Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

Game?

How could all of this be a Game?

And yet…

And yet… hadn’t she seen light shining through one of those monsters? Or a war club sailing through one of them? Yet they crushed physical objects. Or seemed to…

Could the whole thing be some kind of monstrous joke?

But why? Who had the answers? Max, dear Max had tried to tell her over and over that it was only a Game…

She watched Hippogryph, she looked at Ollie. Damned if it didn’t look like Ollie was having fun. He had stuck flares into his bandoleer now. It looked like an editorial cartoon of a Libertarian revolutionary.

Hippogryph (and what kind of a name is that?) wasn’t having fun. He was helping them pick their way through a maze of shattered masonry, and doing a fairly good, serious job of it. He was tired, though.

The masonry broke into a wider area here, as if whatever forces had destroyed this island city had found nothing to attack in this one spot. She looked across it. Again, it looked like the huge hieroglyph she had seen from the top of the ridge.

Hippogryph turned to them. “This might not be a bad place to set off the flares. Right out in the middle, there, and then hightail it back to the ruins as soon as anything shows. I think that we can fight a delaying action.”

Ollie nodded. “That sounds good to me.”

Eviane stared at Ollie. Had she seen his face before? Or Hippogryph’s? There was something familiar…

“Eviane? Sound reasonable?”

“Sure. Let’s do it.”

They stared out across the plain. Eviane was watching the sky. Things moved in the shadows, and they hunched close to the ground, suddenly very aware of their vulnerability.

“Ah-maybe this wasn’t a great idea…”

“The idea,” Ollie reminded him, “was to get the Cabal’s attention-”

“Preferably with minimal tissue damage.”

“-not necessarily to survive.”

“Nobody here but us chickens.”

Ollie and Hippogryph both had flare grenades. While they prepared to ignite them, Eviane watched the shadows.

Everything was so dizzying. So familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It was making her groggy.

Who was Michelle?

“All right, we’re ready here.” They had lashed eight stubby silver flare cylinders together into two bundles of four, and propped them up with snow. The wind that blew from over the great ridge of the plateau herded an eerie howling sound before it.

Ghost riders in the sky…

Ollie twisted the fuse ring on his grenade bundle. With a soft pop and a burst of incandescently white light, it ignited.

The glow was brighter than the eye could comfortably tolerate. Shielding her face barely helped.

“Come on!” Hippogryph yelled, as he triggered his own. He scampered back for the shelter of the ruins.

She ran as fast as she could, but back over her shoulder she saw the magnesium flares erupting into the sky, shooting fire up and up.

Damned if that wouldn’t attract attention! Now what they had to do was- They hadn’t quite reached the edge of the ruins when they saw the first stirrings of movement within. Four of the Amartoqs moved out of the maze, advancing, carrying clubs and spears.

They had attracted attention, all right. Too much, too soon.

Snow Goose saw the false dawn as the first flare went off to what she assumed was the East. She waited for a few moments. According to their timetable, the second batch of flares should be going off simultaneously, but when a minute passed and nothing happened, she could only figure that something had gone wrong.

So Max and his bunch had encountered some obstacles.

Tsk-tsk. How very unfortunate. Ah, well, best not to worry about one’s compatriots fighting for their lives against the ghastly minions of the Cabal. Best to concentrate on the job ahead.

Charlene had taken point. Orson stayed just behind her, moving veritably on tippy-toe despite his size.

They had reached the crumbled door of the Cabal’s sanctum. They hid behind one of the enormous slabs of fallen rock, watching. Waiting. Yarnall had crawled down from the defile and was poised on the temple’s ruined stone roof. Goggles in place, he was ready to warn them of danger.

From the temple mouth came three figures, two male and one female. They were naked. They faced into the driving, frigid wind as if standing on a beach at Maui.

And as the Adventurers watched, the figures began to flow, changing, shifting shape and color. First they hunched down onto all fours, and then the limbs themselves lengthened and shifted, flowing, flowing. Feathers, fangs, and claws sprouted. Where three human beings had stood, three Wolfalcons nodded to each other and sprang howling into the air. Rapid strokes of mammoth wings lifted them up, up toward the crags and away.

“This is the best chance we’re going to get,” Snow Goose said. “Some of them are gone, the rest are in deep meditation. Let’s move it, troops.”

Charlene wrapped the seal fur around her shoulders, and…

She began to fade. Her outer clothing seemed to evaporate, and for an instant she stood, unembarrassed, in pale nakedness. Then the skin itself became translucent, and the internal organs pulsed and played against the light.

Charlene’s organs slipped away into invisibility, leaving bones. The bones faded. There was just the slightest waver of displacement in the air where Charlene had been, and a ghostly grin, and the sound of a voice delighted beyond all belief. “Oh boy oboy,” she laughed, clapping her hands delightedly. “This is great. Have they got a home model?”

“Ahem,” Snow Goose reprimanded. “Let’s finish saving the world, shall we?”

Charlene entered the temple mouth, with Yarnall right behind. The hallway was cracked and warped by the elements, a lustrous ivory finish obscured by dust and cracked by the elements.

Orson watched the ground. Charlene’s footprints appeared with little powdery puffs.

Something with heavy feet moved up ahead, and they flattened against the wall, trying to control their breathing.

They saw the figure now: squatly Mongolian, with beetled brows and heavy, dark skin. His-whoops! Charlene had missed the heavy sagging breasts, the masses of wrinkled skin that were the closest this creature came to secondary sexual characteristics. The bovine nose sniffed at the air, as if trying to scent them.

Charlene’s knife rose and fell, and the troglodyte fell to her knees, hands reaching helplessly back for the blade. She pitched face-forward into the dust, twitched and was still.

Orson rolled her over, patted her down.

“Come on,” Charlene whispered. In the indirect light she was just a bare shimmering. “We’ve got to get going.”

Orson nodded and got Yarnall to help him roll the body over to the side. The invisible Charlene continued down the corridor.

Ahead was a chamber of some kind. Torches glowed within. Charlene’s ghostly hand appeared, and motioned them to come closer.

Snow Goose was the last of them to reach the edge of the doorway.

The tunnel opened up into a larger chamber, with a ruined, cracked ceiling fifteen feet high. At the far end perched a fat Mongol idol perhaps twice the size of a human being. It might have been gold and silver crusted with jewels, but all was scummed with a thick coat of dust. Its thick lips curled in silent, mocking laughter.

A fire roared at its feet. In front of the fire, Robin Bowles’s body lay stretched on a rack, partially dissected. In a semicircle around Bowles sat six men and women.

In the center of the temple, shimmering with such force that a preternatural thrill tickled Charlene’s spine, was the satellite.

Once it might have been a shining testimonial to the creative powers of the industrial Soviet Empire. Now it was little more than an irregularly shaped heap of slag, an iron-cored meteorite, barely recognizable as something that had been machine-tooled, filled with the most delicate and expensive mechanisms of an advanced culture.