Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

Then clumsy footfalls and raucous voices broke the silence, and she knew that her living comrades had come for her.

Now, this was curious: she felt no surprise. She didn’t even turn her head. She only waited with the placid patience of the dead… until the moment she heard Max Sands’s wonderful, vibrant voice. A moment later he was beaming at her like a full moon, his huge round face shining with astonished pleasure at the sight of her.

Eviane’s heart leapt as if she lived.

She noticed Snow Goose cupping her ear, frowning. “Eviane,” the Eskimo Princess said, “we were…” She stopped, and conferred with Frankish Oliver for a moment. “Yes,” she said. Frankish Oliver went away for a few seconds. He came back holding a vicious-looking modern rifle.

“This led us to you, because you held it close to your body.” Snow Goose paused, then shook her head violently. “Eviane, I’m not used to this. You’re dead. Any of my professors would freak.”

“I don’t understand,” Eviane said, and she didn’t. But by her own unreasoning fear of the rifle, she sensed its power.

“It was with you at your death. It has great power, and its link to you was strong. If you wish, we could use it to bring you with us from the underworld.”

“Bring me back to life?” Eviane asked, as though somehow she already knew the answer.

Snow Goose was embarrassed. “No, dear. I’m sorry. As a shade, one of the dead, a tornrait. You would serve me the way a tornrait serves an angakok. You would gather information that human senses can’t reach. You could be of great help to us, if you would.”

There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation. “I will come.” She took the rifle.

The Inuit women around her nodded their approval. Eviane stood and joined the line of heroes. A butterfly drifted too close. Reflexively, Eviane snapped it out of the air. Again, the sugary taste. Also, and curiously, her teeth met no resistance, and she felt nothing go down her throat as she swallowed.

Max was ready to whip worlds. He walked beside Eviane, and could barely restrain himself from grabbing and hugging her.

“Well,” he said, trying to begin a conversation. “What’s it feel like to die?”

The smile froze on his face. Unmistakably, she was searching herself for an answer. “Well,” she said after a long pause, “it’s sort of like gym class, only quicker.”

He took five more steps before he turned and stared at her. Her face was perfectly serious. Her eyes met his. It couldn’t have been a joke. Eviane never joked. And yet. And yet…

The path wound among flat boulders of sedimentary rock, more and more of them, until they faced a wall of boulders rising into the gloom of the underworld cavern. The troupe of Adventurers trickled to a halt.

Eviane looked terrified. Max asked nervously, “Something wrong?”

“I remember…” Eviane began, and then her voice trailed off.

Charlene and Hippogryph loomed close. “You remember what?” Charlene asked.

“I’m not sure. It was back when I was alive.”

Hippogryph looked concerned. Charlene said, “Eviane, dear, if you’ve got anything to say that might save a life, please-”

“To give information is the task of a tornrait,” Snow Goose said flatly.

Eviane did her best. “Falling. Slowly. Shapes around me, big massive shadows. Like a dream. Like being dead. But I wasn’t afraid of going splat. I was afraid of being crushed.”

“Anything else?”

She shook her head.

Snow Goose walked out to where the path disappeared into the boulders. The rocks were flat-sided slabs eight to twelve feet long by half that wide, a bit too uniform for credibility. Thirty or forty feet up, the darkness swallowed them.

She gestured to the rest. “Come on-” Bubbles burst from her mouth and streamed upward. Max gaped, and she grinned at him. Bubbles?

A fish swam past his head. More of an eel, really, some kind of curvy, twisty thing that wiggled fluidly. Its tail almost flicked his nose.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. Bubbles obscured his vision for a moment.

Snow Goose gestured to them again, impatiently. “Come on. We’re going to have to climb.”

Max didn’t look down. He could guess how many of the other Gamers were still at the bottom, staring up, thinking how impossible it all was. The rocks were not that badly tilted. It was like climbing a crude stairway, if each stair was a meter higher than the previous one. Hippogryph was climbing backward, pulling Charlene upward by her wrists; they both seemed to be enjoying themselves.

It got harder as Max got higher… but he couldn’t catch Eviane. She climbed steadily, unstoppable, panting through gritted teeth, pushing forward and upward toward what terrified her.

And now he saw that the wave of boulders spilled against a vertical rock wall. The wall rose seamless into darkness. It might have been a thousand miles high, the core of a hollow Earth.

“We have to breach the wall,” Snow Goose said. “Everyone needs to push. Come on.”

Swell. But Max could see what Eviane was doing: choosing a big, nearly flat boulder for her perch; setting her feet, hands flat against the monolithic wall. The boulders were not big enough for two. He chose one next to hers.

Charlene and Hippogryph took Eviane’s other side. Like Max, they tried to imitate Eviane. Strange, wasn’t it, that she always seemed to know just what to do? So she was just a bit quicker than anyone else. Was he the only one who noticed?

Kevin was giving it his all, but he had climbed no higher than Orson, who was sweating and glaring up at his brother. Trianna and Johnny Welsh had reached the top. Welsh said, “Hulk smash?”

Snow Goose grinned and nodded. Welsh chose a boulder and set his feet. “Push?”

“Push. All at once.”

“One, two, three, heave!”

They heaved. Max pushed with everything he had. He could sense the mass of his companions: if they had anything going for them at all, it was mass! But the mass of the stone wall felt infinite. And yet… there was a gritty, crunchy sound against his ear. They’d done something.

Orson and Kevin reached the top, paused a moment to suck air, then joined the effort. Push harder Snow Goose dropped back, gasping. “All right, take a rest. And then-”

The rest of Snow Goose’s sentence was lost in a growing rumble. The rocks began to shimmy.

Eviane’s eyes flew open. “Oh my gosh! This is about to-”

All at once and nothing first, the wall disintegrated. The pile of boulders spilled outward. Screams sounded muffled; bubbles streamed from their mouths; and the party was falling through dark water in a cloud of shattered rock.

The entire cavern had dissolved, crumbled. Max was on a falling boulder… for that matter, everyone was on a faffing boulder. They sank in a murky cloud of detritus, but they sank faster. Smaller boulders, rocks, pebbles, grit, all rose out of sight and left the view clear. Each Adventurer, astride his own individual boulder, sank sleekly into depths that graded from dark to utter black.

Max felt his ears pop. He laughed. That was too realistic! He hooted, and waved his arms to brother Orson, whose rock was spinning in a slow, lazy circle.

(He could breathe! He had only just noticed that. He was breathing underwater. Unself-consciously he rubbed the side of his neck, looking for gills. Nope, nothing there…)

Although they had to be far below the surface of the ocean, and the water was murky, shafts of light pierced the darkness like silver pillars. The travelers sank down into the depths on a gentle diagonal, slipping through dark and light, past the finny denizens of the deep.

A school of ugly blind fish cozied past him. Showing more good mammalian sense than their cold blood should have allowed, they waited for Trianna. They made kissing motions at her, following almost close enough to touch.