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  The Barsoom Project

  ( Dream Park - 2 )

  Larry Niven

  Larry Niven

  The Barsoom Project

  Cast of characters and glossary

  Falling Angel

  RICHARD ARBENZ: Ambassador from Falling Angel; Charlene Dula’s maternal uncle.

  Dream Park

  MARTY BOBBICK: Griffin’s assistant. Plays as Hippogryph.

  ARTHUR COWLES: Founder of Dream Park.

  ALEX GRIFFIN: Security Chief of Dream Park.

  THADEUS HARMONY: Dream Park Director of Operations.

  MITCH HASAGAWA: Dream Park Security.

  TOMISUBURO IZUML Dream Park R and D tech.

  CALVIN IZUMI: Brother of Tom, deceased.

  SANDY KHRESLA: Head of Dream Park Maintenance Division.

  CARY McGIWON: Alex Griffin’s new assistant.

  MILLICENT SUMMERS: Formerly Griffin’s secretary. Now an executive in the Department of Financial Affairs.

  DOCTOR VAIL: Dream Park psychologist.

  DWIGHT WELLES: Senior computer tech for Dream Park; Game Master for the altered Fimbulwinter Game.

  Gamers

  ROBIN BOWLES: Professional actor. Actor in the Fimbulwinter Game. Talisman: caribou’s ear, for hearing.

  CHARLENE DULA: Gamer from the zero-grav habitat Falling Angel, and friend to Michelle Sturgeon. Talisman: a swatch of white fur, arctic seal, for invisibility.

  EVIANE alias MICHELLE RIVERS alias MICHELLE STURGEON: Veteran of the first Fimbulwinter Game. Plays most of the game as a tornrait. Talisman: semi-automatic rifle.

  FRANCIS HEBERT: Marine, Major in the reserves. AVRAM HENDERSON: Gamer

  MAZIE HENDERSON: Gamer.

  OLLIE NORLISS alias FRANKISH OLIVER: Professional Gamer and MD.

  MARTIN QATERLIARAQ alias MARTIN THE ARCTIC FOX: Sorcerer or angakok among the Inuit. Actor in the Fimbulwinter Game.

  GWEN RYDER alias CANDICE alias KANGUQ alias SNOW GOOSE: Professional actress. Married to Ollie Norliss.

  MAX SANDS: Gamer Professional wrestler under the name Mr. Mountain. Talisman: owl claw, for strength.

  ORSON SANDS: Max Sands’s brother Gamer.

  TRIANNA STITH-WOOD: Professional chef.

  KEVIN TITUS: Computer programmer and computer gamer Talisman: a crumpled skin crusted with black soot, for strength. “Soot is stronger than fire.

  JOHNNY WELSH: Gamer; professional comedian.

  YARNALL alias THE NATIONAL GUARDSMAN: Dream Park actor

  Others

  ANDREW CHALA: Pan-African ambassador.

  KAREEM FEKESH: Industrialist, suspected supporter of UMAF

  ROBERT J. FLAHERTY: Producer of Nanook of the North, 1922.

  TOBY LEE HARLOW JUNIOR: Alias of the person who disrupted the first Fimbulwinter Game.

  LOPEZES: Legendary Game Masters, now semiretired.

  TONY McWHIRTER: Computer whiz, incarcerated for industrial espionage against Cowles Industries.

  MADELEINE: Mystery woman; a possible link to Kareem Fekesh.

  RAZUL: Libyan ambassador

  Glossary

  AHK-LUT: Leader of the Cabal; son of Martin Qaterliaraq, brother of Snow Goose.

  AMARTOQ: A headless troll.

  ANANSI: A space shuttle, the object of a terrorist attack some years earlier

  ANGAKOK: Sorcerer

  BRANTA CANADENSIS alias Tuutangayak alias Canadian Snow Goose.

  THE CABAL: The clique of evil sorcerers.

  COWLES INDUSTRIES: The parent company of Dream Park

  COWLES MODULAR COMMUNITY: Living quarters for Dream Park employees.

  FALLING ANGEL ENTERPRISES: Industrial nation-state, off-Earth.

  FAT RIPPER SPECIALS: Games modified for the reeducation of substance abusers.

  HOLY FIRE: Terrorist organization, precursor to the UMAF

  INTELCORP: The company formed by the partnership of General Electric and Falling Angel Enterprises.

  INTERNATIONAL FANTASY GAMING SOCIETY: The governing body supervising the world of Adventure Gaming.

  KOGUKHPUK: The Burrowing Mammoth.

  LEVIATHAN IV: Mining rig proposed for use in terra-forming Mars.

  MARK CARD: A widely accepted inter-Union credit card.

  OFFICIAL IFGS KAMA SUTRA: A myth, a mere rumor. It doesn’t exist. Forget it. Trust us.

  PAIJA: Giant female demon.

  PEWITU: Taboos.

  PHANTOM FEAST: A Dream Park diet restaurant.

  RAVEN: Progenerative force in Inuit mythology.

  SEDNA: Goddess of the sea and of the sea’s life.

  SEELUMKADCHLUK: Where the sky meets the sea; the barrier between reality and the Inuit spiritual world.

  TERICHIK: A gigantic caterpillar-like monster; the spirit form of Ahk-lut.

  TIN-MI-UK-PUKS, or THUNDERBIRDS: Fabulous Roc-like creatures.

  TORNGARSOAK: Sedna’s lover, Lord of the Hunt.

  TORNRAIT: Ghost who serves an angakok, usually as a source of information.

  UNITED MOSLEM ACTIVIST FRONT or UMAF: A radical mideastem terrorist organization.

  USIK: A weapon crafted from the pubic bone of a walrus.

  WINIGO: Inuit Yeti.

  WOLFALCONS: Hybrid creatures, half wolf, half giant bird of prey.

  PROLOGUE

  Like a raging mountain, the Terichik rose screaming from a frozen, nightdark sea. Its many-sectioned, grotesquely wormlike body reared up; tons of water and ice thundered into the ocean with a howl like the death of worlds. The black night swirled wind-whipped snow through mist that tasted of salt. The Terichik’s mouth gaped cavernously. Endless rows of serrated teeth gleamed as it shrieked its mindless wrath. Its breath was a cold and fetid wind.

  The humans beneath it were warrior and wizard, princess and commoner. They were frail meat in the Terichik’s path, brittle fleshly twigs tumbled in an angry storm. They scrambled for safety, ran back onto land, away from the sea. They fled past the wreckage of the shattered Inuit village: rows of crushed houses, a great stone lodge with its roof stove in, boat hulls splintered and scattered like insect husks.

  Bulwar was the first Adventurer to die, and he died well. He was the greatest warrior among them, but foolish to think that his enchanted usik, the pubic bone of the sacred walrus, could stand against the Terichik. Even faced by a beast to dwarf ten killer whales, Bulwar roared defiance and sprang forward. His ice-caked black beard flagged in the frigid air. His mightily thewed arms coiled beneath the bear furs that lent him strength and courage. Bulwar had once been an ordinary man, a “systems analyst” in the white man’s world. Here where the heavens met the earth, he was a great warrior, a great force for good.

  His magic, his courage, his strength were not enough. The Terichik crushed him, savaged his body with fanged cilia. His screams echoed in their heads long after his body had vanished into its gaping maw.

  The humans retreated. There were twelve now, people of the tundras and the people from the white world beyond.

  They ran until the sound of rifle shots split their screams. Two more of their number fell, trapped in a withering crossfire.

  Agile and lithe, beautiful Eviane rolled to safety behind an abandoned boathouse. Even as she hit the ground, she unslung the automatic rifle from her back and braced the butt against her shoulder.

  She was a woman of flaming red hair and sparkling green eyes. Her mouth was generously wide, quick to laughter or rage. Now it was flattened into a fighting grimace cold enough to freeze the stars in the sky.

  She peered along the rifle barrel and then glanced back over her shoulder. Her companions were holding the Terichik at bay. The sky shimmered with power, enchanted flame searing away the clouds. It was Eviane’s task to break the back of the
ambush, to send the minions of the Cabal howling back into the wastes.

  The Terichik rose to blot out the moon and stars. Its screams shook the earth. Eviane’s stomach boiled acid with fear.

  Now was not the moment to shirk! Now was the time to concentrate, to bring her wit and skill to bear.

  She sighted through the rifle scope. Through the driving snow, a black-speckled ridge of ice and rock leapt into relief. Somewhere behind it were the men who held them pinned and vulnerable to the awesome Terichik.

  Her scope’s crosshairs trisected a shadowed forehead. Eviane grinned: one of the Cabal’s minions was about to join his ancestors. The painted face, the glowing eyes were almost an invitation.

  She inhaled deeply, held that breath, and squeezed the trigger.

  The rifle jittered against her shoulder. Snow sprayed to the Cabalist’s left. He jumped in surprise. Before he could run she fired a second time. He threw his arms around his chest; his mouth gaped wide. Recoil pulled Eviane’s gun barrel upward. The Cabalist’s head exploded.

  Eviane was shocked. Tickled in an odd way, but shocked. Strange. Usually you just get the flash of red. This time they’re using prosthetic makeup effects. Kinda gag-out, but Wow!

  Confusion reigned on the far side of the ridge, and the attack, the ambush, was breaking. It had failed! The enemy was in rout! Eviane came to her feet, howling victory, and her companions rose with her. Brandishing guns and spears they raced across the frozen ground. The night blizzard’s shrieks matched their own.

  Another Cabalist rose, his hands raised to the air in the sign of surrender.

  Take no prisoners! She laughed giddily, and fired from the hip. The Cabalist doubled over, holding his stomach. He yelled something, something that seemed to take great effort to say, but the wind was too loud to make out the words. His face was twisted with pain.

  Eviane fired again, and his body straightened out as if hit under the chin with a baseball bat. Twisting, he crumpled to the ground.

  Eviane walked to her first target, moving more slowly now. She stared down at the body.

  The wind’s whistle was dying. The flakes of ice were settling to the ground. The air was warming, but she shook.

  She bent down, examining the wound she had inflicted. The man’s forehead was gone.

  What incredible… effects…

  As if they had a will of their own, her fingers touched the dead man, crawled to the ghastly hole above the still, staring eyes. They traced the edges The wind died. Sound became silence, save for the whimper of wounded and the growing murmur of the other warriors who approached with lowered weapons. Mute, the titanic shape of the Terichik writhed in the sky behind them.

  Eviane stood, eyes wide, mouth open but silent. Finally, as with a terrible effort she screamed, and ran. She threw the rifle, the goddamned rifle, aside and hurled herself behind an upturned stand of boats.

  She knelt there, whimpering, and watched without comprehension as the Terichik flickered and dissolved. As the moon disappeared from the sky above her. And the stars. And the distant mountains. All that had been heaven and horizon was now a blank white dome crisscrossed with enormous rectangles.

  One building at a time, the abandoned Inuit village disappeared: the lodge, the smokehouse, the line of boats. The boathouse remained, but it was too far. Eviane whimpered and ran and hid again, this time beneath a heap of splintered wood and iron: the only remaining boat.

  Over and over in an endless loop her mind screamed: What is happening? What is happening? I don’t under-ohgodohgod And then even the wreckage disappeared.

  Eviane knelt on a blank field of white. Around her, her companions threw down their weapons and began to gather around the two bloodstained bodies.

  At the edge of the dome, a door opened. Men and women in crisp orange uniforms entered. They mouthed phrases about “effects breakdowns” and “optical difficulties” as they hustled away the warriors and angakoks, the princess and the commoners, separated the quick from the dead. Eviane remained on her knees, unseeing, unhearing, even when she was lifted up and carried gently but firmly to the exit.

  The bodies were covered, belted onto stretchers, and whisked away. Only blurred imprints and smears of red remained on the artificial snow.

  Finally, men came to pick up the rifle. They handled it with infinite care, as if it were a sleeping viper or a live grenade, something that might awaken to wreak new and greater havoc.

  As if it was a thing of magic in a world of technology, or of technology in a world of magic.

  Chapter One

  THE BARSOOM PROJECT

  “ In the beginning.’ Three words spoken uncounted billions of times.”

  The narrator’s voice echoed everywhere and originated nowhere. It filled the vast dark cavern of Gaming Area A with its rolling, resonant embrace. Alex Griffin peered into the blackness. Phantasmal carts danced about him in elaborate patterns, orange outlines in his infrared goggles. The carts glided through an endless, empty night, invisible to each other.

  “ Yet they have never lost their magic, never diminished in majesty. Ever have we looked back to the roots of our cultures, the origin of our species, the genesis of our planet.

  “ Come with us now, and peer into the past of our solar system, to the formation of our most distinctive neighbor-”

  A darkened dome a few hundred meters across became a urn-verse: the stars emerged.

  Above and below, they flamed in primal glory. Never had the skies of Earth been so fully or brightly populated. Blobs and streams of dark matter moved across the stars, dimming them. Never had the stars made any noise at all, but now Griffin’s bones rattled with the reverberations of the best sound system in the Western hemisphere.

  One dim star abruptly flared brighter than all the rest. It was blinding… it was already dimming, while shells of lesser fire expanded from the supernova at ferocious speed. There were flame-colors in the shock waves.

  Griffin chuckled quietly.

  The thirteen hundred dignitaries gathered here by Cowles Industries and IntelCorp were in for a hell of a show. His chief deputy Marty Bobbick had a grip on his elbow. Marty’s round face was soft with wonder, and his eyes gleamed.

  “ Though details differ, current theories agree that the solar system originated as a cold cloud of interstellar gas. There were snowflakes and snowballs, protocomets, scattered through it.

  And so it remained until the shock wave from a nearby supernova disturbed its equilibrium.”

  The supernova had died to nothing… no, not quite gone. Griffin found it as a tiny blinking dot. Then the shock waves arrived with a rolling crash that owed less to physics than to Dream Park magic. The vast interstellar dust clouds bowed before it; flattened, then began to collapse and condense. There were hurricane shapes at the centers. The viewpoint zoomed in on one of the whorls as streamers began to separate, giving it the look of a carelessly spray-painted archery target. The great storm sparkled like a fireworks display. The center began to glow.

  “ Gravity and spin became the dominant factors. Stars began to form,” the unseen narrator said, but Griffin found his mind blanking out the words. The illusion was so overpoweringly real that his chest ached for breath.

  A new sun blazed forth, awesomely bright within its murky sheath of dust and comets. In that terrible light Griffin could see lumps condensing along the rings that surrounded the sun. The solar system was still murky; comets moved through the viewpoint like white bullets.

  This was the big one, the project toward which Cowles had angled for over a decade, the beginning of the largest venture in mankind’s history. And Griffin was part of it… if only as the security man who would keep these multinational billionaires from murdering each other. The 1,333 men and women taking their slow trips into the heart of the primordial solar system would be much more a part of it, if they chose.

  And if they didn’t, there would be no Barsoom Project.

  And if there were no Barsoom Project, then�
�� very soon, by geological time, there might be no life on Earth.

  The turgid protostellar whirl was clearing now. Sunlight boiled away the nearer comets, leaving residues that would become asteroids; boiled the atmospheres from even the closer planets. The planets flashed and flamed from time to time as smaller bodies smashed into them. The viewpoint moved toward one such body, a glowing, cratered, lumpy sphere that grew clearer as its atmosphere dissipated.

  Griffin wrenched his mind out of the illusion and brushed the controls before him in the cart. Of the hundred and fifty computer-driven carts gliding through an embryonic cosmos, he and

  Marty had the only cart equipped with manual override. In case of emergency, he could reach another cart within moments. There was no reason to expect any such emergency, but…

  He whispered to Marty, “Let’s peek in on them.” Marty nodded-he still had a death-grip on Alex’s elbow-and Alex rattle-tapped instructions to the heat-sensitive vidplate before him.

  It lit. It became a quad splitscreen, and in each quadrant a cart appeared. Each cart seated ten visiting dignitaries. At upper-left were intense, serious visitors from the United Kingdom. Only one, a rotund woman in her fifties, was smiling broadly, clapping with childish glee.

  Upper-right held officials from International Labor Union 207, the energy people. The international unions were more powerful than some nations. Certainly they were prime candidates for the offer that IntelCorp and Cowles wished to make.

  Chitchat broke off, heads swiveled right, mouths gaped. A gargantuan gas-sheathed snowball roared directly at 207’s cart. A smaller cornet grazed it. A tenor scream split the air as the comet flared blindingly and passed on the right.

  They laughed and slapped each other on the backs, none knowing who among them had screamed.

  Lower-left was the Pan-African coalition… members who were not currently embroiled in war.

  What a mess. Africa was a jungle, all right. A jungle of artificially drawn lines, so complex that things might not sort themselves out for another century. National boundaries, tribal boundaries, industrial boundaries, and union boundaries all writhed and fluxed and left bloody tracks behind, year after year for the past century. Project Barsoom might straighten them out might give some of these political entities cause to fix them in place. A reason to forget the past, for the sake of the future.