Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

Martin shook his head sadly. “You must learn to see as the Cabal see, if you would best them at their game. We must prepare you for the traditional ways, my friend.”

“He doesn’t mean Eskimo Pies,” Max told his brother.

The pouch reached her hands. What Eviane pulled out had a texture like rough cardboard. She began to chew. It was stringy, with a smoked flavor.

“The Inua of the fish must be respected. They feed us and clothe us, quiver our arrows and seal our boats. Their eggs tan hides and the oil of their bodies lights our homes. Eat, and nourish your bodies, and give reverence to the Inua of the fish. Many of you will die before this is over, and then your spirits will mingle with those beings you have consumed. It would be best to make peace with them now.”

The girl-Snow Goose-said, “Sedna is already gravely ill. Too ill to-” Martin glared at her and she was silent.

Eviane took Martin at his word, eating slowly, chewing until each mouthful was almost a liquid. (Sedna?) The atmosphere in the lodge was close, growing warmer. Her companions were having little trouble eating the peculiar food. Most of them must have tried stranger diets than this, from the look of them. (Did she know that name?)

When she stopped eating, she wasn’t full, but the edge was off her hunger. She felt in a state of readiness, eager to hear the next of it.

Several of the older men and one of the younger went to the fire and threw on crumbled handfuls of powder. When they burned, they made a smell like tobacco and dust. The smoke grew thicker, the flame hotter.

The Eskimos were peeling off their external clothing. Soon they were all in underwear or twisted loincloths. The refugees looked at each other, in speculation or embarrassment or panic. Martin the Arctic Fox seemed half-starved, bones showing, concave belly… no navel. Qaterliaraq had no navel. Orson nudged Max, whispered.

The air grew thicker, warmer. Eviane was perspiring. No help for it. She stripped, and didn’t stop until she was down to bra and panties. She folded her clothes into a careful bundle. The Eskimos weren’t hiding themselves, and she wouldn’t either.

Bowles and Stith-Wood wore their near nudity with ease, but Orson Sands held his shirt and jacket nervously in front of himself, trying to cover as much flab as he could. Kevin spread his thin arms before the fire. His eyes were half-closed in bliss, and his ribs were prominent.

Hippogryph, sweating freely, had kept his clothes on until he couldn’t take the heat. Now he was undressing in some haste. He kept the bundled clothes in front of him, blushing furiously.

Max had stripped down to shorts without a tremor, but many of Eviane’s fleshy companions were embarrassed. They shifted their considerable weight nervously from side to side like guilty children. Charlene tried to shrink into herself, shoulders hunched, arms hugging her knees, guilty grin… but she was relaxing even as Eviane watched. She was watching Hippogryph.

Hippogryph would not meet anyone’s eyes. His ears were quite red. He was hunched as Charlene had been, yet he had little to hide. Beneath his quite Eskimo-like fat layer the muscle was solid. And what did Charlene think she was hiding? Elvish alien beauty, if she would only straighten up.

Behind her, Johnny Welsh whispered, perhaps to himself, “I wish there wasn’t so much light…”

Bowles chuckled. “Steam bath scene, Take One.”

Johnny relaxed; he smiled; his voice rose. “Gosh, Charles, wasn’t it nice of the cannibal king to let us use their bathhouse?”

“We should hurry, Johnny. There must be a dozen tribes outside waiting for us to finish.”

“They’re probably here for the feast the king promised-”

Martin Qaterliaraq spoke again. “This is the sweat lodge, the qasgiq of my people. Mph.” The old man pronounced the word kuzz-a-gick. “Here we dream our dreams and see into the world beyond. But Ahk-lut has t-t-torn the veil between matter and spirit. He would bring the chaos of his greed and fear into the world-mph-and destroy everything.”

The other Eskimos nodded assent. But Martin’s lips were twitching, and some others were having trouble keeping their faces solemn.

The trapdoor in the floor flapped open again. More Eskimos brought in handfuls of brittle driftwood and loaded them into the central fire pit.

Smoke curled up from the crackling wood and twisted through the ceiling. Watching it lulled Eviane into an almost hypnotic reverie.

The relaxation became dismay a few minutes later, when the air grew so close as to be almost unbreathable. Several of the refugees were choking and gasping for breath.

Then the smoke lightened. Pictures floated in a gray, misty ocean that merged into a gray, misty sky. Martin’s voice was strong once again. “It was the beginning, and there were not yet people upon the Earth,” he said. “For four days the first man lay coiled in the pod of a beach pea. On the fifth he burst forth and stood full-grown.”

A man, a proto-Eskimo, stood naked in the mist.

A black shape emerged from the sky, grew wings and a head, became a gigantic Raven. In Eviane’s mind the words of the ancient shaman and the images in the air melded together. The room around her receded from her awareness. She stood on an ancient beach, could see the oily gray sky, smell the protosurf.

The Raven covered a sizable patch of sky. It shrank as it glided to earth: perspective in reverse. It was man-sized when it touched the sand. It stared at the man, cocking its head to the side, and finally said: “What are you?”

The man stuttered in fear and confusion. The great Raven pushed its beak aside, and its feathers away, revealing smooth brown skin beneath. It became very like the man, not fearsome at all.

The man relaxed. “I know not who I am. I know that I hunger and thirst.”

The Raven opened his hand. The flesh of his palm melted and ran, and formed beads which darkened to berries. The man took them and ate.

With the sweep of an arm that was also a wing, the Raven transformed the sea into a creek running at the base of a snowcapped mountain. The Raven scooped clay from the bank of the river and molded it lovingly. He set two blobs on the earth, and waved his feathered arms again.

Two mountain sheep stood inanimate for a few moments, then opened their eyes, shuddered, and ran off to the mountains.

“The Raven made everything that lives,” Martin’s voice whispered behind her ear. Shapes were flowing from the Raven’s wing: reindeer, caribou, rabbits. The other wing swept out, square miles of glossy black shadow, and seals and whales and a thousand shapes of fish rained into the ocean.

The Raven was studying the man again in that odd, avian manner. He molded clay into another man-shape with a slightly different symmetry. He took long grass from the bank of the stream to cover the new creature’s head. Its eyes opened, and it was woman. She stretched her hand out for the man’s.

They walked away. As they passed over the land it blossomed, the stream ran with fish, and birds filled the sky.

Eviane snorted at the smell of smoke and was back in the qasgiq. Martin, half-visible in the smoke, was hunched over, talking as if to himself. “The Raven gave all sea life into the care of Sedna. All land life into the hands of her lover Torngarsoak. When these two are well, all creatures are fruitful and multiply…” And within the murk Eviane found herself deep underwater. Schools of fish streamed past a kneeling Eskimo woman with long, floating hair and a face not unlike that of Snow Goose. Playfully, she brushed her hands through a school of fish Her hands! Her fingers were stubs, chopped off just below the first knuckle.

Orson was whispering to Max: “-pretty typical myth pattern.