The Barsoom Project

Chapter Twenty-Nine

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 looked 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.

He felt the thump. It startled him. The beast grunted with pain. Other shapes, other forms emerged from the shadows, hissing curses. He swung the club backhand across the thing’s face, and howled victory as he saw the damage.

It screamed again, covered its maimed face, and staggered back. Max scooped up Yarnall, shoulder under armpit. “Come on, we’ve got to get Bowles.”

“No! No, Max!” Yarnall had found his feet. “He was right. We need a unified plan. Otherwise we’re just going to get picked apart.”

From shadows all around them, the misshapen figures clawed their way out, grunting and slobbering, reaching for them with long black nails. Yarnall picked up his twisted rifle. “Mothers are strong!”

Max and Yarnall helped each other stumble back a few feet before they were cut off. Three of the creatures lumbered toward them, the eyes in the misplaced faces alight with blood fever.

Yarnall and Max stood back to back. Max jabbed at the nearest. It tested their defensive perimeter with a looping paw stroke Max swung, felt no contact, but saw a paw flash red. The creature sniffed at the wounded arm, and slowed; but the others charged.

A claw got past his guard. Although he felt only a buzzing sensation in his shoulder, a bright red splotch appeared. He cursed, and began to swing his usik left-handed.

But the creatures, for all their size and strength, were clumsier than he, and at a disadvantage: none of them used weapons. Time and again Yarnall and Max bloodied them, and Max’s usik struck one of them a thundering blow, crushing it to the ground. The Amartoqs’ torn, lipless mouths snarled at him, and Max snarled back.

There came a swirl of motion, and now the creatures were caught between two groups of screaming, blood-maddened Gamers.

Johnny Welsh had abandoned his rifle for the moment. His whale-rib sword rose and fell in a glittering arc. An Amartoq howled as its hologram chest was cloven to the teeth.

Max’s peripheral vision found Charlene Dula as a seven-foot elvish beauty, with long thin anus and long slender legs and pale skin, and a lantern jaw making her look like nothing so much as Elric of Melnibone. Her ivory sword flashed and struck. She moved in and out on those improbably long legs, sore knees forgotten in the heat of the moment. She was glorious, swirling in her skins, a primal woman from some lost tribe of albino NBA superstars.

And then the rest of his comrades arrived. Max howled, flashing his war club, noting the red slashes that appeared on the bodies of the enemy as he struck.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Yarnall take another hit from a monster’s claw, and A shocking buzz surrounded him, made his whole body tingle. He hadn’t been paying attention, and a stroke from a five-clawed hand had almost disemboweled him.

He staggered back, and looked at his midsection in disbelief. The spreading red stain wasn’t exactly realistic, but it was damned disturbing. He lifted his club And got a warning shock.

He backed up. This wasn’t fair! It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He was about to die! The monster was coming closer and closer, its lidless eyes staring, its mouth drooling blood as broken teeth chewed at its own lips.

Max backed into a wall, and he lifted his one good arm in defense or in supplication And suddenly Orson was there.

Two-Ton Orson Sands ran thudding to the rescue on the point of the “B” team as they rushed from the shadows, tumbling pellmell into the jaws of battle. Orson interposed himself ‘twixt brother Max and the monster, and thrust his whale-rib spear with a speed that Max would never have suspected. The monster looked down at its guts in amazement, and crumpled.

Max started to jump back into the fray. An electrical buzz in his underwear told him that Dream Park had other ideas. So Max lay where he was, covered his face with his arm, and moaned helplessly. Paralyzed, he watched Orson the Barbarian carry the day.

Orson carried it fine. The fighting snarl on his lips would have done credit to a blood-maddened jungle cat. Orson parried the deadly paws, slashed and mashed, sliced and diced, and generally made a red ruin out of the Amartoqs as they shambled in to attack the helpless Maxwell.

What a man.

Through and occasionally around Orson’s trunklike legs, Max glimpsed snatches of the rest of the battle.

There was Trianna capering with her spear, moving with the grace and poise of a dancer.

Hippogryph used a harpoon more adroitly than brother Orson, and was giving the monsters the old what-fer at a frightening rate. Max admired his erstwhile antagonist’s form and style.

(Uh-uh… brother Orson missed the slash of one claw, and got a glowing red band across the ankle. The monster paid for it dearly, sagging to the ground, pierced to the core.)

Oh, what a lovely fight it was. The claret flowed, war cries arced to the heavens, and in general, a mighty fine time was had by all.

Max searched the battlefield for Eviane, and finally spied her hiding behind a piece of bizarre, convoluted statuary. She was sighting her rifle and carefully placing shot after shot down into the battleground, to devastating effect. One Amartoq fell to the ground, shot in the gut and forehead by a single bullet.

Quite possibly, Max mused, an all-time first.

He only glimpsed Eviane for a few instants at a time. Her face was a small, pale oval screwed up in concentration. She punctured another beast. It staggered to the ground, long black paws scratching its back; moaned and thrashed, then was still.

Kevin Titus was a tiny red-haired whirlwind in the midst of the madness, swinging a war club almost as big as himself. He was a now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t dervish of motion. As long as he kept moving, nothing was able to touch him. But then he reeled and fell against a skewed block of black ice, face to the wall, panting like a dying man And an Amartoq clubbed him down from behind. The arm passed through Kevin. He looked down at himself, suddenly saw all of the blinking black and red light. He said something which, though inaudible, was doubtless vile enough to blister paint. He followed it by saying, “Now wait just a second-OW!” Kevin grabbed at his buttocks, moved by the hand of the Almighty.

Then he bowed to the inevitable, bowed further, and toppled to the ice, dead. He glowed black and red in the snow, sprawled as if boneless, chest still heaving.

So. The kid gloves were off. The rules had changed, and now death was a very real possibility. They had lost two. Max looked down at himself, at the huge red stain across his midsection. Three?

The last monster fell. The Gamers leaned on their weapons, panting and gasping for breath… really heaving this time. Orson had dropped his weapon. He stood with hands braced on knees, giving himself over solely to panting. Kevin was on his back on the ice, eyes open to the sky, dead, breathing more easily now. Robin Bowles was.. gone.

This engagement had been more intense, had continued longer than any of the others. Red-faced and sweating in the snow, they stared at one another, counting. Only ten of them were left.

Snow Goose came out of hiding. Her eyes flicked to each of her companions, studying them: their breathing, their color. At last she stood over Kevin. He looked up at her. “Isn’t there anything you can do…

She turned away sorrowfully. “In this damned place, even the dead still speak. We must perform ceremony, or else this one will be awakened to life against us.”

“Ah-ceremony?” Kevin asked blankly.

“Oliver,” Snow Goose said solemnly, “we need your war club.”

“Now just a second-Ow!” Kevin was shocked back into silence.

Oliver appeared beside her, implement of destruction in hand. “All right. What is it that you need?”

“The head must be crushed, the arms and legs severed, or he will walk against us.”

“Wait just a cotton-picking-Ow! Will you stop-Ow!”

Snow Goose’s expression was mournful. “Truly, it is easier on the recently slain if they accept their new station gracefully.”

Kevin gritted his teeth and lay still. Max wasn’t watching Kevin. He was watching Oliver, who had stealthily made an adjustment on his war club. He had palmed one of the blades. An illusion now projected from the back of the war club, nasty and axelike.

“I don’t think the rest of you want to watch-” Snow Goose said. They gawked.

“Now wait just a-Ahhh!” Kevin said, mighty uncooperative for a corpse, as Oliver’s war club rose and fell, and the blade clove one of Kevin’s thin legs. The entire leg went black. Kevin stared at it. “Jesus Christ! Snow Goose? Ahh!”

The war club rose and fell again, and again, and now Kevin was armless and legless, basically a trunk murder victim still conscious enough to complain about it. He looked up at them, and sighed in resignation. “Ain’t life a bitch?”

The war club fell again. His head went black. Kevin muttered inaudible curses.

Snow Goose examined Max carefully. “You can be saved, but we must make ceremony for you.”

“Not like that, I hope to God.”

Despite herself, a grin touched her face. “No, I think we have something a little more peaceful for you.”

He tried to sit up. “Well, then, I-” A sharp shock made him lie back down again. “Let’s get on with it.”

She touched his chest with her fingertips. “No, I don’t think that you should try to get up and around, the strain could be fatal.” She turned to the others. “Stretchers! We need to move this man to a safe place!”

Several of the Adventurers dug into their backpacks, pulled out flexible shelter sections. and joined them into a makeshift stretcher.

It took five of them to carry him, and they didn’t have breath to complain. Trianna was the only woman, and she seemed as strong as Hebert. “I didn’t know cooking built that kind of muscle,” Max whispered.

She just gritted her teeth and kept going, bumpity bump.

The procession ended in a tumbled pile of slabs and blocks. It might conceivably have been a temple once, but not for any Inuit or other shamanic civilization that he could imagine.

The inside was covered with those oddly ominous symbols. Again, he had the feeling that the glyphs portrayed something important. The images were fascinating, but until they got some torches set up, it was too dark to see anything.

Snow Goose shucked her backpack and came to stand over him, hemming and hawing. “Well, Daddy said there’d be days like this.”

“Like what?”

“I’m going to have to perform a healing ceremony on you.”

“Have you done it before?”

“Only on a dog.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“The dog died.”

“On the other hand, modern miracle drugs-”

“Will avail you nothing-”

“Falling Angels stuff! Magic!”

“You have been injured by a headless one, an Amartoq. Without spiritual treatment you will die.” She turned and examined each Gamer in turn. “Any of you who have been wounded by the Amartoqs, come forward.”

Orson, Charlene, and Johnny Welsh stepped forward.

“You three, lie on the ground next to Max.”

“Not my idea of a dream date, but-” Johnny grumbled, but lay down.

Snow Goose rummaged in her pack, and after a few moments, pulled out a flat, twisted pear-shaped mask tufted with caribou hair. The mouth featured a rather surreal gap-toothed smile. One eye was closed almost to a slit. The nose seemed less a nose than a continuation of the deep eye-sockets. It was carved of some dark wood.

Snow Goose slipped the mask on. “Now the rest of you step back.”

She mumbled under her breath, and began to chant, hopping and dancing around in a great circle. Their lanterns threw odd shadows on the wall as Snow Goose moved slowly around the injured Gamers.

As she danced, she seemed to become another person, left behind the trappings of the twenty-first century. She took on a more primitive aspect, hearkening to an earlier, crueler time in human history.

Max, being very near death, rolled his eyes and strove to look the part. He wondered how many people would see the final tape, and vaguely, he wondered how much money it would make. Perhaps his agent should have looked at that release form before he signed it.

Ah, well. Money be damned, dying or not, he was a trooper. The show must go on.

He moaned, he thrashed. His body twitched in time to each of Snow Goose’s capers. The other Gamers got into the spirit of it: moaning, twitching, leaping. Damned if Orson didn’t begin to foam at the lips, and heaved with sympathetic convulsions. Orson had watched Max perform often enough…

They squatted in the shadows of that tumbled space, and chanted, and grunted, and slammed their spears and clubs and rifle butts against the ground in primal rhythm.

Snow Goose was lost in her dance… the thrum of slamming feet and the strike of the weapons, the voices rising in crude harmony.. the torches and the leaping shadows, the writhing bodies of the wounded…

It was all incredibly hypnotic. He felt his body pulsing with it, rising and falling with it, as if it called to something in him that not only had forgotten that this was a Game, but that he was a twenty-first-century man.

A part that didn’t care whether the capering of the witch doctor or shaman was fraud or fact, magic or science. A part that lost itself in the arhythmic movements, the animal postures taken on for brief moments, then abandoned.

Snow Goose’s dark hair was plastered against her head with sweat. Snow Goose came close to him. The leering mouth of her mask was momentarily shocking and disturbing, and he felt his entire body tingle Another shock through the underwear? This one was more like a trill of sensation, the same kind of quasi-musical note that he had first experienced on the plane. It was exhilarating, and frightening too.

Snow Goose screamed, shaking a bone at him, then screamed again. He arched his body in response, and opened his mouth wide, shrieking with all his strength.

Gee, that felt good.

The red stain began to fade.

Snow Goose screamed, the cacophony growing louder, and the other Gamers, stomping their feet to the rhythm, chanted.

“ Uttoe-seek,” Snow Goose said, bouncing on one leg repeatedly. “ Aypok, pinayoke, sutomok, Aiiyeee!”

And she turned to the others, and nodded, encouraging them to chant along with her. “ Uttoe-seek, aypok, pinayoke, sutomok, Hiyeee!”

Over and over, until they caught the rhythm. Max realized that she was counting up to four, over and over again.

And she hopped, first on one foot, and then the other. She bent over them, and shook her bone at them. His body tingled, and the red spot grew smaller.

“ Uttoe-seek!”

And Charlene’s body arched, and she screamed and sobbed “ Aypok!” and Orson thrashed. His hand, reflexively, reached out and found Charlene’s, and they clasped fingers. “ Pinayoke!” and there was an answering chant from the six chanting Adventurers. They slammed their weapons and their feet against the ground.

“ Sutomok, Aiyeee!”

Snow Goose’s body arched, and in her furs she seemed not even human, but suddenly and spectacularly Her form momentarily shifted. He saw it, saw the flicker of change. She was flowing, changing, the furs transformed for an instant into white feathers. Her neck was long and elegant, and when she stretched out her arms, she seemed almost to hover, her feet not touching the ground. He felt that trilling again. The torches flickered, and the shadows on the wall took on lives of their own, became the shadows of animals. In that moment the Gamers saw their animal totems in shadow form or sharp relief. Here was a seal, there a walrus, there a great eagle, dark wings stretching and folding, and there, and there And Snow Goose, human again, collapsed onto the ground, foaming, convulsing, hips and shoulders slamming against the ground again and again as if electric shocks were coursing through her.

And then she was still.

For a moment there was no sound.

Max rolled over slowly, examining each round, sweat-streaked face in turn.

Were these really the same people who had been pulled into a Game in an airline terminal a few days before? They looked so different, huddled here in the darkness, protected from the shadows by the flickering of oily torches, faces smudged with smoke and oiled with sweat, eyes that had seen death and destruction, the end of one world and the opening of another.

Snow Goose rose to her feet. She was panting, heaving. “Damn,” she said. “I never believed… ” Max looked at himself. The red was faded, almost gone, and as he watched, it winked out.

“Rise,” Snow Goose said. “You are healed.”