The Barsoom Project dp-2

by Larry Niven

  A man, a proto-Eskimo, stood naked in the mist.

  A black shape emerged from the sky, grew wings and a head, became a gigantic Raven. In Eviane’s mind the words of the ancient shaman and the images in the air melded together. The room around her receded from her awareness. She stood on an ancient beach, could see the oily gray sky, smell the protosurf.

  The Raven covered a sizable patch of sky. It shrank as it glided to earth: perspective in reverse. It was man-sized when it touched the sand. It stared at the man, cocking its head to the side, and finally said: “What are you?”

  The man stuttered in fear and confusion. The great Raven pushed its beak aside, and its feathers away, revealing smooth brown skin beneath. It became very like the man, not fearsome at all.

  The man relaxed. “I know not who I am. I know that I hunger and thirst.”

  The Raven opened his hand. The flesh of his palm melted and ran, and formed beads which darkened to berries. The man took them and ate.

  With the sweep of an arm that was also a wing, the Raven transformed the sea into a creek running at the base of a snowcapped mountain. The Raven scooped clay from the bank of the river and molded it lovingly. He set two blobs on the earth, and waved his feathered arms again.

  Two mountain sheep stood inanimate for a few moments, then opened their eyes, shuddered, and ran off to the mountains.

  “The Raven made everything that lives,” Martin’s voice whispered behind her ear. Shapes were flowing from the Raven’s wing: reindeer, caribou, rabbits. The other wing swept out, square miles of glossy black shadow, and seals and whales and a thousand shapes of fish rained into the ocean.

  The Raven was studying the man again in that odd, avian manner. He molded clay into another man-shape with a slightly different symmetry. He took long grass from the bank of the stream to cover the new creature’s head. Its eyes opened, and it was woman. She stretched her hand out for the man’s.

  They walked away. As they passed over the land it blossomed, the stream ran with fish, and birds filled the sky.

  Eviane snorted at the smell of smoke and was back in the qasgiq. Martin, half-visible in the smoke, was hunched over, talking as if to himself. “The Raven gave all sea life into the care of Sedna. All land life into the hands of her lover Torngarsoak. When these two are well, all creatures are fruitful and multiply…” And within the murk Eviane found herself deep underwater. Schools of fish streamed past a kneeling Eskimo woman with long, floating hair and a face not unlike that of Snow Goose. Playfully, she brushed her hands through a school of fish Her hands! Her fingers were stubs, chopped off just below the first knuckle.

  Orson was whispering to Max: “-pretty typical myth pattern.

  Sedna was a beautiful Eskimo girl who tried to escape an arranged marriage. Her father cut off her fingers. The joints fell into the ocean, became whales, seals, and so on.”

  And yet there was no sense of tragedy or regret in Sedna’s beautiful face. Her eyes met Eviane’s; her lips twitched in a smile. Eviane was warmed by the beauty.

  Smoke swirled. Land again: ice melting, green sprouting. She watched men multiplying, expanding across the land. The land filled with children, laughing, growing, mating, spreading their villages and hunting lands out beyond the horizon.

  The seas swelled, and suddenly Eviane was in the prow of a small, shallow boat, skimming across the waves behind a flashing seal. The seal was speared, pulled aboard. The hunters rattled quick memorized words, and for a moment Eviane was back underwater, and the woman with the stubby fingers cocked her head to hear the voices.

  Eviane was on the ice, belly flat against the floe, as a walrus rose through a hole to take a precious mouthful of air. A spear flashed past her viewpoint She ran with her companions beside a river, stretching their nets. Nets heavy with salmon were pulled to land. Voices were raised in happy song She was surrounded by dancing children in the midst of a communal hall, a qasgiq. Naked bodies bent and twisted to the rhythms of a hundred unfamiliar percussion instruments She stood on the shore, and watched a strange and alien vessel approach across the water. It was large, larger than a whale, large enough to hold whales. Gigantic white billowing wings caught the wind and breathed the thing in toward the land. Men sprang out, hairy men with pale skin.

  As she watched, with impossible, magical speed, they began to build. Suddenly houses of wood-more wood than her people had ever seen-began to sprout in tight clusters. The new men killed whales and seals until their corpses littered the beach like poisoned ants.

  And when there were no more whales and seals, they dug the hills, pulling out the yellow metal.

  And when that slackened, they drilled into the ground, and pumped out thick black fluid.

  The quickly shifting views of white intruders spilling across the land were becoming blurred. Behind them Eviane could see the woman beneath the water, the Eskimo woman with mutilated hands. Sedna was sick. A pale mass with white, veinlike threads, a fungus or parasite, was spreading through her hair, across her cheeks and neck, down her shoulders. She hunched her shoulders and hid her face in misery.

  “The people of the Raven watched the destruction of their land.” She heard Martin’s voice dimly in her mind. “The people learned the ways of the intruders and forgot their own. Sedna was ill with their sins. And the Raven circling overhead, watching his people seduced from the way of their ancestors, was not happy.”

  The Raven was a monstrous black shape, diving like a hawk. The earth’s surface tore like paper. The Raven ripped his way deep into the world’s heart. He emerged with claws filled with sticky orange-glowing magma. From that he made new shapes: children, boys and girls who glowed with force, whose faces were filled with wisdom and knowledge. They-uh-huh! — they had no navels.

  Eviane watched as the Raven swept the magical children into his claws and swooped up, up until the entire globe of the earth was a hazy white arc beneath her, and her heart was in her throat. Then the Great Bird swooped down, and left pairs of children around the rim of the Arctic Circle. She saw them swiftly gather together the tribes of the People, and teach them to make fire with the fire drill, to skin and tan, to build houses of wood and stone and ice. The old ways. Sedna showed in double exposure: her hair was coming clean. Her head lifted, she sighed, she waved a languid stub-fingered hand that streamed flocks of seals…

  Gone.

  Eviane blinked her eyes, rousing slowly from the spell. The pictures were gone, and Martin the Arctic Fox was speaking again.

  “The Great Raven made the new men to teach the old knowledge to our people, to give us back the spirit world we had lost. He dispersed us around the great circle of ice. I came here, to this land you call Alaska. My son is called Ahk-lut, and together we were powerful guardians of the Old Ways. For half a century we used the power to help my people. Then Sedna became sick again, and Ahk-lut formed other plans, other ideas.

  “Through dreams, through chanting, he reached our children, the children of the children of the Raven. Gathering them from tribes scattered around the ice, around the world, he formed the Cabal. The Cabal seduced more than half of our children. They kept their secrets from their parents, and together they worked their magic.”

  An ocean of mist boiled away, and when it cleared Eviane was in a sweat lodge much like Martin’s qasgiq, but larger, darker. Eight young men formed a circle around a smoky fire. They were naked but for leather pouches slung on thongs around their necks. Their skins were burnt dark red by the heat. Perspiration drooled down their faces and slicked their bodies.

  An alien, evil sound coursed through the air, one she finally recognized as a chorus of low mutterings, malignant human voices joined in dark harmony.

  One stood. His face was very like Martin’s, leaner than a normal Eskimo face, with indented cheekbones and sunken eyes, as if he had not only Martin’s genes but the old shaman’s suggestion of deep sickness. He was shaven-headed. The dark eyes squinted in old hatred; the corneas looked milky. He reached into th
e pouch that hung from his neck, fumbling, and for a moment Eviane saw a tiny, withered pair of human legs in the pouch, and the rounded suggestion of a head. Then it vanished again, and Ahk-lut (who else could it be?) drew out a bar of chewing tobacco.

  With dark, stained teeth Ahk-lut tore an enormous plug from the bar, masticated it, then spat a long, brownish stream into the fire. The flames leapt, and the smoke became a pillar of fetid dark green, masking and noxious.

  “The young ones. Our children,” Martin said. “They were trying to heal a great wrong, but they were impatient. They wanted it quick and easy. They’ve done a dreadful thing…”

  The Cabal passed the tobacco from hand to hand. One at a time every man in the lodge spat tobacco juice into the fire, until at last the smoke within the lodge was so deep that she could barely see faces at all.

  Ahk-lut turned, picked up a robe, and swept it aside. The lump beneath glowed faintly blue. Ahk-lut picked it up-it was heavy-swung himself around, and set it in the center of the fire. Sparks sprayed outward.

  Firelight masked the blue glow, but set the irregular mass gleaming. It was polished metal, with shattered edges like curved daggers, and thick tubing twisted and torn.

  Above the fire, a huge face looked briefly through the smoke. It was part bird, part man: enough of man to show its astonishment.

  Each man reached into the pouch hung around his neck, and from it drew a handful of powders and bone fragments.

  With each handful there was a brief flash of a shape that roiled within the smoke and then vanished again, like a walrus rolling at the water’s surface before disappearing back into the depths. Here was a monstrous caterpillar, a writhing, multiarmed abomination. Smoke churned and became a killer whale with stubby human arms. It changed again, into the malformed corpse of a fetus pushing its flattened head against its amniotic membrane. A dead man clothed against bitter cold, face hooded, clothing and torso ripped open and empty. There were other, darker, bloodier images.

  Higher within the pillar of smoke, the bird-face showed again. Its beak opened wide; it screamed silently, and faded, and then the shrill cry of a bird burst through the illusory smokehouse. The Cabal bellowed in triumph.

  … When had they become nine?

  Ahk-lut stepped into the circle, set his hands on a man’s shoulders, and pulled him to his feet. Eviane saw that the man’s arms and ankles were bound. He screamed like a bird. She saw, now, the suggestion of a beak in his pointed face.

  Quite suddenly, the fire was out. An angular metal shape gleamed harsh blue within it. Shapes moved in the dark. A shadow occluded the glow, and fell into it-man-shaped, a bound man, writhing-and he was gone, and the blue glow was gone, and the firelight was the light of Martin’s qasgiq.

  Chapter Eight

  THE MISSION

  The fire was down to coals, and the smoke was thinning. Some of the refugees began to remember their half-naked state but there were larger matters to consider.

  Martin said, “We believe that the Raven’s children’s children tricked their grandfather. They piqued his curiosity until he assumed human form to spy upon them. They cast their spells upon him, then upon the sun. The sun’s death spells the end of your world, and the beginning of theirs.”

  “Martin.” Within the smoky dark, who spoke? “What was the metal object that glowed blue?”

  “That? A powerful talisman I traced when I was young. The Cabal has stolen it. It was a fragment of a thing that fell from the sky, in Canada.”

  “That was no meteor.” Now Eviane recognized the voice of Orson Sands.

  “No, it was a machine from Russia that fell before I was born. Talismans gain power from the distance they have traveled. I learned that this object had gone round and round the world until whatever held it up stopped working. So I sought it out. Now the Cabal is using it to throttle the sun.”

  Eviane heard herself saying, “They’ll make the whole world into an Eskimo world.” She wondered how she knew. “Cold. No crops, only the animals. We’d have to learn…” Her prescient vision ran far ahead of her tongue.

  Martin said, “Yes, you would have to learn. Ahk-lut would teach the white and black and yellow men our ways. Those who will not learn would starve. We have guessed that much. We can even guess why they have barred us from tending Sedna-”

  “Sedna,” Orson Sands broke in. “Shouldn’t we know more about Sedna?”

  “Ah, I forget. All who live at the rim of the world know Sedna, or Nuliajuk, or the Food Dish. Sedna has the care of the sea life that keeps us alive, fish and seals and plants and the very core of our lifestyle. She is the conscience of all mankind. When the sins of men and women take refuge in her hair, then Sedna becomes sick. If the sea dies, the land dies, and all men starve. Your people are starving now, and will continue to starve until Ahk-lut believes you are few enough.”

  “What about this Torngarsoak?” Kevin asked. “He’s her boyfriend? Why doesn’t he help?”

  “He is a hunter, and roams the land,” Martin said. “Hunters are often gone for months at a time. He may not know her plight.”

  “Okay, sins. It’s a missionary word.” Hippogryph spoke sharply, as if he were questioning a prisoner. “What do you mean by sins?”

  Martin’s lips moved, tasting his choice of words. “Abortion is a sin.”

  “Were the Eskimos practicing abortion?”

  “You don’t understand yet. Abortion of a creature’s soul is also a sin. To kill a whale or a walrus without proper respect, this causes Sedna pain. Such sins breed in her scalp and hair and cause her misery. Then an angakok must visit her and soothe her and comb away the sins. Sedna can’t comb her own hair, you know.”

  “But the New People fixed that. You taught the Eskimos the old ways again, right?”

  “Yes,” Arctic Fox said bitterly. “Sedna was growing healthy. Then she grew sick again. Our children, they didn’t understand. How could they? We had no answers either! We prayed to the Raven, we tended Sedna, but Ahk-lut’s secret Cabal had a quicker answer. Now their magic prevents us from reaching Sedna at all.

  “We left the Cabal alone. Some of us thought their way might be right-”

  “What, freezing the world?” Orson was shrill, disbelieving. “How would that help anyone?”

  “They hoped to end the sins by forcing you to learn our ways. We couldn’t fight them. They are too powerful, and they had the skyfall talisman. But then Ahk-lut demanded Snow Goose for his own. To take his sister in marriage would give him children who were closer to the blood of the Raven. They would found a new tribe, and rule the world.

  “I refused. His forces clashed with mine. Ahk-lut used white man’s guns from the other side of the circle. I was not prepared for that. My… foolishness has killed what remained of our warriors.”

  Max Sand leaned forward, hands on knees. “How can we help?”

  Martin’s voice was grave. “We have already sent out warriors, our children, beyond the veil of Seelumkadchluk, and none have returned. You are young and strong-and Ahk-lut will not expect to find white men in the world of spirits. Perhaps you can succeed where we have repeatedly failed.

  “We can do some of what needs doing, but we cannot do all. Sedna must be tended, but we can no longer reach her with our minds. Ahk-lut has imprisoned the Raven, and we must learn how and whether he can be freed.” Martin’s eyes were on the fire, and he seemed reluctant to speak. Did he have a plan, or was he only reaching out in desperation?

  “There is your tribe and my tribe,” he said. “One tribe must spy on the Cabal. One must tend Sedna, remove the parasites, before famine takes all of the people of the white lands and half of us too. Which would you have?”

  Hippogryph spoke. “What does tending Sedna involve?”

  “You would have to travel to her, in the flesh, through the realm of spirit. Go to her in her home beneath the sea. Soothe her. Comb the parasites from her hair. Learn from her why she is sick, if she will speak, if she knows.”

&n
bsp; “Fighting the Cabal sounds like more fun,” Max Sands said.

  Eviane’s voice dripped daggers. “Fun? It has to be done, but killing people isn’t entertainment, Max.”

  His mouth dropped open, but he didn’t speak. He remembered the Tar Pits Game, and the careful, single-minded way Eviane had gone after the key. She was a Gamer. He’d heard of the type. She had donned her persona like a second skin-like a body condom-and it wouldn’t come off until the Game was over.

  Hippogryph was speaking. “We don’t know enough. We’ve learned as much as we’re going to here, haven’t we, Martin? Your skills have reached as far as they can?”

  “Unfortunately true.”

  “I’d say let’s find out what Sedna knows before we tackle the Cabal. She might know where the Raven went.”

  Max shook his head. “But-can’t we follow Ahk-lut? He could take us right to the Raven. Free the Raven, he’ll kick ass! We’ve got guns.. do guns work in the spirit world, Martin?”

  “Of course. Why would a tool stop working?”

  “Vote!” Bowles cried. “Hands up for Sedna!”

  Hippogryph and five others raised hands. Orson’s pudgy face was lined in concentration… and his hand went up to make seven.

  “Hands to follow Ahk-lut!” Max’s and Eviane’s hands shot up. And Charlene’s, and three others. Bowles had abstained, and so had Trianna.

  They would go to Sedna. Underwater. Claustrophobia and sea monsters…

  The sober, round-faced men and women around the sweat lodge nodded their heads as if at a prearranged signal. They rattled segments of bone, seal-hide drums, whittled-ivory percussion instruments, strange musical devices that produced a flow of sound like nothing in the modern world. Rattling, lilting, now strident, now coaxing, but always seething with urgency.