The Barsoom Project

His voice was as timeless as the howling wind. “We must find shelter. Come with me to the prayer lodge. Ahk-lut dares not violate that sacred place.”

Eviane nodded as if she understood, and helped the girl to her feet.

The air grew even colder as they marched. The wind drove the snow until it was almost a solid curtain. The refugees stumbled on blindly, following the old man. He bent into the storm, pushing on step after painful step. Who could tell what the old man was following? Instinct or memory or the distant outline of white knife-edged mountains momentarily visible through the terrible gale. Except for those brief moments, they were in an endless, impenetrable shell of white, until Eviane could see only the stunned shadow of Johnny Welsh struggling ahead of her. One moment’s lapse of attention, a single misplaced footstep, and she would be lost.

After a time the storm’s fury diminished, and she could distinguish the alien landscape around her. There were no trees, although the snow was clotted in irregular lumps that might have been trees shrouded and drowned in white. There was no sign of life save for the line of silent travelers. Now that the wind was dying, she heard their gasping.

Charlene tapped her shoulder, whispered down from her enormous height. “How do they do this? It looks as if we can see for miles.”

Eviane frowned. “We’re on a hill. Sometimes I don’t understand you at all.”

Charlene stared, caught without a reply.

Eviane withdrew to a deeper, cooler place inside her mind. Charlene had already begun to crack. Snow madness. Shock. it was to be expected. in a group this size they might lose half simply to fear and despair. Eviane must be strong for all.

Eviane snapped out of her reverie as they approached a large, regular mound of snow.

The old man got down upon his hands and knees. He oriented himself to the mountains, then began digging in the snow. In minutes he uncovered a man-sized oval cave mouth. He disappeared into it like a seal diving into an ice hole.

Others followed. Eviane was sixth in line.

The floor of the passage was compressed and melted into an icy glaze. The tunnel sloped down for the first eight feet, then leveled out. She pushed her pack ahead of her, and nudged herself along with knees and elbows. The tunnel gave her only a foot of clearance to the sides, and if she had suffered from claustrophobia, this would have been sheer terror. Wiggling another ten feet brought her to an upgrade, where the lack of traction became treacherous. Hands grasped her pack from above and pulled. She hung on for the ride.

She emerged from a trapdoor into a kind of lodge. Fifty or a hundred years earlier, the lodge would probably have been constructed from wood and snow, but more modern materials made other options available.

Tubular plastic bladders filled with frozen water formed the rectangular structure of the walls. The ceiling stretched over nine feet high, and a conical sheet of clear plastic capped the roof. The air smelled stale, already warming with the scent of tired human flesh. The old man poked a long spear through a vent hole in the center of the sheet, knocking loose the snow.

In the middle of the room a blackened pit had been filled with branches, chunks of log, and tinder.

One by one the travelers came in out of the cold. Their collective bodies warmed the room. Outer coats were coming off.

The old man looked at them, and Eviane had a better opportunity to examine him in turn. He and the young woman were similarly attired, though the lower cut of her garment was more curved than his. The fur-hooded robe had been sewn together from a variety of animals. Eviane recognized squirrel and mink, and something that was probably muskrat. There were other skins, perhaps not native to Alaska but traded hand to hand from hundreds or thousands of miles away. Was that a poodle skin?

She didn’t see any machine stitching in the older man’s clothing. As the girl peeled off her external clothing, she revealed a pair of Jordache designer ski pants and boots. Girls will be girls. She was cute, in an Eskimo kind of way. Eviane flickered a glance at Max Sands. Yes, he’d noticed.

“Call me Martin Qaterliaraq,” the old man said. “Martin the Arctic Fox. Your Christian missionaries named me Martin, long ago. They were good people, and I pay them the respect of keeping that name. But although my daughter calls herself Candice, to me she is Kanguq, Snow Goose. I serve the old ways.” His face fell. Once more, he seemed impossibly ancient. “It is the old ways that brought you here to this place, and only the old ways can save the world.”

Orson spoke into the silence. “What are you saving, exactly? From what?”

“Wait. We know the way to show you. You have helped us already, but we need more.”