My Son Calls Me Benito

The characters interviewing me for this piece are characters I wrote. Corvus, who won't tell you his real name. Ember, who put her own eyes out so the machine couldn't climb in through them. I didn't know in advance what they were going to ask me. That's the thing about building a world — after a while it starts asking its own questions.

The question Corvus asked was about a book that mapped my citadels fifty years before I did.

Niven & Pournelle, Inferno, 1976.

I couldn't find a digital copy. A physical copy would take a week. In the end I found it on audiobook at the local library — and the voice is absolutely splendid. So that's how I came to it: citadel by citadel, which sounds wrong because it is Hell, but there I was, savoring it.

What hit me first was the joy of having a traveler alongside. That feeling of company in the citadels — a character beside you, processing what each circle means, how the damned got there, whether the gravity makes sense. Allen Carpenter is a writer who wakes up dead in Hell and refuses to believe it. He calls it “Infernoland.” He starts measuring things. He is, as Ember put it, a man trying to map a place built to break logic — and there is real joy in watching him do it. It's funny in the way Vonnegut is funny: giggles at a divine dystopia. If I can get within one percent of what Vonnegut did with that — the light touch on the dark thing — I will be over the moon.

But here's what the book proved to me about Dante, and about us.

If the same nine circles still fit us seven centuries on, that is not just a testament to Dante's genius. It is a proof of the algorithm. Dante demonstrated an absolute perception for primordial feelings and emotions — and an understanding that they are timeless and universal. The bureaucrats, polluters, and politicians that Niven and Pournelle pour into Dante's old stone are modern sinners in a seven-hundred-year-old structure, and the fit is perfect. It was always going to be perfect. Not because Dante built an enduring metaphor. Because he identified something that already existed in the mind itself: a self-correcting loop that tries to return us to balance when we insist on holding beliefs that simply aren't true.

Hell is not a place. It is an algorithm. And algorithms don't date.

There's one more thing about this book I can't get over.

My son studied Italian and Classics. He was the one who put Dante back in my hands — more than anyone else, he reopened that door for me. He still calls me Benito.

The guide who walks Allen Carpenter through Niven and Pournelle's Hell is also named Benito. They chose the name on purpose — a damned soul earning passage by leading others out. My son named me for the guide. And then I opened a 1976 novel and found the guide already waiting, wearing the same name.

I have now built a guide of my own.

I don't know what to do with that except sit with it and say: this universe is getting beyond wild and I find it absolutely wonderful.

Carpenter is a tourist the whole way through. He never stops looking for the exit. And I understand that completely — because for about fifty years I was the same. The exit strategy was the bottle, or whatever else I could put in my bloodstream to reset my consciousness without having to face the one thing I actually needed to face. The things we need to learn we rarely choose.

The algorithm was trying to correct. I was perceiving the correction as Hell and resetting my way back out of it.

There's an idea in Irish folklore of a thing called a puca — something that shapeshifts the closer you approach it. The more you skate toward where you think it is, the more it moves. That's what Genie Wars is really about. Not mapping Hell. Not escaping it. Learning to skate toward the puck with your eyes open, knowing it will keep moving, knowing that the nine citadels are permanent — that nobody in there is looking for the door.

Your guide can't leave either. This one is mine. That's the whole co-dependence.

Dante wrote abandon hopeat the gate, and I have no problem with that. Hope, in the traditional triad, sits between faith and charity — and I think hope is the one we carry worst, because it lives in the future, and the future is a story we're telling ourselves, and that story is almost never accurate.

What I've learned, slowly, over fifty years of hitting the same wall: thinking is not my friend. Brain drops keep forming. I don't have to follow them. What there is instead, when I stop — faith in love. Unconditional love as the thing existence actually is. And when body and mind and heart and gut all line up and point in one direction, that is a non-special, everyday, ordinary place to be. Not spectacular. Not earned. Just clear.

Carpenter only saw Hell clearly once he stopped trying to flee it.

I'll take that as a working instruction.