The Barsoom Project dp-2

by Larry Niven

  Snow Goose looked doubtful. “Never work… mmm. Unless we split their attention?”

  Max was warming to it now. “Right-I’ll buy that. Now listen. Who was it that got the sealskin?”

  Charlene raised a nervous hand. “Me.”

  “White seal against the snow. Hard to see, right? Maybe hard to sense, too?”

  Snow Goose was hiding a grin. “It sounds plausible. What are you thinking?”

  “We split into three teams. Two of the teams provide distraction, while the third sneaks into the temple, spearheaded by Charlene under the camouflage of the sealskin. Do you really think your plan can work, Orson?”

  “Don’t see why not,” he said.

  “The Gods have looked upon the play with favor,” Snow Goose added. She need not describe the conversation that she’d heard from Gaming Central.

  Wait a minute! That wasn’t in the original scenario! They’re supposed to retreat, find that beached Eskimo canoe, and the dynamite!

  Well, Welles had chuckled, they came up with another approach. Can we handle it?

  Well…

  More laughter.

  Hell, boss, is we Dreams ‘R’ Us or ain’t we?

  Then let’s give it a shot.

  Max looked back at Trianna and Orson, shushed them and pushed them back into the shadow.

  They stood on a narrow ridge up around the lip of the valley.

  Something was scuttling around the other side of the trail, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to meet it without a formal introduction. A tickle of fear stirred in the depths of his stomach. There was only one thing to do, and that was to do what a man had to do.

  Max squared his shoulders, inhaled deeply, and said: “Johnny-you want to lead for a while?”

  Johnny Welsh’s eyes flicked to him and away, back to where a long, horny, hairy leg was coming around the corner.

  Earlier, looking up toward the ridge they’d have to reach, they’d seen something that might have been an immense spider, a cross between a daddy longlegs and a tarantula. This could be its leg. There was a sharp, molded tusk fixed to its ankle, anchored by rivets in the chitin.

  A second leg came probing, armed with a second tusk. Max was reminded of the fighting spikes mounted on the collars of pit bulls, back before the dogs were bred into animals so vicious they would no longer mate or nurse their young.

  The spider’s torso emerged, six feet up.

  It scuttled backward for a moment, as surprised to see them as they were to see the spider. Its black eyes were multifaceted, and slightly reflective. Max saw his own face in the creature’s orbs, distorted with shock and fear. Trianna whispered, “Why didn’t you chop it?”

  Max winced. “I froze up.”

  The creature opened its mouth, revealing a black, red-rimmed cavity. It hissed, and charged.

  This was like no spider Max had ever studied in biology. Each of its legs seemed capable of bending in either direction. It flickered those leg spikes with disturbing speed.

  The ledge was narrow, and Max backpedaled.

  Behind him, Trianna said, “There’s a wider spot back about fifteen meters.”

  “Get to it!” He started backing up. He tripped over his feet and fell heavily. “Oh, shit!”

  A rifle fired behind him. He glanced back to see Trianna huddled on all fours to give Johnny his chance. Johnny, with carbine to shoulder, was firing into the thing as it advanced.

  It slowed, licking at the blood, and came on.

  Eviane watched Hippogryph for a signal. Somehow what they were doing, sneaking around to split the attention of the Cabal, seemed vaguely wrong.

  They had found a boat, with provisions and dynamite. The canoe was shattered and bloodstained, and…

  She rubbed her hands against her temples.

  There was a fragment of a human foot in the canoe, as if something had risen from the depths and devoured the occupants. But they weren’t supposed to discharge the satellite. They were supposed to find the boat, and the dynamite, and blow up…

  That was a different Game.

  Game?

  She smiled to herself, even as the confusion threatened to drive her batshit.

  Game?

  How could all of this be a Game?

  And yet…

  And yet… hadn’t she seen light shining through one of those monsters? Or a war club sailing through one of them? Yet they crushed physical objects. Or seemed to…

  Could the whole thing be some kind of monstrous joke?

  But why? Who had the answers? Max, dear Max had tried to tell her over and over that it was only a Game…

  She watched Hippogryph, she looked at Ollie. Damned if it didn’t look like Ollie was having fun. He had stuck flares into his bandoleer now. It looked like an editorial cartoon of a Libertarian revolutionary.

  Hippogryph (and what kind of a name is that?) wasn’t having fun. He was helping them pick their way through a maze of shattered masonry, and doing a fairly good, serious job of it. He was tired, though.

  The masonry broke into a wider area here, as if whatever forces had destroyed this island city had found nothing to attack in this one spot. She looked across it. Again, it looked like the huge hieroglyph she had seen from the top of the ridge.

  Hippogryph turned to them. “This might not be a bad place to set off the flares. Right out in the middle, there, and then hightail it back to the ruins as soon as anything shows. I think that we can fight a delaying action.”

  Ollie nodded. “That sounds good to me.”

  Eviane stared at Ollie. Had she seen his face before? Or Hippogryph’s? There was something familiar…

  “Eviane? Sound reasonable?”

  “Sure. Let’s do it.”

  They stared out across the plain. Eviane was watching the sky. Things moved in the shadows, and they hunched close to the ground, suddenly very aware of their vulnerability.

  “Ah-maybe this wasn’t a great idea…”

  “The idea,” Ollie reminded him, “was to get the Cabal’s attention-”

  “Preferably with minimal tissue damage.”

  “-not necessarily to survive.”

  “Nobody here but us chickens.”

  Ollie and Hippogryph both had flare grenades. While they prepared to ignite them, Eviane watched the shadows.

  Everything was so dizzying. So familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It was making her groggy.

  Who was Michelle?

  “All right, we’re ready here.” They had lashed eight stubby silver flare cylinders together into two bundles of four, and propped them up with snow. The wind that blew from over the great ridge of the plateau herded an eerie howling sound before it.

  Ghost riders in the sky…

  Ollie twisted the fuse ring on his grenade bundle. With a soft pop and a burst of incandescently white light, it ignited.

  The glow was brighter than the eye could comfortably tolerate. Shielding her face barely helped.

  “Come on!” Hippogryph yelled, as he triggered his own. He scampered back for the shelter of the ruins.

  She ran as fast as she could, but back over her shoulder she saw the magnesium flares erupting into the sky, shooting fire up and up.

  Damned if that wouldn’t attract attention! Now what they had to do was- They hadn’t quite reached the edge of the ruins when they saw the first stirrings of movement within. Four of the Amartoqs moved out of the maze, advancing, carrying clubs and spears.

  They had attracted attention, all right. Too much, too soon.

  Snow Goose saw the false dawn as the first flare went off to what she assumed was the East. She waited for a few moments. According to their timetable, the second batch of flares should be going off simultaneously, but when a minute passed and nothing happened, she could only figure that something had gone wrong.

  So Max and his bunch had encountered some obstacles.

  Tsk-tsk. How very unfortunate. Ah, well, best not to worry about one’s compatriots fighting for their live
s against the ghastly minions of the Cabal. Best to concentrate on the job ahead.

  Charlene had taken point. Orson stayed just behind her, moving veritably on tippy-toe despite his size.

  They had reached the crumbled door of the Cabal’s sanctum. They hid behind one of the enormous slabs of fallen rock, watching. Waiting. Yarnall had crawled down from the defile and was poised on the temple’s ruined stone roof. Goggles in place, he was ready to warn them of danger.

  From the temple mouth came three figures, two male and one female. They were naked. They faced into the driving, frigid wind as if standing on a beach at Maui.

  And as the Adventurers watched, the figures began to flow, changing, shifting shape and color. First they hunched down onto all fours, and then the limbs themselves lengthened and shifted, flowing, flowing. Feathers, fangs, and claws sprouted. Where three human beings had stood, three Wolfalcons nodded to each other and sprang howling into the air. Rapid strokes of mammoth wings lifted them up, up toward the crags and away.

  “This is the best chance we’re going to get,” Snow Goose said. “Some of them are gone, the rest are in deep meditation. Let’s move it, troops.”

  Charlene wrapped the seal fur around her shoulders, and…

  She began to fade. Her outer clothing seemed to evaporate, and for an instant she stood, unembarrassed, in pale nakedness. Then the skin itself became translucent, and the internal organs pulsed and played against the light.

  Charlene’s organs slipped away into invisibility, leaving bones. The bones faded. There was just the slightest waver of displacement in the air where Charlene had been, and a ghostly grin, and the sound of a voice delighted beyond all belief. “Oh boy oboy,” she laughed, clapping her hands delightedly. “This is great. Have they got a home model?”

  “Ahem,” Snow Goose reprimanded. “Let’s finish saving the world, shall we?”

  Charlene entered the temple mouth, with Yarnall right behind. The hallway was cracked and warped by the elements, a lustrous ivory finish obscured by dust and cracked by the elements.

  Orson watched the ground. Charlene’s footprints appeared with little powdery puffs.

  Something with heavy feet moved up ahead, and they flattened against the wall, trying to control their breathing.

  They saw the figure now: squatly Mongolian, with beetled brows and heavy, dark skin. His-whoops! Charlene had missed the heavy sagging breasts, the masses of wrinkled skin that were the closest this creature came to secondary sexual characteristics. The bovine nose sniffed at the air, as if trying to scent them.

  Charlene’s knife rose and fell, and the troglodyte fell to her knees, hands reaching helplessly back for the blade. She pitched face-forward into the dust, twitched and was still.

  Orson rolled her over, patted her down.

  “Come on,” Charlene whispered. In the indirect light she was just a bare shimmering. “We’ve got to get going.”

  Orson nodded and got Yarnall to help him roll the body over to the side. The invisible Charlene continued down the corridor.

  Ahead was a chamber of some kind. Torches glowed within. Charlene’s ghostly hand appeared, and motioned them to come closer.

  Snow Goose was the last of them to reach the edge of the doorway.

  The tunnel opened up into a larger chamber, with a ruined, cracked ceiling fifteen feet high. At the far end perched a fat Mongol idol perhaps twice the size of a human being. It might have been gold and silver crusted with jewels, but all was scummed with a thick coat of dust. Its thick lips curled in silent, mocking laughter.

  A fire roared at its feet. In front of the fire, Robin Bowles’s body lay stretched on a rack, partially dissected. In a semicircle around Bowles sat six men and women.

  In the center of the temple, shimmering with such force that a preternatural thrill tickled Charlene’s spine, was the satellite.

  Once it might have been a shining testimonial to the creative powers of the industrial Soviet Empire. Now it was little more than an irregularly shaped heap of slag, an iron-cored meteorite, barely recognizable as something that had been machine-tooled, filled with the most delicate and expensive mechanisms of an advanced culture.

  And yet…

  Something of the device’s original intent still remained in that heap of slag. What had it been? A surveillance device? A targeting system? Had it watched the weather, or found locations and bearings for vulnerable human targets? Had this twisted piece of blackened metal been friend or foe, or, like so many creations of the human mind and hand, had it been merely neutral, reporting back to its masters so that they could make decisions of life and death?

  Now it was an object of power. It had been used to throw the entire balance of the world out of control. It controlled the raven, controlled the sun, controlled the fate of millions, billions, because it was the balancing point for a world of technology and magic.

  Now was a moment of truth, of surpassing importance, and it was all up to them.

  Charlene tiptoed closer to the device, carrying the backpacks. Charlene blended into the shadows. She was more a perfect reflection of her surroundings than a truly invisible woman. If she stood still, it was almost impossible to see her. One noted a bit of shimmering, perhaps a slight disturbance in the air. But at the core of her image almost nothing could be seen. At the outer edges there was a bit more. And if you knew exactly where to look, you could see the invaluable pile of backpacks, the magical Falling Angel material-the hope of mankind.

  The ranks of the angakoks had been thinned. Two women, four men. They were young, perhaps surprisingly so, but withered and pocked and diseased.

  One was taller, broader than the others. His voice rose louder, rang with power. His eyes were wide open but blind, corneas scarred and white.

  Ahk-lut.

  Orson Sands waved at Charlene to move forward.

  Robin Bowles, dead but locked into necromantic spells, stirred, and turned to look at Charlene.

  Charlene didn’t, couldn’t look at Robin. Through her peripheral vision, she had an impression of enormous damage to his central body, of skin peeled away and organs laid out or cast upon the fire, but still he was conscious.

  He drooled from the corner of his mouth, but his eyes focused on Charlene. From his newfound wisdom, the perspective of death, the sealskin’s magic deceived him not a bit.

  Charlene paused for a minute, and locked eyes with Robin.

  His eyes blazed.

  He winked.

  Her path took her close enough to Ahk-lut that he could have reached out and grabbed her foot. The blind eyes looked on infinity. Lost in trance and darkness, he sensed nothing.

  The firelight cast their shadows against the wall, wild and irregular, as if they were standing and dancing rather than sitting still.

  In fact…

  The shadows were more active, more alive than the sitting figures. They were becoming less and less the shadows of human beings, or of anything normal and sane, and more and more the outlines of horrible things, nightmare things. It was as if that strange flame knew the true shapes of its master’s souls and illuminated that reality, rather than their mere fleshly disguises.

  Quashing a nervous flutter, Charlene edged closer to the satellite.

  She could have reached out and touched it now. But dared not.

  It’s only a Game.

  Then why did the hairs on the back of her neck stand up the way they did? Whence came this deep, gut-wrenching fear? Why did the sight of the Cabal, six men and women with ravaged complexions and dead, staring eyes, disturb her as it did?

  If she didn’t get her mind back on track, she’d never get through this. Charlene unfolded the first of the backpacks and laid it across the satellite.

  Orson had suggested it. Magical objects in this world, in a way, seem to act like storage batteries. They store up power, absorb power by traveling, like an electric motor rotating through lines of magnetic force. They are discharged through the spells or circumstances dictat
ed by tradition. Batteries.

  Now, that’s the model that we want to look at. If this thing has traveled around the world thousands of times, then it is a supercharged battery.

  And how the hell does that help us? Max was partly irritated, partly fascinated. Orson could do that to him.

  A battery can be discharged, Orson said. If you lay a conductor across the poles, you can force the battery to give up its power more quickly than the manufacturer ever intended…

  Charlene unfolded the backpacks carefully, with no idea how things were going to happen once the first step was taken. It could be spectacular, it might be lethal.

  Five backpacks, reinforced at the edges with Falling Angel cable, single crystal carbon fibers in an epoxy matrix. Almost unbreakable. One after the other, the backpacks landed on the satellite.

  At first there was no change. Then the satellite began to hum, and the shadows ceased to writhe in their obscene dance.

  But the backpacks… the backpacks began to smolder. It was as if the magic changed forms, as if the reinforcing filaments in the backpacks were conducting more power than they could safely hold. They began to sputter and smoke.

  The Cabalists began to rouse, as from a long, slow dream. Ahk-lut’s scarred eyes began to shift blindly. Charlene backed out of the cave. Now the backpacks were melting, actually changing shape, and glowed as if with heat.

  The glow shifted and flared with color, like a miniature aurora borealis. Additional small fires raced across the hidden wires within the fabric.

  The Cabalists slowly, oh, so slowly began to rouse from their trances. Orson stood, unable to move for a moment; then stepped forward and raised his ivory spear.

  Snow Goose caught his arm. “No,” she whispered fiercely. “You wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  He looked back at them regretfully. Ahk-lut seemed so helpless, so ready for a killing stroke. He fought with himself, and then agreed. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They turned and bolted. Behind them the satellite’s hum grew chillingly loud.

  An Amartoq with vast sloping shoulders emerged from the shadows, shuffling in a clumsily hurried gait. Orson jabbed with his spear. The creatures batted it aside almost nonchalantly. It reached out for Orson with blackened claws, and the invisible Charlene struck.