The Barsoom Project dp-2

by Larry Niven

  One of the riflemen barked out a challenge. Eviane didn’t recognize the language, but the meaning was obvious. She had heard it a thousand times in flatfilms and holos and even radio plays: “Come out with your hands up!” What had they tripped into? Was this the equivalent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police? Were the people in the house desperate criminals? Eviane couldn’t remember. She’d tried to forget, she’d fought to forget, and now, when it mattered, it was all gone.

  Someone emerged from the smoky hell of the front door. His hands were high in the air, and he yelled something back to the attackers.

  There was a guttural laugh, and a rifle barked. The man fell, palms slapping to his forehead.

  Eviane closed her eyes. Her empty stomach curled into a knot. Charlene’s whispered laughter rang in her ear: “You’re overacting. It’s embarrassing. What are we supposed to do?”

  She had no answer. Dreamboat’s voice saved her. “Well, we know that they’re not the good guys.”

  “We don’t have any weapons,” Hippogryph said. “We could get into a lot of trouble.”

  “We have flares,” the Guardsman called. “Two boxes of them, and my rifle. Listen, with three flare guns we can convince them that they’re surrounded. Goners. I say we give it a shot.”

  Hebert objected. “Flare guns? All right, they aren’t that well armed-”

  Impatiently Eviane snapped, “Lead on!”

  After a few whispered instructions, the group spread out. Eviane was all elbows and knees as she crawled along the ridge, the curving sickle of snow that sheltered them from the war below. Just ahead of her, Dreamboat raised his flare pistol. Bowles slashed his hand in the air, and With a chorus of dull phuts, white streamers cut through the air. Suddenly a half-dozen smoking, parachuting flares were drifting from the sky like burning blossoms.

  The men on the ground looked up.

  “Ooooobleobleoble-” Charlene screamed out, her cry swiftly echoed by everyone else in the group. Eviane joined them delightedly-who could resist an opportunity to scream baby talk with a bunch of supposedly grown adult-type people? It was ridiculous, and silly, and somehow cleansing.

  The men in the valley looked around in confusion, but the sound was coming from everywhere and nowhere. The Guardsman aimed his rifle carefully, and squeezed the trigger. One of the enemy went down clutching his chest. The remaining three sprang to their feet, and spread their arms. For a moment Eviane thought that they were asking for mercy.

  Then the clouds parted.

  No, they hadn’t parted. The sky was slate-gray, threatening snow, but a northward wedge of cloud was brighter, widening, and Sky and land were flowing. Off to the north, the vast dim expanse of snow flowed to left and right, as if a folded blanket was being pulled straight. It was hard to see, because what was summoned into being was only new snowscape, no different from the old except that it glowed beneath a brighter sky.

  The four gunmen hastened north, two carrying their wounded member. They didn’t look back, not even when the Guardsman stopped gaping and fired after them. He fired three careful shots. Snow puffed wide of the gunmen.

  “Damn,” the Guardsman said.

  A distant ridge of snow humped ahead of them. The four stopped, and one gestured wide-armed, his face lifting as the white mass lifted

  … and then the snowscape flowed, the path closed, the light dimmed. Eviane huffed as her legs gave out and dropped her in the snow.

  They were gone. There remained only a bare field of snow, and four corpses to mark the place where, a moment before, a dreadful battle had raged.

  Chapter Seven

  THE QASGIQ

  Eviane stumbled down the bank of snow, caught her balance for an exhilarating moment, then tumbled again. She wiped ice from her hair and snorted it from her nose as she came back to her feet.

  The other refugees plowed furrows in the snow as they plunged down. Some rolled like pill bugs, whooping. Max and the National Guardsman. both kept their balance all the way down. At the last instant Max lost his battle with momentum and plowed face-first to the bottom.

  Charlene walked down fully upright, slowly, like an aged elvish queen, with Hippogryph alongside her as a dwarfish attendant.

  Eviane’s amusement vanished almost as quickly as it bubbled up. What was happening here? They had left the violence of the cities behind… and now this!

  Something deep within her was untouched by the cold and the fear. Some voice whispered that it was all a dream, only a recurrent nightmare. Eviane shook her head violently. Such thoughts were dangerous.

  She approached the burning lodge, cautiously avoiding the bodies of the dead.

  Eviane had seen corpses before. A few more meant little. One of the dead men was heartbreakingly young. His eyes stared sightless, freezing in the terrible cold. His arms were outstretched as if begging for mercy, or trying to provide some small measure of protection for his people inside.

  Charlene crunched through the snow behind her, whispered close in her ear. “Be careful?”

  “Why?” Eviane asked, surprised with how damned reasonable her voice sounded. “We can handle it or we can’t. If we can’t, we’re probably dead anyway. Let’s go.”

  Charlene looked at her with what could only have been amazement.. but Charlene hailed from an earlier, more benign world. Here the ice ruled, and only the strong would survive. Somehow Eviane would keep her friend alive until the tall girl had a chance to adapt to reality.

  The National Guardsman jogged up beside them. Eviane scanned him appraisingly. He looked young and hard, jaw square and tight-curled hair cropped short. Good. An asset. There were bad times ahead.

  Max Sands… she could trust Max. Despite the run, he wasn’t really breathing hard. Hippogryph was no weakling either. But Bowles was bent over, hands on knees, panting. Stith-Wood was massaging her knee. Orson and Kevin were still back on the slope. Johnny Welsh hadn’t told a joke in an hour.

  Kevin of the pipestem legs: his padded clothing hung on him like a deflated balloon. He was puffing a little, but his smile was intact. The rest could survive a day or two of starvation, though they’d whine, but for Kevin they’d better find food. He’d build muscle-meat on this trip or die trying.

  Smoke belched out of the front door as it creaked open. Fingers scrabbled on the inside, pulling weakly.

  A man emerged. His broad Eskimo face was all planes and angles, the face of a man who has known starvation or terrible illness. His hands were lines and knobs. Only the eyes were alive. They were piercing, frozen blue, like chips of flaming ice.

  He gasped for breath, and stretched the door wider so that a young woman could squeeze her way out. The girl fell to her knees in the snow, threw her arms around the young man’s corpse. “Wood Owl,” she sobbed hysterically. “Oh, you fool. Oh, my dear.”

  She was rounded, solid beneath her furs. So: it wasn’t starvation which had stolen the fat from the old man’s face. Years of illness might do that.

  As the old man stumbled from the doorframe, the roof gave a sigh and collapsed.

  His voice was as timeless as the howling wind. “We must find shelter. Come with me to the prayer lodge. Ahk-lut dares not violate that sacred place.”

  Eviane nodded as if she understood, and helped the girl to her feet.

  The air grew even colder as they marched. The wind drove the snow until it was almost a solid curtain. The refugees stumbled on blindly, following the old man. He bent into the storm, pushing on step after painful step. Who could tell what the old man was following? Instinct or memory or the distant outline of white knife-edged mountains momentarily visible through the terrible gale. Except for those brief moments, they were in an endless, impenetrable shell of white, until Eviane could see only the stunned shadow of Johnny Welsh struggling ahead of her. One moment’s lapse of attention, a single misplaced footstep, and she would be lost.

  After a time the storm’s fury diminished, and she could distinguish the alien landscape around her. There
were no trees, although the snow was clotted in irregular lumps that might have been trees shrouded and drowned in white. There was no sign of life save for the line of silent travelers. Now that the wind was dying, she heard their gasping.

  Charlene tapped her shoulder, whispered down from her enormous height. “How do they do this? It looks as if we can see for miles.”

  Eviane frowned. “We’re on a hill. Sometimes I don’t understand you at all.”

  Charlene stared, caught without a reply.

  Eviane withdrew to a deeper, cooler place inside her mind. Charlene had already begun to crack. Snow madness. Shock. it was to be expected. in a group this size they might lose half simply to fear and despair. Eviane must be strong for all.

  Eviane snapped out of her reverie as they approached a large, regular mound of snow.

  The old man got down upon his hands and knees. He oriented himself to the mountains, then began digging in the snow. In minutes he uncovered a man-sized oval cave mouth. He disappeared into it like a seal diving into an ice hole.

  Others followed. Eviane was sixth in line.

  The floor of the passage was compressed and melted into an icy glaze. The tunnel sloped down for the first eight feet, then leveled out. She pushed her pack ahead of her, and nudged herself along with knees and elbows. The tunnel gave her only a foot of clearance to the sides, and if she had suffered from claustrophobia, this would have been sheer terror. Wiggling another ten feet brought her to an upgrade, where the lack of traction became treacherous. Hands grasped her pack from above and pulled. She hung on for the ride.

  She emerged from a trapdoor into a kind of lodge. Fifty or a hundred years earlier, the lodge would probably have been constructed from wood and snow, but more modern materials made other options available.

  Tubular plastic bladders filled with frozen water formed the rectangular structure of the walls. The ceiling stretched over nine feet high, and a conical sheet of clear plastic capped the roof. The air smelled stale, already warming with the scent of tired human flesh. The old man poked a long spear through a vent hole in the center of the sheet, knocking loose the snow.

  In the middle of the room a blackened pit had been filled with branches, chunks of log, and tinder.

  One by one the travelers came in out of the cold. Their collective bodies warmed the room. Outer coats were coming off.

  The old man looked at them, and Eviane had a better opportunity to examine him in turn. He and the young woman were similarly attired, though the lower cut of her garment was more curved than his. The fur-hooded robe had been sewn together from a variety of animals. Eviane recognized squirrel and mink, and something that was probably muskrat. There were other skins, perhaps not native to Alaska but traded hand to hand from hundreds or thousands of miles away. Was that a poodle skin?

  She didn’t see any machine stitching in the older man’s clothing. As the girl peeled off her external clothing, she revealed a pair of Jordache designer ski pants and boots. Girls will be girls. She was cute, in an Eskimo kind of way. Eviane flickered a glance at Max Sands. Yes, he’d noticed.

  “Call me Martin Qaterliaraq,” the old man said. “Martin the Arctic Fox. Your Christian missionaries named me Martin, long ago. They were good people, and I pay them the respect of keeping that name. But although my daughter calls herself Candice, to me she is Kanguq, Snow Goose. I serve the old ways.” His face fell. Once more, he seemed impossibly ancient. “It is the old ways that brought you here to this place, and only the old ways can save the world.”

  Orson spoke into the silence. “What are you saving, exactly? From what?”

  “Wait. We know the way to show you. You have helped us already, but we need more.”

  The trapdoor in the ground puffed again, and more people emerged. Some were Eskimos in traditional dress, furs and skins. Some of the frocks looked to have been made of fish skin, and others of waterproof gut. Some wore more modem cold-weather gear, perhaps even some of the plastic adverse-environment gear Bowles had mentioned.

  Both men and women wore earrings hanging from pierced earlobes. As one wrinkled Mongol face passed close by, Eviane caught a closer look at his flat, rectangular earrings. Bits of ivory, glass beads, and colored rock were stuck into them.

  The women were heavy but withered by time and environment. Many wore jewelry decorated with grotesque faces, grinning demon-shapes, snarling animals. Two had bone needles projecting through their septa.

  Eviane counted a dozen men and women. One… two wore bloody bandages. Some were introduced by name, names that made Eviane’s head hurt to hear them: Kitngiq and Pingayunelgen and Tayarut and even less manageable mouthfuls.

  All had the characteristic padding of fat, the dark skin and epicanthic folds. There was a kind of vitality to them that made the excess poundage seem appropriate in a way her own never had. They carried it as if it was insulation above hard muscle.

  When the room was three-quarters full, they arranged themselves around the fire pit in a circle.

  With flint and steel, Martin started the fire. Smoke clouded the air, although it was almost magically drawn up through the roof.

  Pouches were opened. Dried fish and meat went around the circle. Orson Sands sneered at what he was holding. “This isn’t even diet food. There was plenty of real food back in the supply store.”

  Martin shook his head sadly. “You must learn to see as the Cabal see, if you would best them at their game. We must prepare you for the traditional ways, my friend.”

  “He doesn’t mean Eskimo Pies,” Max told his brother.

  The pouch reached her hands. What Eviane pulled out had a texture like rough cardboard. She began to chew. It was stringy, with a smoked flavor.

  “The Inua of the fish must be respected. They feed us and clothe us, quiver our arrows and seal our boats. Their eggs tan hides and the oil of their bodies lights our homes. Eat, and nourish your bodies, and give reverence to the Inua of the fish. Many of you will die before this is over, and then your spirits will mingle with those beings you have consumed. It would be best to make peace with them now.”

  The girl-Snow Goose-said, “Sedna is already gravely ill. Too ill to-” Martin glared at her and she was silent.

  Eviane took Martin at his word, eating slowly, chewing until each mouthful was almost a liquid. (Sedna?) The atmosphere in the lodge was close, growing warmer. Her companions were having little trouble eating the peculiar food. Most of them must have tried stranger diets than this, from the look of them. (Did she know that name?)

  When she stopped eating, she wasn’t full, but the edge was off her hunger. She felt in a state of readiness, eager to hear the next of it.

  Several of the older men and one of the younger went to the fire and threw on crumbled handfuls of powder. When they burned, they made a smell like tobacco and dust. The smoke grew thicker, the flame hotter.

  The Eskimos were peeling off their external clothing. Soon they were all in underwear or twisted loincloths. The refugees looked at each other, in speculation or embarrassment or panic. Martin the Arctic Fox seemed half-starved, bones showing, concave belly… no navel. Qaterliaraq had no navel. Orson nudged Max, whispered.

  The air grew thicker, warmer. Eviane was perspiring. No help for it. She stripped, and didn’t stop until she was down to bra and panties. She folded her clothes into a careful bundle. The Eskimos weren’t hiding themselves, and she wouldn’t either.

  Bowles and Stith-Wood wore their near nudity with ease, but Orson Sands held his shirt and jacket nervously in front of himself, trying to cover as much flab as he could. Kevin spread his thin arms before the fire. His eyes were half-closed in bliss, and his ribs were prominent.

  Hippogryph, sweating freely, had kept his clothes on until he couldn’t take the heat. Now he was undressing in some haste. He kept the bundled clothes in front of him, blushing furiously.

  Max had stripped down to shorts without a tremor, but many of Eviane’s fleshy companions were embarrassed. They shi
fted their considerable weight nervously from side to side like guilty children. Charlene tried to shrink into herself, shoulders hunched, arms hugging her knees, guilty grin… but she was relaxing even as Eviane watched. She was watching Hippogryph.

  Hippogryph would not meet anyone’s eyes. His ears were quite red. He was hunched as Charlene had been, yet he had little to hide. Beneath his quite Eskimo-like fat layer the muscle was solid. And what did Charlene think she was hiding? Elvish alien beauty, if she would only straighten up.

  Behind her, Johnny Welsh whispered, perhaps to himself, “I wish there wasn’t so much light…”

  Bowles chuckled. “Steam bath scene, Take One.”

  Johnny relaxed; he smiled; his voice rose. “Gosh, Charles, wasn’t it nice of the cannibal king to let us use their bathhouse?”

  “We should hurry, Johnny. There must be a dozen tribes outside waiting for us to finish.”

  “They’re probably here for the feast the king promised-”

  Martin Qaterliaraq spoke again. “This is the sweat lodge, the qasgiq of my people. Mph.” The old man pronounced the word kuzz-a-gick. “Here we dream our dreams and see into the world beyond. But Ahk-lut has t-t-torn the veil between matter and spirit. He would bring the chaos of his greed and fear into the world-mph-and destroy everything.”

  The other Eskimos nodded assent. But Martin’s lips were twitching, and some others were having trouble keeping their faces solemn.

  The trapdoor in the floor flapped open again. More Eskimos brought in handfuls of brittle driftwood and loaded them into the central fire pit.

  Smoke curled up from the crackling wood and twisted through the ceiling. Watching it lulled Eviane into an almost hypnotic reverie.

  The relaxation became dismay a few minutes later, when the air grew so close as to be almost unbreathable. Several of the refugees were choking and gasping for breath.

  Then the smoke lightened. Pictures floated in a gray, misty ocean that merged into a gray, misty sky. Martin’s voice was strong once again. “It was the beginning, and there were not yet people upon the Earth,” he said. “For four days the first man lay coiled in the pod of a beach pea. On the fifth he burst forth and stood full-grown.”