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in.
    “Why does he say he will see you again?” Rosemary Bennett asked.
    She was still with me, the only follower I had left. Where were the others? They must have disappeared while I was dazed by Charon’s blow. Driven to see Minos?
    I shrugged. Decided I could stand. “He’s seen me before. And Benito several times. I wonder how many more?”
    “More?”
    “How many of us are wandering loose? There’s me and Benito, and the exploding man —”
    “Where are we?” Rosemary indicated the walls.
    “First Circle. Virtuous Pagans. You never read Dante?”
    “No. Italian, wasn’t he? Some friend of Mussolini’s? Virtuous Pagans sounds nice. I was a pagan. Well, if being an agnostic Universalist is pagan, and I guess it is. I think I’d belong there, is there a way in?”
    “I was agnostic. I thought I’d fit in there, too, but they threw me out.”
    “Why?”
    “They didn’t want me. Maybe I wasn’t virtuous enough.”
    “Oh. Maybe I wasn’t, either.”
    Wherever Charon had dropped us didn’t look anything like what I’d seen the last time I was in this circle. The pavement beneath our feet looked like macadam. The walls were smoother and higher. They rose up on either side of us, higher on my left, and a different color of stone. The construction was different, too. The wall on the right showed each course of stone, every ashlar defined. The left one had been plastered over, all one smooth surface.
    One thing was the same. There were no smells. There was no smell to the air at all, neither pleasant nor stenches. It was just air.
    I walked between the high walls, hoping to find a gate. They didn’t like intruders in there, and my wasp stings had me in a nasty mood. But the stings were healing, and there wasn’t any gate. Benito and I had climbed, that first time. Benito had been incredibly strong. I thought it was because he’d been strong in life, but no one is that strong.
    I didn’t see any handholds at all. If I were going to climb, the left wall was far too smooth. The right didn’t look much better, but at least there were some grooves between the courses.
    “It’s nice here,” Rosemary said. “Thank you. I should have taken the ferryboat a long time ago.”
    “Why didn’t you?”
    “Scared. When you hear stories of what they do to you farther in, the wasps don’t seem so bad. ‘All hope abandon.’ We’re dead, how could there be hope?”
    “Ever think of prayer?” I asked.
    “Sure. Well, not me so much. Some did, but I wasn’t sure who I should pray to. Did you pray?”
    “Not really — well, yes, once.”
    “Did it work?”
    “I didn’t think so at the time, but that’s when Benito came and got me out of the bottle.”
    “Maybe we should try it,” Rosemary said.
    “I wouldn’t know who to pray to, either. And I guess I wouldn’t mean it.”
    She giggled.
    “What?”
    “Bertrand Russell’s prayer. ‘O God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.’ ”
    “As I said. I guess I wouldn’t mean it.”
    We’d come to an intersection of sorts. The left–hand wall went on, but the right–hand wall turned a corner, making a T intersection. We turned right just in time to avoid a crowd rushing down the main path.
    “Why are they in such a hurry?” Rosemary asked.
    “Dante says they want judgment. Driven by guilt.”
    “I don’t feel all that guilty,” Rosemary said.
    “Me, either, but we both started in the Vestibule.” And maybe I did, a little. I’d seen what others got for doing things not a lot worse than I had.
    The path ahead was rough. It looked like an old streambed, muddy, clogged with debris and random boulders. You had to really want to go that way.
    “Is that a bridge?” Rosemary pointed way ahead, down the path to the right.
    “Your eyes are better than mine.” I led her down that way. It was difficult. We could go over the rocks, or we could hop from rock to rock. Neither way was much fun. I lost my footing and took a header into a