The Barsoom Project dp-2

by Larry Niven

  “ But that cost is deceptive. The Beanstalk is also the most dangerous of the skyhooks. For if the cable ever snapped-”

  Flame flashed where the cable broke, somewhere above the midpoint. Meteor strike, or only the sudden release of terrible energies? Part of the cable fell toward interplanetary space. The rest… thirty thousand miles of single-crystal iron fiber composite wrapped itself around the Earth’s equator, carrying meteoric energy levels. The Earth strangled in a noose of fire.

  A hundred voices murmured uneasily. Alex was watching Kareem Fekesh.

  Was that a smile? What kind of smile? Alex had seen smiles like that, a faint curl of the lips, before Dream Park personnel plunged into the details of a major problem. A very bright businessman might be envisioning an answer to a potential difficulty…

  Or a terror-monger might be watching a new and exotic means to trigger Megadeath. Fekesh turned and whispered to Razul. Razul frowned, considered, nodded-

  A large hand fell on Alex’s shoulder. “Alex,” Harmony said urgently. “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “Shhh. This will be over in a few minutes.”

  “And you’ll arrange to be paged away. Now, Alex.” Thadeus’s eyes were blazing.

  Alex nodded and backed up until they were under the shadow of a model mining derrick.

  On the dome above them, the Barsoom Project was building a tower. They built it from the ground up, and it was already too high. No material known to man would support it. The tower stood because it was another linear accelerator. Ferrous rings shot upward through the interior at scores of miles per second. The tower’s magnetic field pushed down on them as they rose, lifting itself against gravity, slowing the rings to a stop near the tower’s crown; pushed down on them as they fell, still lifting itself, accelerating the rings until they reached bottom. There, at scores of miles per second, they looped around in a bitch kitty of a magnetic field and started back up the tower. It was a staggering feat of engineering. Alex ignored it.

  “What are you doing?” Harmony asked furtively. “It wasn’t until this morning that I realized what I’ve done. Name of God, man-!”

  “Don’t worry,” Alex said soothingly. “I’m just keeping an eye on things.”

  “And talking to Izumi and Khresla? And activating Tony McWhirter?”

  “What busy little ears we have.”

  It was all that Harmony could do to keep his voice from cracking. “Alex, I was drunk! I should never have said anything at all!”

  “ So there you have it.” Through the skeletal derrick Alex could see four “skyhooks” on the dome at once: tower, Star-whale, Beanstalk, and a tremendous spinning cable whose endpoints dipped into the Earth’s atmosphere. “ Even the cheapest of these projects would be expensive; the others are much worse. Each of these fantasy devices could lift cargo to space at a few dollars a pound. Each would cause awesome destruction if it failed. And each would be far cheaper, easier to build, less massive, and less dangerous if built to serve Mars!”

  Mars replaced Earth. “ Mars rotates in just over twenty-four hours, but is far less massive than Earth. Stressed by only two-fifths of a gravity-” Sudden close-ups of the Beanstalk and Pinwheel showed each to be considerably shorter and much more slender. The rings being fired up and down the tower moved more slowly; the Starwhale was scores of miles long instead of hundreds of miles.

  “ Each of these devices can serve Mars for around fifteen percent of their cost at Earth. Their lower energies make each far safer. More to the point, they may loft their goods from the surface of Mars and land supplies for the colonists and materials for the terraforming project; but if they fail-”

  They failed all at once. The Beanstalk wrapped Mars in fire. The endpoints of the Pinwheel, which had been dipping low above the surface six times per orbit, now pounded the desert itself until shock waves shattered it. Misdirected rings shredded the tower. A rising spacecraft entered the orbiting rail gun off-center and tore it into a chaff of shredded superconducting wire.

  Disasterlight painted Harmony’s broad, battered face with crimson highlights. His eyes blazed.

  Alex could see the panic there. He asked, “What do you think I’m going to do? Publish a letter in the Times? Activate the Dream Park hit squad?” Alex’s mind’s eye built him an army of three-dimensional cartoon figures dressed as Ninjas. A black-robed Minnie Mouse, a sword-wielding Baby Huey, and Popeye the Sailor covered with Yakuza tattoos, closed in on a whimpering Fekesh…

  “Alex!” Harmony’s voice was rigid with alarm. “Stop smiling like that.”

  “Sorry. I’m easily distracted.”

  “Dammit, this is serious. You’re likely to stir up more problems than you’ve ever dreamed of!”

  Behind them, with staggering sound and visual effects, Martian colonists were battening hatches and shoveling Marsdust to cover glass walls. Mars was ringed in fire and meteoroids.

  Alex pulled back from his friend, deeper into the shadow of the derrick, away from the illumination of the fireclouds. “Thadeus, you hired me because you trust me. Not just to do the day-to-day work, but on the big things. And just maybe you hired me specifically for this.”

  Harmony wagged his head regretfully. “I was crazy. We’re talking about a hundred billion dollars. At least. Alex-”

  Something on Alex’s face must have given Harmony pause, because suddenly he was speechless.

  “Thadeus,” Alex said softly. “Did somebody get to you?”

  “ If they fail, the meteors will pound only a lifeless world. We’ll build again. And again, until we get it right. And then we can build skyhooks for Earth. And then the solar system is ours!” Spacecraft rose from Earth and Mars, all sizes, all shapes, in ever-denser numbers, flung outward by Beanstalks and Pin-wheels. They spread across the solar system… but Alex Griffin and Thadeus Harmony saw none of that.

  Harmony wiped a broad hand over his vast forehead, checked the palm for sweat. “No, Alex. They’re just watching all the time. Sometimes I feel like a goldfish in a bowl. Listen, I’m worried.”

  “You should be. But, Thadeus, now it’s in my lap.”

  “We backed down before that son of a bitch.” Harmony had glimpsed Fekesh. He studied the tall Arab, then abruptly looked away. “We backed down, but we had reason. We don’t do that lightly, Alex. He had us.”

  “You’d almost whipped yourselves before Fekesh ever got there. You told me about it, remember? We’re stronger now, Thadeus. And the girl came back. Raw coincidence, the stuff of dreams and parables. if there’s a trace of superstition in Kareem Fekesh, he must think the fates have come for him.”

  Harmony’s mouth opened and shut twice without producing sound. Then: “You’re dreaming.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Will you at least let me know what’s going on?”

  “Minute by minute.”

  Harmony gave a long, sighing exhalation. “All right, all right. I’m going to go and make a public face. Just… hell. I’ll be in touch.”

  Harmony slouched away, a big, worried bear with an artificial smile plastered across his face, trying to make happy with the guests.

  Alex watched him. Harmony wandered across the room shaking a hand here, clasping a shoulder there. Then, as if in response to Alex’s somewhat sadistic prayer, found himself facing Kareem Fekesh.

  Both froze. Then Fekesh smiled graciously, walked around Harmony, and disappeared into the crowd.

  Alex watched Harmony’s expression as he turned to watch Fekesh leave. The public smile had cracked open. Beneath it was something incandescent with loathing.

  Max popped out of the water. The bubble above him burst, left him standing on a perfectly balanced piece of ice in a choppy sea. Other Gamers popped to the surface around him. The world buoyed for a few moments, then righted.

  A few yards away, Hippogryph and Charlene bobbed up. Charlene was leaning on her rotund companion. They weren’t exactly holding hands, but…

  Brother Orson’s eyes were fi
xed on the couple, and there was, if not primal fury, at the very least disappointment and discomfiture in his gaze.

  Max’s chunk of ice drifted to the edge of an ice field, and fit into the rest of the floe as neatly as a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

  The sky flowed with an endless ribbon of color. The northern lights? Aurora borealis? It was stunningly bright, seemed near enough to touch, and he stood on tiptoes, stretching his fingers up…

  “What in the world are you doing?” Eviane asked.

  “Ah… stretches.”

  She was pulling a lightweight jacket out of her backpack, and he followed suit. The air carried a bit more chill here. Nothing but white, nothing but ice in all directions. Wherever they were, it was in the heart of the arctic. They had no magical reprieve from the cold.

  He looked down at Eviane’s feet, startled to realize that she cast no shadow. Where she walked, her feet left no imprint. It gave him the creeps.

  There were no birds overhead. There were no mountains or trees to break the endless, bleak plain. The wind howled, and the chill seemed to penetrate to a level beyond the physical.

  The other Gamers donned their jackets. Max noted that Yarnall, the National Guardsman, was still with them. How hard had the Gods tried to kill him out? Hard to guess… but Max expected the Game to get considerably rougher now. He put a hand on Eviane’s shoulder, and then walked over to Snow Goose. A light wind from the… east? blew steadily, carrying an unwelcome load of snow.

  “What next?”

  “Ceremony,” Snow Goose said. “We need shelter from this wind, so that we can perform a ceremony. There aren’t enough of us who are Eskimo to build a snow shelter, so we’ll just have to use Robin’s prefab units.”

  The Gamers gathered around in a circle to hear her. They looked tired, but exultant. The wind around them moaned a dirge, but their mood was unaffected. They were strong. They were victorious. They were on a goddamned roll.

  “We’re going to need to construct shelter,” she told them. “There’s a storm coming in.”

  Robin Bowles took center stage. “In the bottom of everyone’s pack there should be a segment of a shelter unit. Please extract that. Now, there are instructions included, but if you’ll just listen to me, you won’t need to take the time to read them..

  The Adventurers formed a circle, and Max fit in next to Eviane.

  Each shelter section was roughly triangular, and included telescoping rods that clicked together into a rigid frame. Additional coiled wire ran through cloth conduits. The whole thing swelled and stiffened admirably, until it looked more like an igloo than anything they had seen since their plane crashed.

  The plane crash. How long ago had that been? Forty-eight hours? It seemed worlds away, and so much had changed since then.

  Eviane still looked somewhat pale, and perhaps a bit forlorn. He imagined that was appropriate: he thought that if he were officially dead, he would be somewhat forlorn as well. But with strong, busy fingers she helped, in all likelihood as cheerful as any dead person could be.

  The igloo grew until it was about twelve feet across and five feet high. The Actor attached a hissing gas cylinder to the tent. Struts swelled with pressure. The tent had become a gelatin mold.

  They crawled in, single file.

  The temperature outside had begun to drop. In the last few minutes of their task, Max’s fingers had grown numb. He was delighted to get inside, where Bowles was already setting up a small conical heater. Temperatures rapidly grew comfortable, if not toasty.

  Snow Goose removed the tin can of cigarettes from her pack and sat cross-legged on the ground, waiting for the others to arrive. She was centered and calm, every bit the picture of a woman who strode between two worlds, the Inuit and the white.

  Outside, the wind howled ferociously. Max could almost hear the voices of the Cabal: thwarted, angry, vengeful…

  But in the igloo, there was peace.

  Eviane gazed at Snow Goose as if trying to remember something. Studying. Absorbing. Then she seemed to give up.

  The Adventurers ringed them ‘round. Bowles. Stith-Wood.

  Hippogryph. Yarnall. The Sands brothers. Dula. Titus. Frankish

  Oliver. Welsh. Eviane. Hebert. These were the warriors of the West, and they had to be enough.

  Snow Goose spoke. “You know we’ve won, like, major gold.”

  There was a round of applause, and a great hearty lot of back-slapping. Snow Goose let it die back down. She said, “We should get a chance to rest pretty soon now.”

  “I was wondering if anyone was going to remember that part!” Trianna said. “I’m pooped.”

  There was a general chorus of agreements about that too.

  “We need another ceremony first. We must reach my father. The elders who helped us with our last ceremony cannot aid us now, but I have something that they didn’t-one of the Dead, whose love for this world brought her back to be with us. She walks between worlds, and in traveling from death to life has gained great power.

  “Eviane, you will sit at the center of our circle. You will help us to open a window between worlds.”

  With evident reluctance, Eviane moved forward and sat next to Snow Goose. Cigarettes were passed around. Max shifted, and then shifted again, trying to get comfortable on the thin padding under his aching buttocks. Nothing helped. Finally he folded his jacket and sat on it.

  Again, the cigarette was unfiltered, and a little shorter than those of which he had seen pictures. He didn’t personally know anyone with a nicotine prescription, but one could still find a bootlegger here or there smuggling Oaxacan tobacco. Rumor had it that a few outlaw “Smokies” still grew the precious leaf up in Oregon, in patches disguised as marijuana fields.

  They lit, and exhaled. Once again the smoke streamed up toward the roof, but this time it congealed above Eviane’s head as well as Snow Goose’s. A glowing image formed.

  Martin the Arctic Fox was kneeling before a foam-plastic crate. They could hear him chanting, and though they could not understand, it was clear what he was doing. For several seconds they watched him negotiating with the Inua of a score of cans of corned beef. Then his head jerked up and his leathery face crinkled in delight.

  “Snow Goose! You still live?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Have you made any progress? How many of the strangers still survive?”

  “We’ve only lost one,” Snow Goose said, “and Eviane is still with us as my tornrait. Daddy, we have warred with the sins on Sedna’s scalp and defeated them, but they must still be combed away.”

  “You didn’t stay to-?”

  “No, Daddy, we’re warriors, not barbers! Our people may need help to attack the Cabal. Will you take care of Sedna? It’s really your job.”

  “Yes, I must dress her hair while others fight,” Martin said glumly. “Carry on, daughter. Well done.” He faded.

  Snow Goose rubbed her palms together briskly. “Well. That’s that.”

  The tension in the air slackened. Johnny Welsh coughed politely. “I don’t want to interrupt the reunion, but my stomach is about to sue me for nonsupport. Do you think we could get some food?”

  There was a sharp popping sound, like a vacuum tube imploding. Suddenly, another vision misted the air.

  It wasn’t of malevolent Cabal members, though. It was a beautiful woman whose long, straight black hair fanned out in an ethereal halo.

  Sedna. She smiled on them through full lips. “My children,” she said, and each word had, not the bubbling sound he would have expected, but a lush, hushed woman’s voice.

  “You have freed me from my bondage. You have justified my faith in you. Though you were of another culture, you are joined in a dance with us. Though you unknowingly sinned, you have repented-what is in your hearts will determine your fates.

  “The Cabal awaits you. You have freed me, but they have gained great power, and still hold the Raven in thrall. They will be all the more dangerous now that they know you are strong
enough to thwart them. You must be careful.

  “Somewhere out over the ice is the next challenge, your penultimate test.”

  Sedna’s face wavered, and in its place there appeared a strange vista. It seemed to be a mountainous island. No, not a mountain. What Max had seen as a natural formation was an endless network of slabs of ice set against one another at crazed, impossible angles.

  Kevin shook his head in disbelief; but Max was more disturbed by Eviane’s gasp of recognition. Her eyes were fixed, staring. He took her hand: it was rigid.

  “Here is your challenge,” Sedna said. “There will be dangers both physical and psychic. My own energy is taken with healing. I can give you one gift. I can return to life one who has suffered in your service, one who died, and even through death served you.

  “Rise, Eviane.”

  A nimbus of pale light played around Eviane. Her mouth opened in a surprised “0.” The other Adventurers stared. Eviane began to shake. Then the light faded, and Eviane stared at her hands in amazement.

  Max prodded her with a sturdy forefinger. “Yep. All meat. No filling.”

  Sedna’s full lips smiled warmly. “Rise, living woman. Restored to your compatriots, restored to life, still you have seen beyond the veil of death. The power of foresight is yours, now and forever. Rise, Eviane, restored to hope, to love. Rise.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  THE SNOWMAN’S WAR

  “Gotcha!”

  Max ducked, too late. The snowball hit him in the side of the head, exploding in a burst of fluff.

  “Point!” one of the two judges called. The judges were unusual. They looked like snowmen: more the Frosty than the Abominable variety. Complete with carrot noses and black top hats, the two odd creatures had appeared at the beginning of the evening break, and led the Gamers on a whistling march to a mountain concealing a network of ice caves. Inside the cave was a suspiciously warm spring, and a banquet of fresh fruit, vegetables, hot breads, and lean proteins.