Inferno. Part 3

Tail!

"What is that?" I demanded.

"Minos. Judge of the Dead," said Benito.

The Builders had mixed some Egyptian or Cretan mythology with their Christianity. That, or they'd had to warp their landscape to fit a genuine alien. I could believe a cropping beast becoming an intelligent biped, given time and impetus and perhaps an a.s.sist from biological engineers. I'd written stories about that kind of thing.

Could Minos be one of the Builders?

People went up to present themselves to the monster. I couldn't hear what the girl in the yellow dress was telling it, but it grinned and nodded. Abruptly its tail looped out and wrapped around and around the girl. It lifted her.

The tail stretched like the limbs of Plastic Man in the old comic book! The girl shot between two pillars and dwindled, dwindled, dwindled to a speck. Minos's tail must have been tens of miles long at that point-- it came snaking back through the air, while the speck that was the girl sank like a single snowflake.

My willing suspension of disbelief went all to h.e.l.l. I started to giggle hysterically.

n.o.body noticed. n.o.body but Benito, who watched curiously as I gathered the shreds of my self-control, took him by the arm, pointed at "Minos," and said, "He can't do that!"

He was doing it again! The tail stretched out between the pillars like an infinite length of snake, dropped a man in a postman's uniform into the murky air, and came coiling back.

But there wasn't room! Even ignoring the moment arm-- that much weight at the end of that much length should have toppled him, and how could such a length of tail, flexible tail, be strong enough to stay almost straight? But ignore that, and tell me where there was room for tens of miles of tail coiled inside his body?

His feet weren't anch.o.r.ed; I watched until I saw them both move. The tail wasn't stored in the floor, then.

"Are you all right?" Benito asked.

My vision was graying out; my whole body had a buzzing foot's-asleep feeling. I said, "I'm going to faint."

"You can't faint here. Hold fast." His hand gripped my shoulder.

A dark-haired woman, quite pretty, was encoiled in the tail until she nearly vanished, lifted, and sent spinning off down the bowl. A man in a cabbie's uniform was next. Three loops of tail and out he went into s.p.a.ce. And another, and another-- There were thousands here. We'd starve before we reached our turn.

But I didn't feel hungry, and hadn't felt hungry since I left the bottle, and that was hours ago. Also, something was wrong with time. "Minos" was in no hurry. Quite the opposite. He took plenty of time to deal with each case, and there were plenty of cases; yet the crowd thinned out much faster than it should have.

Where were they going? I never saw anyone leave the room, but there had to be other audience chambers, people slipping off into side pa.s.sages. There must have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of copies of "Minos."

Ridiculous mummery. But the tail, Carpentier! Hidden in hypers.p.a.ce, or snaking out of an alternate time track? If the Builders have that kind of technology, how long were you dead? Ten thousand years? A million?

It was our turn. We approached together. Not many had come up in pairs.

"Sodomites, huh?" Minos said. "Seventh Circle, Third Level. Or have you got something worse to confess?"

I said, "I refuse to answer on grounds that my--"

He looked a lot like an angry bull when he frowned, and nothing at all like a machine. He turned to Benito. "You've been here before. Why have you left your proper place?"

"Is that your affair? You see I roam freely through h.e.l.l."

"Yes. How?"

"It has been willed that I may do so. You have no right to interfere."

Minos waved at me. "And this one?"

"He has come from the Vestibule," Benito said. "You will note that he comes of his own accord. You may not judge him."

"Lawyers." Minos laughed. "I have problems with lawyers. There are so many places appropriate to that breed. Where are you two going, then?"

"Down."

"Back to the First Circle."

We'd spoken simultaneously. Minos laughed. "Back you will not go. Are you sure you don't want me to judge you, Allen Carpenter? My judgment is just and fair. You could choose worse for yourself than justice."

"Cease!" Benito commanded. I jumped. He was a changed man. Power seemed to gather around him as he struck a pose, ma.s.sive chin jutting out in defiance, his face both calm and stern. Once upon a time he had been used to obedience.

"I am permitted to judge..." Suddenly Minos sounded petulant.

"You have already judged me. What other power have you? And this man is not under your jurisdiction. Leave us alone to go in peace."

"Not back up."

"No. Down."

Minos laughed. He waved toward the steps leading down into the bowl from his throne. "Depart. Thou art sent!" He was still laughing as we started down those steps, the mocking laughter in our ears until we lost sight of the palace.

CHAPTER 6.

We were all right as long as the steps continued. Unfortunately they soon trailed away into a broken slope that still dropped at forty-five degrees or so. At the same time a wind began to rise. Benito and I turned to face the slope and backed down on toes and knees and hands.

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 h.e.l.l 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 p.r.o.nunciation.

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 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 wind had them. Here it 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 PAOOKAKansans 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 l.u.s.t. 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. "Well fly out of herel"

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 gla.s.s 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?"

"d.a.m.n 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.

The weather changed as we lost alt.i.tude. 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 alt.i.tude 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 alt.i.tude 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 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 s.h.i.+vers 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 pa.s.s, showing us uniform looks of weary despair, then sank back after we were gone.

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 like the company. "But I'm not staying. This isn't my spot."

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 ten miles a day. I figured hed be a lot of help building the glider.

"How do you get out of h.e.l.l?"

So they'd convinced him too. "We go downhill for a while. Then... well..."

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. "h.e.l.l 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 quant.i.ty."

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 be got caught in the Watts riots. But they d.a.m.n sure didn't freeze him! They cremated hini!"