INFERNO.

by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

CHAPTER 1.

I thought about being dead.

I could remember every silly detail of that silly last performance. I was dead at the end of it. But how could I think about being dead if I had died?

I thought about that, too, after I stopped having hysterics. There was plenty of time to think.

Call me Allen Carpentier. It"s the name I wrote under, and someone will remember it. I was one of the best-known science-fiction writers in the world, and I had a lot of fans. My stories weren"t the kind that win awards, but they entertained, and I had written a lot of them. The fans all knew me. Someone ought to remember me.

It was the fans who killed me. At least, they let me do it. It"s an old game. At science-fiction conventions the fans try to get their favorite author washed-out stinking drunk. Then they can go home and tell stories about how Allen Carpentier really tied one on and they were right there to see it. They add to the stories until legends are built around what writers do at conventions. It"s all in fun. They really like me, and I like them.

I think I do. But the fans vote the Hugo awards, and you have to be popular to win. I"d been nominated five times for awards and never won one, and I was out to make friends that year. Instead of hiding in a back booth with other writers I was at a fan party, drinking with a roomful of short ugly kids with pimples, tall serious Harvard types, girls with long stringy hair, half-pretty girls half-dressed to show it, and d.a.m.n few people with good manners.

Remember the drinking party in War and Peace? Where one of the characters bets he can sit on a window ledge and drink a whole bottle of rum without touching the sides? I made the same bet...

The convention hotel was a big one, and the room was eight stories up. I climbed out and sat with my feet dangling against the smooth stone building. The smog had blown away, and Los Angeles was beautiful. Even with the energy shortage there were lights everywhere, moving rivers of lights on the freeways, blue glows from swimming pools near the hotel, a grid of light stretching out as far as I could see. Somewhere out there were fireworks, but I don"t know what they were celebrating.

They handed me the rum. "You"re a real sport, Allen," said a middle-aged adolescent. He had acne and halitosis, but he published one of the biggest science-fiction newsletters around. He wouldn"t have known a literary reference if it bit him on the nose. "Hey, that"s a long way down."

"Right. Beautiful night, isn"t it? Arcturus up there, see it? Star with the largest proper motion. Moved a couple of degrees in the last three thousand years. Almost races along."

Carpentier"s trivial last words: a meaningless lecture to people who not only knew it already, but had read it in my own work. I took the rum and tilted my head back to drink.

It was like drinking flaming battery acid. There was no pleasure in it-- I"d regret this tomorrow. But the fans began to shout behind me, and that made me feel good until I saw why. Asimov had come in. Asimov wrote science articles and histories and straight novels and commentaries on the Bible and Byron and Shakespeare, and he turned out more material in a year than anyone else writes in a lifetime. I used to steal data and ideas from his columns. The fans were shouting for him, while I risked my neck to give them the biggest performance of all the drunken conventions of Allen Carpentier.

With n.o.body watching.

The bottle was half empty when my gag reflex cut in and spilled used rum into my nose and sinuses. I jackknifed forward to cough it out of my lungs and pitched right on over.

I don"t think anyone saw me fall.

It was an accident, a stupid accident caused by stupid drunkenness, and it was all the fans" fault anyway. They had no business letting me do it! And it was an accident, I know it was. I wasn"t feeling that sorry for myself.

The city was still alive with lights. A big Roman candle burst with brilliant pinpoints of yellows and greens against the starry skies. The view was pleasant as I floated down the side of the hotel.

It seemed to take a long time to get to the bottom.

CHAPTER 2

The big surprise was that I could be surprised.

That I could be anything. That I could be.

I was, but I wasn"t. I thought I could see, but there was only a bright uniform metallic color of bronze. Sometimes there were faint sounds, but they didn"t mean anything. And when I looked down, I couldn"t see myself.

When I tried to move, nothing happened. It felt as if I had moved. My muscles sent the right position signals. But nothing happened, nothing at all.

I couldn"t touch anything, not even myself. I couldn"t feel anything, or see anything, or sense anything except my own posture. I knew when I was sitting, or standing, or walking, or running, or doubled up like a contortionist, but I felt nothing at all.

I screamed. I could hear the scream, and I shouted for help. Nothing answered.

Dead. I had to be dead. But dead men don"t think about death. What do dead men think about? Dead men don"t think. I was thinking, but I was dead. That struck me as funny and set off hysterics, and then I"d get myself under control and go round and round with it again.

Dead. This was like nothing any religion had ever taught. Not that I"d ever caught any of the religions going around, but none had warned of this. I certainly wasn"t in Heaven, and it was too lonely to be h.e.l.l.

It"s like this, Carpentier: this is Heaven, but you"re the only one who ever made it. Hah!

I couldn"t be dead. What, then? Frozen? Frozen! That"s it, they"ve made me a corpsicle! The convention was in Los Angeles, where the frozen-dead movement started and where it has the most supporters. They must have frozen me, put me in a double-walled coffin with liquid nitrogen all around me, and when they tried to revive me the revival didn"t work. What am I now? A brain in a bottle, fed by color-coded tubes? Why don"t they try to talk to me?

Why don"t they kill me?

Maybe they still have hopes of waking me. Hope. Maybe there"s hope after all.

It was flattering, at first, to think of teams of specialists working to make me human again. The fans! They"d realized it was their fault, and they"d paid for this! How far in the future would I wake up? What would it be like? Even the definition of human might have changed.

Would they have immortality? Stimulation of psychic power centers in the brain? Empires of thousands of worlds? I"d written about all of these, and my books would still be around! I"d be famous. I"d written about-- I"d written stories about future cultures raiding corpsicles for spare parts, transplants. Had that happened to me? My body broken up for spares? Then why was I still alive?

Because they couldn"t use my brain.

Then let them throw it out!

Maybe they just couldn"t use it yet.

I couldn"t tell how long I was there. There was no sense of time pa.s.sing. I screamed a lot. I ran nowhere forever, to no purpose: I couldn"t ran out of breath, I never reached a wall. I wrote novels, dozens of them, in my head, with no way to write them down. I relived that last convention party a thousand times. I played games with myself. I remembered every detail of my life, with a brutal honesty I"d never had before; what else could I do? All through it, I was terrified of going mad, and then I"d fight the terror, because that could drive me mad-- I think I did not go mad. But it went on, and on, and on, until I was screaming again.

Get me out of here! Please, anyone, someone, get me out of here!

Nothing happened, of course.

Pull the plug and let me die! Make it stop! Get me out of here!

Nothing.

Hey, Carpentier. Remember "The Chill"? Your hero was a corpsicle, and they"d let his temperature drop too low. His nervous system had become a superconductor. n.o.body knew he way alive in there, frozen solid but thinking, screaming in his head, feeling the awful cold-- No! For the love of G.o.d, get me out of here!

I was lying on my left side in a field, with dirt under me and warm light all around me. I was staring at my navel, and I could see it! It was the most beautiful sight I"d ever imagined. I was afraid to move; my navel and I might pop like a soap bubble. It took a long time to get the nerve to lift my head.

I could see my hands and feet and the rest of me. When I moved my fingers I could see them wriggle.

There wasn"t a thing wrong with me. It was as if I had never fallen eight stories to be smashed into jelly.

I was clothed in a loose white gown partly open down the front. Not very surprising, but where was the hospital? Surely they didn"t waken Sleepers in the middle of a field?

They? I couldn"t see anyone else. There was a field of dirt, trampled here and there, sloping downhill to become a shiny mud flat. I raised my head, and he was standing behind me. A fat man, tall but dumpy and chunky enough that at first I didn"t notice his height. His jaw was ma.s.sively square and jutted out, the first thing I noticed about his face. He had wide lips and a high forehead, and short, blunt, powerful fingers. He wore a hospital gown something like mine.

He was beautiful. Everything was beautiful. But my navel? Magnifique!

"You are well?" he asked.

He spoke with an accent: Mediterranean; Spanish, perhaps, or Italian. He was looking closely at me, and he asked again, "You are well?"

"Yes. I think so. Where am I?"

He shrugged. "Always they ask that question first. Where do you think you are?"

I shook my head and grinned for the pleasure of it. It was pleasure to move, to see myself move, to feel my b.u.t.tocks press against the dirt and know something would oppose my movements. It was ecstasy to see myself in the bright light around me. I looked up at the sky.

There wasn"t any sky.

Okay, there has to be a sky. I know that. But I saw nothing. Thick clouds? But there was no detail to the clouds, just a uniform gray above me. Even in my sensation-starved condition it was ugly.

I was in the middle of a field of dirt that stretched a couple of miles to some low brown hills. There were people on the hills, a lot of them, running after something I couldn"t make out. I sat up to scan the horizon.

The hills ran up against a high wall that stretched in both directions as far as I could see. It seemed straight as a mathematician"s line, but I sensed the slightest of inward curves just before it vanished into deep gloom. There, was something wrong with the perspective. but I can"t describe precisely what, just that it didn"t seem right.

The hills and the mud flats formed a wide strip between the wall and a fast-moving river of water black as ink. The river was a mile away and didn"t seem very wide at that distance. I could see it perfectly, another perceptual distortion because it was too far away for the details I could make out.

Beyond the river were green fields and white Mediterranean villas, walled complexes with the squat cla.s.sical look to them, some quite large. They weren"t arranged in any order, and the effect was very pleasing. I turned back to the wall.

Not very high, I thought. High enough to be trouble climbing, perhaps two or three times my six-foot height. I was hampered by the perspective problem. The nearest point of the wall might have been a mile away or ten, though ten seemed ridiculous.

I took a deep breath and didn"t like the smells. Fetid, with an acrid tinge, decay and sickly sweet perfume to cover the smells of death, orange blossoms mingled with hospital smells. All subtle enough that I hadn"t noticed them before, but sickening all the same. I won"t mention the smells often, but they were always there. Most stinks you get used to and soon don"t notice, but this had too much in the blend and the blend changed too often. You"d just get used to one and there"d be another.

Beside me on the ground was a small bronze bottle with a cla.s.sical beaker shape. I figured it would hold maybe a quart. Except for the man standing above me there wasn"t another blessed thing.

"Never mind where I am," I said. "Where have I been? I don"t remember pa.s.sing out. I was screaming, and here I am. Where was I?"

"First you ask where you are. Then where you were. Do you think of nothing else you should say?" He was frowning disapproval, as if he didn"t like me at all. So what the h.e.l.l was he doing here?

Breaking me out of wherever I"d been, of course. "Yeah. Thanks."

"You should thank the One who sent me to you."

"Who was that?"

"You asked Him for help--"

"I don"t remember asking anyone for help." But this time I"d heard him p.r.o.nounce the capital letter. "Yeah. "For the love of G.o.d," I said. Well?"

The fat meaty lips twitched, and his eyes filled with concern. When he looked at me it wasn"t in distaste, but in sympathy. "Very well. You will have a great deal to learn. First, I answer your questions. Where are you? You are dead, and you lie on the ground of the Vestibule to h.e.l.l. Where were you?" He kicked the bronze bottle with a sandaled foot. "In there."

Hot diggity d.a.m.n, I"m in the nut hatch and the head loony"s come to talk to me.

Carpentier wakes up a thousand years after his last flight and sloppy landing, and already he"s in trouble. Spoons and forks and chopsticks, traffic lights, the way a man puts his pants on, all may have to be relearned.

Law and customs change in a thousand years. Society may not even recognize Carpentier as sane.

But wake him in a thirtieth-century loony bin among thirtieth-century twitchies, and now what? How can he adjust to anything?

There were other bottles sitting unattended on the dirt, some larger than mine, some smaller. I don"t know why I hadn"t noticed them before. I picked one up and dropped it quick. It burned my fingers, and there were faint sounds coming from inside it.

It sounded like human speech in a foreign language, a voice screaming curses. That tone couldn"t be anything else. Endless curses screamed-- Why would they put radios in old bronze bottles and scatter them through the loony bin? My hypothesis needed more work.

The people up on the hills were still running. They"d looped back to about where I"d first seen them, and whatever it was they chased, they hadn"t caught it yet. Do they let the nuts run in circles in futuristic loony bins?

Where had I been? Where? There wasn"t any hospital around here, no facilities for keeping all at part of a corpsicle, nothing but this crazy man and a lot of bronze bottles and people running in circles, and-- and insects of some kind. Something whined and did a kamikaze into my ear. Something else stung me on the back of the neck. I slapped frantically, but there wasn"t anything to see.

It felt good even to hurt myself slapping.

My "rescuer" was patiently waiting for me to make some response. It wouldn"t hurt to humor him until I had more information.

"Okay, I"m in the Vestibule of h.e.l.l and I was in a bottle. A djinn bottle. How long?" I told him the date on which I"d fallen from the window.

He shrugged. "You will find that time has not the same meaning here as you are accustomed to. We have all the time we will ever need. Eternity lies before us. I am unable to tell you how long you were in that beaker, but I can a.s.sure you it is not important."

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. G.o.d will not allow you back into the bottle. I cannot a.s.sure you that there will be nothing worse before you leave h.e.l.l. 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 at 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-- Look-- wherever I really spent all that time, effectively I was in a bottle, right? It"s a convenient figure of speech. Anyway, my exercises in the bottle had paid off. 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."