Inferno. Part 9

"Certainly."

Agony surged in my leg. I looked down... and couldn't look away. I watched in helpless fascination.

The blood had stopped pumping. The bone ends gradually vanished as skin crawled out to cover them. It crawled on, closing the wound, leaving my leg in an odd tented shape. Without my willing it the leg straightened slowly.

An old scar I'd once got fis.h.i.+ng slowly reappeared where before there had been b.l.o.o.d.y jagged bone end. The pain turned to a ferocious itch. That went away too.

I was healed.

Corbett had stopped screaming. Now he only moaned softly. I looked, afraid to look, afraid not to. The char was flaking off him in thick patches. The skin beneath was bright sunburn red, not at all like raw meat. His tattoo, like my scar, came up from underneath his skin like a self-developing photograph. He groaned again and opened his eyes.

There were eyes in the sockets. Corbett looked at me and smiled weakly. "Can't die again, I guess. Wished I could for a time there."

"It is a pointless and evil wish," said Benito. "The dead cannot die."

"No." Corbett began an inspection of his body.

I stood up uncertainly. Benito watched, saying nothing. I was able to stand. I could walk. I did. I went off a way, toward the glowing tomb, until the heat was nearly unbearable, and I stared at it.

We'll have to change our theory, won't we, Carpentier? Corbett's no robot. The Builders would have had to put new, sunburned skin under the skin to be charred. They would have had to plan all this ahead of time. They would have to be omniscient.

And what about your leg, Carpentier? What about your leg?

Biological engineering. Rapid regeneration. That, to add to their other powers. They can warp s.p.a.ce and possibly time. They can take the ma.s.s from a human body and leave the weight. They can put Minos' tail into-- where? Hypers.p.a.ce? They've got fine-tuned weather control and infinitely adaptable robots.

And they can engineer your body, Carpentier, your body, in such a way that it heals in minutes, and do it without your knowing they gave you that ability.

Getting a little thin, isn't it, Carpentier? A neat set of rationalizations, but it won't work. How are these Builders different from G.o.d Himself? What can G.o.d do that they can't?

And back at the edge of my mind I couldn't help remembering the last thing I'd screamed in the bottle.

Corbett had got up and was peeling saucer-sized flakes of charred skin from his chest and shoulders. "Hot here," he said.

I nodded and abandoned my reverie. It was hot. Even the tombs that weren't glowing were just below red heat. Here and there flames shot up from open pits. It must have been painful for Corbett with his new skin.

I remembered where we were. Inside the walls of Dis. How were we to get out again? We were surrounded by hot glowing tombs, flames, fire, heat everywhere, except in one direction where darkness showed through the red glow.

"We have to get out of here," I said to Benito. "We'll roast to-- we'll roast." To death? We couldn't die. Can't die twice, Carpentier.

"Of course we must leave," Benito said. "Recall your promise. I helped you with the glider, and it did not work. Now you have no choice. We. go downward."

"Which way?" For that moment I didn't care.

"I am not sure. We may as well go where it is more comfortable." He led us off toward the dark. It drew us onward, promising relief from the heat and the choking air. We threaded our way between heated tombs and great vatlike pits with fire dancing from them. Huge lids that would just cover them lay beside each one.

The edge of the hot region was the beginning of a white marble maze. The heat stopped as if we'd gone through an insulated doorway, but there was no door. I wasn't even surprised. It would take more than invisible heat barriers to surprise me now.

Corbett staggered into a corridor and sank down with a happy sigh, his back against cool marble. He wriggled to get his head clear of the bra.s.s fixtures.

We were in an endlessly sprawling building. The corridors were about fifteen feet wide and nearly that high. Every wall was covered with square-cut marble slabs and rows of bra.s.s plates and slender bra.s.s... what? Vases? I read some of the plates. Name, birth date, date of death. Sometimes an insipid poem. These were burial vaults, and those bra.s.s things were vases, and of course there were no flowers in them. The corridor stretched on endlessly, and there seemed to be branches at frequent intervals. Millions of tombs...

"More unbelievers," I said.

"Yes," Benito answered.

"But I was an unbeliever. An agnostic."

"Of course."

"Why of course?"

"I found you in the Vestibule," said Benito. "But now you know the truth."

A two-syllable response stuck in my throat. The truth was an elusive thing, here in Infernoland. I could talk about advanced technologies until h.e.l.l froze over, and Benito would still call them miracles.

I'd watched a miracle. A compound fracture had healed before my eyes. And I was no robot!

But this place had to be artificial. It was a construct, a design. I knew that.

All right, Carpentier. An artifact implies an artificer. There has to be a designer. Pick a Chief Engineer for the Builders, and call him... what? Good fannish names, like Ghod, Ghu, Roscoe, the Ceiling? No. Call him Big Juju.

Question, Carpentier. In what way do Big Juju's abilities differ from G.o.d Almighty's?

Size? This place is the size of a small planet. Carpentier, you've no way of knowing Big Juju can't build even bigger. Worlds, stars, whole universes.

Natural laws? He suspends them at will. A world-sized funnel, as stable as a sphere would be in normal s.p.a.ce. And-- and he can raise the dead. Me! Corbett, who couldn't possibly have been frozen. Jan Petri the health-food addict, cremated, Carpentier, burned to a pile of greasy ashes and a few chunks of bone, and now risen so that he can be tortured.

Big Juju can create. He can destroy. He can raise the dead and heal the sick. Was more ever claimed for Christ?

I looked back at the red-hot tombs. They still glowed with heat, but none of that reached us in these cool marble halls. "There are people in those tombs?"

Benito nodded. "Heretics."

The word was frightening. Heretics. They believed in the wrong G.o.ds, or wors.h.i.+ped the right G.o.d in the wrong way. For that they were raised from the dead so they could be tortured in botboxes.

Iago says it. "Credo in un Dio crudel." I believe in a cruel G.o.d. And that you must believe, Carpentier. The ability to make a universe does not presuppose moral superiority. We have seen no strong evidence that Big Juju's moral judgments are better than our own. Would G.o.d torture people?

I half-remembered Sunday school lessons. No. But also, yes. It was one reason I was an agnostic. How could I wors.h.i.+p a G.o.d who kept a private dungeon called h.e.l.l? That might be all right for Dante Alighieri, a Renaissance Italian! But Carpentier has higher standards than that!

A voice floated from within my mind, a tired voice whispering out of a mound of fat. We're in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.

We were in the private museum park of Big Juju. "We've got to get out of here."

"Too right," said Corbett. He paused. "Music?"

I listened. There was music playing from somewhere within these marble corridors. Something chintzy-sweet, a minor work by a major composer, played for every melodramatic sweet note in it. Artificial good cheer in h.e.l.l. "It fits," I said. "Granted we're d.a.m.ned, how do we get out? Which way?"

Benito looked around him. "I have never been in this part before."

"Not back out there," Corbett insisted. "Not unless we have to."

"Right. We've got time," I said. And I started laughing.

It was an awful sound. It bounced around in the maze and came back at me from all directions, trans.m.u.ted to racking sobs. I tried to stop. Corbett and Benito were staring. I tried to tell them: "I was right. Just once, I was right. All that time in the bottle, all that guessing, and I was right just once. Immortality! When they woke me up they had immortality." Dammit, I was crying.

Corbett took my Arm. "Come on, then."

We went inward.

CHAPTER 14

The corridors branched away, endless cross-corridors in an endless corridor, and every one of them the same, wall after wall of marble-sealed caskets, each with its empty bronze vases for flowers. Our footsteps echoed hollowly. Our sandals hadn't been touched by the flames. The sprightly music continued, never getting louder, and the light never changed, neither gloomy nor bright. On and on, corridor after corridor. Finally we halted.

"We haven't turned," I said.

Corbett nodded. "Do a one-eighty and we can get out of here. Let's."

Half-facetiously I rapped on a bronze nameplate and read off the name and dates. A translucent human shape formed before me. I stared in horror, then shrugged. What was a ghost among ghosts?

"Pardon me," I said. "Can you direct us toward the wall of Dis?"

The ghost's voice was faint and reedy. "Wall? Dis?" Faint laughter. "They must have added more extensions to the Mausoleum. I don't remember anything like that in Forest Lawn."

"Very funny. This isn't Forest Lawn."

The ghost seemed vexed. "I was supposed to be buried in Forest Lawn. I paid for it before I died. It was in my will. Where am I?"

"Would you believe h.e.l.l?"

More faint laughter, as if from a great distance. "Certainly not. I don't even believe in ghosts." And then there was nothing but the wall.

I jumped when Corbett spoke behind me. "It's a risk, but are you game to try a cross-corridor? I think if we turn left and keep going straight we'll be headed up again."

The scenery changed. Now there were niches with urns in them, much closer together. We came to a T intersection and turned and returned to the right direction when we could. Then another T and a Y and a big round empty s.p.a.ce with corridors off in all directions, and a big monument in the very center...

... and we were in the good section of town. The sarcophagi were no longer buried in the walls. At the ends of short alcoves were huge marble oblongs, ornately carved, guarded by traditional statuary. Knights and vague s.e.xless winged beings that were supposed to be angels and might have been f.a.ggots; reproductions of famous religious statuary; original creations, all done with enormous competence, all in monstrous bad taste. Sculpted Bibles open to John 3:16. Replicas of European cathedrals, done in perfect scale, bronze toys.

One alcove was blocked off by a bra.s.s gate and enormous lock. All the nameplates were of the same family, all ornately carved with relief pictures and bronze replicas of their life's signatures. We looked in, grinned at each other, and went on.

Pride. Unbelievably ornate monuments purchased at unbelievable price: expensive tombs turned prisons. I wondered if they matched monuments left behind on Earth. Sure, I decided. Big Juju has a sense of fitness.

Fitness?

In this one case, yes, fitness.

The corridors twisted again and again. The dead were high walls on all sides of us. Our footsteps were dull intrusions on music for the proud dead. The dead walked among the dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead! Word and reality echoed with each step. Word and reality hammered at my soul. Dead. Dead. Dead. Presently I sat down against coot marble.

"Allen? What is the trouble?" Benito's anxious voice was far away.

"Come on, let's get moving. This place gives me the creeps." Corbett shoved at me with his toe. "C'mon."

I tried to speak. It wasn't worth the effort, but finally I heard my own voice saying, "We're dead. Dead. It's all over. We tried to make lives for ourselves, and we didn't make it, and we're dead. Oh, Corbett, I wish I'd died like you."

The gay sweet music mocked me. Dead. Dead. Dead.

Green light blinked on and off in the corner of my eye. It was annoying, a disturbance, an irritant in the thick cotton closing about me. I could see the source without turning my head, but it was an effort to move my eyes. Why bother? But the light winked on and off, and eventually I looked at the source, a neon sign blinking far down at the dead end of a corridor of the dead. It echoed my thought: SO IT GOES SO IT GOES SO IT GOES.

--off and on, endlessly, in green neon.

Unreachably far away, on another world, in another time, Allen Carpentier had been buried like a potato in a closed coffin ceremony. The fans had come to the funeral, some of them, and a few writers had come, and afterward they'd gone off to have a drink and talk about new writers. Carpentier was dead, and that was all there was to it. I could speculate forever about Big Juju's moral superiority, I could wander forever through h.e.l.l, and so what?

SO IT GOES.

SO IT GOES.

Corbett's voice came dimly. "We may have to leave him. I saw this happen to a guy, once, in the war. He's going autistic."

"I have seen it also. Many times. Would you leave him here?"

I thought Benito was shaking my shoulder.

SO IT GOES.

SO IT GOES.

SO IT GOES.

--what was the blinking neon sign doing in this place?

A horrible suspicion filtered through the blankets around my brain. I pushed Benito away and surged to my feet. I walked, wobbling, toward the blinking light. So it goes?

At the end of the corridor was a tremendous square-cut edifice in black marble. The epitaph beneath the neon sign was long and wordy, couched in words of one syllable and short, simple sentences. A man's life history, a list of books and awards-- Corbett and Benito stared when I came back. Corbett said, "You look like you're ready to kill somebody."

I jerked my thumb behind me. At first I couldn't speak, I was that angry. "Him. Why him? A science-fiction writer who lied about being a science-fiction writer because he got more money that way. He wrote whole novels in baby talk, with sixth-grade drawings in them, and third-grade science, and he knew better. How does he rate a monument that size?"

Benito's smile was lopsided. "You envy him that tomb?"

"If you must know, I was writing better than he ever did before I left high school!"

"Being dead hasn't hurt your ego," said Corbett. "Good. We thought we'd lost you."

"He's got vases bigger than the bottle they put me in!"