Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

Vaguely through the murk, the bottom was taking shape. Max could almost… he could make out the titanic outline of a woman in repose, though the head was wrong: lumpy, misshapen.

A flutter of panic: the Paija? Nahhh. Too big.

It was a woman, and she was huge. Three hundred feet high if an inch. Bigger. Sedna.

The surrounding murk made anything but a vague impression difficult, but it seemed to him that she sat in an attitude of sorrow. Her arms and knees hid her face. She might have been carved of alabaster or of mud; it was just not possible to make out detail. Her shoulders were gently rounded, slumped.

Although she was a giantess, a goddess, Sedna, the mother of life, Max felt the burden which hung heavy upon her. He wanted to hold her, shelter her, protect her.

Well, damn-that was why he’d come, wasn’t it?

A wayward current was floating them down toward the gigantic head. He’d been right: Sedna’s head was misshapen. A pale brownish mass capped the back and left side of her skull and was spreading down her neck. It had an angular look, less like fungus than like a growth of crystals. White, veinlike threads intersected everywhere, like… roads?

Orson screamed, “Max! They’ve built a goddamn city in her hair!”

Charlene called, “We’re going past!”

The current was sweeping the falling boulders past that growth. Good. Landing in a parasite city would have given them no time to think, to plan; but the current was dropping them toward flowing black locks.

This close, Sedna’s hair looked like tangled cables. Max began to feel like a wind-caught flea. Their impossible little rock-chariots sifted like sand grains into Sedna’s scalp. Max squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself for a bump.

There was none, only a gentle settling sensation.

The boulder seemed to have landed on solid ground, but damned if he would just assume that. Max got down on hands and knees, and backed off the boulder, feeling with his toes until solidity pushed against the metatarsals.

He stood ankle-deep in a mass of cables… of hairs. He reached down and hefted one: a quarter-inch thick, soft to the touch, running back out of sight. The hair was relatively sparse, thank God, or the Adventurers would have been choked immediately upon arrival.

He checked that the others had arrived safely. There was no need to wonder: each and every boulder had dropped without mishap onto the glorious head of Sedna. Max had an absurd urge to plant a flag. Was this how Neil Armstrong had felt?

His peripheral vision caught something on a strand of hair. Something crawled away, disappearing as he watched, something bigger than his hand.

It gave him the creeps.

Hebert was the first to comment. “I see some kind of big bugs around here. I don’t know what to call them.”

Johnny Welsh volunteered, “Water bugs, maybe.”

The rest of them began to look around, peering in the mesh of cables for “water bugs,” but found nothing.

Snow Goose called them to attention. “All right. I think we can safely assume that we made it here in one piece. Which way do we go?”

“Aren’t you the one who knows that?”

She laughed. “Please. I’ve just about run out of magic. Why don’t one of you take control of that point?”

Robin Bowles looked very serious. Just as serious, in fact, as he had been when passing sentence on the psycho-killer in Judge Knott. A little more puzzled, perhaps. “I think I heard something from over in that direction,” he said finally. “Let’s take a look.”

The hair was piled into thick rows. It was (he hated to admit) slightly greasy to Max’s touch. “You’d think that a Goddess could wash her hair twice a week, wouldn’t you?”

Orson shot him a dirty look. Trianna said, “She can’t comb her hair. That much I remember. No fingers.”

Something crunched under his feet, and he heard a high-pitched squealing noise. Peering carefully through the forest of follicles, he saw three more “water bugs.”

They gave him the creeps. Smaller than a dog pack, but far too big for bugs. Yerch.

Before he had any clue as to what was happening, a net of webbing had settled over him. Before he could respond to it effectively, a second flew over from the opposite direction, and he was entangled. Then his feet were gone from under him, and if the hair hadn’t been so spongy and resilient, he might have had a nasty fall. As it was, it was a lot like faffing into a stack of fresh-cut grass. Embarrassing, but not at all uncomfortable.

Dream Park wants no lawsuits.

Behind him, Bowles shouted something that Shakespeare never wrote, and grabbed at hair with one hand while trying to keep his balance with the other. It didn’t matter: he went down anyway. All of the Adventurers were going down. Kevin dodged and ran, and there were multiple sputt sounds before they managed to catch him and drag him down.

Max tumbled and rolled as unseen forces pulled him along. At the lowest threshold of hearing, he could hear tiny, squeaky voices singing:

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go Bump. Bump. A hair as thick as a pencil flapped across his face. Sedna’s hair flagged out above him in the drifting currents like abed of kelp.

They came to rest in a broad bare area, a bald spot in the middle of Sedna’s scalp.

Max tugged at the net. Strong. Was it strong enough to stop him if he gave it everything he had…?

Probably.

He wiggled over until he was on his other side. Brother Orson lay about four feet away, one eye visible through the black stalks.

“Looks like we’re cooked,” Orson said, resigned.

“Such a Pollyanna, he is.” Max hoisted himself to one knee, then tumbled over.

The hair began to tremble, and only then did he really focus his eyes on it. Multicolored bumps moved along the strands. They were seven and eight inches long by half that wide. They moved and crawled, and when he rolled over in his net to look at them, they squealed and ran away.

Finally one turned and looked at him, cocked its head sideways, and hissed. It was a cross between a human being and an insect of some kind. The head was disproportionately large. Its face was a Punch-and-Judy caricature, medieval in its exaggeration. Even on a face that tiny, the projection of evil glee was unmistakable.

It grinned at him and skittered away; but another faced him, a bug with the body of a walrus turned inside out. And below that one was a lascivious woman-creature. It whistled at him-tiny, very high-pitched-and wriggled its two-inch-wide derriere suggestively.

Just what did you have in mind, honey?

Kevin choked back a face full of laughter. “What is all of this?”

“It’s the sins of mankind. I think I’ve seen vanity, and wasteful killing, and loose sexual practice.”

“Jesus,” Hebert hissed. By wriggling around in the net, Max could just make out his dark face. “I think you’re right. I’ve got murder, I think, and maybe theft.”

“All right, then. We know where we are, but what do we do?”

There wasn’t long to wait. The sins were busy around them busy, busy, busy… and from the roots of Sedna’s hair rose a city. They watched it form one shell at a time, built by carapaced creatures that flowed from every follicle. It was an array too vast and differentiated to even begin to categorize.

There was every sin that he could recognize: sloth and gluttony and greed and murder, and actions mimed but beyond his understanding. The creatures reached Sedna’s bald spot, and there they shed their shells and wriggled forth like glistening varicolored slugs. The shells built up and up in a heap. It grew like a coral reef. Hundreds upon thousands of individual beings contributed one bit at a time. A bizarre castlescape rose up and up while the sluglike occupants mingled in obscene pools or piles in front of the structure.