The Barsoom Project

Chapter Twenty

A butterfly formed out of the thin fog and fluttered near her mouth. It was a delicate yellow thing, wings tinged with black, and it came too close. She snapped at it, didn’t feel her teeth touch anything, but tasted a sweet, mellow tang like sugared toast.

Eviane sighed. It was butterflies today, butterflies tomorrow, butterflies until the end of time. She was trapped in this drifting darkness, surrounded by strangers and silence. She had resigned herself to that fate.

Then clumsy footfalls and raucous voices broke the silence, and she knew that her living comrades had come for her.

Now, this was curious: she felt no surprise. She didn’t even turn her head. She only waited with the placid patience of the dead… until the moment she heard Max Sands’s wonderful, vibrant voice. A moment later he was beaming at her like a full moon, his huge round face shining with astonished pleasure at the sight of her.

Eviane’s heart leapt as if she lived.

She noticed Snow Goose cupping her ear, frowning. “Eviane,” the Eskimo Princess said, “we were…” She stopped, and conferred with Frankish Oliver for a moment. “Yes,” she said. Frankish Oliver went away for a few seconds. He came back holding a vicious-looking modern rifle.

“This led us to you, because you held it close to your body.” Snow Goose paused, then shook her head violently. “Eviane, I’m not used to this. You’re dead. Any of my professors would freak.”

“I don’t understand,” Eviane said, and she didn’t. But by her own unreasoning fear of the rifle, she sensed its power.

“It was with you at your death. It has great power, and its link to you was strong. If you wish, we could use it to bring you with us from the underworld.”

“Bring me back to life?” Eviane asked, as though somehow she already knew the answer.

Snow Goose was embarrassed. “No, dear. I’m sorry. As a shade, one of the dead, a tornrait. You would serve me the way a tornrait serves an angakok. You would gather information that human senses can’t reach. You could be of great help to us, if you would.”

There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation. “I will come.” She took the rifle.

The Inuit women around her nodded their approval. Eviane stood and joined the line of heroes. A butterfly drifted too close. Reflexively, Eviane snapped it out of the air. Again, the sugary taste. Also, and curiously, her teeth met no resistance, and she felt nothing go down her throat as she swallowed.

Max was ready to whip worlds. He walked beside Eviane, and could barely restrain himself from grabbing and hugging her.

“Well,” he said, trying to begin a conversation. “What’s it feel like to die?”

The smile froze on his face. Unmistakably, she was searching herself for an answer. “Well,” she said after a long pause, “it’s sort of like gym class, only quicker.”

He took five more steps before he turned and stared at her. Her face was perfectly serious. Her eyes met his. It couldn’t have been a joke. Eviane never joked. And yet. And yet…

The path wound among flat boulders of sedimentary rock, more and more of them, until they faced a wall of boulders rising into the gloom of the underworld cavern. The troupe of Adventurers trickled to a halt.

Eviane looked terrified. Max asked nervously, “Something wrong?”

“I remember…” Eviane began, and then her voice trailed off.

Charlene and Hippogryph loomed close. “You remember what?” Charlene asked.

“I’m not sure. It was back when I was alive.”

Hippogryph looked concerned. Charlene said, “Eviane, dear, if you’ve got anything to say that might save a life, please-”

“To give information is the task of a tornrait,” Snow Goose said flatly.

Eviane did her best. “Falling. Slowly. Shapes around me, big massive shadows. Like a dream. Like being dead. But I wasn’t afraid of going splat. I was afraid of being crushed.”

“Anything else?”

She shook her head.

Snow Goose walked out to where the path disappeared into the boulders. The rocks were flat-sided slabs eight to twelve feet long by half that wide, a bit too uniform for credibility. Thirty or forty feet up, the darkness swallowed them.

She gestured to the rest. “Come on-” Bubbles burst from her mouth and streamed upward. Max gaped, and she grinned at him. Bubbles?

A fish swam past his head. More of an eel, really, some kind of curvy, twisty thing that wiggled fluidly. Its tail almost flicked his nose.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. Bubbles obscured his vision for a moment.

Snow Goose gestured to them again, impatiently. “Come on. We’re going to have to climb.”

Max didn’t look down. He could guess how many of the other Gamers were still at the bottom, staring up, thinking how impossible it all was. The rocks were not that badly tilted. It was like climbing a crude stairway, if each stair was a meter higher than the previous one. Hippogryph was climbing backward, pulling Charlene upward by her wrists; they both seemed to be enjoying themselves.

It got harder as Max got higher… but he couldn’t catch Eviane. She climbed steadily, unstoppable, panting through gritted teeth, pushing forward and upward toward what terrified her.

And now he saw that the wave of boulders spilled against a vertical rock wall. The wall rose seamless into darkness. It might have been a thousand miles high, the core of a hollow Earth.

“We have to breach the wall,” Snow Goose said. “Everyone needs to push. Come on.”

Swell. But Max could see what Eviane was doing: choosing a big, nearly flat boulder for her perch; setting her feet, hands flat against the monolithic wall. The boulders were not big enough for two. He chose one next to hers.

Charlene and Hippogryph took Eviane’s other side. Like Max, they tried to imitate Eviane. Strange, wasn’t it, that she always seemed to know just what to do? So she was just a bit quicker than anyone else. Was he the only one who noticed?

Kevin was giving it his all, but he had climbed no higher than Orson, who was sweating and glaring up at his brother. Trianna and Johnny Welsh had reached the top. Welsh said, “Hulk smash?”

Snow Goose grinned and nodded. Welsh chose a boulder and set his feet. “Push?”

“Push. All at once.”

“One, two, three, heave!”

They heaved. Max pushed with everything he had. He could sense the mass of his companions: if they had anything going for them at all, it was mass! But the mass of the stone wall felt infinite. And yet… there was a gritty, crunchy sound against his ear. They’d done something.

Orson and Kevin reached the top, paused a moment to suck air, then joined the effort. Push harder Snow Goose dropped back, gasping. “All right, take a rest. And then-”

The rest of Snow Goose’s sentence was lost in a growing rumble. The rocks began to shimmy.

Eviane’s eyes flew open. “Oh my gosh! This is about to-”

All at once and nothing first, the wall disintegrated. The pile of boulders spilled outward. Screams sounded muffled; bubbles streamed from their mouths; and the party was falling through dark water in a cloud of shattered rock.

The entire cavern had dissolved, crumbled. Max was on a falling boulder… for that matter, everyone was on a faffing boulder. They sank in a murky cloud of detritus, but they sank faster. Smaller boulders, rocks, pebbles, grit, all rose out of sight and left the view clear. Each Adventurer, astride his own individual boulder, sank sleekly into depths that graded from dark to utter black.

Max felt his ears pop. He laughed. That was too realistic! He hooted, and waved his arms to brother Orson, whose rock was spinning in a slow, lazy circle.

(He could breathe! He had only just noticed that. He was breathing underwater. Unself-consciously he rubbed the side of his neck, looking for gills. Nope, nothing there…)

Although they had to be far below the surface of the ocean, and the water was murky, shafts of light pierced the darkness like silver pillars. The travelers sank down into the depths on a gentle diagonal, slipping through dark and light, past the finny denizens of the deep.

A school of ugly blind fish cozied past him. Showing more good mammalian sense than their cold blood should have allowed, they waited for Trianna. They made kissing motions at her, following almost close enough to touch.

Vaguely through the murk, the bottom was taking shape. Max could almost… he could make out the titanic outline of a woman in repose, though the head was wrong: lumpy, misshapen.

A flutter of panic: the Paija? Nahhh. Too big.

It was a woman, and she was huge. Three hundred feet high if an inch. Bigger. Sedna.

The surrounding murk made anything but a vague impression difficult, but it seemed to him that she sat in an attitude of sorrow. Her arms and knees hid her face. She might have been carved of alabaster or of mud; it was just not possible to make out detail. Her shoulders were gently rounded, slumped.

Although she was a giantess, a goddess, Sedna, the mother of life, Max felt the burden which hung heavy upon her. He wanted to hold her, shelter her, protect her.

Well, damn-that was why he’d come, wasn’t it?

A wayward current was floating them down toward the gigantic head. He’d been right: Sedna’s head was misshapen. A pale brownish mass capped the back and left side of her skull and was spreading down her neck. It had an angular look, less like fungus than like a growth of crystals. White, veinlike threads intersected everywhere, like… roads?

Orson screamed, “Max! They’ve built a goddamn city in her hair!”

Charlene called, “We’re going past!”

The current was sweeping the falling boulders past that growth. Good. Landing in a parasite city would have given them no time to think, to plan; but the current was dropping them toward flowing black locks.

This close, Sedna’s hair looked like tangled cables. Max began to feel like a wind-caught flea. Their impossible little rock-chariots sifted like sand grains into Sedna’s scalp. Max squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself for a bump.

There was none, only a gentle settling sensation.

The boulder seemed to have landed on solid ground, but damned if he would just assume that. Max got down on hands and knees, and backed off the boulder, feeling with his toes until solidity pushed against the metatarsals.

He stood ankle-deep in a mass of cables… of hairs. He reached down and hefted one: a quarter-inch thick, soft to the touch, running back out of sight. The hair was relatively sparse, thank God, or the Adventurers would have been choked immediately upon arrival.

He checked that the others had arrived safely. There was no need to wonder: each and every boulder had dropped without mishap onto the glorious head of Sedna. Max had an absurd urge to plant a flag. Was this how Neil Armstrong had felt?

His peripheral vision caught something on a strand of hair. Something crawled away, disappearing as he watched, something bigger than his hand.

It gave him the creeps.

Hebert was the first to comment. “I see some kind of big bugs around here. I don’t know what to call them.”

Johnny Welsh volunteered, “Water bugs, maybe.”

The rest of them began to look around, peering in the mesh of cables for “water bugs,” but found nothing.

Snow Goose called them to attention. “All right. I think we can safely assume that we made it here in one piece. Which way do we go?”

“Aren’t you the one who knows that?”

She laughed. “Please. I’ve just about run out of magic. Why don’t one of you take control of that point?”

Robin Bowles looked very serious. Just as serious, in fact, as he had been when passing sentence on the psycho-killer in Judge Knott. A little more puzzled, perhaps. “I think I heard something from over in that direction,” he said finally. “Let’s take a look.”

The hair was piled into thick rows. It was (he hated to admit) slightly greasy to Max’s touch. “You’d think that a Goddess could wash her hair twice a week, wouldn’t you?”

Orson shot him a dirty look. Trianna said, “She can’t comb her hair. That much I remember. No fingers.”

Something crunched under his feet, and he heard a high-pitched squealing noise. Peering carefully through the forest of follicles, he saw three more “water bugs.”

They gave him the creeps. Smaller than a dog pack, but far too big for bugs. Yerch.

Before he had any clue as to what was happening, a net of webbing had settled over him. Before he could respond to it effectively, a second flew over from the opposite direction, and he was entangled. Then his feet were gone from under him, and if the hair hadn’t been so spongy and resilient, he might have had a nasty fall. As it was, it was a lot like faffing into a stack of fresh-cut grass. Embarrassing, but not at all uncomfortable.

Dream Park wants no lawsuits.

Behind him, Bowles shouted something that Shakespeare never wrote, and grabbed at hair with one hand while trying to keep his balance with the other. It didn’t matter: he went down anyway. All of the Adventurers were going down. Kevin dodged and ran, and there were multiple sputt sounds before they managed to catch him and drag him down.

Max tumbled and rolled as unseen forces pulled him along. At the lowest threshold of hearing, he could hear tiny, squeaky voices singing:

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go Bump. Bump. A hair as thick as a pencil flapped across his face. Sedna’s hair flagged out above him in the drifting currents like abed of kelp.

They came to rest in a broad bare area, a bald spot in the middle of Sedna’s scalp.

Max tugged at the net. Strong. Was it strong enough to stop him if he gave it everything he had…?

Probably.

He wiggled over until he was on his other side. Brother Orson lay about four feet away, one eye visible through the black stalks.

“Looks like we’re cooked,” Orson said, resigned.

“Such a Pollyanna, he is.” Max hoisted himself to one knee, then tumbled over.

The hair began to tremble, and only then did he really focus his eyes on it. Multicolored bumps moved along the strands. They were seven and eight inches long by half that wide. They moved and crawled, and when he rolled over in his net to look at them, they squealed and ran away.

Finally one turned and looked at him, cocked its head sideways, and hissed. It was a cross between a human being and an insect of some kind. The head was disproportionately large. Its face was a Punch-and-Judy caricature, medieval in its exaggeration. Even on a face that tiny, the projection of evil glee was unmistakable.

It grinned at him and skittered away; but another faced him, a bug with the body of a walrus turned inside out. And below that one was a lascivious woman-creature. It whistled at him-tiny, very high-pitched-and wriggled its two-inch-wide derriere suggestively.

Just what did you have in mind, honey?

Kevin choked back a face full of laughter. “What is all of this?”

“It’s the sins of mankind. I think I’ve seen vanity, and wasteful killing, and loose sexual practice.”

“Jesus,” Hebert hissed. By wriggling around in the net, Max could just make out his dark face. “I think you’re right. I’ve got murder, I think, and maybe theft.”

“All right, then. We know where we are, but what do we do?”

There wasn’t long to wait. The sins were busy around them busy, busy, busy… and from the roots of Sedna’s hair rose a city. They watched it form one shell at a time, built by carapaced creatures that flowed from every follicle. It was an array too vast and differentiated to even begin to categorize.

There was every sin that he could recognize: sloth and gluttony and greed and murder, and actions mimed but beyond his understanding. The creatures reached Sedna’s bald spot, and there they shed their shells and wriggled forth like glistening varicolored slugs. The shells built up and up in a heap. It grew like a coral reef. Hundreds upon thousands of individual beings contributed one bit at a time. A bizarre castlescape rose up and up while the sluglike occupants mingled in obscene pools or piles in front of the structure.

The castle ringed them, twice as tall as a human being, with walls several feet thick.

How many sins? How many ten-inch sins did it take to make a structure of that size? He searched his mind, the confusion drowning out the equations before he could come up with an answer… but the net was relaxing. He could move.

Max shucked the net smoothly, the way he would wiggle out of a full nelson. Sedna’s scalp was resilient, bouncy. Max crawled on hands and knees, found Eviane and helped her out of her net. This time she didn’t fight him, and her fingers stayed, warm on his wrist, for a lingering second.

Cityscape stretched around and above them, a megalopolis for rats. Sins were still swarming forth like denuded rats, writhing and fluxing in vile pools, in a moat of living tissue. The corners of Sin City were four parabolic arches, and the flat wall beneath each arch was bulging, sculpting itself…

Until four human figures faced them, standing in the corners of the miniature city like dark brothers of the four cardinal directions. The shells that shaped them were still occupied. Crawling sins even shaped a suggestion of faces; but the features moved restlessly, semi-independently.

European, African, Asian, Eskimo. The nightmare figures examined the Adventurers, reaching out of the architecture to poke and then drawing back as if the prospect of touching a human being was distasteful. They retreated back into their directional corners, and sighed heavily.

The European figure spoke, and Max could see a hundred mouths moving. Its voice was a buzzing composite. “We have… ” It wanted “s” sounds where there were none. The sibilance was disturbingly reptilian. It adjusted slightly. “Yesss. We have waited for you, long, long time. And now you are here. Yesss.” It turned to its brothers, lifted its arms jubilantly, and screamed: “Let the trial begin!”