The Barsoom Project dp-2

by Larry Niven

Alex nodded reluctantly. He didn’t either.

  The elevator rose rapidly. The tiny Martian spaceport town dropped away at fantastic speed, and even without the accompanying sense of acceleration, his stomach flopped and gurgled. He gulped as Mons Olympus rose over the horizon with thin clouds streaming from its shallow flank at two levels, then shrank to become a bump on a shrinking sphere.

  If Charlene Dula had been killed out, where would she go? Someplace unprotected?

  If the terrorist had missed Charlene, he must be a fool. But fool enough to think that Marty would stay in the Game with Charlene out?

  “Mr. Ambassador, has your niece ever been named directly in one of these threats?”

  “No. But indirectly, yes, and a kidnap attempt was made on Mitch De Camp’s boy.”

  “Dr Camp’s the President of Falling Angel.”

  “Correct.”

  Alex closed his eyes, reviewing the information. When he opened them again, Mars was a beach ball held at arm’s length, and the Beanstalk span stretched below them like a tightrope across the Abyss. “All right. Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  “Not really,” Arbenz said. The elevator came to a halt. “And now I must ask you to excuse me. There are appointments waiting.”

  The inner door opened. Beyond was conversation and sanity, the smell of food, and the feel of solid ground.

  “Thank you for your time,” Alex said, and shook the long, broad hand that Arbenz extended to him. “Ah… I think I’ll come in for a moment. I need to check on some things.”

  “By all means.”

  The door hissed shut behind them.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  THE ISLAND

  Eviane shielded her eyes, guarding them from a killing glare. Far away, across a vast blue-white sheet of ice, their destiny waited. Now it seemed like nothing so much as an empty plain, but she knew: in her heart she knew.

  Her pack was heavy against her shoulders, but her heart was light: for the first time in many months…

  Years?

  Ever…?

  Inwardly, she shuddered. Why didn’t her memory reveal other friends, other lovers? It was all a mist. Perhaps she had taken a blow on the head.

  (No, that’s not it, a voice whispered. And the voice was disturbingly familiar. She could almost, but not quite, remember the name that went with the voice. Almost. It wasn’t the first time that the voice had spoken to her, but the sound of it was growing more and more welcome, like an old friend…)

  Max adjusted the strap on his pack, and looked down at her, one massive arm resting on her shoulder. It was a comforting weight, and she took unutterable comfort from his nearness.

  Last night… last night. The panic had been there, as if he really were her first lover. She had been prepared to hide it, as she would hide her fear before a battle, but it hadn’t been like that at all.

  He had been so gentle with her that her panic had fluttered and receded as his hands, those large, clumsy-looking, powerful, gentle hands, somehow did their magic. His hands were so strong. She thought that he could mold rocks the way children use modeling clay. But last night he had treated her with such consuming tenderness that she had finally dug fingernails into his neck, bitten his shoulder, hissed and whimpered until he had treated her like a woman, not an overgrown child.

  And panic turned into something else, something that was desperate for human contact, something that used him and welcomed his use of her. What started out as a cry of loneliness became a scream of triumph. Both of them, together, howled against the wind, and laughed, and laughed, and touched.

  She grinned, thinking how it must have sounded on the other side of the rock. At least nobody had come to the rescue.

  Afterward they just held each other and whispered in the darkness of the ice cave. No talking about the past. No talking about the future, when the Cabal had been defeated (Max had said: “When the Game is over.” Men. Even in the direst of circumstances, they somehow still believed life was all a big game). Just the kind of talk that two strangers make, when the roar of their glands has momentarily subsided, and the flesh is cooling, and the wonderful, terrifyingly intimate afterglow is erasing the barriers between them. In those times lovers talk, speak quickly, say anything to keep that space open as long as possible, knowing that too soon it will iris closed.

  Or, in other times, times that she dimly remembered, during those same moments partners sometimes turned away, lit cigarettes, rose to fetch drinks, visited the bathroom. Succored every bodily need except intimacy. Fought like demons to keep the moment from becoming too intimate, as if intimacy was the most terrifying thing in the world.

  And, Eviane reflected, perhaps it was.

  There were gentle clouds on the horizon. The twelve other Adventurers stood assessing the coming challenge, measuring each other for strength and weakness. Charlene and her escort Hippogryph were only a few steps away. Soon, Eviane thought, she and Max-

  (She liked the sound of that. Eviane and Max. Just like a real couple. Just like a normal, healthy…

  (Eviane and Max. Why didn’t that sound quite right? As if there was someone else in the loop. Did she have a rival? She looked around herself in the group. No, there was no one else her man was interested in. She knew.)

  Charlene Dula broke the spell. She angled over to Eviane. Her slender face was still a little slack with sleep. A light breakfast hadn’t dispelled the dreams completely. She stood four inches taller than any of the others, and was starting to carry the extra height and weight more comfortably. Whatever aches and pains she had started with, her body was making the necessary adjustments.

  “All in all, I’d say that you have had an excellent night.” Charlene cocked an inquisitive eye, perhaps hoping for details.

  Eviane hugged Max’s arm. Max looked up at the clouds and whistled tunelessly.

  Snow Goose slide-stepped across the icy ground. Like the rest of them, she had fastened a pad of Velcro-like hooking blades to her shoes. They increased the traction wonderfully. She came close to Eviane. “All right,” she said. “Which way do we go?”

  Eviane closed her eyes. In the darkness, shimmering like a heat mirage, was the city. The ruins. She raised a hand and pointed toward the horizon. Snow Goose touched her arm lightly, correcting it a few degrees.

  “The spirits say that if we head north, we’ll reach our goal.”

  Kevin shrugged his bony shoulders. The air was chilly, but not quite unpleasant.

  The Adventurers formed a line and began to move out, the blades on their shoe bottoms grating against the ice, keeping them stable.

  Hippogryph sidled up next to Max. “Good bout yesterday, Mr. Mountain.”

  Max smiled. “Yeah, I guess it was.” He looked at his former opponent. “You were really trying, weren’t you?”

  “Nobody takes falls like that for fun. I should have brought a goddamn parachute.”

  Max’s grin broadened, and a little tune came into his whistle. His bear paw of a hand slid over Hippogryph’s. “Thanks,” he said. “That means a lot.”

  There were no signs of life. It was as though they had gone beyond the pale. Nothing but the incessantly howling winds. No birds, no plants. Just the slow crawl of the blue-pink fantasia arcing endlessly overhead.

  Eviane began to feel a certain heaviness in her guts, a sourness. She looked back over her shoulder. Already the mountains were far behind them. In this strange and magical land, time and distance didn’t seem to have the same significance they did in the outside world. More of the Cabal’s doing, she would imagine.

  “Are you afraid?” she asked Max.

  He wore a three-day stubble of beard and frankly, she liked it. Without it there was a certain babyishness to him; he seemed soft and vulnerable. With the dark beard, he seemed dangerous. For that matter, so did Orson.

  “Of course.” Max’s eyes were hooded, serious, but his voice was merry. “Only a fool wouldn’t be afraid.”

  Ah, her man. He di
dn’t fool her for a moment. He was the bravest, handsomest-

  Once again she caught a sidewise glance at those flashing eyes, peering ahead into the danger as if there was nothing in the world that could stop him. At that moment she was sure that he was right.

  And she was happy that he was hers.

  And Michelle, still hiding behind stern, strong Eviane, giggled like a happy child.

  They had been walking for an hour before the ice began to vibrate.

  It was a gentle sensation at first, and she marked it down to loose shoes, or the slipping of her ice grips on her soles, or the sound of the marchers around her. But terror was already rising along Eviane’s spine.

  A few seconds later she heard it thrumming more powerfully, rhythmically, a deep ringing like a man striking a gong. She felt it more than heard it, as if she were an ant crawling along the edge of the gong, and now the terror was yammering in her frontal lobes.

  “Hey-” Robin Bowles was the first of the others to comment on it.

  And there it was again. This time the entire field shook. The memory of the burrowing mammoth flashed through her mind and body and held her paralyzed and mute.

  Max grabbed her shoulder and yanked her back. All of the others stepped back away from the locus of vibration. The waves shivered through their feet, up their legs, rattling their brains, shaking them as if with titanic hammer blows.

  “Back!” Yarnall screamed. “For God’s sake, get back!”

  And the ice began to split.

  The fissure line was tiny, a delicate hairline that suddenly tore apart and became something hideous. Jagged sheets of ancient frozen water cracked and jutted like a miniature mountain range. Eviane rose clumsily to her feet and scrambled backward. She grabbed Max’s hand, but lost it as he rose up five feet on an angled ice cliff. She yelped and slid down on her backside, thumping into an abutment of ice.

  The environmental craziness began to spread.

  The sky crackled. The aurora borealis was temporarily obscured in a swirl of storm clouds and blinding sheets of lightning. The roar of the storm, the thunder melded with the sound of the ice just a few hundred yards away as the entire shelf split. A dark and mazelike form loomed up from beneath it.

  It must have been two or three kilometers across. The cry of the shattering, groaning ice was a terrible thing, rising above the wind, above the clash of lightning, filling earth and sky with a bone-jarring cacophony. The birth of a mountain range might have been like that. It overwhelmed the senses, eye and ear and sense of touch all overloaded to the point that the Adventurers couldn’t run, couldn’t hide, could do nothing but watch, mouths agape with shock.

  The mist and the hail grew thick enough to turn day to twilight. The hissing of a dark ocean somewhere deep beneath the ice roared as if regurgitating the last drop of caustic from a poisoned system.

  What burst into the air was impossible, and the Adventurers sprawled on the ruined ice floe gazed at it in amazement and horror.

  It was a maze of sorts, like a windowless alien city carved out of some black stone. The angles of it actually hurt Eviane’s head to examine.

  Max’s arms snaked around her from the side as she pressed palms against her temples. “Sweetheart,” he asked in alarm, “are you all right?”

  She couldn’t speak her answer, could only press tightly into his comforting warmth.

  The city’s skyline was jagged with crystal spires too thin to support themselves, that should have vibrated and shattered in the wind, and spans between towers that twisted like facets of a gem, viewed through the center of that perfect stone: the angles were there, the angles could be perceived, but not understood. They didn’t make any sense.

  Max and Orson helped each other down from one of the higher shelves; and looked at it in astonishment. “Like something out of an Escher painting,” Max muttered.

  Orson, for once, just shook his head, then looked around for the skinny redhead. “Kevin? What have we got here?”

  Kevin sighed. “Mythologically, I haven’t the foggiest fuck of a notion. Effects-wise, I think it’s a modified three-dimensional holographic binary decomposition of a Mandelbrot set.”

  “Kevin?” Orson said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Get a life, would you?”

  The other Adventurers had collected around them by now, gazing up at the impossible reality. “What is this?” Yarnall whispered. “Anybody read about anything like this in Eskimo lore?”

  There was no direct answer, but Kevin looked at the vast crystal forest of buildings and shook his head slowly. “Damned if it doesn’t remind me of something, but I can’t remember what.”

  “Eskimos…” Orson said. “But does it specifically have to be Eskimo mythology, or could it include mythology about Eskimos?”

  Trianna pulled her collar tighter. “Why? What’s the difference?”

  “I remember something from Lovecraft about a tribe of degenerate Eskimos who worshiped… worshiped… I’m sorry. It just won’t come.”

  Cautiously, they began to move forward.

  The ground, although uneven, had better traction here. The maze was only about three hundred meters away. The avenues between the blocks were slick with ocean damp, freezing dry, a glare of ice forming over everything even as they watched.

  Frankish Oliver was the first to step onto the new ground. He tested it with one foot, then looked back at them, and nodded his head in a sickly approval. “Let’s do it,” he said, thumping his war club against the ground. He might have been trying to convince himself that the street wouldn’t collapse under him.

  Max leaned close to Eviane. “This is weird,” he whispered. “Long time ago I saw a movie. Made in about 1910. Silent, black and white, flatfilm. Name of Nosferatu. None of the angles looked right. Everything looked wrong. This is like that, only worse.”

  “Worse?”

  He rubbed at his eyes. “Yeah. Not only can’t these angles work to hold buildings up, they shouldn’t even be angles.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Neither does what I’m seeing.”

  Snow Goose shushed them and pushed them back into the shadows. “Look!”

  Something came shambling by. Mercifully, it passed at a distance: an enormous black shape, an impossible cross between an ape and a spider, with long, hairy arms and the gait of a man who has had his limbs broken repeatedly and set at weird angles… and then can still move, with a strange and fluid coordination that set Eviane’s hindbrain aflame with panic.

  From past or future, she remembered this thing. With a dull, heavy certainty, she knew that some of her friends were going to die. The world began to darken, and the breath came hard in her throat. For a moment she lost it completely, and didn’t know where she was until Max was suddenly shaking her shoulders.

  “Eviane? Are you-”

  Charlene and Hippogryph and the others were looking at her with alarm.

  “I’m all right.”

  Snow Goose and Oliver examined her carefully, comforting her. Oliver consulted some sort of a monitoring device strapped to his wrist. Strange, she had never seen it before. He peered fixedly into her eyes. “Were you… ah, having visions?”

  “Maybe. That monster. It’s called… an Amartoq, isn’t it?”

  Oliver gave Snow Goose a sidelong glance, said something that Eviane couldn’t hear. “Yes,” Snow Goose said. “I was just about to tell you that.”

  “And if you get scratched by its nails, you die?”

  Snow Goose nodded.

  Eviane reached out for Robin Bowles and hugged him, gripped at his arm with pitiful strength. “Don’t! Don’t go in there! You’ll be murdered. Worse.”

  He pulled back. “What…”

  And she turned back to Snow Goose. “And you. You’re going to be killed by things. Things with no heads.”

  Snow Goose took a moment to collect herself, and then spoke calmly. “Eviane. We have to go forward. There are things to do, things to
learn. If we have to face monsters, then that’s the biz.” She smiled wistfully. “I don’t want to be here. I’d rather be back in the dorm eating pizza. But we have an ace. We have you, and you can see things. And you’ll tell us what you see, won’t you.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  Eviane nodded, numbly. She turned her head into Max’s arms, and sobbed.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  SECOND THOUGHTS

  By now, Max was totally confused.

  The woman he held in his arms wasn’t the warrior, or even the passionate creature it had been his pleasure to discover last night. It was someone new, almost a different personality, motivated now by a balance of knowledge and blind fear.

  The bizarrely twisted spires of the Cabal’s stronghold rose around them, ice sculptures that were a twisted wonderland of disturbing angles and facets.

  Hippogryph bent over them, concern in his round, flat face. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Max sighed. “I think she’s going to be all right. I think we’ve just got a certain amount of exhaustion here. It’s been a hard couple of days.”

  “Just another few hours… ” Hippogryph said, but he must have been wondering if she could hold together that long.

  Charlene Dula slid in next to them, and her long, long arms went around Eviane’s trembling shoulders. “Why don’t you go on for a while, and let us girls have some privacy?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  Max crept around the side of the ice wall, and looked down at the shambling Amartoq. It paced as if keeping guard.

  “Can’t we just go around it?” he whispered to Snow Goose.

  “I doubt it’s alone. This is the stronghold of the Cabal. It’s mobile. They must keep it moving around the Arctic Circle-”

  Johnny Welsh was suddenly behind them, his voice, for once, completely serious. “What for? Ah-they’re racking up traveling points! The further something magical travels…”

  “That must be it.”

  Hebert hefted his rifle. “We’ve got all of this wonderful Falling Angels gear. Aren’t we powerful enough to just take them?”