t in compet.i.tion with G.o.d or anybody! All I did was make up some religions for aliens. If that was enough you"d have every science-fiction writer who ever lived!"

"We"ve got him," said the demon, and he pointed with the sword.

I forgot the sword entirely. I leaned far out over the edge of the pit to see. "What in h.e.l.l-- to coin a phrase-- is that?"

It was, in a sense, the last word in centaurs. At one end was most of what I took for a trilobite. The head of the trilobite was a gristly primitive fish. Its head was the torso of a bony fish... and so on up the line, lungfish, proto-rat, bigger rat, a large smooth-skinned beast I didn"t recognize, a thing like a gorilla, a thing like a man, finally a true man. None of the beasts had full hindquarters except the trilobite; none had a head except the man. The whole thing crawled along on flopping fish-torsos and forelegs and hands, a tremendous unmatched centipede. The human face seemed quite mad.

"He founded a religion that masks as a form of lay psychiatry. Members try to recall previous lives in their presumed animal ancestry. They also recall their own past lives... and that adds an interesting blackmail angle, because those who hear confession are often more dedicated than honorable. Excuse me."

For the line of victims had bunched up while we talked. The demon turned and sliced at them rapidly, to a tune of scream and curses. The centaur creature he sliced into its separate components, and it went past him in a parade, on arms and forelegs and wriggling fishy fins. The sword flicked up again just as I"d decided to make a break for it.

A bead of blood formed at the tip of my nose. "I"m not like him," I said quickly. "He played the game for real. With me it was just a game." I backed away until the tenth bolgia was an emptiness beneath my heels. He couldn"t reach me now. "Take the Silpies. They were humanoid but telepaths. They believed they had one collective soul, and they could prove it! And the Sloots were slugs with tool-using tentacles developed from their tongues. To them, G.o.d was a Sloot with no tongue. He didn"t need a tongue; He didn"t eat, and He could create at will, by the power of His mind." I saw him nodding and was encouraged. "None of this was more than playing with ideas."

The demon was still nodding. "Games played with the concept of religion. Enough such games and all religions might look equally silly."

"You can"t do this!" I shouted. "Listen, there"s a friend of mine in the Eighth Bolgia, and it"s my fault he"s there, and I"ve got to get him out!"

"Did anyone promise you it would be easy? Or even possible?"

"Whatever it takes," I said, and thought I meant it.

"Step closer."

I walked to the edge. Carpentier shows his good faith.

The sword flashed twice. I heard and felt the tip grate along my ribs. It left two vertical slashes along my chest and belly. I reeled back with my arms wrapped around myself to bold my guts in.

The demon was watching me steadily. What could he be waiting for?

I knew. I stepped forward and dropped my arms. Carpentier shows his inability to learn.

The sword flashed twice more, leaving two deep horizontal slashes, perhaps mortally deep. A living man would have fainted from shock. I couldn"t.

"Games," said the big evil humanoid. "Your move."

I studied the slashes and the flowing blood. Shock did seem to be slowing down my thought processes, but presently I saw what he meant. I said, "What do I use for a pencil?"

"You"ll think of something."

I studied my fingernails. I thought of something.

I gouged a ragged X in the top left square of the diagram. The sword flashed to place an 0 in an adjacent corner.

I climbed the first slope of the bridge on fingers and toes. When I could walk I held my arms wrapped around myself, holding me in. The pride of my victory seemed excessive tor a stupid game of tick-tack-toe.