The Barsoom Project dp-2

by Larry Niven

  Snow Goose shook her head. “We have powerful artifacts more powerful than theirs. But they have the knowledge. if we go blundering in there, they could take our talismans from us and become twice the threat.”

  “What can we do?”

  Snow Goose slid down and sat on the ice. Her eyes scanned the misted horizon. “One last ceremony. One final spell. We must work the magic of our talismans, and call for their strength.”

  Max drew his collar up tighter around his ears. “Goddamn it’s cold!”

  “Yes,” Snow Goose said. “Ahk-lut may have misjudged. We don’t have much time.”

  She gathered them around in a circle. “We have been through much together. We have slain beasts and overcome fears, have walked through the land of the dead. We have much more power now than we did at the beginning of our trek. But our task now is the greatest of all. I’ve got to tell you that Eviane is probably right-not all of us will survive. But we had to try. This is our time.”

  Each Adventurer nodded or murmured assent, not exactly sure of what to think or expect, but willing to go along.

  “We must pray-if Sedna has grown healthy enough, she may be able to help us.”

  “Help us what?” Johnny Welsh asked.

  “Although you have totems, and magical objects, you are still too European. We must complete your transformation.”

  Again they sat in the sacred circle, this time buffeted by the wind. For a third time they smoked the sacred cigarettes.

  Max wondered what the old tobacco companies would have made of this, back when you could display tobacco ads on a hundred million TV sets and never face a misdemeanor rap. What an advertising campaign! Smoke Camels! The cigarette that saved the world! Warning: The Surgeon General is known to be a member of the Cabal.

  Once again the smoke rose up, ignoring the wind and the driving snow. The smoke puffs shaped a beautiful Eskimo woman without fingers. Sedna. Her hair was still unkempt, but there was more life to her now, and she smiled to them.

  He “heard” the words, but not through his ears. There was a general buzzing all over his body. The very wind seemed to be modulated by the sound, so that the gusts of snow seemed almost to be talking.

  “My children,” she said, and Max felt all gushy-warm at the sound of the words. “I know that you need me, and I am ready to give you what help I can.

  “Look! Look to the sea! My creatures gladly give their lives that this evil may come to an end.”

  Once again, the ice beneath their feet began to vibrate; but this was no quake. There was a drumbeat music to it, a rhythm that reminded Max of the music in the qasgiq. A rift formed in the ice not fifteen meters from where they stood.

  A black ocean swelled beneath that shattered ice, an ocean tossed by strange powers, an ocean that rolled and screamed, its spray dissolving before the driving wind.

  And out of the ocean crawled… a seal, but no ordinary seal. Its eyes were huge and black, and they were fixed on Orson. It humped across the land to him, shuddered and died as he reached to touch it. Its body deflated, muscle and bones dissolving like a melting ice sculpture.

  Orson, frozen with his hand outstretched, completed the motion and picked up a flaccid sealskin.

  Snow Goose said, “Put it on.”

  Orson lifted the spotted brown skin and wrapped it around his shoulders. Immediately, his expression changed. “Ooo! It’s… it’s so warm..

  As the seal’s transformation ran to completion, the sea began giving them more gifts. Max heard another splash to his right, and a gigantic walrus crashed up onto the land. It rolled onto its side and began to melt away. A killer whale thrashed painfully out of that black and restless ocean, humped across ten meters of ice, and died. While the Gamers shuffled toward the great, gross corpse the wind flensed the flesh, then etched away some of the bones, until only six naked, gleaming ribs protruded from the spine.

  The ribs were pointed, grooved… spearlike.

  Max touched one of them, ran his hands along the smooth, polished length. The other Adventurers gathered around, reached out and grabbed ribs, pulled and torqued until, one at a time, the ribs detached from the spine.

  Clubs. Spears. Each rib was carved, covered in runes. Max examined the side of the rib he had chosen. Pictoglyphs carved by no human hand (There he was, popping out of reality again. He sighed, and resigned himself to ride the illusion out to the end of the Game. If they put him away afterward and gave charge of his finances to Orson, well, he was riding with Eviane.)

  — depicting the marriage of earth and sky, hardy men and women battling the elements, the denizens of the sea sacrificing themselves that frail humans might live.

  Trianna had reached the whale too late to get a spear, and was kicking at the spine in irritation. Max handed her his and examined the walrus.

  Already the beast was half etched away. Its intact eyes gleamed at him blackly. Also intact was an enormous, obtrusive erection. Must be mating season, Max thought.

  Eviane was beside him, and her eyes flashed from the walrus to Max and back again. Max began to blush.

  “ Usik,” she said flatly.

  “What? Here in front of everyone?”

  “The genital bone. It’s magic…” Her voice was far away.

  The walrus was gone by now; only the one bone remained lying on the ground. He hefted it. A war club! And a magical one. He wondered if the Eskimos had ascribed any noncombative, more intimate powers to one who wielded such a mighty tool…

  “No. Don’t take it.” Eviane pulled at his arm. The first note of a belly laugh emerged like a dog’s bark; Max throttled the rest. She didn’t notice. “If you do, you’ll die.”

  “What?”

  “I… saw someone…” Her eyes were getting that unfocused look again.

  “Dear, it’s war.”

  She stared up at him. Her red hair flagged in the wind. Ice frosted the collar of her coat. She looked absurdly like the archetypical little match girl. She shuddered. “I don’t want to lose you,” she whispered. “I’ve lost too much.” She leaned forward into his arms.

  What in the hell do you say?

  There was a pause. All weapons were checked. There were rifles and a few rounds of ammunition. Hippogryph still carried his flintlock. The rest of the tools-knives, clubs, spears-were all traditional. These were checked and made ready.

  Yarnall raised his hand. “If none of you mind, I’ll take the lead.” He shrugged. “I’ve been on borrowed time here anyway. if anyone gets killed, let it be me.”

  “I don’t know-”

  “Listen.” Yarnall was grinning broadly through two days of stubble. His eyes squinted against the driving snow. “I got through the full day! I beat the Implementor! The only thing that I ask from you is that when you nail those bastards, do it good. Do it solid.”

  Robin Bowles nodded soberly, black beard, black hair caked with ice until he looked like a mountain man. “All right.”

  In a thin line they entered the maze of ancient ice.

  Yarnall held up a hand to bring them to a halt. Frankish Oliver came up tight behind him, and they conferred. Max couldn’t hear. Then Yarnall turned.

  “Let’s break into teams. I want one force to cross this open space, while the other team circles around to approach from the other side. A pincers. What do you think?”

  Johnny Welsh raised his hand. “Listen, everybody. I’d like a chance to lead. I’m just a funny fat man, but if we’re coming down to the line… I’d like to be some use. There may not be another chance. If you need a decoy, what the hell-I’ve always been an odd duck.”

  Kevin, a rifle in one hand and a spear in the other, raised a skinny arm. The skin from the deflated corpse of a sea lion made him look a little less like a walking skeleton. “Me too. First group.”

  “Any other volunteers?” There were, and the group split into halves. Max moved forward to join the first group. Eviane hung back, pulled at his hand imploringly.

  There was work to do,
Max thought, squeezing Eviane’s small hand. Dangerous work, but they were heroes all.

  Heroes all.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  THE MAZE

  Max’s breath sounded rough in his throat. He was too aware of his hurts. Muscles hurt everywhere… as if he’d been in a match, a rough match against an inept and overpowered opponent, a match that had lasted for days.

  He was worried about Eviane. Getting into a part-that he could understand. It came to him now that he had never seen her leave it.

  How were the others doing?

  Kevin was doing fine. The kid had seemed all sticks and parchment a few days before. Now he was whalebone and rawhide. The wind blew snow into his thin face, fluttered the furred edges of his parka, and he barely seemed to notice. Kevin had taken the lead in their column.

  The two groups of Adventurers moved in a modified pincer movement through the tumbled blocks of the city. The oddly angled blocks rose twenty stories tall. At first Max had thought that they were composed of ice. Now he saw that they were stone, ancient blocks of stone sheathed in ice, carved with hieroglyphs unlike anything he had ever seen.

  Kevin clutched his war club and sidled up to the edge of an abutment, poking the club out and waving it gently as if trying to draw sniper fire. Nothing.

  He looked back at them, sugarcube teeth showing in a wide smile. He was nervous, but trying not to show it.

  Just a Game, right?

  Right.

  They peered out across the space separating them from the central citadel.

  Most of the chunks of wreckage seemed to have been abandoned ages before. He guessed that the ice on the blocks was as layered as a cross-cut redwood. Lights showed in a central cornplex of buildings. Somebody lived there, or something. The presence of life in the midst of this black desolation was no comfort at all.

  Behind him, Eviane was wheezing. She was a little better than she had been a half-hour before, no longer paralyzed with fear, but she was still baggage.

  There was movement in the ruins.

  The thing that shambled through the ruins was man-shaped, but had no head. It was huge. It reminded Max of one of the Goons in an old Popeye cartoon. It stumbled through the ruins making odd sniffing sounds, poking in the shadows. It wasn’t exactly alert, but it was tenacious, consistent. It kept moving constantly.

  But without a head-?

  There was another movement in the plaza. A door on the far side opened, and a line of human beings trudged out. They were naked. They walked as if they were asleep.

  Robin Bowles asked Kevin for his binoculars. He focused them through the snow on the line of slow marchers.

  He grunted in surprise.

  “What is it?” Kevin asked.

  Bowles dropped back down into the snow beside him. “It looks like Mik-luk. He worked for me at the trading post.”

  “Why is he walking naked in this cold?”

  “Magic?” Bowles rubbed snow out of his beard. “Maybe the Cabal has some kind of spell on him. If they do, and I can get him to recognize me, it could be the break we’re looking for.”

  The six of them thought for a minute. Yarnall looked doubtful. “On the other hand, it could get you very killed.”

  “If I don’t go down there and try to save him, I’m betraying our friendship.” He hefted his whale rib. “I have this. Sedna wouldn’t have given ‘em to us if they wouldn’t do the job.”

  “Then we all go,” Yarnall said.

  Eviane would meet nobody’s eyes. She shuddered.

  Bowles shook his head. “No. No need to risk everyone. The rest of the team is moving around from the other side. Someone has to be here to tell them what happened, just in case.”

  “Well, then, what about two of us?” Max asked. “Me and Yarnall.”

  Bowles considered it for a moment, then nodded. “All right.”

  Yarnall turned to Ollie. “Trade you.” He exchanged his war club for Ollie’s rifle. He hefted it lovingly, sighted along the barrel. “That will give us one modern weapon and two traditional ones. That’s a decent spread.”

  Eviane clung to Max’s arm. “Max-”

  “Have you had another premonition?” He was only half-kidding.

  She closed her eyes, and he saw her eyes moving under the closed lids, searching for visions. “No. No, but it comes and goes, Max. I don’t know-”

  If she could play for the hidden cameras, so could he. “Listen, Eviane,” he said. Damn, he could almost hear the music swelling in the background. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s-”

  His miserable attempt at humor was wasted on her. Her eyes overflowed with genuine tears, and she pulled herself against his chest and sobbed. He looked beyond her to brother Orson, who shrugged.

  Max pushed her out to arm’s length. “Now hear this. You knew that all of us might die on this trip. We all understood that. I’m just playing out the hand as dealt.”

  She nodded dully.

  Max shucked his pack. He peeked over the wall.

  The wind had died down a bit. The line of naked brown bodies was still trudging along, overseen by the one headless creature. Its long arms lashed at them, urged them one at a time into a low stone-slab building on the far side of the clearing. From that building, flush against the jagged rise of cliff, there issued forth irregular, horrifying screams.

  The line moved forward again. Mik-luk was third in line at the door.

  Carefully, cautiously, Yarnall, Robin Bowles, and Max moved out from their hiding places, covering each other as best they could.

  (How exactly do you “cover” someone with a walrus prick? The usik wasn’t a ray gun! Max’s rising sense of the absurd would drown him if he wasn’t careful.)

  Max ran a modified zig-zag pattern through the ruins. He stopped, heaving for breath. Max turned and ran his fingers over one of the blocks. Hard, cold, carved. The layers of ice prevented his fingers from actually touching the carving. He saw glyphs and pictographs portraying strangely shaped creatures, some of which looked like the result of an obscene, and surely fatal, mating of human and pachyderm.

  They were oddly hypnotic. He wanted to spend more time studying them, but a whisper from across the path pulled him back to his mission.

  Yarnall motioned with his war club. Bowles had moved on ahead, maneuvering to a piece of masonry within ten yards of the line of naked Eskimos.

  Max was twenty yards away. From here the men and women appeared listless; they stood as if in a deep trance or drugged state. Their hair fluttered in the wind, and they stared straight ahead toward the low opening.

  He could see a little into the room now. There was no door, just an arch formed by stone slabs that seemed almost haphazardly thrown about, by earthquake or tidal wave or long ages under water. Certainly, no living force could move blocks so massive…?

  Deep within the recesses of the alcove, lights flickered and shapes moved. When the wind ceased howling for even a few moments, he heard screams that turned his stomach.

  Bowles was right. No one could leave a friend to such ministrations, regardless of the risk.

  They were heroes!

  He checked both sides and joined Yarnall. Yarnall slapped him on the shoulder and, crouching, ran up to join Bowles.

  Bowles was flattened out against the wall… heh. Well, the stout actor was certainly trying to flatten himself. Watching, waiting. He showed Max a sickly smile. Max read fear and hope and a touch of genuine heroism in that smile. Bowles motioned Yarnall over to the other side of the divide. Both took aim at the headless thing And it turned to face them. Max almost screamed.

  It was brownish, with skin that folded over and over itself like an old overcoat, cracked and blistered, moving like sheaths of heavy leather. It had no head, but it had a face. The face was set into its belly. It was heavy and bovine, leaden-jowled, with bright little eyes the shape and size of almonds.

  It was utterly evil, almost an abstraction of malevolence. Slits for eyes, and a mouth that loo
ked like the teeth within it had chewed their way to the surface, leaving the lips raw and tattered, the incisors sharp and encrusted with red and brown filth.

  It was the face of a Yeti, and it snarled at them, and opened its mouth for a scream Bowles threw his spear. It missed and clattered on the far side.

  Yarnall began firing.

  The first two shots seemed to have no effect at all. But the third drove the beast to its knees. The fourth knocked its bowed legs from beneath it. It flopped back onto its massive, gnarled shoulders.

  Bowles motioned them back, and dashed out, and pulled one of the naked men out of the line. The others stood cowed, afraid to move, or too numb from cold…

  Or something.

  But the instant that Bowles grabbed Mik-luk, the Eskimo grabbed him back. His mouth opened hugely. In less than a second it had expanded to the size of a kitchen oven. He screamed like a dying wind.

  Bowles’s scream was quite a lot louder as he tried to tear himself loose. Max started out from his hiding place, and saw shadows emerging from the depths of those odd, disquieting angles.

  Bowles screamed, “Get back! Get back! He’s already-”

  That was all that he had time to say before the others were on him, all of the naked, frozen men. Bowles went down, their nails and teeth savaging him.

  A second Amartoq stepped out in front of Yarnall. The Guardsman was too close to get his rifle up. The torn, lipless mouth set in its stomach-face snarled, and it wrenched the rifle from his hands and bent it into a “U” shape. Yarnall was frozen for a moment, and only Bowles’s screams roused him from his shock.

  From Bowles they heard a last inarticulate cry as the light within the alcove brightened, and Robin Bowles was dragged inside.

  Yarnall scrambled back, tripped and fell. Max looked at the Guardsman’s face. The fear there was not an act. The sight of the beast advancing on him was as intimidating as anything that Max could imagine, though by now his imagination had turned wild and crazy.

  But Max was in motion, moving forward, swinging the usik. He brought it down with a thump, squarely between the monstrous shoulders.