The Barsoom Project

Chapter Three

Twenty meters of Tyrannosaurus rex thrashed helplessly in the tar pit. Its gray-green hide sprayed blood from a dozen bullet wounds. It glared up at them and screamed the scream of the dying saurian-a sound very like the product of a Cowles Mach VIII synthesizer, to Max Sands’s educated ear. It blended perfectly with the thunder of the volcano erupting at the south end of the canyon.

It would have been the perfect end to a two-hour mini-Game: the dinosaur, the tar pit, the volcano, the lithe and lovely cave girl who clung to his side like moist silk. One problem remained unsolved. Professor Deveroux’s legs still kicked weakly in the tyrannosaur’s mouth. This was, of course, no fun for Deveroux (“Remember, I’m a hologram! Don’t try these stunts at home!”) and no fun for Max and the rest of the team either. Deveroux still had the Time Key in his pocket!

Max checked his watch. There were only ten minutes left! The lava crawled toward the tar pit beneath them, toward the mouth of the cave where five Adventurers huddled in confusion.

“Jeez,” Orson Sands wheezed. “We’re up the creek now.” At six feet four inches and three hundred and fifteen pounds, his twin weighted twenty pounds more and looked fifty pounds heavier than Max. The difference was that under his cushion of fat Max actually had considerable muscle, which made him an anomaly in the Sands clan. Orson’s twenty extra pounds weren’t muscle. Muscle didn’t run in the Sands family. Nobody ran in the Sands family, which in part explained the proud and readily identifiable Sands profile.

Max said, “Any suggestions, Eviane?”

The short, freckled redhead shook her head without saying anything. She never said anything. Maybe she’d checked her vocal cords at the door. She was kind of cute, particularly if you liked them chunky. But… standing or sitting, she seemed to wrap herself around herself. The space around her became armor. Max had to force himself to speak to her, and why bother?

Orson repeated his litany of grief. “We been screwwwwed.” His face was red and puffy, as if he was about to roll on the ground and hold his breath for two minutes. The tactic had been awesomely effective when he was a plump, cute five-year-old. He had grown plumper than plump and less than cute in the past thirty years. Max was tired of the act.

The lava had reached the edge of the water covering the tar pit, and a feather of steam boiled up. The stench of sulfur grew chokingly strong. Rakes of gray ash streamed from the sky.

Eviane watched the lava with what Max couldn’t help thinking was a practiced eye. Quiet she was, but she’d Gamed. That key They’d found the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex, and the bones of a man within. Eviane’s stick had poked among the bones of the right hand, just enough to disturb them, to spring any trap; then the left, just enough to expose a glittering key. Tapped the key. Tapped the ground at her feet. Reached among the bones and plucked the key without brushing a single bone, and before any other player had planned a move.

Alura, the lovely cave girl who had guided them, pulled at Orson’s arm. “Must go.”

“Oh, what’s the poooint?”

“Orson, will you shut up? The point is that we came to play.”

Eviane nodded approval, and said her first words in two hours. “This isn’t right. They promised.”

“Darlin’, this whole thing hasn’t been right.”

“We go,” Alura said in her best mock-Paleolithic accent. “We go, worship. Pray for help.”

Orson pulled a face. “You’ve already gotten everyone else killed, you tryin’ for a perfect score?”

Max smiled benevolently. “You’re going to be a ball on the Ripper.”

“I wish I hadn’t come.”

“That makes many of us, Orson.” Max checked his watch. Eight minutes.

There were four players left: Max and Orson and Eviane and Kevin. Kevin Titus was a kid, and the only skinny one in the group. He was really skinny, painfully so.

In the two hours that the Game had been on, three of their four guides had been killed by various toothy carnivores. With the exception of the late lamented Professor, their guides had all been young, vivacious pidgin-English-speaking cave dwellers encountered on site. Max had chuckled quietly at the anachronism and followed the bouncing curves.

“They cheated,” Kevin said plaintively. The kid was five feet of knees and elbows, sugarcube teeth, frizzy brown hair, and nervous energy. He was panting with exertion, though even Max had his breath back. “They said that everything made sense.”

Eviane breathed hard, as if hyperventilation helped her memory. “They said that ‘given the stated Game situation, everything is accurate.”

“So they lied.”

The lava was getting close. The mouth of the cave was growing wanner. “No. They wouldn’t lie.” She repeated that as if it were an article of faith. “Dream Park wouldn’t lie. There’s an answer.”

“We go and pray! Gods must help,” Alura said almost calmly.

“Have they ever helped before?” Max asked hopefully.

“No.” Her shaggy blond head gave a mournful wag. Then she smiled ingenuously. “But maybe we pray wrong!”

“If Dream Park didn’t lie, then they’re idiots,” Orson whined. “There weren’t any goddamn cave people in the Cretaceous. Dinosaurs were dead for sixty million years before the first human being ever appeared. They blew it!”

Lava swept down the valley. The tyrannosaur’s tiny eyes bulged as the water around it began to boil. It screamed piteously when the lava hit it. The scream reverberated through Max’s bones, and a whiff of cooking lizard hit them in a blast.

Then the swamp was gone and the tar was exposed to the lava, and it all went up in a fireball. The Gamers threw themselves flat. The air whooshed, crinkling his eyebrows with heat. Max glimpsed big white bones before the lava rolled them under.

Damn! This is too much, too damned graphic, even for Dream Park. Thank goodness I haven’t eaten since breakfast!

Lava filled the valley below. It percolated like a demon’s cauldron.

“We’re screwed, I’m telling ya. I want everybody’s money back.”

Eviane was looking thoughtful, if her slightly crossed eyes could be interpreted as a thoughtful expression. “Something isn’t right here,” she said.

A flat certainty in her voice caught Max’s attention, and Orson’s too. She may look like a flake, but there’s somebody home in that head. Orson’s mood calmed in an instant. “What’ve you got?”

She shook her head. “It’s… it’s a puzzle. They always are, when they run over fifty minutes. There’s a clue.”

“What’s the clue?” Orson said. “I haven’t got a clue. I’m hungry and I’m tired, and we’ve got six minutes to live.”

“Think about it. What’s wrong with this?”

“Everything- Waitwaitwait.” Click: you could almost hear it. In some ways the brothers lived in different worlds. Max made his living as a very particular kind of clown, Orson as a computer programmer. But when the puzzle-solver in Orson’s head suddenly clicked on, Max vicariously shared the thrill. There was the brother he loved, the fastest question-crunching mind he had ever known.

“You’re right. There aren’t supposed to be cave people here. We found just one group, all about the same age. Everything else was right. All of the sauropods have been right for the era: we saw diplodocus and brontosaurus, but no stegosaurus or allosaurus mixed in.”

Kevin slapped thin hands against his head. “So what are the cave people doing here-”

Max caught the joke, and his laughter drowned out the rumble of the volcano. “Unless they’re time travelers too!” He turned to Alura, who had been cowering politely through the entire exchange. “Alura, take us to church!”

“This way!”

Behind them the sky glowed. The lava was filling the valley of dinosaurs, and in another few moments it was going to come roaring down the tunnel. The result was likely to use up all of his hit points in one hot second… so to speak.

They ran, or at least moved as quickly as girth and wind would allow. Kevin, a skinny little rabbit with barely enough meat to separate bones from skin, reached the chamber alongside Alura, way ahead of the rest. He was gasping, she wasn’t. Max clamped his mind down on the fatigue, but when he saw the chamber, exhaustion and confusion melted away like snowflakes.

The structure might have been carved from limestone by the passage of water, or it might have been an enormous gas bubble in a mountainous, sludgy wave of primeval lava. Whatever had carved it had done one hell of a job. It was huge, a crystalline cathedral with indirect lighting. (And where did the light come from? Oh, give it up. Phosphorescence, bioluminescence, whatever, it was gorgeous!)

Stalagmites rose from the floor like rows of fairy teeth. Thick spiderwebs festooned the corners, strange, baseball-sized husks dangling from them; but the room still sparkled.

In the center, surrounded by a cone of light, was what Max knew they would find.

Orson clapped his hands delightedly. “That’s it!” A platform with a metal post and a waist-high metal ring large enough for several adults to grasp simultaneously. “It’s an advanced version of Deveroux’s time machine.”

“Another group came back, with their kids-like taking a picnic.”

“Stopped to feed the dinosaurs-”

“Kids got stranded here, grew up with no adults.” They were laughing and hugging now. Even Eviane had abandoned her vow of silence, and was whooping louder than anyone.

“Let’s move!” Max said, checking his watch. He’d set it to count down. It gave him ninety seconds to end the Game.

Kevin and Orson examined the machine. Orson called, “It takes a key! Ev-Eviane?”

The only key still in the Game. Eviane tossed it underhand to Orson, who fitted it into a lock and turned it.

“Fits. It was drownin’ fair, after all.”

“Move it. We’re about to have company, say a million tons of lava.”

Kevin and Orson tinkered with the vehicle, fiddling with the buttons until lights triggered around the metal ring, and the air vibrated until it sang. Max felt the tingle all over his skin, and laughed and stomped delightedly. They were going to make it, they were “All right. Everybody gather around, and get ready.” The room was heating up. The hair on his arms stood up away from the skin as the time machine’s whir grew loud.

All five of them grabbed the ring, felt the electric trill as the power increased. The entire room began to vibrate. Alura released the ring with one hand to grab Max’s shirt, pressing her warm little body against him. Max was terribly glad that Alura, unlike the rest of her family, was a real live unhologram-type person.

The entrance of the cave splashed with lava. For a moment fear filled his stomach, and a shrill whir filled his ears The room whirled, and there was nothing there, nothing at all. When the smoke and lava cleared, they were back in the clean, sterile Time/Life building.

The woman who called herself Eviane wandered out of the Time/Life building into the main thoroughfare. It had been a long time since she had been to Dream Park, although in another sense, Dream Park was with her wherever she went.

The facades of the rides and exhibits rose like a fabulous array of circus balloons. The hologram images rose thirty and forty feet into the air-Polynesian Paradise, DragonWorld, Fokker Biplane (duel the Red Baron!), the Ali Baba ride, the infamous Snuff Show (kill any of two thousand famous historical or contemporary figures!), and the hallucinogenic Little Nemo.

Some of the facades were pure delightful fantasy: the rosy cheeks of Snow White blended naturally with the Alpine splendor of the Ski Chalet. But there were also strong elements of the grotesque. Here was the face of a screaming South American Indian, with ants swarming..

Before her eyes, naked bone appeared.

The Marabunta Challenge. The threat of violence made Eviane’s head spin. She stopped for a moment, leaned against a railing, and squeezed her eyes shut.

No violence. No pain. Just fun. Right? Nobody gets hurt…

It was self-defense. Plot smashed, the Cabal had been rabid for vengeance. The Terichik…

She opened her eyes, and when the film of tears cleared, she remembered to breathe again. The pain in her chest went away. Maybe she shouldn’t be here at all.

She shrugged that thought aside. She had already met somebody nice, not even counting Charlene Dula. Charlene had been a miracle, a genuine seven-foot elvish miracle. But Max Sands was nice. Bright, cheerful. Curiously athletic for his size. And he seemed to like her. Maybe she should have gone with them…

The voice snapped back on her instantly. How could anyone like you? You’re a murderess. A crazy woman, and if they find you, they’ll put you where the birds don’t sing and the sun don’t shine, and sleep comes in black capsules with little white bands.

She swallowed hard, and forced her shoulders back and the voices into retreat. They grew quieter, but didn’t go away. They never went away.

A little boy swiveled, and pointed. “Mommy! Wow! Look at that costume the lady’s wearing! She must be ten feet tall!”

Eviane turned and made herself smile. “Charlene!”

The hypertall woman picked her way through the crowd. It was true: she was grotesquely tall; she might have been another exhibit. Jewelry at her ears and throat had a high-tech look: medical monitors. But she carried herself with a grace and dignity that inspired respect rather than pity or shock.

Eviane ran to her friend, and hugged her. Charlene returned the hug for a second, then gently pushed the shorter woman back. For an instant, Eviane was overwhelmed by the variance in body type. With Charlene balancing on Eviane’s shoulders, they could go to a masquerade ball as an exclamation point.

“How were the rides?” Charlene’s voice was that of a cultivated child. “I wish that I could have been with you. Uncle wanted me with him at that Barsoom thing.” She smiled in shy apology. “This was supposed to be our time together. I’ve made friends over the holo for years, but it’s just not the same.”

“Oh, don’t worry. If it weren’t for you I wouldn’t be here in the first place. This is just the best time ever.”

Charlene hugged her friend’s arm. “I know I would have had more fun with you.”

“The fun is in getting out alive.”

They stepped aside to let a comical car cruise past. It loped along on jointed hairy legs instead of wheels. The “driver” had headlights instead of eyes, and fenders for ears. Charlene chuckled. “It’s usually more crowded than this, isn’t it?”

“Hard to believe, but true.”

This wasn’t ordinary Dream Park time. The Park was only half-full. This was a VIP week, reserved for people like Charlene, bigwigs and their families involved in the Barsoom Project, and people participating in the Fat Ripper Special…

She closed her eyes. The next thing she knew, Charlene was holding her.

“Eviane? It looked like you blacked out for a moment there. You didn’t know where you were.”

“It was the crowd. The noise.”

Charlene looked unconvinced. “Right.”

“Maybe I’m just hungry.”

“Now, that I’ll believe. Come on. Isn’t it time for our briefing?”

“You bet.”

Red-shirted acrobats juggled balls of fire bare-handed, with dazzling agility. The flame formed a stairway up into the sky, disappearing in a bank of mist. As exotic flute music played, one acrobat after another did hand-springs up the stairway and vanished.

The walls of Dream Park twisted and turned around them like the walls of a mare, every foot crammed with shops, exhibits, and concession stands, the entrances to rides and “experiences.” To the north, like a great moon rising at the end of the street, was the gleaming dome of Gaming Area B.

They reached the restaurant, an ivory tower labeled “The Tower of Night,” which rose from the middle of an Arabian bazaar. Eviane felt a little more at ease. Here, finally, would be people that she would be comfortable with. Gamers, Magic Users. Sorcerers. Keepers of the Dark Secrets, the same breed that she was…

… had been?

She got into the tube lift on the side of the tower, and pressed her hands against the tube as it began to rise.

And rise.

The cage moved at impossible speed. The sun was sinking behind the mountains when only minutes ago it had been midafternoon. Now they were above the entire arc of Dream Park, the hundreds of acres laid out in glittering array: conical towers and silvered spheres, twisting roller-coaster loops and the thousand hotels and motels crowding hivelike beyond, all shrinking, shrinking. Now she could see the entire valley basin, and as the elevator continued to rise, the lights of Los Angeles stretched out like strings of glowing pearls.

Neat! The illusion was magnificent. The cage was still accelerating. Around a black Earth, refracted light outlined the atmosphere in a bright circle that was still contracting. Eviane felt the chill of fear, just enough acrophobia to make things interesting.

Charlene’s breath fogged the glass. “Wow.” No acrophobia there!

Sunlight flared along one rim of the world, which had become a tremendous ball. Eviane wrenched her eyes away to look up. A structure was coming at her, a cluster of bubbles on the tower. The bubbles engulfed the car. The elevator stopped, and the doors opened.

Noise hit her like a solid wall, the cacophony of a hundred throats rumbling at the top of their collective voices. A flood of images rushed in on her, colliding somewhere between her ears.

Eviane wandered away from Charlene, meandering through the group. She felt both at home and alienated, able to float along on the periphery of the groups, skimming bits of conversations without the nerve to join in.

“I’ve never been here before,” one Gamer was saying. He was about five and a half feet tall, black and pudgy. He juggled a drink in one hand and a four-inch saucer of little sandwiches in the other. He wore a quasi-military uniform that was too tight across the belly. His name tag said F. Hebert. “But from what I’ve seen so far, the whole thing is overpriced. Too expensive.”

A stout, extremely pretty blonde whose name tag was stenciled Trianna attacked at once. She may have been overweight, but her self-possession and beautifully cut blue suit made her mass a deadly weapon. There was something else, too-a sense of leashed sexuality that Eviane found instantly intimidating. “If you’ve never been here before, what are you comparing it to?”

Trianna’s target was overwhelmed. “Ah-other amusement parks, I guess.”

“Do other parks really have facilities like this?”

“Well…”

She snorted in disgust. “The word I get, it costs more than you’re paying. They charge it off to research and use it to make cassette games.”

“Oh, that’s-”

“But let’s just assume they’re taking a thousand percent profit. Then what? Nobody else has what they’re selling. What have you got to whimper about? Pay or don’t pay.”

“Ah… ” F. Hebert wandered away looking deflated.

There was a face all skin and bones, one gaunt visage across a sky of full moons. Kevin. She remembered him from the Tar Pits Game.

Fat Ripper, they call it; but we’re not all overweight. Eating disorders. Substance abuse- That one black man was round of face but hardly overweight. Still, he had a twitchy look. She was guessing, only guessing, but who would he kill for a drink? or a cigar?

Eviane heard a ripple of laughter over in one of the corners of the room, and pivoted in time to catch a spherical dervish completing a complex pantomime. She knew that man. Who wouldn’t? It was Johnny Welsh, one of the featured players on Kodak Playhouse. He was acclaimed as a brilliant comedian, but she remembered hearing that he had lost a lucrative television contract because the insurance company wouldn’t issue a bond. Too much excess weight…

He was laughing now, and red-faced. She had seen him this way a hundred times. The rubbery red face and hiccoughing bray were as much a trademark as the famous profile. He was surrounded by a circle of admiring faces. “And if they wanted me to lose weight, then they should have stopped serving pasta in the commissary. Hey! If I look at one, it just cries out to me.” He crouched down and squinted up at them, rubber face suddenly, absurdly reminiscent of a lonesome lasagna. “It says: ‘Johnny! We’re here! Don’cha love us anymore?” Lasagna had an Italian accent.

Music blared in the opposite corner, and several couples were on the dance floor, moving languorously to the latest fusion of Indonesian and Latin music.

Eviane stood on the outskirts and tapped her toes to it, and felt a flutter of pleasure. Such a nice group of people. This is going to be fun!..

Unless something goes wrong.

Her breathing was going haywire, and she craved magic, magic in the form of a black pill rimmed in white. There’s no point to this. Let the past stay dead. What is there to gain?

But I have to know. I have to know.

There were security cameras in every corner of the room. Information on eating habits, conversational patterns, and preferential interactions were being recorded on all Game participants. The data was carefully filed, collated, and processed in a hundred different ways. Computer programs weighed words and patterns of words. One special technician per participant annotated and corrected, planned and theorized as Game time drew near.

The information went out to nutritionists, psychotherapists, experts in aversive-conditioning behavioral modification, neurolinguistic programmers, and the computer experts coordinating the effort.

And it went to one other desk.

At that desk a man watched, brooding. He frowned every time the camera crossed the features of the woman who called herself “Eviane.” Her stringy red hair had once been well groomed. The padded body had been svelte, the confused, frightened eyes filled with purpose.

Dream Park accepted Gaming names, but demanded a real one as well: this woman had written “Michelle Rivers” in her file.

Lies within lies.

He held in his hand the picture of a younger, more slender, prettier woman, a picture summoned from a file eight years old. The label read “Michelle Sturgeon.” There were differences, but the similarities were undeniable.

Beneath the picture of Michelle Sturgeon was a short psychological evaluation concocted by the Dream Park psych division. He traced it with a finger that shook.

Eight years before, Michelle Sturgeon had murdered one Dream Park Actor and severely wounded another. Her alter ego, the persona of “Eviane,” however, was an Adventuress who had defended herself against evil magicians. It seemed that “Eviane” had become the dominant identity.

How had she gotten past Dream Park Security? The “Rivers” name shouldn’t have fooled anyone.

“Came in with Charlene Dula. Okay, they wouldn’t want Charlene irritated, they need her uncle’s money in Barsoom. So no heavy security check?” He couldn’t convince himself. “No, dammit. You couldn’t stop The Griffin with politics. So what happened? Fekesh could have changed her records.” The man’s voice trembled. “But if he did, why? Because if Harmony and The Griffin saw the flag… hmm. He was afraid they’d use her. Somehow. So why the hell didn’t Fekesh tell me? Damn, damn, damn.” He opened a bottle of headache tablets and swallowed two of them without water. “Why now? I’ll never get any sleep. What kind of game…”

He caught himself, forced the panic into remission. The office was empty, dark except for the light of the holoscreen. “Calm down,” he muttered. “I can handle it. So she’s back. It’s not a trap. It’s an accident. She doesn’t know anything. I can get her out.”

He scrolled Eviane’s chart. He read slowly; he wasn’t used to reading charts. “He’s got to help. Fekesh. He’s got as much to lose-” Finally he let out a sigh. “All right. It started in the Fimbulwinter Game. It can end there too. Kill her out.”

He punched another button, and the screen went dead.