Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

Max looked at Snow Goose, and her face was drop-jawed silly. The Guardsman looked the same.

What in the hell?

The mammoth sagged further. It was dissolving. Within a minute it had become dust and bones, then nothing but dust. The torn ground around it healed, until there was no trace that something singular had happened.

And where Eviane had stood, there was no blood, no clothing, nothing but flattened earth. As if she had never existed at all.

“Oh, shit rocks,” Snow Goose said, blanching. “She’s dead.”

“What?”

“She’s dead. I…” Snow Goose looked up, bewildered, at twenty-six pairs of bewildered eyes. She said, “The burrowing mammoth has claimed her for his own. T-tonight we mourn.” The formal words sounded utterly alien in her mouth. She seemed uncertain of her next word or move. “I… I guess we can camp here. We ran it off. We should be safe now…”

With equal uncertainty, the others shucked their packs. Max distinctly heard the Guardsman mutter, “Well, if that don’t beat all-” before their eyes met. The Guardsman was an Actor… wasn’t he? But the consternation in his face was real.

As for Max, it was as if the fates, or Dream Park, had promised him Eviane and then reneged.

He prepared to make camp. What else could he do? But something had happened, even if he couldn’t figure out precisely what. Was it an accident, or a glitch in the programming, or more goddamn clues?

For once, the guides seemed more shaken than the Gamers!

Pins of fire leavened the darkness. That one, much brighter than the rest, had to be the sun. There was little else to catch the eye.. but here was a tiny twinkling point; there, another; there, a tumbling snowball marked with black fissures. Alex Griffin’s video wall was open to the realm of the protocomets.

Weird skirling music floated in and out, low in the background. A tiny voice spoke of billions of iceballs a few kilometers in diameter, spaced as far apart as Earth and sun, growing sparser yet as the sun dwindled aft. Compared to the inner solar system, the Oort Cloud was nearly as empty as interstellar space.

The view zoomed in on a world banded in black and dull reds, nested in a wide ring: Nemesis, a giant planet in a wide eccentric orbit, whose mass periodically hurled flurries of comets into the inner solar system. Nemesis was impure fiction. There was reason to think there might be a Nemesis, a world too distant to have been found by probes or telescopes.

The Oort Cloud presentation must have been infinitely more impressive in Gaming A this morning. Even so, the illusion was so deep and complete that Alex felt as if he and Millicent were sitting sideways above a pit. It surely had Millicent’s attention. Her hands moved like independent entities, bringing lobster to her mouth while comets buzzed her in the video wall.

He enjoyed watching her like that, in profile. He saw African and Spanish and English in her features, a recipe that brewed an almost irresistible meld of earthiness and intelligence. She was just what he needed to salve the day’s frustrations. But even if the doctor had prescribed her, the nurse still had to agree to the treatment…

Words from the screen caught his attention. “-probes will be driven by solar sails, powered by tremendous lasers stationed on Earth’s moon-”

“That bothered me,” he said.

Millicent looked at him. “Why?”

“I eavesdropped on our guests. They weren’t saying anything, but I saw their faces. Some of the Arabs and Brazilians, they don’t care about the comets or Mars. They want those terrawatt lasers. If a terror-monger could get control of one of those, he could fry Tehran or Sao Paulo before Earth could launch a ship.”

“Not your department,” Millicent said. “Anyway, I can’t picture a terror-monger with enough schooling to run one.”

“Don’t kid yourself. A lot of them are sending their kids off to college. MIT. Cambridge. Intelligence and fanaticism live in two overlapping worlds. Life isn’t a sliding scale, where you have single-minded fanatics on one end, and intelligent people on the other. Some of us can be very single-minded about things which are purely emotional…”

She said, “We’ve been moving asteroids for thirty years, and no one’s heaved one at us yet.”

“No. Thirty years, right? Sixteen asteroids, and three more on their way with Falling Angel crews? That’s not many. One asteroid strike can ruin your whole day.”

“Brrr. You’re rather grim tonight, aren’t you?”

Definitely the wrong mood. He reached across the table to squeeze her wrist; which took some care, because she was holding a forkful of scalloped potatoes. “Sorry. All work and no play makes Jack et cetera.”

Millicent smiled. “No play at all? That’s my Alex.”

“If I don’t invite the occasional young, beautiful account executive to my humble abode, I’d never find surcease of sorrow.” He put on his sincerest expression. “One of the burdens of power is that Communications can beep me twenty-five hours a day. One of the advantages of a loyal staff is that they’ve promised me the night off, if it’s humanly possible.”

She sipped at her wine, peering at him over the edge of the glass. Her eyes were alight with mischief. “We can hope, can’t we?”

Does that mean yes? He interpreted it as a good strong “maybe” and decided to back off, soft-pedal, and make another approach in a minute or two.

Millicent sensed the mood change, flowed with it. She cracked open a lobster claw with sudden force. “How’s Marty doing?”

“He’s keeping up. He looks like the point man in a Zimbabwe expedition. They’ve got him carrying a flintlock, for Christ’s sake.”

“Oh, Alex… sometimes it’s so easy for me to get lost in the accounts and the computers that… I guess I just miss Security. A lot more craziness.”

“Yeah… but you have a lot more talent than we could hold back. I’m glad you made it out.”

She sighed. “And Marty’s still playing games.”

“That’s Marty.”

“Well. I’m glad you recommended me.”

“It would have been criminal not to.” He found himself feeling slightly warmish. She lowered her eyes, and began pushing potatoes around the plate, doodling her fork with great intensity. Which smile was that blossoming…?

“Ah, Alex..

“I’d hoped,” he said, “they’d keep that thing off until eight tomorrow.”

Millicent’s smile broadened. “No rest for the wicked.”

“I’ve been on duty for twenty hours straight. Millicent, I’m plagued with these things called ‘griffins,’ nasty little nocturnal animals that only come out at night. They usually”- BRRRNNGG! — ”manage to wake up just about the time that my mating cycle is running riot. I remember sex. Why, back in naught-six-” BRRRRNG!

“Alex, the beeper.”

“Aye aye. Griffin. Telephone.” The comets vanished, replaced by the smooth round face of Dwight Welles. Twenty-four-year-old Dwight Welles was senior computer tech for all of Dream Park, a man whose four-poster at Cowles Modular saw him far less than his cot at Research and Development.

“What’s up, Dwight?”

“Griff, we got a problem here.”

More Arab madness? “Tell me.”

“Alex, somebody’s messed with my program for the Fimbulwinter Game. I know I got all of the bugs out of it-”

“Hold it hold it hold it. Tell me what happened first.”

“Somebody got killed out of the Game.”

Drown me! “What? How-” Suddenly he felt very foolish. “Sorry. Killed out. Right. My heart will return to normal presently.” He thought for a minute. “I thought none of the Gamers got killed out of Fat Rippers.”