Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

Johnny Welsh was drinking coffee from a paper cup thoughtfully provided by the Gods, and chewing on a makeshift cheese sandwich. He looked as if he had died and gone to heaven. Everyone ate more slowly than they had at breakfast. Maybe the excellence of the food and drink had something to do with that. Something, but not all.

Johnny belched contentedly. “Java blend,” he said. “Last coffee I had was on the tube out from Denver.” He made a face.

Hippogryph was willing. “That bad?”

“Let’s put it this way. I had the concierge send it out to a lab. Got a call back saying ‘Congratulations, your moose is pregnant.’”

Hippogryph sprayed a mouthful of grape juice, narrowly missing Kevin, who lunged out of the way. “Jeeze-will you watch your timing?” Kevin said plaintively.

Johnny smiled wickedly. “Sorry about that.”

Orson popped open one of the cans, drank, and made a face at Snow Goose. “You brought me all the way to Hell for sugar-free 7-Up?”

They sat in a circle on a stone bridge over the pit of infinity. Max looked a little distant, wistful, that massive, muscular body sagging somewhat in repose. Gwen wondered what he was thinking. There was no way for Dream Park magic to give her that piece of information.

Yet.

They were on the move again, and the trail began to lead gently downward. The air was chilling, and the wind plucked at Max’s face and hair more fiercely.

Part of it was his imagination. The howl of the wind had increased more than its velocity. The temperature had only dropped a few degrees.

The path grew narrower and narrower, and then the walls were well within reach, rock glazed with ice. The wind was a hollow, reedlike whistle in their ears. Moods recently elevated by a fine meal went edgy. They gripped their weapons tightly and walked single file.

At first, the cries might have been mistaken for a trick of the wind. Then Max heard them for what they were-the endless moaning and shrieking of the Eskimo damned.

So far there was nothing to see. Light had diminished to a murky dusk.

Then a glowing aurora illuminated the scene, and Max felt the pit of his stomach tighten.

Naked men and women stumbled blindly through deep snow. One man staggered across jagged rocks with a caribou lashed across his shoulders. His feet were torn and bleeding. Blood trailed down his back from a gash along the caribou’s ribs. The caribou kicked and wriggled in nightmarish slow-motion.

Snow Goose stiffened, then ran jerkily to a spot where a stone wall caused the path to branch. An Eskimo was lashed to the wall with leather thongs. Butterflies fluttered around his head, and he snapped at them with his teeth. He caught one and ate it. Other Eskimos were bound identically. Their movements were sluggish and awkward as they lunged uselessly against their fetters.

“Wood Owl!” Snow Goose cried.

He looked up at her dully. “Who…? Who is there?” Then she stepped closer, and his eyes focused. His lips curved, making a small sad smile. “Snow Goose. It is you. How did you die?”

“No, Wood Owl. I come with friends. We fight to destroy the Cabal.”

He nodded. A butterfly fluttered too close to his mouth. He snapped it out of the air, and chewed thoughtfully. “Could use a little salt.”

“What’s it like being dead?” Hebert asked.

“Not bad, really,” Wood Owl answered after a moment’s consideration. “Like waiting for a tax refund, only slower.” He looked at Snow Goose regretfully. “I would not have made you a good mate, but I loved you.”

“You died for me. So you were a lousy hunter. I turned vegetarian at ASU. No problem.”

“When you see your father again? Tell him I’ve seen cousin Gray Otter. We can stop wondering about why Gray Otter’s wife cut his throat and drowned herself. Seems he was sharing furs with Weeping Walrus when he was supposed to be fishing.”

“Soap operas in Hell,” Bowles mused. “The mind boggles.”

“Death will not release you,” Wood Owl agreed.

Snow Goose smiled bravely, and they continued on. Max kept looking back at Wood Owl, lashed to his stone and snapping at the cluster of butterflies around his face, until they rounded the corner of the wall.

Hell was a small place, evidently. The next group of damned they encountered were all half-naked women. Blue lines and dots made patterns on their faces. They cried, holding their hands out to the travelers, and begging in a language that he couldn’t understand.

“What was their sin?” Max asked Snow Goose.

“They have bad tattoos.”

Orson’s jaw dropped, and he looked at the Eskimo dead with new interest. Studying their tattoos, of course. Max said, “That’s pretty minor. What kind of Gods are these?”

“Petty, like all Gods. On the other hand, there’s no penalty at all for masturbation.”

“I’m changing religion,” Kevin said positively. “Obviously, I have strong Eskimo blood and never knew it.”

The women were all black-haired and sullen, except for a woman in her thirties, with flaming red hair, who hung numbly in her bonds. Her green eyes were partially unfocused. Slowly, she lifted her head. “Who …?”

Max cried, “Eviane!”

Her confusion lasted only a moment; recognition following swiftly. “My comrades,” Eviane said. Tears streaked her face. “I knew you would come for me. Even Hell couldn’t keep us apart.”

Transit time from Security to Research and Development, on the far side of the park, was about forty-five seconds when Alex could catch the right routing.

There was the gentle bump as his shuttle capsule hit the bottom of the vertical tube, a moment’s hesitation as the gyros rotated the capsule, and then a shush as he accelerated, like a bullet fired beneath the thriving metropolis that was Dream Park.

For some of the trip, the clear walls of the shuttle revealed nothing save an occasional flash of light.

The maintenance shops were along this route. The Chief of Maintenance liked the transit tubes through her sector to be clear, so that she could see the shuttles streaking past.

Six years ago, a study had given Maintenance the greatest efficiency level of any department in Dream Park. This was considered puzzling. Someone noted that instead of the green or blue worn by maintenance personnel in the other companies, the Dream Park crew wore white, more like a doctor’s gown than the uniform of one who keeps pipes and wires humming.

Sandy Khresla, a chunky little woman with a Ph. D. in environmental engineering, was the pipe-smoking head of the division. When someone asked her why she chose such untraditional garb, she smiled as if she had been watching her clock and her calendar, wondering when the big brains would get around to asking that question.

“We service the veins and arteries of Dream Park,” she said around a mouthful of sweet, quasi-contraband Turkish smoke. “You guys are the brains or the arms, and transportation is the legs. But we’re the heart. Without us, everything dies.”

Alex Griffin remembered that story as Sandy’s offices flashed by. Three white uniforms huddled in conversation. A pair of eyes flicked in his direction, then indifferently away.

He thought of all the people who took their jobs so damned seriously, toiling for seventeen and twenty hours a day, who often had to be pried away from their desks and terminals. They believed in the dream. How would they feel if they knew? What if they knew of his mission?

The capsule shushed to a halt in the basement of R amp;D, quieted for a moment as it was switched to a rail, and then began to rise. The shuttles sat up to four people, and were completely modular, capable of hooking onto either the vertical or diagonal tracks that could take them anywhere in the Park.